“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was trying and failing to explain some thoughts on the push and pull of information to someone via email yesterday. It stuck in my mind a lot and I was thinking about it for most of last night. I had decided to write another email today to try and explain it and then to use that email as the cornerstone for a posting.

The email is gone and I think I made sense. I don’t think I’ve managed to get everything that I wanted down onto the screen but I got distracted. I wanted to check that I was using the word meme appropriately. I tend to use it in an internet email/LJ/forum context and I wasn’t sure that it was reflected as such. So a quick Google for the definition lead me to scrolling down the answers page and hitting the Wikipedia entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

And man did that throw some new thoughts into the mix. Starting with the quote from Mr. Emerson above. That first line hits pretty hard. Is it writing to understand and to turn a key? It sure seems to be at sometimes. Sometimes it’s even meant to be. It doesn’t always work but it’s worked at the important times so I’m sticking with it.

Scrolling down a little more, it goes into “language as a virus” and other such thoughts. To be honest, I’m not currently sitting comfortably enough to do anything more than skim the entry at this point. I’ve heard the phrase, I think I know what it means, at the least I know what I think it means but I can’t take that any further right now. It just seemed worth noting. It ties into writing to understand so well, so a topic to come back to at some stage.

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On a complete side note. For some reason I’ve been coming back to two Beatles tracks the past couple of days. Penny Lane and Eleanor Rigby. The latter is easily my favourite Beatles track. I’ve alot of time for a few of their tracks, overall I think they are overrated but I do admit that I didn’t (and still don’t) see the impact that they had on the world so I can let some of it slide. Anyway those two are the soundtracks to this post.

Dylan on the otherhand I see the impact of almost everywhere I look. So much owed to a single man. I really hope that Never Ending Tour hits the UK again soon. That will be a go every night without a fucking doubt. There isn’t anything posted for after April, although a new album does have to be recorded, there seems to be a whole lot of time to go and do some tours of the rest of the world. You know I think I’d try and do some Dublin dates there too.

I’ve just installed my first ever Linux system. I should have done it years ago but I’ve only now actually got a reason for it. So it’s running on an old box on my desk for a proof of concept type thing for a little while. No, I’m not just running command line. My terminal-fu is week. Next up a purl upgrade and some Apache and then it’ll all be set and ready to go. Looking forward to getting to play with it. It’s nice to have something, nevermind something new to do. Not knowing quite enough to know exactly what I am doing is however, annoying. I don’t get why I can’t create a folder in usr/share when I have already su. It’s causing a slight bit of hassle. But it’s fun to work on and the multiple workspace is beautiful, so very beautiful. I thought Windows was bad for having to run updates after a reinstall but this has 211 outstanding updates. Ouch. I’m not sure the box is stable enough to do all that.

4 day week, 4 day weekend, 4 day week. This makes me happy. I have no major plans for the weekend. Well I say that now but it’s actually all falling together nicely. Friday I’m going to walk Regents Canal (subject to weather) and some more Regents Park to take some photos. I hope to have some company and find a nice pub somewhere for a quiet lunch. This should be a good day. Saturday is Mr. Watson’s birthday and there shall be drinks. Sunday may perhaps be more of the some. I like the idea of a quiet enough one in the Big Chill Bar. I shall see how that one goes. Monday is gaming. A few of the lads are coming around and we’ll be playing some Halo and indeed whatever else we think of. So not so quiet after all.

It always seems to be 4pm when I come to actually post in blogger. This has been going in a variety of ways since early this morning. There was a CoH post first, then onto Linux, then the first piece. And now it’s all rolled into one.

I also just removed the del.ico.us stuff as I wasn’t really using it. I may use the space to expand the quotes which I draw on so much around here. I have to do something soon, it’s been an ongoing nag at myself for a while now.

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Nerdy CoH stuff follows

Last night I did the Terra Volta Respec trial…again. This time I did it with my level 24 Defender. I wasn’t planning on it, but I got a tell asking me if I wanted to give it a try. I was about to say no, but the tell said they had a full team and were ready to go. So I figured what the fuck and went for it.

We slaughtered it. Less than 90 minutes and minimal deaths. 2 stupidly on the first mish in TV, by people not paying attention and then just a couple towards the reactor. So I got most of the way to 25, I kept everyone alive most of the time and I have a respec which I don’t really need just now. I’m not sure what to put in there. I’m thinking about opening Stealth and dumping Manoeuvres. I’m pretty much pure defense, I cannot solo anything. I have two attacks, neither are slotted. I guess there is the option of rounding out a little but I prefer to play this one as support. I considered respeccing out Recall Friend and Resurrect in order to get up to phase shift, but I think those are two of the most important parts of my defender. Someone falls in battle, I have them back on their feet in seconds and going strong. So many times I’ve TP’d someone just as they are about to die and had my heal queued. So I’m going to keep them and maybe just open up stealth a little more. I’ll save the respec for a while I think.

Anyway it seemed way too easy. I should have thought to check what the slider was at. I do want to do it again with my main, not sure what I to do with him either but I um, I want the badge.

So after that I spent some time in The Hollows. I was playing a new alt in there the night before and I was in way over my head but it being The Hollows there were lots of other heroes around and they came to my rescue more than once. So I figured I would do the same for a while. A speedster healer can cover a whole lot of ground around the main areas pretty quick and save a lot of lives. So that was fun. I’ve seen many a team decimated trying to get to a mish in there so it’s good to sometimes get a helping hand or indeed a helping TP. I’ll probably do that again for a while tonight.

And now home.