Chris Worfolk's Blog

Men don’t understand women.

Most of my gender freely admits this. We don’t, what you do makes no sense to us. What is far less commonly realised however is that women don’t understand men either. This comes to a head with flirting.

First of all, if you think you’re being subtle about it, you haven’t a chance in hell of us noticing. It’s never going to register on our radar, not one bit.

Secondly, if you think you are being obvious, you’re not. This might register as possible subtle flirting to us. Then again it might not.

What women don’t seem to understand is that anything short of “hey, I like you. In that way.” is considered subtle. Anything else we could simply be misinterpreting even if it registers as flirting so put together the general obviousness of men together with the suprisingly fragile ego and fear of rejection and you can go as far as to pull us as we’ll still debate whether you actually like us.

There is also the issue that flirting from a girl’s perspective is quite ambigious. Something that one girl does to flirt, another girl will just do out of routine. Some girls just have naturally flirty personalities. Close and personal dancing is something some girls do with everyone. It’s not flirting. Making jokes about you and me hucking up – I do this with most of my female friends, it’s not flirting.

Finally it’s also worth considering that every action you take it thrown into the debating ring when a guy is trying to work out if you are in to him or not. This includes how often you accept invites to come out, what reasons you give when not coming out, how you phrase it, how you act when you do come out, etc. Also it’s usually an assumption that you’re not into them so sending any kind of mixed singles won’t keep a guy interested, they are more likely to conclude you’re not into them and move you into the dreaded friend category.

To conclude my 2 cents, if you think you are being subtle you aren’t going to get noticed, if you think you are being obvious you are being subtle and if you are just honest and let the guy know, he may actually realise you’re into him. We’re scared, pessimistic, conservative thinkers and you really need to realise this and re-align this phase shift. Happy boyfriend hunting.

Just moved the next load of my stuff home and now have my desktop set up at home. I’m running somewhat of a wierd setup compared to normal as I’ve got my desktop sat on top of my desk (literally on the desk top) rather than underneith to reduce the amount of cables that need to come round the front of my desk (as it’s a fitted corner desk) – this way it’s just the network cable that runs from downstairs. I’ve also got my subwoofer on the desk to try to stop it vibrating straight through the floorboards and annoying anyone sat in the lounge below me.

I like to think I have my priorities right though. There is only a thin snaking path through my room with piles of boxes covering the entire floor and my bed is an even bigger pile which if you look at it from the top you cannot see any bed at all. But my computer is on, so all is well!

My laptop arrived back yesterday. I actually seem to be able to touch it without it breaking once again though I couldn’t get the wireless working last night. Haven’t tried it again yet though. I’m really hoping it doesn’t have to go back again.

Still haven’t sorted my server out either as I’m not entirely sure what route I want to go with it now.

On the plus side my fan is working perfectly. You can’t beat the good old fashioned reliable technology of a desk fan.

Damn.

Saturday saw the long awaited garden party hosted by Kieran/Matt/Kat/Heather. Having had a power cut on Friday night I was way behind with backing up my laptop (which has now gone back) so I wasn’t able to get there until 5 by which point the party was in full swing.

It turned out to be a really good night, we ended up staying until 1:30 in the morning (and some stayed longer) with good food, food music (of course as some was suggested by yours truely :D) and of course, great company. Congratulations on a well thrown party guys.

I arrived home to check up on the backing up process of my laptop to find everything in my room (save my laptop) dead. The power was off. Not to the rest of the hall. Or my lights. Just my power sockets (and wall lights) apparently. All my computer equipment was dead, my UPS was drained and that five hour backup process that was running – cancelled half way through. Awesome.

They finally got the power back on about 30 minutes ago Everything seems ok though I’ve lost everything I had open on my desktop (which is always a lot because I have stuff like web browsers with a dozen tabs open as well as notes in text documents (most of those are saved though).

I don’t know what went wrong really. I didn’t have that much running and it’s not like I suddenly turned something on and that tripped it as it happened when I was out. I had a really small load running at the time as well, it can only have been a few hundred watts at most.

It has propper messed up my schedule though. I need to get my laptop backups completed today and I’m supposed to be going to Kieran’s garden party this afternoon.

The last two Fruity’s of the year being free we decided to head down last night for a cheap night. It started off with drinks at Michelle’s before heading down at 11. They had the DJ on the stage in Stylus, interesting choice given that it wasn’t exactly going to be a busy night though it probably made the dance floor a bit busier and they wouldn’t have been that pushed for space. You could actually move and everything.

It actually amuses me (and saddens me at the same time) that there were still so many more people there than there would be at Wendy even though this is an exclusively student night and all the students have gone home.

We got dragged out at 1:30 to go find Graham who was lying in the middle of the road having lost his glasses. Turns out he was actually lying on the grass and already had a plan – to just kip down there for the night so didn’t actually need our help but it was too late by then :p. Sarann is now his all time hero for finding them. Kat had also had her phone stolen (technically it was robbed) which was a bit of a downer.

We headed back to Michelle’s at which point she cooked an impressive array of good food for post-clubbing consumption which was much appreciated. Let it never be said that Fruity isn’t an eventful night out.

it’s going on 3am. I have to be up reasonably early tommorow so I was hoping to be in bed by midnight. Why am I still up at this time then? Trying to get my new computer working, that’s why. Yet it seems no matter what I do, it refuses to work.

As soon as I enable RAID then it refuses to boot as it just hangs at “verifying DMI pool data.” Yet if I turn it off, it boots fine I think. I managed to narrow down the problem as when I removed my RAID-1 and just had all the disks as non-raid entities though still controlled by the RAID controller it booted. Fully and everything, it normally hangs at GRUB when RAID is disabled but this booted Ubuntu and everything.

However when I tried to stick my DVD-ROM back in it refused to verify the DMI pool data again so basically I cannot re-create the problem with any degree of certainty, it just won’t work no matter what I do.

What is more annoying is that I shouldn’t be troubleshooting this pile of crap. Because I have a pile of crap laptop on the desk next to me that I need to back up all the data on before it goes back because it’s packed in working. Not that it will be going back any time soon because my pile of crap phone refuses to call DHL. It just ends the call as soon as a dial. Erm, WTF?

Basically I hope the people who made all this technology burn in the fiery depths of hell. I hate computers.

Having recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I followed it up by reading one of Alister McGrath’s responses to the book, The Dawkins Delusion. McGrath opens the book saying he mainly intended it to be read by Christians wanting to be able to respond to the questions of friends who had recently read The God Delusion though also hoped that the odd open minded atheist would read it too.

After reading the critical response though I can’t help questioning whether McGrath actually read The God Delusion. For example he claims that Dawkins suggests that removing religion would end all violence. An idea Dawkins of course dismisses. He also seems to suggest Dawkins believes natural selection by evolution happens by chance. While most of The God Delusion is about God and religion, a hefty sum of it is Dawkins explaining how people misunderstand that evolution works by chance and indeed in reality, is the complete opposite of chance.

Also his critism of Dawkins’ discussion of the meme is interesting because he almost seems to go beyond the idea that the meme cannot be applied like this (which is perhaps a fair critism) to suggest the meme simply doesn’t exst. He seems to think of it as a hypothesis rather than a phenomenon that has simply been named. Perhaps he has never experianced a catchy tune, but if I was to take a while guess I would probably bet against that.

In the end, the book is simply a character attack. The criticisms that Dawkins insists rather than suggests things is far more overpowered by McGrath’s own convictions, insisting Dawkins is unquestionably a fundamentalist without any real argument to back up the claim while acusing Dawkins of doing the same thing. He goes to great lengths to call Dawkins a variety of names and insist his writing is unscientific without let up or discussion of anything else.

The book fails to provide any kind of counter arguments as McGrath set out to do. His constant repetition of the idea that Dawkins is a dogmatist doesn’t leave much room for answering the questions raised in The God Delusion or provide answers provide the generic theist argument of “because I know you’re wrong.” The unscientific methods of Dawkins are not disected, simply asserted as being wrong.

There is a constant repetition of the idea of Atheist fundamentalism, an idea that can’t really exist because there isn’t really such a thing as Atheism as that implies it is a belief and it isn’t, it is simply a lack of a belief. Therefore how you can be fundamental about not believing in God or gods is beyond me. Secondly, McGrath does what most moderates do in demonising fundamentalism. Even if this was an example of fundamentalism (which it isn’t) why is this obviously a bad thing? Fundamentalism means following one’s beliefs strictly, surely if you have a holy book written or inspired by God you should follow it? That is fundamentalism. It is obviously not a corruption of religion, the corruption is religious moderation, the picking and choosing (or as it could be described, secularising) of God’s holy word. This apparent attack on Dawkins actually turns out to be a complement (albeit unintentionally) that Dawkins has the convictions to stick by his beliefs (or lack of them) when analysed for what it really is.

Anyone who has read Dawkins writing I believe will see he is not as anti-religion as theists would have us belief. He isn’t interested in politics, in making people feel better or worse, in what impact things have on society – he is only interested in one thing, the truth. All other concerns are irrelevant, you only have to read one or two of his books to realise this is what he thinks and this surely shows he is the heart of a true scientist. He has no interest in being anti-religious, he is simply a scientist.

Which begs the question, what is going to happen when someone who is actually anti-religious moves against the lumbering giant of religion?

It’s often not until you loose something that you actually realise the value of what you have. That seems to be true of Windows. Having got Ubuntu running on my new server it really makes me appreciate just how well Windows works straight out of the box.

The stability as well. Ubuntu keeps crashing on boot up. It’s also very slow compared to Windows, it needs time to think to do everything and this is a brand new machine. It’s configuration also leaves a lot to be desired, not only is it simply missing the resolution I want (it’s not a problem with the monitor as I’m running the resolution on my Windows box, could be the graphics card though so I don’t want to point the finger too sharply at Ubuntu) but it has also misaligned the screen so that it’s too far to the right leaving me with a black strip down the left hand side and my shut down button missing off the right side of the screen.

As for configuration, I’m not taking to the Linux file structure. It wasn’t really a problem in my test box when I only had one hard drive but this whole unified file system doesn’t make much logical sense to me. I can see why it would be good but I much prefer having my hard drives and optical drives are separate entities. Not that it’s much of a problem as Ubuntu is blissfully unaware of my other two hard drives. I know I have to mount them but the point is, Windows would just do this for me. Ubuntu doesn’t even seem to have any kind of device manager to let me set these things up.

In my quest to get RAID working I re-install a DVD drive into the machine and stick the Ubuntu install CD in. It takes a good 10 minutes to boot LiveCD up because of the endless string of Buffer I/O errors that appear. Once it finally loads I decided GParted might do what I need. I’m wrong of course, it can’t detect any devices. Any. So I decided to try a re-install. Same thing.

Giving up on that I decide to play around with the BIOS some more. I eventually manage to find the option to enable RAID (it’s disabled by default) and now there is a RAID screen that appears for literally no more than a second with instructions on how to set up RAID. My manual for my motherboard hasn’t heard of any of this btw. In fact I’m not even sure what does it as I changed two settings from SATA mode to RAID mode (apparently if you use RAID you aren’t using SATA).

Out of interest when I first got back in after my break the machine wouldn’t do anything. I would turn it on but no output to the monitor or beeping. Now when I try to boot it stops at verifying DMI data pool. This is after the JMicro stuff spends a minute or two detecting my DVD-ROM every time I turn it on. So I insert the Edgy release and see if that will work. That takes me to the boot screen which locked the first time. Second time lucky maybe?

It spends a bit of time loading using the progress bar that goes back and forth. This then goes mental, throws a load of random characters accross the screen, freezes for 30 seconds, goes black with a blinking cursor, goes totally black then loads a blank orange desktop. Oh and guess what, yes, it’s misaligned the screen again. Edgy can’t work out the correct time like version 7 can do apparently. Having entered the settings the partion manager loads. It sees all 3 hard drives despite the fact two are now supposed to be configured in RAID.

I try to boot up the fresh install only for it to hang on the verifying DMI pool data. I go back into the BIOS and set everything back from RAID mode to SATA mode. This time it passes the DMI pool data verification and prints the words GRUB (the boot launcher) underneith before hanging.

I hate computers.