All posts by rbowen

Denial, amnesia, political correctness, and cheeseburgers

Moose, Bourbon, Tim, Ken, and I talked late into the night about various things. It’s really hard to summarize, or even remember, most of these things now. But major topics included political correctness, and the denial of truth that our culture seems to be burying its collective head in.

So, the general idea is that Policital Correctness is built around the idea that nobody should offend anybody else. The fact that this is impossible does not seem to bother the Powers That Be, since denial of reality is a major portion of how this all works.

The surest way to offend someone, it seems is to claim that you know the Truth, and that someone else, whose opinion is out of sync with this Reality, is therefore wrong. Telling someone that they are wrong is a big no-no. Claiming that you know the truth on any matter is therefore also wrong. Accepting multiple mutually-exclusive truths, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable. This is called “tolerance” rather than the more correct “self delusion” or “logical fallacy”, because either of those would be judgemental, and therefore intolerant.

While it seems that any intelligent person you speak to will deplore this intellectual dishonesty, Moose made the interesting observation that they will only deplore it when it refers to issues on which they don’t have a firm unbending opinion … I mean, know the Truth. So it is very possible that I am practicing exactly the same kind if dishonesty that I am deploring.

The other thing that came up in this context was the idea of authority. Because we cannot know everything, we need to accept the idea that someone is an authority on a particular topic. On #apache yesterday, I told someone that they were wrong about something, and he called me politically incorrect – which, in part, started this train of thought. In this technical matter, which has a clear and indisputable right answer, I was supposed to accept his wrong answer, in tolerance, and not make him feel marginalized for holding a different opinion. This is hogwash. He was wrong, and I was right. But political correctness, which rejects the ideas of wrong and right, also rejects the idea that I could be an authority on the matter, and that he has to accept what I say on the matter, because of my authority.

I was going to write about the idea of denial and amnesia, also, but I’ll have to get back to that when I have more time to collect my thoughts.

Big tree

On the way back to the office after the LPLUG meeting, I was about the 3rd car on the scene after the storm brought down a BIG tree on top of a passing Buick. It landed on the hood, and the car had climbed up on on branch, where it was stuck. So I spent 30-45 minutes pulling branches out of the road, directing traffic, and generally getting soaked to the bone as we waited for the police to arive and take over.

Although the Buick was damaged – a small crack in the hood – I think that if he had been 3 or 4 feet further on when it fell, it could easily have gone through the windshield or roof, and been much more serious. We hooked up a chain to the car, and dragged it off of the tree branch, and he drove away just fine.

Next, we hooked the chain to the various huge bits of the tree, and dragged them out of the way so that traffic could get past. When the policeman eventually did arrive, there was really nothing for him to do, since the road was clear, and the damaged vehicle had long since left.

I would have taken some pictures, but unfortunately left my camera at home. It would have been nice to have a machete with me, too.

New server

I spent all day yesterday, and some of the day before, trying to migrate services off of a dying server before it completely died. Mail, DNS, CVS, and a plethora of test and demo vhosts inhabited the server, as well as my news and blogs site.

I was getting periodic kernel panics, that were coming with greater frequency as I tried to move services. In typical saved-at-the-last-minute movie fashion, as soon as the last bit of data was recovered, the server crashed, and will not even so much as power back on. Although I’ve managed to mount the hard drive in the new server in case I need to recover any more files that turn up missing. The new server is one of the machines that I bought for my training room, but, with training going at the rate that it is right now, I don’t think that it will be missed. Added a little ram, and now I have a $500 server, replacing one that probably cost $2000 new, and has had many times that much spent on it in maintenance time. (Hi, sungo!)

So, chimp is dead, long live barolo. I hope it can run for 2 or 3 years without much needing to be done to it.

Today’s caches

Sunday is becoming my cache day, which is just fine with me.

Three caches today, two finds, one no-find.

The no -find: This morning, I went to the Preston’s Cave Spring cache, where I surprised a young reprobate smoking some of that *other* Kentucky agricultural produce. I suspect that I looked rather like law enforcement in my getup – cowboy hat, black shirt with ASF logo emblazoned on the pocket area, hiking boots, and a binoculars case that probably looked like a holster. The kid saw me, got a terrified expression, and bolted into the woods like a scared deer. The aroma was unmistakable.

The other two were rather more out of the way – one at Shaker Village, and one in a park in Danville. It was a gorgeous day for driving with the top down, and I contributed to the terrorist cause by driving my SUV more than 50 miles today.

Listened to about 3 hours of Dean Koontz in the process, which I don’t recommend to the uninitiated. He’s annoying me more than usual in this particular book. Can’t he just say “It was dark” without 5 minutes of analogies? Sheesh.

Gettysburg

Nearly 10 years after buying the movie, I just finished watching Gettysburg. I think I made it most of the way through the first of two tapes, back when I bought it. As with many movies, I was not able to complete watching it because the co-watcher lost interest.

So, anyways, this evening I saw the rest of it.

It is hard for my mind to grasp that kind of slaughter. 53,000 men died in that battle. Many of them knew men on the other side.

In a time when a handful of casualties is considered a heavy blow, it is hard to grasp a 50% casualty rate.

LUG Library software

Our LUG has put together a simple library thingy for our web site, which lets us list the books that we have in our library, and lets people post reviews of these books. This, in turn, encourages the publishers to keep sending us more books. (Lest anyone should think, for a moment, that this wasn’t entirely mercenary in motivation.)

The software is mod_perl, and, now that it is mostly functional, we’d be delighted to let people poke around at the source. We had talked about moving it to SF.net if there seemed to be any actual interest, since, at the moment, the cvs repository is on my home machine, which makes me somewhat reluctant to hand out accounts like candy.

Yes, it is very limited, annoying in a number of ways, and lacks some rather important features. But we are making good progress, and hope to have something a little more functional pretty soon.

Technology and outdoorsy stuff

So this guy amputating his arm, and a variety of other things, got me thinking about the role of technology in outdoorsy stuff. Given sufficient budget, technology enables us to (almost) never be out of contact with other people, and made it (almost) impossible to get lost.

Whenever I go hiking or climbing, I carry a cell phone, and I carry a GPSr. The cell phone, most of the time, allows me to call anyone in the world from anywhere I happen to be. If I were to get injured, I could call the local police, and give them my exact coordinates.

The GPSr, on the other hand, makes it almost impossible to get lost. Now, it is very possible to be out of view of the satelites, but usually if you wait long enough, you can see them again. So, whenever I go hiking in unfamiliar territory, I put a waypoint marker in the GPSr called “JEEP”. Thus, no matter how lost I get, I can always press “Go”, select “JEEP”, and know exactly what direction I need to go, and for how far, before returning to where I started. So even when I get completely turned around, as I did on Sunday afternoon, I simply *can’t* get lost.

Now, perhaps this removes some of the thrill of exploring, and perhaps it dulls some of the instincts that hikers work hard to cultivate. But, should I ever get stuck on a ledge, or under a boulder, or just lost in the woods, the danger is largely removed. And, given my tendency to go hiking alone – hiking is usually about getting away from everything, anyway – this is a great comfort to me.

So, while I tend to think that technology makes us dumber, and that it is usually pretty hard to find emerging technology that genuinely makes life better, in the arena of outdoorsy stuff, I think that we’ve got a winner.

Always carry a sharp knife

CNN.com – Climber recounts decision to amputate arm – May. 8, 2003

I suppose it’s a measure of my weirdness that as I read about this guy amputating his own arm with a blunt knife, what keeps coming to mind was, well, at least I always carry at least one, and usually two, sharp knives, when I go climbing solo.

I simply can’t imagine the kind of fortitude necessary to perform an operation like this on oneself. But I guess, after 3 days, that one can do extreme things.