Displacement

May the proliferation continue!

I have recently decided that the free OpenOffice programme, though valuable, is not sufficient to my paranoid needs. The programme was never particularly responsive but it was whilst looking into possible alternatives that I read a remark that put the Fear of God into me from the NeoOffice web site.

NeoOffice is not perfect. Although we try very hard to make NeoOffice free of bugs and crashes, our users still find new bugs and new cases that cause NeoOffice to crash. So, if you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

If this is true of NeoOffice, I reflected, so it might be true of OpenOffice. So, with thoughts of losing my entire thesis (thus far) buzzing around in my brain, I heeded their advice. Microsoft or Apple was the choice: Protestant or Catholic? The fact that I already have a Mac, together with the very reasonable cost of iWork (with student discount), led me to choose the latter. And Pages is very nice. I especially like its full-screen feature which, theoretically at least, blacks out all distractions from the almost ritualized colour and movement of one's Mac's display.

Some might wish to accuse me of indulging in displacement activity and, of course, there would be some truth in that. When it is disagreeable to focus on bringing about the ends, why not focus on the means? Form and method instead of content; surface instead of depth.

Lethargy prevented me from going to Hatfield to hear the legendary John Cottingham speak at the University of Hertfordshire. That and the fact that I downloaded a typescript of what he was going to say (I assume this since the paper bears the same title as the talk) from his website. I was in no mood to heckle.

Next week I plan to write up my observations on Karl Jasper's periechontology with a dual focus on his notion of 'ciphers' and his views on the role of the subject-object dichotomy. His ideas on both create ambiguity: on the one hand, ciphers are the 'language of being', they embody what is beyond the subject-object dichotomy to human Existenz - a way of being that is existential, where subject is not separable from object. But he also claims that the subject-object dichotomy is essential to the existence of human consciousness. If we are not in the dichotomy, he argues, we are unconscious. This appears to place equal weight on scientific ways of engaging with the world and 'spiritual', broadly religious, ones. The question is, How do the two relate? His concept of Existenz doesn't seem adequately to bridge the other two categories of his tripartite system: ordinary consciousness (in the subject-object dichotomy) and Transcendence (or God). I hope, at any rate to draw from him a better account of the relation of human consciousness to what is beyond itself than that provided by Tillich's account of symbols which can never escape the subject-object dichotomy. Jaspers provides us with that possibility, though perhaps not without inconsistency or ambiguity.

Test

[Edit: Warning! This is a boring and stupid post. What was I thinking?]

This is not a test. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. For future reference: if only Magritte had had access to the (strike) (/strike) code.

Also links:

One needs to write:
(a href="http://www.my-lovely-website.com/me/how-amazing-i-am")text as which link appears(/a)

Computing (again)

Partly because I think it's important to keep my readers informed, and partly in order to delay the process of thesis-writing for as long as possible, I take this opportunity to make a post and to inform you all that, further to my previous post, I have inherited a Mac. In case any of you are interested in what it looks like, here's a picture:


And here's my current desktop:

Overall, the switch from a PC has not been too irksome though I have had to convert some music files from .ogg to .mp3. It's nice to use and I have a distinct preference for this machine over the previous one. Today, I discovered growl. Open Office helps keep me as free as I can be from the clutches of Bill Gates.

I've booked tickets for this satirical operetta in London. It will be interesting to see Armando trying his hand at something new. I recall that he used a similar idea in one of his TV shows. Now he's actually written one!

And finally, here is a song by Hugh Laurie (who is apparently now very popular in America (and a Selwyn man - hurrah!)) which will get stuck in your head all too easily. Enjoy:

Computing Conclusions

I have been using my Eee PC for a while now and have recently reached conclusions on how best to use it. Recall that in an earlier post I had installed Ubuntu Eee, which is a version of Ubuntu customized for the Eee by this man. The other option is to use Ubuntu with this customized kernel. My reasons for doing this were:

1. I wanted the freedom to install software outside the bundled package.
2. I wanted a more aesthetically pleasing OS. The default (a version of Xandros) is cruelly dubbed 'The Fisher-Price Desktop' in this thread.
3. I wanted to avoid Microsoft.
   

Note: None of the reasons are "I wanted to spend hours arsing around with an operating system". I wanted the machine to 'just work'.

Now I know very little about these things so it's unclear to me why Ubuntu doesn't work on an Eee when, presumably, it works on other machines. Anyway, it doesn't so I installed the customized version (which also didn't work), made necessary modifications to make that work and, after many hours, all was well. But then Ubuntu released a major update. My machine updated itself automatically but from the wrong source (i.e. from Ubuntu rather than from one of the non-generic repositories), something I (wrongly) thought I had guarded against. So the thing didn't work for the third time. I searched on the various fora dedicated to these matters and found ways of making modifications but, to be frank, I couldn't be arsed. I did not want a machine that had to be modified just to work properly every time a six-monthly update was released.

So I've reverted to the Fisher-Price Desktop - it works and does everything I would need a computer of that size to do. But the whole experience has taught me something about the whole business of software that is owned by a company (i.e. not free or open source): it has made me aware of just what one is paying for when one buys such software. One is paying for the fact that it 'just works'. And I have also learned that it would take more time and expertise than I have to make that happen myself. Now, I have not changed my opinion of Windows (which I think is horrid to use and bullying) but, I have learned from the 'Eeexperience', neither can my next main computer use a free operating system. So I shall turn to Apple when my ancient Toshiba laptop becomes extinct. By doing so I hope to acquire a machine that is aesthetically pleasing and 'just works'. I have not found that free software meets both criteria.

Wireless

I've recently bought a marvellous new machine which is so small that it can be taken almost anywhere. A good friend of mine remvoved the operating system it came with and installed Ubuntu Eee. The advantage of this operating system is that it is marvellous when it works. The disadvantage is that it doesn't, yet, quite, work with the hardware, perhaps because it existed before my machine did. But I like it so much that I've decided that it's worth the battle. The real test will be when the update is released at the end of October.

I've also been initiated into the geeky world of Wi-Fi in which people in anoraks wander round constituting their world around wireless hotspots. I am typing this (guess where!) in the UL and, if you don't believe me:





















Heidegger is turning in his grave.