When it comes to feeding, Ingo the Birdman recently threw a little survey stick in random directions, one that I actually have the means to respond to, too.  See my responses to that feed reading survey below.  But first, one other thing of note that neutralizes a couple of recent blog posts…

Hmm…  There’s one thing about spending EUR 100 per week on fast food that compensates for the entire spending-too-much-money-on-junk-food thing: I felt great all last week.  Even if it’s Irish beef (which is a pretty lame shindig when using that party-in-your-mouth metaphor), charbroiled cow does something good for my brain chemistry.  Not particularly good for my weight, I know (but don’t care, as long as I can still climb mountains faster than a mountain goat), and it might turn off some vegetarians who might stop by this blog once in a while…  Whatever works, right?  :)

Feed Reader Surveying Stick:

1. Which feed reader do you use?  Since when?

Outlook 2007 SP1, baby.  It’s not just Microsoft’s eat-your-own-dogfood philosophy (which I gladly subscribe to unless it comes to servers, where the only reason to run Windows Server 200x is to run Exchange Server 200x), but also the fact that I try to reconcile as many different functions into a few programs.  Many years ago, I tired of having five different instant messaging programs open–the response was Gaim/Pidgin, and it works fine.  The same thing goes for feed reading.  What else is Outlook than a messaging platform?  E-mail, newsgroups and blog/news posts are pretty much the same thing, when push comes to shove.  And Outlook 2007 finally integrated RSS feeds into the feature set, and it did it pretty well–no fancy things, no frills.  Been using OL2007 for feeds since it came out.

2. How many feeds do you subscribe to, and how many of those are blogs (in %)?

24 feeds, 22 of which are blogs–so, approximately 92%.  The non-blog feeds are the Battlestar Galactica podcast feed (just in case something new does come out, and the other is the MS TechNet webcast feed.

3. How many feeds do you read per day, on average?

I look through all feeds with new posts whenever new content comes in.  That depends on the blog–some deliver new posts daily, others’ schedules are a little more irregular.

4. What’s your most-read feed?

http://www.thedailywtf.com

5. Which news sites are you subscribed to?

Actually, not one.  I’d rather go to web sites for those or watch the Tagesthemen podcasts.

6. What’s your first and last blog in the reader?

Hard to say.  They’re alphabetically sorted in a folder structure, based on subject and topic.  Alphabetically, the first would be the “Daily WTF” blog, the last “You Had Me at EHLO” (the MS Exchange team blog).

7. Do you read feeds alphabetically, chronologically or randomly?

Whenever something new comes in.  If several new posts come in at roughly the same time (or over night, since I feed-read at work), whatever I feel like reading first will be read first.

8. Any blogs you’d deny having subscribed to?

Nope.

Whoever wants to provide their own answers to this survey shall respond to this survey.  (How’s that for randomly throwing survey sticks around?)

Cheers!

So your big black cloud will come,
So your big black cloud will come,
And press you to the ground,
The air will leave your chest,
Your faith and where you’re found,
You’re finally standing still,
And your fingers all go numb,
Get higher on your hill.
So your big black cloud will come,
Your big black cloud will come.

- The Microphones: “Mt. Eerie”

Chances are low that I’ll be around for more than a week at this time.  For the past month and a half, except for the few moments when diversions were available, I’ve constantly been thinking of doing terrible things to myself.  For some reason, when you don’t cling to life anymore, drivers seem to be much more careful on the road, and trains enter the station slower than ever before.  Not that I am trying to do something stupid, but I can’t shake off thinking about it and if it wouldn’t be better to end it all than stick around one more day, and that affects not only my psyche but also my outward appearance.  As far as I can count, it’s been fifteen years of off and on depression so far, and whenever I’d hit one of those really low spots, I’d avoid people and put on the best frowny face I can make to ensure I didn’t have to act all happy and content–nothing’s worse than people asking you about things they don’t really want to hear.  I’d occasionally thought about doing myself in, but those thoughts hadn’t lingered for almost two months straight yet, until now.

And why shouldn’t I do myself in?  I’m deathly afraid of everything except real danger, am sick of IT, love working with people but loathe working for people, think the entire planet (if not the world) would be much better off without humans and have too little energy to start working in a field I know I’d really enjoy if I’d know what fields that would be at all.

I don’t know.  I stopped writing after that last paragraph for more than two hours because I wanted to figure out what else to write.  Who needs to read this, anyway?  No one, really.  It’s stupid to be open about suicidal thoughts.  And yet, it’s better to say something instead of having it happen and be a huge mystery to all.  Oh well…

I’m not sure I’ll write more in this blog.  Of course, I’ve said that many times before, but for now, the blog’s on indefinite hold.  Perhaps I’ll be around for a long time to go because I’m too much of a pansy to do something bad to myself, perhaps I won’t.  Either way–if you don’t hear from me: cheers!

While you’re reading this post, listen to the new track “Visions of Zero” in a very preliminary mix, created on 12 April 2008, on iLike.com!

Well, back to the same-old blog that’s been around for a relative eternity (half a year is a relative eternity the frequency at which I closed and reopened the blog over the years). It’s no use to keep this site closed with a splash screen for bigger and better things to come on this domain or www.nadimhaque.com, especially when I have neither the time nor energy to come up with some better design, layout and site structure that I’m actually happy with.

Another question that begs answering is whether it’s actually sane to implement a new site when I feel the my life’s usefulness in general has left the building a year or two ago, anyway. Currently, all I’m doing is going through the days and motions in order to earn enough money to pay for an apartment, food and toiletries.

I don’t feel I live a fulfilled life.

I don’t think I’ve found my true calling yet.

I don’t believe it’s going to get better from here on.

So, what’s one to do when these three statements apply to one’s mindset? What am I supposed to do when I think this way?

The cynical answer would be to consider myself a victim of society. That doesn’t sound too otherworldly when you consider that it’s hard to work outside the ways society–culture, over the course of millennia–set up for the people living within it. I’ve chosen system administration because it was the least boring thing I could do with a degree in Computer Engineering, and it’s only come that far because I realized way too late that I didn’t care at all about working with computers for money while studying. Now, a few years after finishing up that degree because my parents and I couldn’t afford to switch that late in the game, it’s hard to find something new to do.

How do you convince someone they should give you a chance in a field you’ve never worked in?

How do you find a field of which you already know whether it’s the right or wrong line of work?

Work’s no problem, I’d just like to feel some kind of pay-off with it. I currently don’t feel any pay-off. In old jobs, I haven’t felt much pay-off, either, and when I did get some pay-off, it was usually invalidated by crazy company politics and pissing contests among various groups of people. But I’m not sure what kind of work I could do that would warrant more emotional pay-off, and if I have the kinds of skills needed to do that more interesting and rewarding work. Skills abound, but when it comes to formal training, I can’t afford that anymore, because that tends to cost a bit of money nowadays.

Writing used to be a dream, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Spend a decade or two finding the time to write in between normal work days and overtime, and it becomes a pretty destructive force when you realize you should have managed to write more and rewrite and edit more than you actually have. The drafts for two novels still sit on backup DVDs in my parents’ basement; I didn’t even bother taking those drafts from two and three years ago with me to Ireland because I haven’t felt like writing in a long time.

Music’s an interesting field, but inspiration is pretty hard to come by these days. It’s probably something better left to those who are more creative and know what the hell they are doing.

What else? There are other interesting kinds of work that would be options, had I not missed the train years ago–life sucks because there’s no time travel to go back in time and warn your younger self of these things.

So, what to do when you feel generally useless at the time and see no way to increase usefulness with the amount of energy you have? I’m thinking of becoming a hermit or leaving the world behind in another way. Considering I have grown up to appreciate the nice amenities society has invented over the years that make me a pretty wussy kind of person who doesn’t enjoy experiencing the elements unless it’s from inside a building with insulating window panes and a heater turned all the way up to “desiccate”, hermit might not be such a great choice.

The other way of leaving the world behind is more of a taboo in our western society. What is it about suicide that makes people squeamish and call a van to the closest mental asylum? This may be my atheist, nihilist ideology speaking, but grief for dead ones is simply egoist behavior–rarely do I encounter grieving people who are sad that the person who died can’t experience the joy of living anymore; it’s usually sadness that the survivor will never meet the deceased in live action again.

Obviously, talking about suicide–your own, as an option–opens a huge can of worms. That’s pretty much only because our modern society thinks about suicide as an easy way out, because life after all isn’t that bad. Cynically thinking, again, it might also just be the sentiment that the autodeceased has managed to get out and the survivors end up cleaning up the mess.

Whether life is good and worth living is a pretty subjective issue. I don’t think life is either. There are little elements of life which I do enjoy, but when I walk around the world, to work, to shop–in short, to do all those things I need to do in order not to end up sitting on the street and freezing to death–my mind’s constantly engulfed in a haze, it just isn’t connected to what I’m doing because I don’t see a point in doing those things just so I can continue living another day. When I realize that–because my relatives seem to live at least into their 70s–I have about 50 more years of this same old stuff to go, I get into a pretty disillusioned mood.

The world isn’t going to get better. Society isn’t going to get better. My sentiments about life aren’t going to get better. Why not leave on my own terms?

Note that this is just a thought experiment for now. I’ve thought about the cost of living and to potentially forfeit life for 15 years now and haven’t taken action yet, mostly because there are people who’d like to have me around. But for the last two years, these thoughts and rationalizations have been following me wherever I’ve gone and whatever I’ve done.

Hell, welcome back to the same old blog.

While looking for inspiration for a new site design, I came across one of my favorite sites that I keep forgetting all the time, SimpleBits, and this discussion on the text sizing control behavior of pixel-sized text in the IE8 beta.

Very briefly, the article and debate (in comments) is about the fact that IE8’s beta–like IE7–doesn’t adjust font sizes for text whose size is specified in CSS using pixels as a unit when users use “View / Text Size”.  The comments seem a little lopsided to favor either a) it’s a bug or b) it’s an extremely bad design decision.

I don’t think so.

Back in the days when I started tinkering with HTML and all the stuff that surrounds it, CSS as a specification had just started gaining ground, and hardly anyone who knew what HTML stood for hadn’t heard of CSS yet.  Web design included tables, spacer GIFs and font tags.  Then the day came when CSS was on everyone’s tongue tips, because it parted content from presentation like Charlton Heston the Red Sea.  I’m not using that metaphor lightly: in both cases, it was a huge bunch of smoke, mirrors and forced perspective.

The fact that a) no two people had the same idea of what cascade and style were supposed to mean (and perhaps even still don’t), b) the CSS-defining community chose arbitrary and not completely well-thought out rules for several important issues (box model, anyone?), c) browser developers arbitrarily chose how to implement arbitrary subsets of CSS 1.0 (continuing through to today and CSS 3.0 or whichever version they’re already thinking about aloud) and d) browsers still feature different behaviors when it comes to mundane and somewhat logically OS-related things like text rendering.

The fact that CSS makes it easier to specify simple things like text attributes can’t overshadow the fact that the internet is simply too squishy to design for reliably.  Internet Explorer seems to use Windows’ ClearType technology to render text, Firefox uses some other method, and Safari renders even regular font weights so strong that I’m afraid text might singe letter-shaped trails into my LCD panel if I rest on a web page for more than two seconds.

They say you should specify as many dimensions as possible using relative units such as ems, ens or even percent.  That’d all be fine and dandy if image scaling in browsers worked a bit better than it does now (a healthy baby at 100% can easily look like a progeria patient at 200% scaling), and if dimensions of elements like DIVs could be linked so they could grow together if necessary.  But, lacking those, I still use pixels as the unit of my choice when I touch CSS: it allows me to retain as much control as possible (on the horizontal, that’s easy, but there’s hardly any control for the vertical), and the fact that I always have average computing equipment that’s prodced for the mass market means what I see and can read, a majority of computer users should be able to see as well.

So, back to the cause for this whole bantering session now.  I think IE8’s behavior is just fine and correct.  Pixels are pixels.  Sure, with the advent of LCD panels, pixels have become a bit more virtual–LCDs offer different ways to display images when the delivered resolution doesn’t match the native resolution of the panel itself.  But: pixels are still pixels.  They might not be square all of the time, but they tend to have the same shape everywhere on a monitor.  If text defined with pixel sizes is scaled by browsers, everything else should be scaled analogously.  Which essentially fits the definition of a zoom function, which IE7 has and–I’m sure–IE8 will have, too.

Enough.  It might be time for a CSS replacement with a logical (i.e., reasonable and sane) model, consistent and consequent implementation and a lot more control for both dimensions a computer screen makes use of.

Listening on iPod: TUNER - “11-11″

Paying for meat at the deli counter: EUR 11.11

Time stamp on receipt from deli counter: 11:13 (phew, at least not a hattrick!)

Oh, this Gregory M. Dizzia.  Who the fuck is he?  I don’t know, but after looking through this highly interesting illustration of his almost 20-year romantic life (watch out–big PDF!), I feel I know him enough to diagnose a severe case of Patrick Maitlandism.

When 99% of all pop hits were written by a Polish family from Zabrze and this family hasn’t received royalties for these masterpieces, it’s understandable that this family eventually has to resort to drastic measures.  Over Easter weekend, they hacked into the WDR’s late-night programming to carry their message and tons of pop songs the way they were supposed to be played into the world.

It’s Der Popolski-Show!

You might need to know a bit of German to get around their site, or you might just decide to click on random things and see if you can get to the Popolski-Show! videos and random other video stuff.

Here are some words I can’t stand to hear right now because they’ve been overused, misused and abused in the media on an hourly (if not more frequent) basis.  Unfortunately, they’re all German right now, because I’m in Germany right now.

• Angeschlagen.  As in, “die angeschlagene Handelsbank IKB…”  Yes, the bank might be a little down at the moment, and its stock holders as well, but that doesn’t mean there’s only one adjective to describe the bank’s financial situation.
• Linksruck.  As in, the SPD (the German social-democratic party) finding its way back to its intended nature, democratic socialism, thereby edging just a tiny bit closer to the party programs of the younger left-wing party, Die Linke, which has taken in huge numbers of ex-SPD members who didn’t like the SPD’s recent centrist disease.  (For the record: I used to be a member of the SPD, but have since found my true political identity as moderate mugwump–which in no way means centrist!)
• DSDS.  As in, Deutschland sucht den Superstar, the German version of American Idol and whatever Simon Cowell’s original British show was.  Out of the nine candidates that I’ve seen so far (which waiting for their live show to end and a pretty damn good stand-up special by Kaya Yanar to come on a couple of Saturdays ago), only two were identifiably German–the others are people who somewhat know how to speak German but may/may not have been born here or be German citizens or live here.  Employing my kind of logic, that must mean either a) Germans can’t sing, b) Germans are too intelligent to participate in this embarrassing show or c) Germans with less than a generation’s worth of history in the country are masochists.
• Migrationshintergrund.  As in, “Deutscher mit Migrationshintergrund”, or “German with migrant background” (this translation sounds bad, but I can’t come up with a better one right now).  Either you’re German or you’re not.  I think that’s pretty easy.  But politics, the media and pretty much anyone who carries a little bit of the German xenophobia gene in him is working hard on inventing a second-class German citizen, the German with very recent (currently one generation, soon probably two generations) immigrant ancestors.  There are no laws that specify anything different for them in terms of rights and privileges (unlike Great Britain’s second-class citizens), but constant debate in talk shows seems to revolve around problems with integration, especially with Germans with migrant background.  Enough!  I’ve seen enough German kids without migrant background over the last few years that could speak German less intelligibly than my fellow German kids with migrant background and I did in grade school in Berlin-Kreuzberg.  Immigrants and their kids aren’t the problems–it’s the loonies who want to establish immigrant communities completely separate from everyday German life or force all immigrants to completely get rid of their cultural assets who fuck up all chances at getting Germany into the 21st century integration-wise.

I’ve seen a lot of SG-1 over the years, so it’s not a miracle that I keep seeing the same episodes when I zap through the channels and find Stargate is on.  But really, for the last few months, I kept hitting episodes from the eighth series.  Why is that?

Granted, it’s better than watching Battlestar Galactica with its hideous German dubbing (Thomas Fritsch does sound like Eddie Olmos, but the grand parade of lovely German dialects you can hear in the RTL2 version doesn’t fit the rest of the characters), but it’s really hard to watch the same subset of 20 episodes all the time, especially when there is nine more seasons’ worth of content to broadcast.

From Bash.org, quote #34038:

<evilbob> installing linux is like piercing your tongue. it’ll impress your friends, but it’s stupid and painful. and people without pierced tongues will laugh at you when you complain about it.

Agreed.