I’m Back

I’m back in New York. It feels like I’ve been gone for more than six days. Now I’m in my comfort zone. I have nothing left to say, except a few pictures I’m going to parade below. Visit the photos page for more. I didn’t capture much. I’m a lazy bummer when it comes to photography.

The Rockies (British Columbia)

The Prairie (Manitoba)

1 comment June 28th, 2008

We The Living

“We The Living” is about a struggle of three individuals in Soviet Russia. Ayn Rand claims that the heroin inherits all the philosophical ideas from her.

In the beginning of the book, Kira was my model. She did not care about anyone but herself. She walked the path which would make her happy. She denounced society because according to her, oneself always comes first. The highest reverence of man is himself. Selfishness is a virtue.

A few chapters later, I lost interest on Kira. She contradicted herself because she fell in love. Her love affair(s) is unconventional. So what? She attached herself to another and that created a “society”. This is the beginning of her downfall and she never rose back.

I have been attempting to detach myself completely from everything — emotions, society, etc. I had the opportunity to complete the task 4 years ago. I also had another opportunity 5 months ago. Both opportunities were shattered by an emotion that everyone seeks and what caused Kira her downfall.

Once a man is detached, he shall live life like a comatose. So far, I have devised three phases in order to achieve complete detachment: (1) detach yourself from blood, (2) detach yourself from love, and (3) detach yourself from dependence. I shall explain each one.

Detachment from blood means to extract yourself from your family and relatives. This does not mean casting out of the house (you will do this in the third phase). What I meant here is to not care what happens to the family. You shouldn’t feel grief, envy, jealousy regarding the family. This may be the hardest because you grew up attuned to this form of collective. It’s the basic form of society — family.

Detachment from love means to not be in love with anybody. This is difficult as well because the emotions playing here are very enigmatic. However, this is the only phase where you have to overcome something that’s not inherent. It’s injected. It’s poison to selfishness. Total self control is needed in this phase. Strong will to resist external temptation is a must.

Detachment from dependence is not exactly independence. Independence is the result, but is not the task. This is the most difficult of the three because you will have to abandon all connections. You will no longer depend on others in order to live. You will not have a job, acquaintances, connection to the world. You will be completely alone.

The first phase, I have partially completed. There are still stray emotions I need to sort out. The second phase, I should have the full control in this. For now, I can’t say I have this taken care of. Lastly, I need to save in order to accomplish the third phase. I have a long way to go… What about you?

2 comments June 1st, 2008

Deceiving Statistics

I feel cocky tonight, so I’ll present you with deceiving stats for this web site. I intentionally cropped the graphs to have 400px width so that they won’t mess up the layout of the web site. Giving, of course, the sample containing the highest peak.

If you see a graph, do not conclude immediately. You need more information in order to understand the situation — the behavior of the sample. Statistics is widely used now to give us false information. Every morning you will hear these information in the news. Researchers taking down stats and most of us make facts out of these samples. That’s why I hate the medical field so very much because of its dependence to stats.

Below is a Wordpress blogstat graph. Even though I’m showing a sample with the higest peak, blogstat shows that this is a typical activity for this site. That’s an average of 1000 visits. Blogstat does not compute according to a visitor’s uniqueness. So you may think that I’m bored every day and since I have no life, I visit the site 1000 or so times in order to see a graph looking like this.

You thought wrong! Below is a graph from Google Analytics. It’s really a boring graph because it’s nearly constant (almost a straight line). The graph below (the Y-axis has an interval of 1000 visitors) is showing an average of 1000 UNIQUE visitors daily. That proves the graph above to be legitimate.

Why then did I entitle this entry “Deceiving…”? Well, I intentionally omitted relevant information. The information I omitted do not affect the result of the graphs above, but they do affect the understanding of how the site is doing.

2 comments May 28th, 2008

Unplugged / Off-Air

The day is beautiful; it’ll be warmer today. The sky is clear, so wireless signal should be excellent. I guess it’s one of those days. A man took my usual seat before I arrived at the cafe, so I had to take another location. Too bad, the signal in this location is faint. I won’t bitch about my hardware because I was connected, but got disconnected when I lost the signal. I’m writing this in my offline server so I’ll be publishing it online later.

I’ll leave you with one thought:

I can feel a pleasure, that’s the pain.

Add comment May 23rd, 2008

Short Term Absence

I had a short term absence online, if anyone noticed. I did it intentionally because nothing was coming out of my head, except the back entries that I will be posting tonight.They were posted offline in my i-touch-nothing-happens. I installed an offline WP there so that I can write directly through there and I don’t have to re-format my entries when I’m publishing online. Before my word processing software was formatting the entries when I copy & paste.

I vowed to halt my presence in the world wide web for a week. I didn’t even check if I had comments for moderation. I was going to reinstate my presence on Monday, but a slew of ideas came into my head and I didn’t want to lose them, so I’m writing this now while I’m on the ferry.

For some reason, I feel relieved from anger and all the negative thoughts that’s why I’m able to write again. I was reading so much of Ayn Rand that I realized I was bashing society so much. It is as if I’m emphasizing society, thus giving it more importance. Well, I’ll lay low on that topic for now. I was thinking of writing about emotions, especially pain. I heard a Dolores O’riordan song and it inspired me to personify pain and destruction. I don’t think I can, but I’ll think something along the way that’ll satisfy my urge to write about it.

Add comment May 15th, 2008