You feel like you want to be able to do something that
had a point to it. But chances are, in the grand scheme of things? It
probably didn't.
— Ronnie Martin
Granted that the machine-victim has leisure. What is he going to do with it? What memories and experiences has he to form a background to give significance to anything he can do? What can he see or do that will mean anything to him? What has heretofore made life tolerable for the majority is the fact that their natural workaday routine and milieu have never been quite devoid of the excitement, nature-contact, uncertainty, non-repetition, and free and easy irregularity which build up a background of associations calculated to foster the illusion of significance and make possible the real enjoyment of art and leisure. Without this help from their environment, the majority could never manage to keep contented. Now that it is fading, they are in a bad plight indeed; for they cannot hope to breast the tide of ennui as the stronger-minded minority can. There will be, of course, high-sounding and flabbily idealistic attempts to help the poor devils. We shall hear of all sorts of futile reforms and reformers — standardised culture-outlines, synthetic sports and spectacles, professional play-leaders and study-guides, and kindred examples of machine-made uplift and brotherly spirit. And it will amount to just about as much as most reforms do! Meanwhile the tension of boredom and unsatisfied imagination will increase — breaking out with increasing frequency in crimes of morbid perversity and explosive violence.
— H.P. Lovecraft
Here's some general "information" about me, in no particular order, for those wanting to know:
One of my favourite places to eat is Bento Teriyaki in Mountain View. It's a small Japanese bento restaurant, Korean family-owned, within walking distance of my abode. I've gotten to know the Yang's quite well over the years, and thus I can attest to not only their excellent food, but their service being equally as decent. If you want something not on the menu, or a mix-and-match combination of two things, just ask Julie.
I suffer from both agoraphobia and a form of specific social phobia. These make life significantly more complex when compared to most people. I have good days and bad days, just like everyone else, except that bad days can result in panic attacks. These issues affect life on a daily basis, and I'm doing the best I can (with medications and self-managed CBT), but it's an ongoing battle. I have a specific section on my blog for agoraphobia, which describes my experiences.
One of the most common questions I get is "What sort of music do you like?" The easiest way to describe what I like: almost everything, excluding: country, most rap, and present-day mainstream pop. Some of my personal favourites, sorted alphabetically (all Wikipedia links), are below. Those italicised were/are influential to me (e.g. stuff I grew up listening to):
AC/DC Andres Segovia Beastie Boys Beck Biosphere Black Sabbath Blink-182 Depeche Mode Descendents Dir en grey DragonForce Duran Duran Erasure Frank Black Green Day hide Iron Maiden Joy Electric King Missile L'Arc-en-Ciel Lagwagon Lionel Ritchie Luna Sea Ming and Ping Moby MxPx New Order Nine Inch Nails Orbital Patrick O'Hearn Projet Orange Ramones Run-D.M.C. Rush Ryuichi Sakamoto Suicidal Tendencies The Cure The Doors The Gerogerigegege The Knife The Pixies Toad the Wet Sprocket Van Halen Venetian Snares Wesley Willis William Watson X Japan
For entertainment... well, I'm a life-long fan of nethack. I used to play on nethack.alt.org, but the recurrence of server hardware (disk) problems over the past few years has done nothing but irritate me. So I began running my own nethack server via dgamelaunch. The server is private and has strict firewall rules applied to it, but it's always up and maintained regularly. If you'd like access and have a static IP, drop me a line.
When it comes to video game consoles, my favourite by far is anything on the original Famicom/NES. I also enjoy playing games on the Nintendo DS. I love turn-based strategy games (the Advance Wars series, Daisenryaku) and adventure (Castlevania) games. At present, I'm only playing one PC game: EVE Online. I recently got an XBox 360 Elite, so I've been having fun with that as well.
I take part in a multitide of projects, mainly to keep myself busy, and because I like to contribute where/when I can:
When I'm not working or playing, I frequent many different forums or sites; I despise SomethingAwful, 2chan, 4chan, and Fark — so here's a list of those I do enjoy:
Finally, I work over at Tellme Networks, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, as a bizarre combination of NOC monkey, junior network administrator, and *IX (Linux and Solaris) system administrator; it is in no way your average Tier 1 NOC. If you're looking for my resume, this should suffice.