David's Blog

My iPhone died agian tonight. For the third time… this YEAR! what am I doing wrong?

Its completely bricked, wont even take a charge. Ive set another appointment with the Apple store, where they will generously give me a new phone. I hope I get lucky this time and get a phone that lasts more than a month.

The snow is falling here in the mountains of North Georgia. As I gaze into the sky, with my tongue sticking out of my mouth, it occurs to me that this is the perfect backdrop for Valentines Day.

As I try to catch as many of the incredibly tasty flakes of snow as I can, I am reminded of all of the beautiful souls that I have come across in my (still young) life. Each of them has been as much an individual as the shapes of these flakes. There are sometimes several seconds that pass before a snowflake lands, at those times I even feel like going inside, out of the cold, I wait just a little longer and that next tiny flake is all the more refreshing. There are also those times that the snowflakes bombard my senses, overwhelming me. Then I shudder, and may even pull my tounge inside the warmth of my mouth for a second, retreating from the stimuli.

Yet no matter when these flakes fall, or how often, they have each soothed me with a surprisingly fresh and new sensation. Each one has stimulated me with an incredible vigor that could never be repeated.

You would think that as these snowflakes melt, that they are destroyed, gone forever. There is nothing further from the truth, after stimulating my senses, they become part of my body, where they continue to nurture me.

Thank you, beautiful souls, perfect snowflakes.

From this inspiration I have created a new haiku…

As a student I am often caught between the crossfire of multiple platforms. At home I use OSX and have Lynux (eeebuntu) netbook. Most of the schools computers run windows, but there are a couple of labs that have Apple machines.

In this hostile environment most word processing or spreadsheet documents are worthless. Trying to move files from one computer lab to home, or the next lab is inconvenient at best.

In order to survive the greed of these corporations, I have turned to two opensource (sorta) resources. The first is Google Docs, I cannot stress how useful Gdocs has been, I take all my leture notes directly to google docs on my netbook. I share and collaborate with other students and my professors. Do I trust Google? to an extent, yes, but especially with recent security problems, I limit the access of my most precious intellectual material to my own Disk space.

Ive solved the problem of dealing with incompatible office suites (I could just buy them all… If I weren’t a student and had money.) by putting a copy of each platforms OpenOffice.org application on a thumbdrive. And save all my files on that drive. Don’t Forget backups!

I dont watch television, so when someone uses the lingo of ‘talking heads’ to make their point, it freaks me out. In a recent friendly political conversation I heard the strangest phrases, like
“spewing venomous lies of destruction”

Seriously, who says that stuff? It sounds like its out of a ‘boogyman’ story!

That got me thinking…

What does the Political Boogieman do? What does it look like?
From what I gather there are a few of them, and they are:

• The Killer Donkey that steals money and eats children out of women’s stomachs while fornicating with other donkeys of the same sex.
• The Gold Hoarding Leprechaun who beats malnourished children and is bent on stripping all forms of advanced economic theory from the earth with a time machine.
• The Pot Smoker that thinks it would be really funny to live in tree houses, walk everywhere (with horses on their backs), and castrate people who have more than one child.
• The Grotesquely Overweight Elephant that voraciously devours everything in sight, mowing down anyone who stands in its way with a gataling gun.

Children: I hate to say it, but there are probably one or more of these creatures in your house.