Carnival of the Snoggers: #1

Okay, this marks the inagural edition of Carnval of the Snoggers, a Blog Carnival held among members of the illustrious SNOG! message board. If you're not familiar with the way a Blog Carnival works, it's essentially a group of bloggers who come together to post on their blog about a common topic, or write posts to their blog along a common theme. One blogger, appointed the host, acts as a hub hosting links to all of the sites in a magazine-like format, with some optional wry commentary on the various posts tossed in for good measure. A great example is Carnival of the Godless.

Okay, so the call for submissions was er...found somewhat wanting. I've got three submissions online, and I decided to go ahead and publish with what I've got, mainly because I said I'd be publishing tonight. The "grace period" will be until tomorrow noon, EST. After that, that's all folks!

This week's topic is "Thinking Positively". How did our first round of submissions go? Let's see...

Live and On The Air...

As Katherine can attest, I have no love lost for Xanga users, but our first two submissions gave it their best. And besides, Xanga users can't be all bad, right?

• x_Perfectly_x3_Flawed_x says that we really need to stop giving a damn about acting and thinking positively...and just...er...think positively...

So you may ask yourself "Gawsh, how in the world can I get back to the positive self that I used to be?" My solution is this: Don't focus on trying to thinking postively, in fact, don't even focus on not thinking negatively...don't focus at all. Take the time to be by yourself and simply *inhale* relaaaax *exhale*. Sounds simple, right? Eh, it usually is.

Sometimes the most complex of problems can be solved with the most simplest of solutions. I mean, we usually drown ourselves in a well of constant self-analysis. Well, I do at least. How often does it occur to us to simply just, well, relax and take a deep breath? Not often enough, I imagine.

• Citarra has a somewhat different outlook on things...

People can just try to think positively about some of the things that they used to be so negative about. You never know what you can find out about a person if you change the way that you are thinking.

Even if you think that someone has something bad about them such as being childish, try to think that maybe thats a good thing, that you can only be a kid for so long and they are trying to grasp it and hold onto it for as long as they can. Yes, it can get annoying, but, they will most likley get over it if you give them the chance.
For some people it may be hard, but, just try. :)

I like Citarra's general message, but I really think she should have elaborated more on that. I like her "Can-Do" attitude, but I wonder if she understands how difficult it can really be for people to "Just Do It". Sometimes you meet people who drive you absolutely nuts and telling people to try to see the good in that person would probably get you reactions ranging from indignation to outright incredulity. How do you fight human nature? I'm curious to know what she has to say to that.

• Stephanie, meanwhile shows that something good can come out of being in a depressed state:

So I was frustrated, most especially with me and most especially with the hard time I was going through and the fact that no one was really paying attention. I wrote that entry to release some anger. It really helped.

But one side-effect to writing that was surprising. It seemed that writing that entry, that way with all of the emphasis that I think looks so pretty, helped cement everything in my head. Everything. Before I would tell myself, “Oh, you should think positively every day!” every one or two weeks, whenever a weblog or person or something reminded me of it. Now, I get out of my car in the mornings and the first thing I do once I’ve gotten all of my junk out of the trunk is remember to smile. I smile at my friends when I first see them. I smile at random people at school. I try not to look quite as harried in between classes, and I remind myself to really look at people.

That reminds me a lot of the general sentiment I felt when I wrote my own submission. You feel a certain sense of anger, and you turn that into a way in which you can in some small way make your life better. Even if it was just through writing. Glad to know I'm not alone.

In a way it does seem plastic, but I do sense a genuine sincerity behind it. If you're not sincere about something like that, the veneer quickly fades away, but if you in some way believe in it, it sticks. She doesn't mention how long she's tried her new habit, but it's working. That's proof enough, right?

• And of course, last but not least is my own submission, easily accessed below.

Hopefully the others will be finished soon, so I won't have to do an excessive amount of edits.

Until next time...

Fits of Madness, and On Thinking Positively

I was rereading an fairly recent interview with famed Mac developer Wil Shipley on DrunkenBlog. To sum up, he's a fairly well-respected figure in Macintosh programming circles, and for good reason. He was one of the principal minds behind software powerhouse The Omni Group, and is now head of Delicious Monster, maker of the critically acclaimed Delicious Library.

One of the things that really lept out at me was this particular bit:

My discovery is that everyone I meet is broken in some way. As I've gotten to know my friends and business associates and girlfriends, I've discovered they all have some kind of problem with their emotions. And they all compensate for it in different ways, so it's hidden from other people most of the time.

Fits of Madness

There's certainly no shame in realizing that you're flawed. But we often lose sight of that. We build up massively overblown expectations of who we are and what we can do, and when we fail to meet those expectations -- as we invariably do -- we often tend to magnify our flaws, and dwell on them. And that leads to a whole variety of ways that we can deal with that. Which led me to this post on Shipley's own blog, linked to that article:

Depression is not glamorous. It's not like a movie. You don't get to get cured of it. You don't wake up one day and realize that life's tough, but there it is, so slap a smile on your face and keep on trucking. Some people have never dealt with depression, and they can't figure out how it's different from "being sad." "I've been sad! I don't whine about it! I just get over it." Yes, that's nice. Also, not the same.

Depression completely robs you of hope. You don't believe things can get better, and you don't believe anything is OK. You look around you and realize that everyone and everything you love is going to go away, sooner or later, and you don't believe anything good will replace them. Sometimes you just want to self-destruct: you get so tired of waiting for the things you love to abandon you, waiting for that shoe to drop, that you push them away pre-emptorily . Take that, you thing I love, now you can't hurt me, now I don't have to live in fear.

If I just stay in bed, and pull the covers around me; if I just unplug the phone, if I don't answer the mail, then whatever bad news is waiting for me can't get to me. If I can just sleep, and then just sleep some more, then I won't have to deal with it. Not now. I can't deal with it now. Maybe it'll go away on its own. Maybe I'll die and I won't ever have to deal with it.

I realize I'm probably overstepping my bounds since I've never been formally diagnosed with clinical depression, but I want to say that I feel that a lot of the underlying emotions that are felt by people who have to battle through this are emotions that a lot of "normal" people can relate to. Which is why I think that there's a special kinship that can be felt between the mental "haves" and "havenots" when it comes to depression. What Shipley said in his blog really resonates with me, because it reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago. She told me that she just feels this overwhelming urge to just lay in bed and sleep all the time. And it seems silly to most people, perhaps, but to me, I said to myself, wow, in some perverse way it makes so much sense. When you sleep, you don't think about all of the things that are bothering you. And you don't have to do a thing about them.


On Positive Thinking

Which is the real challenge when you're trying to rationalize in your head all of things you should do keep afloat; to not just give up and let yourself be swept away by the current, caught in the undertow. For me, it's not a sense of dread over an impending and inevitable loss; it's just this constant fatigue from having to fight life or God or whomever and whatever is out there, every single step of the way. Why do things always have to be so hard? Why can't things run a little more smoothly? These are questions we ask all too often, but we never really see the meaning of them until the shit really hits the fan and we realize that what we worried about five minutes ago really didn't matter in the Grand Scheme of Things.

There's a quote I picked up a few months ago, one I ended up saving in my email .sig file:

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- St. Augustine of Hippo, (354-430).

I think that's one of the keys to thinking positively. A sense of anger and frustration at the the way things are. Sure, it's possible that you may not be able to change a thing, but you did something, and that something will at least go to making your life better in some way. If you're going to be executed, you'd might as well go feeling comfortable.

We often associate anger with destructive, negative tendencies, but here I think it serves a valuable, constructive purpose: a driving force that pushes us to do things we otherwise thought we couldn't do. Maybe that's one of the things we could do to help us fight depression: be more angry -- at ourselves, at the world, at others...and then use that anger to make things better. I find it almost fitting that someone could in some way find help in improving themselves with something that we think makes us worse than what we are.

I'm writing my abstract Dr. Sage, honest...

I was going to continue on chronicling my single-minded quest to trick out my Mac as much as I could without going overboard with the Dremel. However, I realize that 99.999% of the people who take the time to read what I'm writing don't know half of what I'm talking about, let alone understand why I'd go to so much trouble instead of leaving well-enough alone. I'll give it a break for a while and deal with some other things I've wanted to write about.

Also, I've got a million and one things rattling around in my head. An urgent reply to a message I got from a treasured friend who I've been sadly neglecting. A possible misunderstanding with another. The Hawaiian Paper for Dr. Brooks. The Blackfly Paper for Dr. Currie. And an abstract I need to write for a course that I want to email to my TA tomorrow morning. I wake up in the morning with expectations of what I'm going to do and what I'm going to accomplish. And a lot of times I fall woefully short. So is the error I'm making one of insufficient effort? Or just overly-ambitious goals?


There's a point to all of this rambling, really

I saw something in today's Metro which ended up making headlines at Slashdot. Apparently, Wal-Mart's recruited bloggers to help whitewash its corporate image. Which is of course, what's happened often in the print and online media for ages now, with companies, nations, and many other institutions, both public and private. So why the outrage?

I think it's because we've come to expect the blogosphere as the Great Equalizer, in a way. Before, it was The Internet as a whole that was considered to be the Great Equalizer, but that was really before it became less of a democratic forum and more of the great untamed virtual wilderness that the military-industrial complex could exploit. I mean, we've all seen with our very own eyes how commercialized the online experience has become. And we've all heard alarmist reports of "cyber-terrorism", alongside reports of how the US military wants to do to the internet what it's been trying to do to space since Reagan's "Star Wars" of the 1980's: "weaponize" it. (Is that even a word?)

Blogging may be the last great expression of free speech which is true to the phrase's very nature. You all heard the pundits talking about what effect the Blogosphere could have on the election, both in Canada and in the US. Your virtual soapbox has a virtually unlimited audience. This is communication at its very finest.


Great Expectations

Which brings me to my original point. We've built up our expectations of "the blog" and "the blogger" as this last frontier for freedom of speech and freedom of oppression. When in fact, the "blog" is just some amorphous entity that doesn't really have any meaning or purpose aside from the intent that the writer has when he or she writes in it. I mean, people recently have been raving about blogs like its some new phenomenon. But sites like Digital Expressions, Diary-X and LiveJournal have been around for years and years now, before anyone ever even thought of the trendy word "blog". And what were a lot of these people blogging about? Not politics, or computers, that's for sure. Just a lot of mundane, semi-interesting things about themselves, their friends, and their daily lives. And that's not really a bad thing or a good thing, it's just the way it is. Nothing profound in it at all. If the "origin" (if you could call it that) of the "blog" were teens and twenty-somethings just writing about the stuff in their lives, then I don't think you could expect some massive socio-political revolution to come out of it. A lot of fighting and verbal internet-drama, sure, but not some profound intent to expose the evils done in the shadows of the corridors of power.

Oh well. I think I've said enough for tonight. Speaking of expectations, I have a few to live up to, a few I should have made good on a long time ago. It's about time I changed that, starting now.

The MDD Chronicles: Part II

Some people go to absolutely extraordinary lengths to cool their MDD Power Macs. I wasn't about to go crazy with the power tools on my Mac, especially since it's long out of warranty and I'm sure parts as mundane as the plastic front panel would cost me an arm and a leg (plus iI feel it'd be somewhat wrong to put two gaping holes in the top of my sleek, beautiful Mac).

Nevertheless, I love taking risks, which probably might come as a surprise to the people who usually know me to be the shy, reserved, introverted type -- which I usually am. So, with some trepidation, I decided to wade into further the world of computer modding.

After trying to scour the web for days trying to find hints on how to (non-destructively!) cool and/or quiet down my MDD, I came across Steve Smedley's homepage, where he documented a pretty cool trick which didn't look very hard.



Pop off a part of the back plastic panel of the MDD with a flat head screwdriver, and you can access the perforated metal grille below. Then, after sliding two 60 x 60 x 25 mm fans behind the processor heatsink, screw them into the grille, and pop back the panel. You now have an easy way of increasing the cooling on the typically hot heatsink.

It seemed a lot easier than two other mods I'd looked into. The first involved the use of a hard drive cooler similar to mine, retrofitted with two 60 mm fans. Problem was, I couldn't find any store, in Toronto or on the Internet, which sold the kind of hard drive cooler that he used. All of the coolers I've seen bolt directly on to the back of a hard drive; this one apparently screws into a 3.5" hard drive bay much like a hard drive itself. The second involved the mounting of 60 mm fans directly onto the processor heatsink itself. This mod involved the use of something called "Tiger Elastic Fixation", a sort of plastic rubber anti-vibration fixture. Trouble is, I couldn't find anything quite like this that was locally available; at least, nothing that would be able to fit in between the fins of my heatsink. Furthermore, it seems that there are two types of aluminum heatsink used on the MDD; the first is a type that's more traditional, with the fins broad at the base and tapering off at the tip; the one on mine is a series of thin aluminum plates stacked horizontally, so I wasn't sure if I could do this with my heatsink (the aluminum plated one). And then of course, the fact that the heatsink currently runs in excess of 40-60 degrees C; I couldn't help but shudder at the thought of melted rubber fusing itself to my heatsink.

So, Smedley's hack was the one to use. I'm a creature of habit, so having had experience with a Vantec hard drive enclosure, I decided to use a Vantec fan, from their much lauded "Steath" product line.

A lot of the shops on College Street don't seem to sell cooling parts -- at least, that's the impression you'd get if looked at the websites for all of the various computer stores on College Street. The only place I saw which seemed to have a good variety was Bigfoot Computers, a store near the corner of Jane and Dundas. After visiting several stores trying to find the vaunted Vantec Stealth fan, it seemed like this was the last place on earth that had them -- and they only had one left. I remember the experience of my first time visiting there was rather amusing; the guy eyed me nervously and with some mix of bewilderment, confusion, and suspicion. I think he thought I was going to stick him up, or dash out the door with my merchandise before I paid for it. Maybe that or he just didn't expect a brown-skinned guy to be into the whole PC-modding thing. Or maybe they just don't get a lot of foot traffic into their retail store. I mean, hey, the corner of Jane and Dundas is a far cry from the strip of College Street between Spadina and Bathurst.


Oh Snap

Anyway, I get home, a little cocksure. I mean, hey, if Smedley could put two 60 mm fans behind his heatsink to cool off his MDD with just a flat-head and Philips-head screwdriver, I could do it, right? Only, there's one problem...



The bloody fan won't fit behind the heatsink. Damn. There's just no getting around it. At least, not without damaging the heatsink. And this fan certainly wasn't cheap. I didn't go to all of the trouble I had to go to, to get the fan only to end up not using it. I had to use it somehow. Okay, what about removing the heatsink and then attaching the fan? No can do: you need to reapply thermal paste to the CPU's after you remove and before you reattach the heatsink. Which I didn't have. Plus, in a catch-22, you couldn't screw the heatsink back in without removing the 60 mm fan to gain access to the three rear heatsink screw holes. Damn. Then, remembering Jason Schraeder's MDD cooling project highlighted on MacMod, I realized that the only thing I could do to not let the fan go to waste was to just strap it to the back of my Mac with plastic wire ties.

Yeah, it looked ghetto. At least his installation was more professional, since he used machine screws. In fact, my attempt was so ghetto that I was glad that I didn't have access to a camera to document this project. The copper heatsink (the third type of heatsink commonly seen on MDDs) seems to the only common denominator among people with MDDs who easily did this hack without disassembling their motherboard. The copper heatsink, while much taller, seems to be more narrower at its base than the aluminum heatsinks, affording more clearance for the fans. Damn.

To add to the hilarity, I noticed something funny about something else I bought at Bigfoot: a set of plastic slot covers also from Vantec, ostensibly meant to cover free RAM and PCI slots to prevent dust build-up. The PCI slot covers, however, only covered up 2/3 of the actual PCI slot. Huh? I then remembered: Apple used full-length 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots in pretty much all of its G4 and later G3 Power Macs. Guess what the majority of PC motherboards use? Smaller, 66 Mhz PCI slots (which, according to what I've seen, can be either at 32-bits or a full 64-bits). Ah, right. This is Apple we're talking about. A company that builds its computers with as many non-standard or uncommon parts as possible, quite possibly for the sole purpose of pissing off to the fullest extent people who dare to add anything standard to their hardware. Thanks, Apple. Thank you, so very, very much...