Not a Journal Entry
I don�t know what up with all my crazy posting lately. It seems like the flood gates of blogging have opened. No sophisticated philosophical musings this time though. I just thought I should mention that I am really enjoying work so far. Certainly my position relatively far down the pecking order leaves me doing a lot of �grunt� work. Grunt work for web-design that is. I can sit here for five hours and enjoy being wrapped in my technology. I work in Macromedia suite and a attempt to accomplish design projects for a job. It�s like a warm cocoon of digital joy surrounds me here at work. Does using a Mac make everyone feel euphoric the same way? One way that this job far exceeds my job at Offut over the summer is that there are people I work with who know far more, and even the same amount as me about the topics that I am interested in, Web-Design, Programming, Server administration. Over the summer I pretty much lived in the forums at Kirupa.com. This was my only real social interaction with professional peers, and was actually the majority of all my social interaction for the last 2 weeks of the summer when Becca went back home. At college I�v placed myself in a social situation where I cannot be an introvert. At work I get to revel in my introverted tendencies. That�s the long and the short of today. I�ll be leaving work here in a few minutes and will be getting ready to go on a float trip with the crusade guys. Woo!
Posted by
sirtimbly on 08/27/2004 at 02:08 PM
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Philosophy Journal 01
For my philosophy class I have been directed to journal my thoughts regularly. My assumption is that this exercise will allow us to more thoroughly analyze our own thoughts. Even I fear what I might learn if I were to ever truly understand my own thoughts.
For this class, which I have in about 7 hours, we are reading Plato�s Republic. I have finished the first section of the book and have to say that I was suprised at how easy it was to sit down and read it when I was really bored and had nothing else to do. I think that the point of philosophy is the painful elaboration of the obvious. Socrates seems to be the kind of guy that plays devils advocate and teaches by challenging his students to intellectual duels. He has crossed mental sabres with 3 different people already on one basic topic, Justice. Justice certainly seems to be a tenuous idea. No-one in this book is able to grasp any solid defining ideas on what Justice is. Socrates and company are able to point out many instances of effects that justice has, but lack any sort of structured definition. This book actually seems to be drifting over a variety of topics and will no doubt eventually land on the island of politics. Just a hunch, but I see this lengthy discussion leading to a discussion on what the role of government in peoples lives is, and why governments rule, and why a government needs to rule justly. And, oh yeah, what was justice again?
I�m just throwing words out here now, this is all raw thoughts I�m about to spew into being. Justice is the set of consequences (rewards and punishments) that allow society to hold itself together. Even if the very acts that are commited in the name of justice are truly atrocious and cruel they must still be done by each person in the society to hold it together. We may not really want to believe in the ideas that our current culture holds as justice, but we will follow blindly these ideas and even enforce them simply to perpetuate the society that we are a part of. Continuing the social stability through total justice offers the individual the greatest chance of surviving by way of giving the population a greater chance of surviving. Lack of justice means chaos, and chaos means greater likelyhood that an individual will die prematurely or be unable to continue his genetic line.
Of course that does not mean that each groups idea of justice is correct, in fact our ideas of justice are almost certainly wrong and harmful to many many individuals. Perhaps leading to our own distruction, but on a time scale that is too large to have a meaningful impact on our current decisions. So the people who are most able to affect a socio-ppolitical change are those who are willing to ignore conventional ideas of justice and follow their own ideas. These people can have good effects, or they can cause bad effects. A patriot and a traitor are two labels that can be applied to the same person, that depends on your perspective.
Whoa, these late night philiosophizing sessions kinda wear me out. At least blogging this is easier than shudder pen and paper.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 08/27/2004 at 02:08 AM
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Continuating
So, I failed to continue the saga yesterday, lets hope I can make this brief so I can take a nap.
When I finally got the details for this new job nailed down I was very close to finishing my internship at Offut. I really had a great time with that job, I was kept pretty busy but I somehow found ways to challenge myself with something new and different every week there. I will miss the friendly office environment of DNTT. I finished up work on Friday August 13th and went back home. Packing everything up and leaving my studio apartment was a little depressing. I knew that I would be going back to a dorm room with the likelihood that I will get a roomate at some point. For now I don�t have a roomate, and living in a dorm room isn�t so bad. I am able to keep busy enough here that I don�t really spend that much time in my room anyways. I have a bed and a desk for my computer and a nice recliner to nap in. What more do I need.
I moved back to school last Tuesday, 3 days earlier than everyone else. I had to start working in the IT department a couple days early so I got to move in earlier. It�s a kinda weird thought that (assuming all goes well) this will have been the last time that I will move into a dorm room at UNK. I�m pretty sure that I will be more than ready to be done with school by the time April swings around. After that point it�s all pretty foggy right now.
Books are freaking expensive this year. It�s always been a little frustrating in the past, but I never really buy books for my classes anyways. Everyone is telling my that book prices have jumped up to ridiculous proportions. The economy is not doing well enough yet for this kind of price inflation to occur. I swear, If someone were to actually buy all the books required for their classes they could spend over 500 dollars pretty quickly!
I may go buy one $75 used book today if my Geography teacher really insists. Hm, this is really freaking annoying, I just checked half.com and the price there was the same as that in the book store. How is that possible. What happened to half.com?!? What happened to power to the people and all that, are we all doomed to suffer under the iron fist of the tyrannical book publishers? Why must we suffer so with huge tuition hikes, loans that barely cover a third of the cost of attending, and no scholarships for the consistently average?!!?!!?!? You know what this post is lacking? More punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Alright, so now I�m at school working for the webmaster and I just got a decent G4 for my machine now. I am really looking forward to working on it. I should talk to the JMC department and see what kind of price I can pick up one of their old lab G4�s. That would be pretty sweet.
�Those who take me seriously are doomed to frustration and possibly, even insanity.�
Posted by
sirtimbly on 08/26/2004 at 09:08 AM
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Not Lazy
Okaaay� so yes, I sorta died off there towards the end of the summer and havent really given any updates on the many things that have happened in the past 3 weeks or so. I�ll just go ahead and say that I am in fact back at UNK for my last year of school and have jumped in with both feet to my many projects and responsibilities here. I�ll hopefully remember get back to talking about school later in this post. Right now I�m gonna progress chronologically from where I left off with the last post.
All summer I was a little uncertain what I would be doing when I came back to school for a job. For the past 2 years I was a helldesk� er um, �help�desk tech. Because of several factors I am not working for the helpdesk anymore, I had been working on gettting a job as work study assistant to the campus web-master. Same department on campus but different supervisor.
So about 3 weeks ago I end up talking to a guy that has a management position in the IT department and he tells me that there is a brand new full time position that involves watching the Help desk for the night shift and also taking care of some multimedia projects. This job was going to pay $11-12 per hour and keep me really busy. I was a little wary about having to drop at least one class and be so incredibly busy during school. But the money was sounding very ver nice to me. I accepted the position pretty quickly after he offered it to me and was of course very excited.
So about two days later I get ahold of him to clear up some details on when and how to get started with this job. He tells me that there has been yet more reorganization within the department and the position that he offered to me has now been scrapped and replaced with a training position for teaching faculty and staff basic computer skills.
On the up side, he did offer me the original work study position for $8.00/hour and 19 hours per week. So I still got a very nice job and I will still be able to graduate on schedule. I would have been much happier about getting this great position if it weren�t for the fact that the much better position was dangled in front of me and then yanked away.
Alright, I have to get back to work. (To be continued�)
Posted by
sirtimbly on 08/25/2004 at 02:08 PM
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