Thursday, December 22, 2005

Work it out!

So i joined a gym the other day. I am not interested in working out so much as renting space. I do this thing called 'body-flow' and i need room. I also need a place where i can focus on it instead of answering my phone and watching tv as i'm wont to do.
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Monday, December 19, 2005

Si i found the way to dissolve racism

I was reading a book about business and the most interesting thing i read. The author was talking about solutions to problems operate assuming the problem. However, in science, in addition to haveing this notion of 'solution' they also have a notion of 'dissolution'. Basically he was advocating designing a environment/context/world in which any problem has not solution, but rather dissolves into the world.

MLK in part of his most famous quote said "judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin". I think this was prophetic, not only because it was idealistic, but also because it held the solution to the problem of racism. In a related incident I was browsing a bookstore and read part of a chapter that said that we could end racism by discriminating! The author went on to say that the process of discriminating itself was neutral. The problem was that people actually stopped discriminating between people and that posed a problem. They made the first distinction between people: race. And that was it. What people didn't do was keep discriminating according to other factosrs: integrity, communicative ability, charm, deceitfulness, gumption, etc. There are a whole host of characteristics that people use unconsciously to discriminate between people: who's honest, who is reliable, who is shifty etc.

So what's the solution? Well, it's actually a dis-solution. It's a method to envelop race as one variable in a person's character. It's called paying attention to character. And how do you do it? Pay attention to character. The problem is such that no person or group has come up with a relatively consistent and coherent way to analyze people. The feild of psychology is rife with an obsession of stimulus-response and white rodents. Psychiatrists wan't to prescribe then diagnose the side effects. Astrologists have too much make-up on. Psychotherapists want to talk without discussing why they're asking such probing questions. . .

I'm deliberately being a victim of a different -ism (occupationalism instead of racism) to segue into the point. The point being that there is no widespread coherent model of how people function that enables people to create a different set of standards about human behavior. So i propose that someone somewhere come up with like five criteria upon which everyone can be categorized and whose explanatory power is significant. Sure, there are all kinds of typologies and metaphorical things. . . but INTP says nothing about gumption or integrity. . . sometimes, sagttariuses are stupid not witty, etc. I wan't something that enables people to not see all the flaws in the system, but to see the beauty of it.

In short, the way to end racism is to start discriminating. Discriminating as a process, not discrimination as a product. We have to distinguish between people who have integrity, who communicate well, and all kinds of other things that make life work but aren't scripted by genes, race, gender, birthdate, section of the city or what have you. A set of criteria that are based on choice.
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Friday, December 16, 2005

down with microsoft

not really. I just found out about a free program from Sun microsystems that replaces the Microsoft Office suite. It's called OpenOffice and can be found at Openoffice.org

I haven't tried it. I'm waiting to get my new computer to put it on that. I think I will be able to cannibalize my old computer and make that little 30gig hard drive a slave drive loaded with linux. The cool think about open office is that its cross-platform, it has versions that work on linux, mac and pc's. That'll make my use of linux a likkle more easy.

Actually, a friend of mine showed it to me. I didn't get to delve into it, but it looked like it had most of the stuff i'd use from Word anyway.
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Wednesday, December 07, 2005

another regular day

I am having another regular day. I realized that i've double-booked two commitments this weekend, and i have to replace myself for one. I'm supposed to be assisting a leadership training program this weekend and attending a school-related function. I double-booked the same before but the school-related event staff was a no-show. This time i forgot in advance and hopefully can find someone to take my place.

In other news. I love the ipod. But today i read that the format sucks when you listen to it on high-quality equipment. I read in wired magazine about an mp3 maker called "lame" that's supposed to be really good. Apparently, most of the sound quality in a file deteriorates the smaller it gets, duh. But, you can stave that off if you're smart about it. The people at "Lame" did double-blind sound quality tests for their files. So basically, they got people to listen to recordings of Cd's and recordings of mp3's and tried to have them figure out which was which based on sound quality. They failed to do that. So that's basically saying that with this mp3 maker you can have mp3s that sound as great as CD's with the compression of small files.

This would really be relevant if i had a bigger ipod, i've got the shuffle. So i'm now hoarding what i have in aac format because they're smaller. when i get to upgrade, i'll probably switch back to the mp3 format (even though i used to do the wma format) with this Lame thing. I think i'm becoming an audiophile. I molest music.
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