#18 Is freedom a stat or skill?

http://www.owenfitzpatrick.com/meetowen/philosophy/philosophy.php#SlideFrame_1

This guy says "Personal Freedom is your own ability to take control over the way you think and feel and decide to become happier and more successful."

Surely it can't be that easy?

Mind over matter? What about all those external stimuli?

That financial crisis for instance. A whole bunch of people are pretty frazzled after the house of representitives shot down the savey deal. It's not quite the same as congress, but I'm a little fuzzy on that.

Still, the suggestion is that happiness and freedom are linked - not a bad idea. They might even be the same thing.

So maybe personal freedom as an ability relies on mental spam filters. If all the outside stuff bums you out, the only way you can get happy again is thinking your way there. Almost a bit like other skills and stats e.g. long distance running, stamina, patience, origami or dancing.

#17 Names that would be unsuitable for a horse

Never name your horse minge.

Or do. It would be fun.

In other news, I'm starting to lose enthusiam for work. And I'll buy spore when they remove the DRM.

#16 Storm front approaching

Big stuff coming in next week.

Yep.

I'd better get ready.

Remember, emulation is the greatest form of flattery.

Why are wheelchair ramps so slow? Saftey?


Comm skills went up a little today, along with working memory. Practise helps in all things.

I'd like to learn how to raise my right eyebrow. I can raise the left one just fine, not sure how to work the other one.

#15 Shopping around

Looks can be deceiving.


I mentioned before that time buys money.

I thought about this. Money has value. There are many different types of money. The type of money I earn has a much higher value in places like Eastern Europe. In fact, as I go east, the value of my money goes up. There are plenty of factors at play here, far too many to quantify within the system of my blog.

In a similar way, time has value. Just like money, where you are determines what it's worth. What's my time worth right now? Not a lot really. I'm spending it watching TV. Successful people don't watch TV (apparently). Tomorrow morning at work my time will be worth a wage, because I'll be spending it pushing paper.

SO, I suppose economics determines what my money is worth. Does free will determine what my time is worth?

The other thing is that you need both time and money to survive. When you run out of time, you don the wings and head up to the pearly gates (hopefully) . But when you run out of money, bad things happen.

Money buys time, time buys money. Money can buy happiness, or at least the means to attain it. Whoever said otherwise obviously never heard of buying tickets to a comedy gig, or a nice holiday, or even a rigamarole PA to find a date. Courtship can be expensive. The grand objective appears to require significant amounts of time and money, but the return on investment is well worth it.

I'm trading time for money. It's working out. Now I need to find a way of spending my time towards the current objective: Stat increases.

#14 What an awful prang

And so, a standard reinstall ended up with a virused machine. Not a great week.

I'll get'er done eventually. Stats though, they've changed.

Confidence took a hit because I screwed up majorly
Memory, a perceived stat, took a hit too. I'd already downloaded the software in work where it wreaked havoc. For some reason, I thought the same software wouldn't cause the same problem.

Lemme paint the bigger picture here: Sibelius 2 needed a reinstall. I uninstalled it. Silly man, don't click custom!! Oh Noes!! Now the folder with all Dads work in it has been uninstalled too!!

Oie...

Ok, so try and reinstall? Okie, where's the serial number?

Oh Noes!!!! No serial number! Uninstall again? Yes. Oh dear, where are all the work scores? Oh noes... They've been wiped! Quick, get the Helix disc! FTK or FileRecovery! Save me!!

Oh NOES! They didn't help at all! Hmmm, what to do... Other recovery software? Worth a try... Even though FTK says the folder is all zeros now.

Ok, what's the best one? Recover my files? K, let's try this... later.

Oh, the guys at work wiped a flash card. I have recover my files. Let's try it.

Eeep. That installer was virused. Now the work computer needs to be fixed.

Hm, shame about what happened at work. Let's try the same file at home.

Oh noes. Oh NOES!! Now my home PC has a virus! Damn you smit.fraud!

Oie, this isn't pretty.

But at least now I have all the tools I need to fix both infections :(
smit.fraud isn't malicious (if kaspersky is to be believed) but it's a right pain to remove.

So as you can see from the above story, I did a series of very stupid things. Worse still, I kept rushing into doing stupider things.
Both infected systems have dual boot (two operating systems - 1 good, 1 bad), so fixing them won't be completely impossible. I just need to work out a pathology to success. Everyone has problems, but very few have solutions. I should count myself lucky.

My wish for a superpower is to know the exact solution to any problem I encounter. I mean I could say scientific problem or engineering, but why limit what I might need to know? The internet already has this power. It wouldn't be beyond my powers of learning either. In the story above, I've had to learn from necessity.

Another harsh lesson.

#13 Artsy

I drew this yesterday.

K, so the guy in the middle is a smiley pink dude with 4 legs, 1 of which is from a table, and the other 3 clad in tights. His right ear is either a hole punch or a paper clasp (you know, like those big black metal paper clips?). I was actually trying to draw an A4 punch, go for the whole pierced ear visual pun gag there. The legs are the metal bits from the paper clasps too. Above him we have a blue cloud long bed pick-up truck with a scorpion tail that also has a flame thrower for those roadside BBQ doos. Not sure why it's blue. Then in the bottom corner, we have my initials and the year of creation. Beside that, stickman wearing the badly drawn fez is asking 'eh?' because he's in the picture, but not quite getting it, and there's purple rain along the right side as a tribute to Milli Vanilli and Prince, who wrote blame on the rain and purple rain respectively.

Funny thing, art.

#12 Halfway from the start is halfway to the finish

I'm getting the hang of this. As to work, my theory was right. I was vindicated too, so I'm glad I came clean and let everyone know where I was. Being in Ireland seems to mean you can call someone or leave them a voicemail and they won't call me back. I'm just as guilty as everyone else. I took down the voicemails this morning from the night before. Wanna know how many I called back? 2. I think. Boss wasn't happy about that. 'Course if you only leave a name and number then hang up, will I think it's important? Probably not.

Why am I putting up with this? Well, I need money. I have plenty of time, so I figure I can trade some of it for money. Time is money, remember? That also means money is time, which explains why people hire plumbers, electricians, computer repair men, driving instructors and other things, like water, gas, oil, electricity, transport and groceries.

Economics described in 2 lines. Take that Wikipedia!

Oooh Peggle!

#11 Tree in the Forest

If you drop a pebble in a pool, how long will it take for the ripples to subside?

#10 Stride

Handwriting skill improved today. Paperwork management, work habits and customer relations skills are also up.

Still working on it all. Hope you're all reading good books :)

Here's a picture of a TV oozing what might be cheese:

It's art Jim but not as we know it.

#9 Reality Intervenes

The real first day was today. Because my social stat is so low, working with customers is very difficult. The first week will be a true test. Toughness has been revealed as dangerously low. An offhand remark or angry person seems to cause a long lasting sometimes permanent confidence debuff, a stat that can't afford to go any lower. If it does, introversion will take a sharp rise, and social will plummet until confidence recovers.

The 'forget about it' ability needs to be learned. Otherwise the foibles of everyday life will eventually crush me. Toughness is low because of a long period of self imposed social isolation, largely related to the shyness trait. Why it should be that I can't take the mildest of knocks is yours to decide. Bound and retained such as these wounds are, remedied only by love. So we should hope.

Everything works out in the end. God plays dice, and the dice are loaded. Kay surah surah. Another Day another Dollar. Live to work or work to live.

Winter is coming.

#8 Time marches on

So well we are, happy and healthy, or hopefully at least so.

Stats update today.

Social is up 10%
Beermat flipping skills levelled up thanks to a successful first attempt at a stack of 10 (asynchronously sized, half aerial turn, fingertip catch, 2 witnesses). Beermat skills now stand at level 4
Hearing took some temporary damage due to all that loud music
Loneliness is on the rise, +1% every hour
Organisational skills are set to rise steadily until the end of the month
Sleepyness is rising steadily, so this post won't last much longer
Dancing abilities rose by 2D6%. Those of you playing at home should roll 2D6 now.
Maturity rose by 1 D10%. Mental age is now estimated at around 19 years.
Despondency caused by the humdrum nature of life rose slightly

Maybe next week I'll post up my alternate zodiac. It should blow traditional astrology out of the water.

#7 I'm lucky, but sometimes everything changes

Routine. Any freedom in that? Sure: how about the freedom from thought?

Some freedoms aren't as good as others. Heh, the freedom to choose freedoms, now that's a good one. All freedoms have limits. Bush said there ought to be limits to freedom. Not sure if he was joking, but there are.

You've the freedom of your time up to when you get hungry or thirsty. Then you lose a freedom to your body. This one loss starts the domino effect. You have to go find food and/or water (usually water).

What would life be like if we didn't need food or water? Now that I think about it Jesus said a lot about bread and water.

Let's say you could still eat and drink for fun. No famine, that's a given. Pestilence? That'd take a hit for sure. Plenty of folks died from bad food and water. War? Majorly hit too. Food competition is out of the equation so all we fight over are things like natural resources. Not sure if oil would still cause problems. Death? Hard to say. Isn't aging caused by oxidization? Call an expert in.

Most of what I'm writing about has already been written elsewhere. The difference is that I'm piecing it all together for myself from places like books and modern media.

The grand objective remains. This perhaps brings in a third need.

Love.

#6 First Day

First day of the rest of my life, of Autumn, of September, of what will be. This means a lot of stats over near the relationship wall will start moving about. An odd mood dip occured earlier today but passed. Full moon I guess. The language is coming on nicely, the book has stalled and the other blog is sporadically updated.

Sickiness is up due to a rather terrible diet. I was thinking of adding Health status somehow. Life is pretty three-dimensional as is free will, so I might add Health as the floor. It'd fit nicely, because without good health, very few of the other walls matter. Religion holds up in the hopes that belief in healing has been demonstated to cure disease e.g. faith healing and the placebo effect.

Financial situation might improve in 4 weeks.

Common sense now dicates that sleepiness should be decreased. There is much to be done tomorrow.