It’s always interesting when I run across things on the internet that jolt me back into a philosophic mood.  I never thought that such a thing would happen from coming across something like that from the blog of an intelligent design proponent.  This post brought into focus my pet peeve of intellectual honesty.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand when people try to make arguements, it’s intellectual dishonesty.

After doing a bit of reading about this author, he seems to be pretty well recognized as an ID supporter that actually adheres to some standard of intellectual honesty.  I know a few people reading this will have instantly though “ID supporter? he must be retarded,” but that is exactly the type of intellectual dishonesty that this guy tries to avoid.  Specifically take a look at #1 and #7.

Intellectual honesty was a concept that had fallen to the back of my mind.  When I first saw that title of the post in my reddit feed all of the thoughts I’ve had about it in the past, while taking philosophy classes, came rushing back.  More than anything else, I respect people for being intellectually honest, not matter which way they’re leaning.

It seems that intellectual honesty is a rare thing in this day and age.  From simple advertisements, to the travesty that is Fox News, the world at large seems to be quite an intellectually dishonest wasteland.  So much so that I am extraordinarily refreshed by the rare occurrences of honesty that I come across.  Even amongst people I talk to every day, I can pick out inconsistencies and double standards on a regular basis.  Hell, often I catch myself doing it.

Most people smoke because of the addicting nature of nicotine. Whether its the chemical addiction or the mental addiction, it’s something about the cigarette that keeps people coming back. For me though, I only ever feel a need to smoke (and no smoking while drinking at the bar doesn’t really count) is when I’m involved with girls.

Without fail, it seems that getting involved with girls just tends to through my mental world into a tailspin. It’s either the “does she like me back” but eating at the back of my brain, or the “is the a reason she hasn’t returned my call yet” bug boring a hole in my frontal lobes. Every time I meet a new girl that seems to meet my standards, I go a little crazy.

Even if I already had plans on a certain night, if there ever enters a glimmer of a chance that I could hang out with girl X, it consumed my thoughts. Once that glimmer was shattered, my night was ruined. Is temporary OCD a real thing?

At times in the past it has gotten so bad as I would start feeling nauseous because I was so nervous about the state of things with a certain girl. I lost my ability to keep myself entertained and I ended up sitting on the couch watching tv for hours just wasting time until I could try to talk to girl X.

It seems a bit dangerous admitting this tendency towards infatuation, but if I never acknowledge this I can never fix it.  And besides, I’m sure everyone’s gone through similar at some point in their lives.

Luckily, I seem to be starting to overcome this particular character flaw.  In recent weeks, I managed to reduce the craziness to the same level as being anxious about an upcoming test or due date for a paper.  I’m proud to say, I can now make a phone call, leave a message, then head out to hang out with friends or otherwise make use of the night for myself.  Quite liberating, seeing as to where I’ve come from.

Half the problem seems to arise from the fact that I don’t meet new people very often and I meet girls I’m attracted to a fraction of that time.  Scarcity breeds obsession?  I think it’s time to ramp up talking to strangers.

Just after writing that, this weird lady at the coffee shop here started talking at me about the most random stuff….  karma is a bitch I guess.  This is not the kind of talking to strangers I wanted.  This is strangers talking to me and weirding me out.

So where was I?

Ah yes, moving on.  I think if someone just slapped me whenever I meet a new girl, that should work too.

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

The past two weeks have been mentally tiring.  After a two weeks on the new team, I started to get bored with just learning objective-c from a book and I was getting more and more eager to start working on actual code.  Despite having a short list of menial tasks to get me familiar with the code base a bit, I wanted something a bit more hands on. Over the last week and a half I’ve not only managed to scrounge up some stuff to do, but I’ve managed to do it without seriously breaking much.  WOOHOO!

Though it’s left me quite mentally tired, it’s helped get my brain churning again.  About a week ago while hanging out at a coffee shop with friends, we started philosophizing about the prospect of free will.  (Granted, this was after an absurd philosophic inquiry into what makes a questions a good vs worthwhile vs valid question.)  I haven’t had a good philosophy session in a while, and I think it might have been because I’ve become quite mentally lazy.  While I was on the snagit team, I often got stuck with less than mentally stimulating tasks (fix this or that bug, blah blah).  Switching to the new platform and having to deal with that learning curve seems to have jolted my brain awake again.

Throughout my day-to-day routine, I’ve been more aware of my surroundings.  I’ve also picked back up a philosophy book I started reading about six months ago, but ran out of time to sit and read.  It’s nice to get back to reading it, though I now see that had I finished this when I started, it would have given me answers to quite a few questions that were raised during my most recent philosophic discussions.  Now I just need to find a way to satisfy my craving to get out and work on my photography.  If only I knew of some more interesting spots to take pictures.

With that, I leave you with a picture of the happiest i’ve ever seen my trunk.  That’s right, five and a half cases of really tasty beer.

So recently I got switched over to do mac development at work.  Being that I’ve only ever written anything worthwhile in C++/C#, it’s a pretty big step to switch over to writing production code in a language that I only first saw code of a few weeks ago.    The syntax of Objective-C is pretty counter-intuitive to a C++ developer even though objc is a C derivative.  For the non-programmers out there, its kinda like going from eating with a fork to eating with chopsticks.

I’ve been procrastinating learning obj-c for about a year now.  I’ve been planning to learn objective C to write a media organizer for my mac media center but have never actually gotten off my ass to start.  Now that I have an artificially imposed outside deadline, however, I’m sitting at a coffee shop after work trying to figure this shit out.  If only I could find some sort of similar outside motivators for other stuff I’m trying to do since I’m pretty terrible at self-motivation.

After an hour or so (including learning curve), here’s what I came up with: http://screencast.com/t/w8kRupWcuAm.   That’s after a day of programming exercises at work.  Hopefully learning the rest of this stuff starts speeding up as I keep going.  So far the biggest hurdle has been getting used to the new syntax.

Tomorrow I get to head out to Purdue for to participate in a career fair for my company.  My job there will be to actively engage the students there and sell the company to them in an effort to recruit kids to the amazing Lansing area (or at least the mediocre area which is made up for by an amazing job).

What better way to chip away at my social inhibitions than with a monetary motivator?  Get out there and talk to people or suck at your job.  Personally, I’ve always taken pride in all the jobs I’ve had when interacting with people and this should be no different.  Practice makes perfect afterall.  And hell, I’m getting paid for it too.

Looking back, I was always incredibly outgoing when working at the movie theater in high school.  When I was in that uniform I became a different person.  That simple change of appearance gave me extraordinary amounts of self-esteem and I could say anything to anyone there without flinching.  (Probably part of the reason why I got so many more girls there than from just meeting people as myself in college).

Either way, it’s nice to have more motivation than just myself to dive into more and more social situations. And if all else fails, there’s at least a really good brewery on the way in which i can down my sorrows.

A couple days ago I went in to Best Buy to try to find a eyecup for my camera (mine seems to have been broken somehow).  On the way in, I get the same old greeting as always at best buy.  After I’m about 10 feet into the store, the greeter says “Hi.”  So I do my usual and turn my head back and give a nod.  They didn’t have what I was looking for, so I left after about 3 min in the store.  On the way out, I get a “Have a nice day.” from behind after I’m 10 feet out the door.  At that point, I just keep walking; screw responding.  Then I realized what gets on my nerves about the greeters at best buy:  they always talk to you from behind, never giving you a chance to respond without awkwardly turning around.

Most of the time I’m out and about, I try to be at least somewhat friendly with strangers.  If I make eye-contact, I generally smile or say hello.  At best buy however, I’ve noticed that even when I walk in and purposefully make eyecontact with the greeters, they dont do or say anything until I’m at least 10 feet into the store.  At that point I feel the obligation to respond but am unable to without turning around to say something.  Anyone else get this there?

Apologies for being lame with this.  Too many things came up in a row and I fell out of habit.  Fortunately, I have actual content this time.

So, throughout my endeavour to become more social and grow beyond the shyness that defined me through much of growing up I have only been able to measure my success through my own point of view.  I had to rely on comparing memories to tell if I was actually being more social or if it was just something i’d convinced myself of.  Over the last month though, I’ve found two different instances where my perception of progress was reinforced by other people.

First, a couple weeks ago I was at a concert with a friend.  We got there about an hour before the bands went on, so we had time to waste talking.  After a while, she mentioned reading my blog before and asked about my endeavours of self improvement.  Of course this led to a discussion of how I got on the road I am currently travelling, and she was really surprised as I told her how shy I really was growing up.  She always thought I was a really social person from the day I met her.  Granted, I met her after I was a few months into this experiment and she’s a cute girl, so that may have factored into why I came off as so social.  Either way, I’ve managed to keep up the ‘new me’ and supress the typical shyness I have with people.

Second, in late July I was up visiting family and having breakfast with my aunt and grandma.  After talking for a bit, my aunt made a comment to my grandma which hit me pretty hard.  “He never used to talk.”  It was so true.  Growing up, I always shied away from talking with anyone but my close friends unless pressed.  I never worked to keep conversations going and often just found it to hard to.  But now, I had been having a conversation with family that I’ve never talked to for more than 10 minutes at a time for more than an hour.  Talk about signs of progress.

Now that students are back around campus, it seems like a great time to ramp up the social skydiving.  Practice has been my greatest tool so far.  Might as well push a bit harder than usual while it’s easy to do.

Since I started this blog, I’ve tried to aim to only make posts of some substance.  This requirement seems to bring me down to one past every two weeks when I actually get busy with things (moving, etc.)   So, the question is: more shorter posts, or few long posts?   I cant decide, maybe you guys can help.