What Works for Me

Windows 7 “Starter Edition” comes with a restriction that only allows you to run three separate applications at once.

Are you pissed off yet?

Microsoft wants you to give them money for an operating system that holds you hostage.

And this blog post wants you to be okay with that.

That post is totally apologistic, and really pisses me off.

"Yeah, it’s not so bad that Microsoft is limiting what you do with your computer; you can totally have as many IE windows open as you want!" Really? Is this where we’re finally at with Microsoft? We’re letting them dictate what we do with our computers? Man, fuck that. If anyone expects me to hand over money I earned to someone who’s going to use it to tell me what I’m allowed to do with my own computer, they’re fucking crazy. I’ll run AmigaOS 1.0 before I run Windows 7.

And yet Windows has the biggest installed-base. I guess what’s really rewarded is cutthroat business tactics, rather than spending resources on innovation and actually competing fairly by creating a superior product. We have a word for that: it’s called cheating; gaming the system rather than playing it the way it’s meant to be played.

Before you know it, Windows will be charging you for every program you run. And then we’ll have bills in Congress deregulating the operating system.

real life, seriously serious, software microsoft, windows

I feel like, nowadays, people really throw around terms like “amazing,” “fantastic,” “ingenious,” and “awesome.” I have to take issue with this because the more often we do this, the more often it sends the signal that being average or boring is bad.

Being average is not bad. By definition, not everything can be amazing; most of the time we fall somewhere below amazing. What’s wrong with that?

Some of the things I regard as “awesome” and “amazing” are in the list below. I think you’ll see what I mean when I say that things shouldn’t often make this list:

• My fiancée
• My sister
• Good friends
• Most of the Super Mario Bros. games
• Pizza
• Cheeseburgers
• Presents (e.g. birthday presents, Christmas presents)
• vim
• Good amusement parks (though nowadays they just seem to scare me)
• The concept of movies

Some of the things I regard as merely something in between “great” and “average” are in this list:

• GMail
• RSS feeds
• The iPhone
• Donnie Darko
• Twitter

fun, real life, seriously serious amazing

Once someone is fertilized, birth and life are inevitable, so I don’t see how abortion is not murder – assuming there aren’t health risks for the mother.

If you don’t have the guts to admit it’s murder, you’re doing a disservice to your own sanity and the unborn child.

I’d posit that most of the people that argue that abortion isn’t murder, and are actually considering having an abortion, on some level know that it is murder, and don’t want to deal with that reality.

I’m not going to take a pro-life/pro-choice stance since this is just my opinion, but it’s all that makes sense to me.

real life, seriously serious abortion, murder

There are compelling reasons to want to agree with others. Obvious reasons include:

• Wanting to be a part of a community
• Wanting to have a good relationship with someone

Less obvious and possibly unhealthy reasons include:

• Needing to please someone and gain their approval
• Getting a sense of self-worth from what others think of you (in a childish way related to obedience)

So there are good reasons and unhealthy reasons to want to believe what others believe. Likewise there are good and bad things to being an independent person and an independent thinker.

On the “Good” side, you have:

• Confidence in yourself
• Not swayed by the opinions of others just because you want to make them happy

If you take this too far, though, you’ll end up lonely, and you won’t be much fun to be around. That is, if you make it a point to remain independent always, you may end up unhappy and bitter.

There is an alternative to these extremes, though (and here I’m reminded of why Buddhism is called “The Middle Way”): Unconditional acceptance.

If you accept others for what they are and what they believe, you’ll find that you’re a lot more easy-going, and you’ll be a lot happier and more content.

The biggest obstacle I’ve found to unconditional acceptance is feeling responsible for others. If you believe that you know better than someone else, you feel a drive to correct them or “fix” them. And what happens when they inevitably balk at your obvious attempts at correcting them? They balk, and things will be stand-offish for a while.

Ask yourself this: Do you need or want anyone to live your life for you?

You don’t have to agree with anyone; you don’t even have to want to be around them. Those are your choices for your life.

So, at least for me, I think that accepting our differences and embracing our commonalities (and we usually have countless commonalities if we stop to consider it) is a good approach.

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New isn’t sexy; reliable is sexy. In people and products.

New is unknown. Your brain fills in the unknown gaps with expectations based on the behavior you’ve seen thus far. If someone is nice the first time you meet them, you start to imagine all the nice things they’ll say and do, and all the things you’ll share in the future. This is one of the reasons (aside from the chemical reasons) that new love is so exciting, I believe. Unless you’re extremely pessimistic, in which case you probably have some negative expectations mixed in there, in which case you guard yourself.

What is sexy is when someone - or something - proves that they’ll treat you right over the long haul. This is where the whole notion of “trust” comes from: If someone or something proves time and time again that they’ll treat you right during day-to-day mundanity and times of crisis, you naturally trust them more.

→ But note that lack of trust and longevity don’t necessarily go together: You can be in a relationship with someone for a year, and still have that uneasy roiling in your stomache — that’s distrust (though it’s fair to say that some of us have “trust issues” that come from someone/something other than the target).

Now, don’t get me wrong: novelty, I believe, is important to human life (and science seems to agree with me). Who doesn’t love to try out something new? This is how we make things better — in our personal lives, and in society. This is how learning works. But I believe, as I do in most things in life, that balance is the key: Some novelty, resting on a bedrock of reliable relationships and things, is great (provided that the novel thing doesn’t threaten the reliable things). Try out the new thing for a while, and see if it works in the day-to-day. Nothing can maintain the excitement of novelty forever; mundanity, though much maligned, is the real beauty of life. Excitement - also called “drama,” sometimes confused with “hope” - is not the essence of life.

So I believe that too often we put value in new things because we believe we are missing something in our own lives. Love? Something to live for? A passion? I can’t say what it is for you, but I know that when you find it, you feel confident in yourself — that you can handle anything, and you accept yourself for how you are. Buddha called this being a light unto yourself.

A new idea, a new thing, a new person in your life — all these things are just that: new. Betting all your chips on something new may come off as romantic, hopeful, and optimistic, but none of this betting or hoping will make the new thing into what you want or need it to be.

seriously serious