I just received a call. From a renowned and prestigious firm of international tax consultants.
It needs to be mentioned that this firm looks after stupidilous amounts of money for mostly autistic/semi-retarded/soulless banker types who generally make stupid money.
Which brings me to another thing. Most people assume the phrase "stupid money" means it's stupid because it's so very much. The etymological fact however,* is that it is called "stupid money" because the people who get paid these large salaries are actually a bunch of social retards.
Which reminds me of the one and only time I purposely (though unknowingly) surrounded myself with such non-entities.
Honestly I have never been more bored out of my fucking mind than when I went to a charity function for Romanian orphans. I had a Romanian girlfriend for a time and she was/is one of the coolest people I had ever met,** plus she had an amazing sense of honour and ethical correctness. And I had seen a documentary on Romania after that sick fuck Chauchescu. So I have a soft spot for Romanian orphans. I decided regardless of the company it would be a good deed to donate some money to it and visit the Tower of London while doing it. Besides I'd get to meet the Princess of Romania.
That whole evening was filled with banker types. The Princess of Romania did not disappoint however. She is a genuine lady in every sense, she was humble, courteous and made sure to talk to everyone even going so far as to enquire as to what I did and I was honoured to shake her hand. She truly is an interesting person in her own right.
Her husband too, though I did not get a chance to speak with him, seemed a perfect gentleman and someone I could probably become friends with. And there was also a girl dressed in red as opposed to all the other people dressed in black. She with her reddish dress and me with my blue suit and colourful blue tie were the only spots of colour in the place apart from the Princess who wore an elegant turquoise dress. The girl in red could almost hold a conversation until the woman whom had invited me got into an eye-stabbing match with her when she arrived and saw we were talking.
Anyway...apart from these odd spots of colour, the rest of the evening was filled with people of a boredom so singular I could not even amuse myself. They seriously risked lobotomising me with their personalities. The only time their beady little eyes lit up was when someone mentioned an interest rate or an exchange rate on the forex market or the inflation of Switzerland compared to the depreciation of the Rouble. Or some such mind-numbing life-sucking "factoid" as ephemeral as these people's humanity.
At one point I noticed one of the wives of one of these shadows (we cannot really call them people) gave me a look that was so transparent it actually sort of shocked me. As regular readers will know, I have undergone gruelling hardships in order to explore the female mind, which is best explored via a thorough examination of the female body. As such, there are certain looks a woman can give you that are basically the equivalent of her saying "Would you like to come to my place for coffee?"
Well this clearly married woman gave me a look that actually translated to something like:
"Take me now! I would like you to drag me home and fuck me on my matrimonial bed so hard I faint, preferably with my ass on my husband's pillow, but I can't wait, drag me off to a closet here in the palace! Now!"
It took me aback. Which you know, given my naivete, happened that one time and one other in 1992.
Anyway it was so blatant I wondered if it was really true. Sure enough, there she went and gave me another look that confirmed it. It was so...blatant that I honestly toyed with the idea of just walking up to her, taking her hand without saying a word and walking her off to an unused corridor off the side of the large hall we were all gathered in. Logistically it was so insane it appealed to me. Oddly, the room full of bankers, was not an issue. Honestly the place could catch fire with them all in it and I honestly don't think it would have troubled me more than say the smoke marks on my shirt. Nor would the fact she was never more than a foot away from her husband have phased me. I had the distinct impression he would either not care, mind, or know, and that even if he did and even if he caught her in the act of giving it away with a whole film crew gathered around the event, all I'd have to say to distract him from the situation would have been something along the line of "Dude, the Euro just dropped 2 points against the dollar" and he'd be off like a shot looking for a computer screen.
No, my logistical problem was that it would be embarrassing for the Princess of Romania if I did get caught, and in all honesty that would have disturbed me more than anything else. Oh. And I had been invited to this thing by a woman that I knew was sort of ...assuming we were going to be "together". So I put the shark-eyed married woman out of my mind and tried to find intelligent life. I failed at that but a short while later I actually felt a presence near me, and I turned to see the hungry vampire-like female standing right next to me, she instantly threw a scarf over her wedding band and turned her head so as to pretend she didn't know I was right next to her. I could actually feel the heat off her body. I have to say that few times in my life have I ever been creeped out by something but this was one of them.
I wish I could believe it was just the fruit of my fevered imagination, but I am certain that my sense of things was actually basically correct and this woman gave off an aura of such sexual desperation/depravity/need that it was clearly in the Lovecraftian part of sexual intercourse.
The fact she was so creepily, sickly in need of sexual gratification made my skin crawl. Not because of her, she was reasonably attractive and frankly, if it weren't for the Princess of Romania and that other girl I had been invited by (I am a pig but I try not to be a boor) on a purely physical note I could and would have shoved her against the nearest rough stone wall and made her squirt herself into oblivion. And I wouldn't have cared less if she screamed at the top of her lungs. But it was the way. The way she was so...ill. It made me think what kind of life did she exist in that she got like this and I began to look around and realised I was in a room full of soul vampires. Most of these people were not even human. The total absence of empathy was devastatingly clear. In an alternate universe, my avatar drew a mighty sword and cleansed the world of these foul undead beings. In this one I avoided the hungry female vampire and ran out of there as soon as I could.
So these are the types of people this prestigious tax consultancy firm deals with all the time. You thought I forgot. No, no, dear reader. And I just got a call from their director. The main man. The head honcho. Whom is a shockily intelligent man whom if he only turned his mind to crime would no doubt be right up there with the likes of Bill Gates and whoever runs the Federal Reserve these days.
Well. In actual fact his PA called me. He was in the background though. I could clearly hear her referring my words to him. And the reason they called?
They wanted me to update the blog. They want to know what life-changing events are occurring.
It warms my heart it does. Probably 20 people read this blog, but I now fancy that along with this guy and his staff of Nazgul whom keep in order the tax affairs of the world's most powerful vampires, if this is any indication...well...it must be only a matter of time before Obama shows up.
Finally.
The Earthlings have taken me to their leader!!
* Which I just made up. But is still true.
** She is a redhead too. In fact...there is a picture of her somewhere on this here blog. Happy hunting.
Well dear readers, sadly (for you I mean) my life is deeply interesting and filled with intrigue, so I cannot yet reveal some rather life-changing news which sort of affects many aspects of my existence. Soon, oh curious ones...soon....but you will have to be patient a little longer.
In the meantime, I shall instead entertain you with some interesting concepts and a couple of short but funny anecdotes which I may have to reduce to Zen-like aphorisms of wisdom scattered through this post. Without attribution sadly because the wise persons who uttered these sayings would probably lose their job/marriage/status/careers/ if it were known they were the originators of some of the truly inspired words of wisdom you will read here. Anonimity for my guilty acquaintances first and foremost I say. So here's the first one:
On Make Up Sex
Make-up sex? make-up sex? What the fuck is that? Who the fuck does that? I don't have that shitty need in my life!
If I am going to have angry sex, I will have angry whore sex!
me: But not with your wife...right? (just making sure I got the Zen aphorism correct you understand)
Fuck, no! Not with her! Just cause I call you bitch don't mean you're my Ho!
Fuck that. Angry make-up sex. Fucking stupid, fucking make-up sex. Who the fuck needs that?!
New Laptop
So I got a new little laptop, the Samsung NC20, and it's brilliant. Only 1.2 kg, runs windows XP which is great because I hate Windows anyway but Vista is basically the equivalent of having to live with a schizophrenic crack whore junkie. And then I spent three days thinking of the directory structure for it and in doing so I actually managed to change my own internal mechanisms. Since my existing laptop is basically dying a slow death I had to get a new one and the new one is the NC20 and as it turns out it will have to have all of my working life and many of my different persona on it, so the structure of the filing would be important. Who would guess that by thinking about how to re-orgainse all my files I would actually also re-orgainse my thinking?
New Word Processor
So that was a very useful exercise. And I decided to expand it a bit. And I thought about MS Office and how cumbersome it is and how much I dislike propriety software anyway, so I thought I'd research a few alternatives...I had already looked at Open Office and thought it was cumbersome and not as functional as MS Word....but then I found AbiWord. Which basically allows you to do everything I could want to do on MS Word but it's a small program, really neat, fast and just...cool. It's also Open Source and you can open and read and save all MSWord Doc files. I tested it a bit and it doesn't work so great at opening huge Word docs that have a lot of picture files embedded in the text in complicated ways, but then this is not a task I would be doing often. I researched quite a lot of them and AbiWord just seems right. It's very intuitive, clean, simple to use and as far as i can see it has all the functions I could want.
It was so LIBERATING to do such a simple thing as use a new, clean, simple, intuitive and fast, word processor that I actually experienced a really measurable shift in productivity and just freed mental energy!
So much so that I realised hey...if I find a similar open source alternative to Excel which similarly reads, opens, and saves excel files in their native format as well as an open source alternative...actually...i would then no longer need the MS Office suite alltogether.
And once I realised that; I realised it's a short step from there to getting rid of Windows alltogether. Then we could actually use an operating system that doesn't let every spyware, malware, adware and virus in existence attack your files as well as just grow and continue to grow as it basically dumps logs and files and creates a multitude of droppings that eventually destabilise your whole system after a few years.
On the Children of Religious Zealots
Well..of course we cannot just get rid of a whole bunch of children, who after all are born innocent of the stupidity of their zealot parents. It's not like we can just kill off all the religious fanatics. Even if they are only six years old.
But no more should be born.
The short steps to getting rid of Windows alltogether are:
1. Get rid of MS Office without feeling any pain (meaning you can still communicate efficiently with all the people who use MS Office files daily for work) I am 50% of the way there by getting rid of MS Word. I will investigate Math and other Excel-like programs in the near future.
2. Get rid of Explorer. Firefox is the obvious alternative but still a bit clunky for me. Part of the attraction of getting rid of Windows is getting rid of shoddy programming that clogs the system unnecessarily. Google chrome would be perfect IF they integrated the damn google toolbar in it. You'd think they would have done this by now! Come on Google. Wake up. Everyone wants this option. At the very least integrate the google bookmarks! Even without this...Once you play with it a bit chrome is very attractive. It's sophistication is also that you almost don't even need the bookmarks...because the address bar is also the search bar....and your history bar...so if you readjust your browsing behaviour you might even do away with bookmarks...almost. So I'm toying with the idea of using it anyway. Besides. Chrome was released in September 2008. they HAVE to add the google toolbar in by now right? Soon. When they do...I think explorer will take a MASSIVE hit. Vista has so many bugs and explorer 8 will be the usual pile of unsecured dogshit that all windows programs are, so really...I should have done this sooner.
3. Get rid of Windows media player. There are already better alternatives to this which in at least one case I already use anyway. VLC Player being one of them, but I will do more research and figure out which one to make my default "play every damn type of media file" software.
4. Get rid of the Windows Operating System alltogether. I will do this last as soon as ubuntu learns to make drivers for the laptops that use all the potential of the power-management features so your batteries last as long with Linux as they do with Windows. Once I have got to this point I know I will personally never use Windows again. And I also know if *I* get here...so will a whole bunch of people, because honestly I am pretty lazy and rigid and settled in my computer ways...but windows is so crap and so cloggy and it spams your RAM with unnecessary shit and forces the Microsoft tax on every computer you buy...so yeah. I envision i will actually get here for real at some point. And it will be a lot easier than I thought.
Funnily enough, the way to get rid of Windows is to first get rid of the parts you depend on the most, not overhaul the whole thing by switching in one shot to Linux Ubuntu.
Anyway the really important lesson I learnt from all this is that drastic change actually is best implemented by a non-direct route. Change that one thing you did most first, and make it a small one thing. Once you change one tiny part of one habit, the rest collapses almost organically. I have finally found a really good use for my innate ability to discover the weak point of a...anything really...of a system. Aside from punching people in the head I mean. Which is fun too but not as life-enhancing as you'd suppose.
So my advice for this week:
Try Abiword. Really. Give it a shot. It's free, stable, secure and just works several times faster than MS Word. You don't lose the ability to use or work with MS Word documents, and I can do anything I could need with it and I am a pretty intense/extended user of MS Word, so I'm pretty sure it will fill all your writing needs too.
And this last koan of wisdom is mine. I can attribute this one. To me.
Because Windows sucks ass.
Dirty, worm-infested, hobo ass at that.
Have a great week Earthlings. I know I will. Flow.
Ok. So this has been bugging me for years. Music is a touchy topic for me, as I am sure it is for many other people. Probably for most people with functioning ears.
I didn't have it growing up around me, so by the time I did start listening to it, it was kind of too powerful for me.
Got me to feel really strong emotions if the song was the type to get to me so I cautiously avoided it during turbulent times of my life, which was a lot, so it was really only in my late 20s and 30s I began to listen to it, become used to it and so on.
So that is point one.
Point two is that I HATE DRM (Digital Rights Management) with a passion. *
And point three is that I would like to be able to port my music, from my PC to my MP3 player freely and easily and be able to sort it by mood. Moods I design myself.
It should not take too much to design a piece of software that tags music not only by album name, by artist name, by music type (Rock/Country/Classic/etc) but ALSO by user defined moods!
Yes I am aware that there are some applications that work with iTunes to do some of this stuff; but that's the whole point. I don't want to use iFucking-DRMed-Bullshit-iTunes.
This same piece of software should actually tag the actual file so that when it's ported to another (also utopic, also completely open) MP3 player, it too can use all these tags to sort the playlist by author, by mood, by album, or a combination of all three.
Please imagine with me here how cool it would be to actually play say....all the:
- Style (Rock)
- Artist (Bruce Springsteen)
- Mood (Sexy/Funny Dancing)
Songs on your player. That would be a pretty small selection I suppose but imagine you can create an instant playlist based on how many tags you use. So it could be very wide:
- Mood (Background for working)
or
- Mood (Background for dinner conversation)
or
- Mood (Running/Movement)
or
- Mood (So ANGRY with the stupid humans!)
Down to very very narrow:
- Style (Rap)
- Artist (Snoop Dogg)
- Mood (Calming)
The tags should be available for:
- Performer (Automated- The actual person singing or playing the instruments)
- Writer (Automated - The actual person who wrote the song or piece)
- Album (Automated - The name of the album)
- Artist (Automated - The person it's sold by)
- Music Style (User Definable with also Automated Option)
- Mood (User Definable with also Automated Option)
- Owner (User Definable - This should be you, the user and legal owner of the paid for audio file)
All the tags should be able to be automated, so people with a collection of 50,000 songs can just upload the mood type of a song automatically from the net, and later if they actually find that a particular song for them is actually what they think of as Rock instead of Hip-Hop, they can change it (conventions be damned) similarly with the Mood tag which is always very personal.
When creating a playlist you can use as many or few of the tags as you want, and in an instant you have created a playlist to suit your mood, artist, etc etc.
Because you can tag the song with your own name, you can also distinguish between different people's moods.
So for example on your MP3 player Johnny Cash's A boy named Sue song might be labelled as Mood (Funny) on your (male) friend's Jane player it might be labelled as Mood (Disturbingly Suicidal).
ON DRM
Now I know there are a whole bunch of problems with copyright etc etc with all this,** but the plain and simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelmingly huge and vast majority of all the music I have ever used, I have actually bought myself or was bought for me by others. To be perfectly honest, I actually don't see the point of stealing music for free off the 'net.
Make it easy for me to listen to the songs I like before I buy them and make them reasonably priced and frankly, just because I am a lazy and relatively honest guy I will just one-click buy the ones I want and download them every once in a while.
I am too "lazy" to learn too use peer to peer e-mule type stuff and then spend hours trying to find the music I want from WareZ sites, downloading broken or crappy versions in lower res...etc etc. It's not that I am too stupid to do this. It's that my time is WAY more important for other things than to spend this way. I would much rather spend the extra time I save by buying it legally and easily listening to the damn music if nothing else!
Fuck it. Just make it EASY for me to downlaod what I want and stop treating me like a thief and I will just BUY IT. Because I don't have any objection with the principle of fair pay for fair use. I write and I expect someone who wants to read a book I publish commercially to pay for it when they buy it and I have no problem paying for a piece of music I want to listen to. Yes it would be easier if songs were physical objects like books, but ultimately we're all just selling ideas, some more concrete than others, but it comes down to just this.
Karate-Do, Systema and Copyright Issues
And would I expect a poverty-line person to buy my book commercially if the only way he could get it was in PDF format over some peer to peer network? Frankly, no. Because a guy who has to worry about where his next meal might come from, should spend that cash on getting a better meal or buying a better set of clothes for that interview to get a job that might change his life. And while he's worrying about that, in all honesty he can't actually afford my book. So I have no problem with him "stealing it" in PDF format.
I know this sounds weird, but the fact is it's the same in Martial Arts training and again, in all honesty, I don't see why it should be any different in the rest of my life.
All the places I trained in, be it Karate, or Systema, which I now actually teach as well as train in, were never businesses. Primarily they are places of human betterment. Uldiss, one of the guys who has a lot of experience with Systema who also teaches me Systema concepts probably put it best when he was asked why he came to training. He's retired from the working aspects of the martial art now, so he doesn't do it for his profession anymore. his reply was that for him it was a bit like going to church. He came to train, move his body, relate with people he liked and so on.
I have never trained in a place that has ever turned away someone because they could not afford to pay the fees.
Someone who cannot afford to pay the fees has bigger problems to worry about and if despite these problems they are willing to put in the effort to get themselves to regular training, then it would be uncharitable to not train them. I suppose it's a very Christian concept, but I think every religion has an aspect of giving alms to the poor. If a guy cannot afford my book, he has bigger problems than reading about the history of Humanity and the Martian Wars.
If despite this he can still make the time and the space in his mind to contemplate such things, then I say more power to him and I wish him much luck and good fortune with the "theft" of my intellectual property.
This is not to say I condone it. Nor does it mean he wanted to buy a more expensive Armani shirt than the D&G ones he normally uses so that means it's ok to steal the book. No. I mean a guy who has practical issues more pressing (food, shelter, basics of living and so on) that would really just not buy the book if the only way he could practically have it were to buy it, is sort of welcome to it.
We had people who could not afford to pay fees in our dojo and without fail they always paid something towards the training even though all we asked was that if they can spare some payment was better than none. And we accepted sweat equity. The dojo needed lots of repairs and maintenance and some people gave their time. TO me this clearly demonstrates that the fundamental concepts of justice are clear to every sane human being, and given a chance to act well in this regard, most people will take it.
None of the people that trained with us begrudged the poverty striken their "free" classes. Because they were not free at all. For those people to attend regularly they had to make more sacrifices proportionally than the paying guys. And we all knew that.
I know a lot of people would abuse this system with respect to music files or books in PDF format, especially at first, but after a while, why would you steal a song if it cost 5 pence for you to buy it easily and quickly? Seriously....wouldn't the peace of mind and sense of justice just be worth it? I know it would be for me. And if it worked this way the artist would probably still get the same kind of cash they do now and the middle man (the people setting up the infrastructure for the online sale) would get reasonable fees. Therein lies the problem. Reasonable fees. And a non-megalomaniac greed-obsessed middle man. Which brings me back to Closed source operating system software.
Because if OS Software was all open and all the infrastructures were open (document format types, audio, video etc) and optimised for efficiency instead of for propriety, then these problems would almost vanish overnight.
I honestly think Open Source is intimately tied to the turning around of the whole world economy, which - as you're no doubt becoming aware of now - is broken. It was obvious to me at age 4 that the concept of money as I understood it then (which was basically the same as I understand it now) didn't make any sense, now the rest of the world seems to be catching up (albeit very slowly and sporadically).
So yes, we went from the need for a perfect music player to saving the World Economy.
I wonder if I could get Martian Economics 101 to be taught in schools. That is my utopic dream Earthlings.
***
* This post cannot cover all the reasons for it in detail, though most of them stem from the concept that if I buy something, I own it and can do whatever the fuck I please with it. For this reason I must be the only person that I know that does not own an iPod. Fuck Apple. Fuck Windows too actually, but until Ubuntu wakes the fuck up and actually ports Linux to decent laptops easily and without me having to become a geek of IT to use it out-of-the-box, I will sadly continue to use non open source software. But I pray daily that Brazil gets it IT sorted out with only a standardised version of Linux (I like Ubuntu because Mark Shuttleworth is a cool dude) as its main operating system and open documents (truly open, not the corrupted shit that Microsoft has managed to say is "open") as its national identity and that coupled with a sudden magnetic pole switch which will instantly kill all the stupid and ugly people, heralds a new world where people no longer have "closed" or propriety operating system software.
** And actually yes, I do know a lot about this, being a writer myself and having followed really interesting things like the whole SCO saga on Groklaw for a number of years. As well as following the moves Microsoft makes daily to continue to keep Open Source suppressed. They are a powerful enemy and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves.
Came accross this on TED and it's deceptively simple, yet amazingly brilliant. Presented so clearly and simply, and the diagram below looks simplistic at first, until you actually think about it a bit and realise it was created from years of raw data, so it's not just a cute chart. It's how human beings actually work.
I knew this already for myself on an instinctual level. I think we probably all do. But seeing it so clearly spelt out crystalised it for me very nicely.
In other news....I know I have been away for a while. BUT. Stay tuned. Some stuff I can't write about yet, but it will be fun when I can.
So. The project I'm working on at the moment is this house worth some £60 million and I concluded today that if you gave it to me for free and I couldn't sell it and had to live in it I would say no. It has something like 9 bathrooms, a pool deck that rises so it becomes a ballroom...all sorts of extremely opulent shit.
And it's wrong. It's wrong beyond anything I know. It's pointless. What the fuck do you need 9 bathrooms for? Ever?
Which reminded me of this other philosophical question and actually crystallised it for me.
Say you had only one of these two options and it lasted your whole life without possibility of changing half-way through or ever, which would you chose?
Option 1: You settle with only one person, never ever have sex again with anyone else ever again in your whole entire life. Never kiss, meaningfully flirt or touch another member of the opposite sex in any sexual way...
OR
Option 2: You settle with one primary person for life in order to have kids if you so chose, but both of you are open to having sexual relations with others. There can be some kind of rules imposed on this (Like say no more than one fuck-buddy per month, or no blondes, or whatever you guys agree on) but essentially both of you (not just one of you) basically can get it on with someone you fancy. Not in a way that would replace your primary relationship, but just for fun and variety.
I had this conversation with one of my closest friends when I was 16 and again a couple of nights ago with my Russkie friend and in January with Redhead girl.
I would like to know your choice if those were the ONLY two options available before I give you my take on it.
Use your comments to let me know. Follow up post will be posted when I have say three votes of the four people who read this blog.
