artificial intelligence?

no doubt you, the beloved non-existant reader, have seen it. or something like it. or gotten emails including clips used to make the overall video i just watched.

i am talking about the bad day at the office video clip. it is truly funny. look it up if you have no idea what i am talking about.

my favorites are the guy who gets sprayed by the toner and proceeds to attempt to violently copy his monitor, and, without a doubt, the fella what goes out to grab a sledge to take to his desktop.

but as i was watching this video, i kinda watched the people in the peripheral. here are these almost beetle-like individuals, hunched over their keyboard, eyes squinting at tiny numbers being inputted on their screens, when, without any warning (in most cases), a cubicle near them is erupting into violence.

they all do the same thing: they leap up, look around them with eyes that have widened as if they expect to see the armageddon (or is that armaggeddon? neither one looks right) and then sort of stand there, agape, at a loss. if the tirade goes on long enough, they sort of sidle back to their desks and attempt to work whilst keeping a wary eye on the disturber. one guy has the aplomb to toss the laptop that has just bounced off the brick wall by his head back onto the offender's desk.

but what, o my beloved non-existant readers, my droogs and only friends, are the factors that lead to violence against office equipment? well, i'm not completely sure, but judging by the average size of the offenders in this clip, obesity would be one thing. and apparently you have to be male.

i do know i have been this aggravated. probably not enough to leave to get a hammer, but definitely enough to use whatever is handy. if we could all refer, briefly, to my post about the last fourth of july, while my wife (and most of my internal organs, definitely, at least, my brain and heart) was far away in points east. if you, like me, are too lazy, here's is a quick recap of the contributing factors: whiney, exhausted kids who won't shut up. a broken dvd player (broken by same whiney kids). an inability to fix said dvd player. no wife (and no sex) for two months (at the time of the "mishap", heh heh). and an ambient heat level of upwards of 90 degrees farenheit (that word doesn't look right either. oh well). all resulting in feet being stuffed rather roughly into the already-open guts of said dvd player.

but here's the rub, malchicks and ptitsas. here is the item that gives me pause: i know my mom was extremely stressed out when i was younger, being a single mom, recently divorced, trying to keep a roof over three kids' heads, basically on her own, while working full time and trying desperately to have a personal life as well. she was stretched so thin we could almost see through her at times. but the worst i ever saw (or heard) was some screaming and one broken plate.

does technology exacerbate (i actually had to look that one up, o my beloveds) our pre-existing aggravation? have we come to rely so much on computers and such that when they don't work properly, we are prone to violence? would anyone even have thought of finding a sledge to take to their computer if someone hadn't made that really funny cartoon some time ago with the duck wielding a hammer over a desktop and saying, "compute this!"? are we on some kinda handbasket/bus/slippery slope ride on skids greased by technology that is advancing and increasing so fast that our minds can't even keep up? how soon before we reach terminal velocity?

and will anyone be laughing when we do?

darth sardonic

sometimes nothing is a cool hand

wellp, my beloved non-existant readers (and i can never quite decide if that should be a hyphenate or a single word, hence the constant changing from one spelling to another), i am planted with my computer in front of me again. it has been nearly a week since it was taken to our computer tech's to be "cleaned", and boy o boy is it clean.

like we need to download nearly everything back in. and all the tracks i had recorded; gone. yep, gone. i was peeved yesterday, but the more i think about it the more i think that nearly every track i had laid down needed some fine-tuning, and what better opportunity to accomplish that? mostly, in my inimitable candide-ish manner, i piss and moan, shrug, and get set about redoing it all.

as a fun and added twist, for some sort of security thingie that is completely beyond my scope of understanding, we can only download in one setting and then have to make ourselves "users" to the downloaded stuff to be able to use it in our personal settings (or i would've rerecorded at least one song already!) now, i am sure each and every one of you much more enlightened techie types are nodding your head and saying "of course" and "makes sense" in your sage manners, but i am at a loss.

i am not a technophobe, in any stretch of the imagination: i love technology when it can help me enjoy myself more (i.e. porn, the ease of recording and mixing songs at home, producing dvds to view and what-have-you), but i am technically stupid. yes, stupid. there is simply no other word for it. it has to be explained and showed to me at least twice, and then i need to do it at least once with guidance over my shoulder, and then if for some reason, the process should change, i am skullfucked.

i also feel that, while technology is cool as fuck and makes our lives so much easier, somehow we end up missing out on simple pleasures. i still, despite the ease of typing on the computer, love taking a pen in hand and writing something across a virgin sheet of paper. it is calming. it is cathartic. it eases whatever pain i might be feeling, simultaneously bringing it to the surface so that i might examine it and discard it. i am a fan of vintage things, things from a "simpler" time and age.

but then again, i certainly am a bucket of contradictions.

darth sardonic