Brian's World

Depreciated

So its Sunday, tomorrow marks the start of another week in college, another week full of work, work, and a few minutes of fun. Weekend are always interesting times for me, there is rarely any scheduled academic work, RPI TV might have an activity, rarely more than one; and besides that I don’t usually do a whole lot.

I believe in past blogs I’ve associated myself with a negative social value, detracting from the situation. Yes, I just asked Google search and I have. Wow, I learned I pretty much wrote this whole blog in “I only think in the form of crunching numbers”. Hrm, how to make this blog different. Ok. I can do this.

There are plenty of people who don’t think in the form of crunching numbers, there are most likely only a few people who do “think in the form of crunching numbers”, but lets focus on everyone else. Its strange, when I first thought about it I was sad to be on the outside, the one not fitting in. Maybe I shed 1.5 tears before I went to bed [I was thinking about this before falling asleep once]. Whats extra strange about this is that I’ve never fit it, ever. Its hard for me to have a decent explaination why I was so effected, in past times I would have been not effected in the least. I felt nothing when everyone went to High School dances while Brian stayed home writing PHP. Yes, it was lonely reading all the away messages, pondering where people would go afterwards, what photo albums I would be able to find online, what stories I would hear back at school. It was probably the hardest watching people leave in a limo next door, knowing I knew most of them since kindergarten. I did not fit in anymore.

The movie Superbad raises similiar feelings in me. I’m not a fan of the movie, probably because I cannot relate to it at all. 0%. I have never been to a party at someone’s house, I did not spend my high school days trying to “get” with any girls. The goal of being an expert at certain physical procedures before college never crossed my mind, nor would I have approved of the thought if any of my friends approached me with such a plan. (I thought I had a post about American Pie but I cannot locate it) I never made the assumption that being in college would correlate to getting/doing more of anything besides homework. The movie is funny because people can relate to it, it triggers a part of their memory that is likely good, situations they’ve likely been in, and adds humor to them. Me, I cannot relate to it, hence any humour I would find would be purely hypothetical, and I spend most of my hypothetical time focusing on much different issues.

I’ve lost where I was going with this, if I even had a destination. Lets keep writing and see where we go eh?

I’m trying my best to please people within the bounds I am comfortable with doing, but struggling with the balance of what I’d like to do. This is difficult to explain, something that became the core of Brian at roughly 6-8th grade. My primary coping tactic with situations I am not involved in, but might potentially want to be involved in lies somewhere around hypothetical simulation. Yes, that is a fancy way of saying make believe and pretend. Trouble arises when the hypothetical simulation is pushed close to a reality, and I’m completely disoriented when I find the hypothetical simulation outside of myself, mirrored elsewhere. What if everything I had hypothetically simulated was something someone else had done, what if they were able to maintain Brian-acceptable standards while physically doing things that I could only simulate. What if I couldn’t find any significant points of different between ones self and the latter. It makes me want to quit sometimes, seeing that its possible to carry out all that I’ve simulated without messing things up. That out there, you can do what I’ve only imagined doing without having to comprise. My ideal of “better than me” exists outside my imagination.

Its one of the few times in my life, quite honestly the only time, I can recall someone appropriate to yield my deck to. In all of my simulations I am the highest ranking captain and I’ve never considered what might happen if someone was able to outrank me; the thought of it scares the pants off me. [I am wearing shorts, and they are still on me, please take it metaphorically] I would run more simulations, but the past dozen have all ended the same as they began, outranked.

I must not give up, failure is not an option, but neither is changing what few things make unique. There must be a way to exploit the few things I have different to my advantage, I need to pull a MacGyver.

Lets run this one again guys, back to the top.

Vlans, Switching Loops, PVST

No, for those of you who expected some strange post about managed switches you’ve come to the wrong place. A website like Cisco.com may be able to help you out, me? I can try and make it work, but I also might break it. If you can actually break anything, I thought the spanning tree protocol was suppose to fix that.

The world is connected, not only online, but in person. Some people think of the internet as the frontier in globalization and networking but I would challenge that argument. The internet brings another dimension to connections that already existed. With another dimension comes another fallover method, more redundancy to the process… globalization, RAID 5 style. I’m not going to focus on the network of people on earth as a whole, but zoom in a little bit, traverse down the tree closer to a few leaves. (The algorithm deciding which leaves I’ll be getting close to is up to debate of course).

I think we can look at people in the same way we look at connections to the internet as both provide methods for access and transmitting data. How that data gets from A to B is very interested. Clearly there are direct connections, I can talk with someone and tell them something, A direct relay of that information, they can then process it, relay it along to someone else who I might not be able to contact at the moment, or tuck it away to look at it later.

To control network data we use VLANS (Virtual Lans) to create smaller segments of the data, while they generally all have physical access to the same devices their are software barriers setup to prevent them from talking to undesired nodes. We as people behave very similarly, without thinking about it. We fall into certain networks, we only talk to a few nodes, even though we may have access to hundreds (the population of a university or school). Clearly there are logical routes to this, its illogical for me to ask a stranger to relay information, completely unreliable, but people are more likely to ask a stranger for directions, something they’ve determined is outside their standard network.

Sidenote, I just found the optimal sound quality can be generated by my iPod headphones if I wedge them in my ears in a very uncomfortable position. This can only mean a few things, in this case Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” is playing.

Back to the networks. I don’t know much about the Spanning Tree Protocol except for its not instant, and I don’t like that but I can see why. If a human can’t do it instantly how do we expect a piece of emotionless machinery to.. wait a second.. My understand is that this protocol attempts to remove loops from the network, where data could be transmitted to the same place multiple times, or data could get lost in this loop trying to find an exit. The same can happen with the human networks. If you introduce a new node … no you can’t insert a new node, that would imply a birth. If you move a node from a different part of a network into one of your preferred communication channels your spanning tree protocol should update, and so should everyone else’s . Ok, the effect on the person in Africa is minimal, but the butterfly effect makes sense to me.

Now I was going to introduce the idea of spanning trees applied to a specific Vlan, but clearly I’m not going to. I’ve had quite enough switching theory for now. I’d like to go to bed but it sounds like the roommate next door is carrying on a phone call in the bathroom. Time to resolve.

Good night moon.

3 Months

I’m mad I didn’t start blogging 3 months earlier than I did. I started this blog in December of 2005, and I would really be interested in reading some posts from myself back in September-November of 2005. They would contain some pretty helpful things I’m sure, blogs describing emotions I don’t commonly experience but would be good references and tools for analysis. If I can review the past where fundamental beliefs where formed, I can certainly come to better conclusions about those fundamentals currently.

Darn, I have a virus. I’m not sure where I got it, but I’m pretty sure it was a bad file. I’m going to hunt for it to remove it, but worst comes to worst I reformat my desktop. My setup is good for this, keeping all my data on the external drives. Program Files could be a pain to reinstall, but I have all the common ones easily accessible. I’ll keep you posted.

Back on track, if there is a track. Well off track, I’m most definately developing a quote system, yes its been done 100 times before, but I like some quotes, and I’d like an effective way of delivering them to viewers on all my sites.

Now for the track, the track I’m going to masquerade so its nearly impossible to understand. If I was a fruit I wouldn’t be anything tasty. I think I wouldn’t even make a good oatmeal, food probably isn’t something I should compare myself to but its very easy to see how others fit so clearly into the Big Y costumes of summer. I also wouldn’t call myself a basket either, I can’t catch anything that well. I make a better ground, the underlying base that everyone just takes for granted. You don’t recognize the ground is there until there is a hole in it, or its not there. Why? Because we’ve been accustom to the ground since birth, its what we learn to walk on. Its always been there for us, usually when we don’t notice it. You can decorate the ground by planting it, covering it, pouring concrete on it, but regardless its there. No, I’m not comparing myself to the earth you idiot.

Usually I talk about how there is something wrong with me, and I’m ok with that. And this blog will be no different, but I’m insisting that I’m ok with it; not just telling. I have an idea I need to develop, but its similiar to an idea that took me several months of not doing very much to perfect and get ready, it will be hard to create it in a few months while I’m busy with schooling and other activities. I guess its good tho, that I can probably find some time to do this because I dunno; its one of the larger holes in the ground. I’ll most likely patch it with a large bump or some seemingly unsightly mark, but we’ll try to avoid that by employing a dash of cool.

Why do people eat bananas? It is because of their nutrition? Their taste? Their bright yellow colour? I’m not really sure, but I would bet it is a combination of factors. Nutrition is probably low on the list. No one likes food because its healthy, thats why we have McDonalds and Burger Kings. Color and taste might have more to do with it. Me, I’ve never had a banana, so I couldn’t tell you what it tastes like but most fruit is sweetish and moderately pleasant. The bright yellow colour certainly helps, people eat things that look good. Thats why most people don’t eat oatmeal, but lots of people eat apples, steak, turkey, candy, etc. I will say chocolate doesn’t fit in this category, but I have nothing more to say about this.

I shall head to bead. All problems addressed, the world is right again.

Not really, if only.