Ice Cream Social

Update: Changes are mostly grammatical. aprently I cn’t tpe no gud.

I don’t know if the gentlemen at Microsoft have this in mind, but I just realized how they could make money off of the vast majority of apple systems without breaking a sweat.

Microsoft has been designing and pushing .Net pretty hard. Quite frankly, its a good thing for most developers. There are some areas (many perhaps) that .Net isn’t the best language for, but it works well in most. It seems like all the major advancements are starting to happen through .Net. Everything from new languages and language improvements (VB.Net, C#, ASP.NET) to new technologies to make things easier and more reusable (Linq, XNA, GUI, etc.) is happening there.

To be honest, I have no clue whether or not Microsoft is using it for their own stuff or not (Office, Explorer, etc?), but imagine: as things move forward more and more will run on .Net, right? More things will be developed natively on .Net. At the end of the day, you end up with .Net almost being the operating system itself (perhaps even having processors with some form of .Net acceleration, though I imagine it would be short lived as things progress).

I’d imagine that Microsoft could fairly easily port .Net over to Mac OSX. They could probably get away with charging the same amount as they do for vista. In doing so, they’d effectively sell a vista license to every mac user who needed to run windows software, without doing virtually anything new!!

Two problems come to mind. First, what about Mono? Mono has some support for Mac OS X. So why would someone use a Microsoft costly .Net implemenation? Second, why wouldn’t Microsoft come out with it right away.

Corporations will be less likely to use something they can’t call a support line to get help. Some people want Office simply because its the real deal. There will probably be compatibility issues in Mono (not that it won’t work, but it won’t be perfect). Finally, and most sadly, many people won’t know there is a free version. I guess on many levels, Mono simply can’t compete (though I’d love to be proven wrong).

In answer to the second question: while I said Microsoft could do this easily, that’s not entirely true. Being an enormous corporation has its downsides. They would have huge overhead, so they have to be pretty sure they’ve done things right, plus they’d need to have a team of Mac users to support its development. To make matters more complicated, they simply can’t sell .Net now. There’s not enough penetration yet.

To be able to get someone to pay over 200 for .Net, you’d have to be enabling 90% of modern apps. We’re not there yet. In fact, you’d almost want to get products branded: .Net Enabled, or some similar nonsense. This way, people can recognize quickly what will work and what will not, without question.

Will Microsoft do it? I doubt it. It has other convenient benefits (they’d have some munitions against people making claims of them being a monopoly), but realistically I think it’d cause some serious issues. It’d also allow people to move from Windows more easily. While that sounds good for you and me, from a corporate standpoint, that means they’d have to work pretty hard to keep you with .Net.

In fact, if I were apple, I’d be VERY interested at this point with Mono. The work is half done… and if Microsoft continues killing off other technologies, and investing their time in .Net, Mono could help apple take shares…

Divide and Conquer

I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals. One of the artists I work with a lot was talking about his need to do something more valuable than create “fun games.” He initially stated that he wanted to put some sort of ideals into play. The problem is that he doesn’t quite know what that means.

So I’ve started prodding and poking people. Without vision, people perish. I remember talking to a police officer while flying home. He was a real great guy, offered to buy me a drink and everything! For some reason I asked him what his long term goals were. It was pretty simple, he wanted to move up near Notre Dame. As he talked, you could tell that it was his nirvana. Truthfully, I don’t know if he would have been any more fulfilled if he achieved it than he was now.

I guess its just sad to think of people working to survive. If you work just to get food and pay for a place to live, I suppose I can understand why living on food stamps might make sense. Why waste the time? I’m not sure if there’s much logic there, but it seems to bring around an interesting question. If you’re living on handouts, but not living for anything, is there any reason not to? Perhaps part of fixing the welfare system is giving people a purpose.

In fact, I remember when working in Colorado Springs, one of the interesting things I realized was that the hard part of growing old for many people isn’t the pain, the disease, the hospitals; its becoming a burden; its having purpose literally ripped from you and handed to someone else. Perhaps this is why growing old is always pictured as a positive thing in Native American tribes. We generally have a picture painted of wise people; leaders or guides, who have a huge place in the tribe. Instead, we have a society that finds little purpose for our elders, partially due to the pace at which knowledge is out pacing what an elder might be able to handle, and partly due to our own arrogance.

I digress. My goals? I still plan on opening a youth center. Though I suppose the word plan is becoming more fuzzy each day. I plan on releasing games. This also seems more fuzzy each day. I plan on losing working out and losing weight. This also…

This isn’t a bad thing… I just have many large goals and lots of obstacles. At the same time, I’m trying to establish smaller goals. Little things I can do to keep moving on the larger goals. I’ve got to say, finding smaller goals to keep me on track is difficult, mainly because I don’t seem to find the time to make goals.

With respect to words that I hate, I’ve come to another. Its very similar to soon; its the word “almost.” It seems like most of the time I’m almost finished with what I’m working on. The problem is that “almost” usually takes two or three hours. Or I’ll often hear from a friend of mine about how he’s almost finished with something (which suggests he hasn’t started yet) or he’ll tell me he’s “almost here” when we’re supposed to be meeting up. Still it could be an hour or two before I hear from him again.

I suppose the problem with both the words almost and soon is simply that they’re vague. I remember doing units in school where we focused on vague words. We’d go over sentences like, “I want some of that.” The problem is that you have no clue how much of “that” that you actually want. In any case, it seems like almost is another of the words that seems to run my life.

The Zimbra server for example: I’m working through the pre-reqs in my free time and I keep getting a package that I’ve “almost” got working. Really, its some slight configuration issue that I have to figure out usually. Still, I can’t say that it ends up getting finished quickly. Almost seems to invariably mean 2+ hours.

I think part of all this frustration is that I’m slowly losing my patience and joy in life. More on that later.

I’m reading through Job and I’m sort of intrigued by many of the interactions. However, there’s one in particular here that I don’t remember talking about at all in class.

Job 2:3

This is interesting: Satan incited God. Ignoring the question of who this satan is, whether truly the ultimate evil or something else, I must wonder how could God be incited by anyone or anything. See the problem is that I’ve always lived under the assumption that God is timeless. I’m not saying he can’t die, I’m saying he’s outside of the limits of time, so death has no relevance. If you are somehow at all points in time, what does death mean? Further I’ve always had the assumption that since God exists at all points in time, he must know what the ultimate outcome of his actions will be. This leads to some… theological problems, but if its not true, then wouldn’t God be ruled by time? In any case, the truth is this is all relatively pointless. Our understanding of life and our existence is much more limited than I think we can imagine, so its also possible that I simply don’t understand time and its impact on God.

But God was incited? This actually sounds dangerously mythic. It sounds dangerously close to a battle between Greek gods. The only way this is acceptable in light of the assumption that God is all powerful, is if he “faked it” so to speak. The outcome is: God succeeds. So if God is using satan for his own purposes, and orchestrating this thing himself, it makes sense. Its not so much that God was incited, as he pretended to be, for the sake of manipulating satan.

Isn’t this what it seems like is happening the whole time though? The book starts with God probing satan, “Have you considered Job?” God incites satan, not the other way around; but it appears God wants to force satan to ask for permission to do more. I wonder sometimes about the “benevolence” of God because of situations like this one. How is it fair to Job’s family for this to happen, let alone Job himself? This is one of the places where I have to stop rationalizing the situation and trust that God knows what he’s doing. Surely if he doesn’t, how can I?

A few separate notes. A lot of people don’t seem to know what I’m doing with my life. It was supposed to be clear, I was working for a Video Game company and headed to Montreal soon. “Soon.” I hate that word.

It seems to me that lately everything has been soon. The problem is that “soon” has basically put my life on hold! What for? I didn’t want to get too involved with any churches, or get to involved in local social life, because we were supposed to be moving “soon.” Now, I’ve been home for over a year, and I feel like I’ve lost any amount of foward motion. I’ve got, what, one person that I call when I’m bored? How sad is that? Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty to do, so I’m seldom bored, but thats just it, isn’t it? Not only do I not have much time for friends, but I don’t have that much interruption to remind what the whole point of what I’m doing is supposed to be. I’ve been told by a number of people with job oppurtunities that I’ll hear from them soon. In fact, I’m waiting on a call, an email, anything to show that my efforts weren’t in vain; though, truthfully, I’m not expecting anything.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how much is really on hold. I’ve been waiting to get involved in a church, I’ve been waiting to find a place of my own, I’ve been waiting to try and build new friendships, I’ve been waiting to get active, I’ve been waiting to read more, I’ve been waiting to relax, I’ve been waiting for “you.” I suppose I’ll stop waiting… Soon.

I keep trying to start with a title… I think its time to create a plugin that moves the title to the bottom! That reminds me of a Dilbert episode on hulu. At any rate, I suppose this starts my attempt to fulfill the large task Tom gave me to fill: to write something daily, in the hopes that it might happen weekly.

I’ve been working on building a Zimbra Server lately. I really like what they have to offer, plus its one of the few things that offers push email for the iPhone right now. I suppose support will start bubbling up on a lot of the IMAP servers in the near future, but I’m not one to wait. The problem is that the Zimbra Server isn’t built against Solaris, and my server runs Solaris. I’ve taken to tediously documenting the steps I’ve taken to build the server, but to be honest I started a little late. With any luck what I’ve done, and am doing, will be good enough to help others along. I am most certainly planning on releasing the details it took me to build it once I get it finished. My only concern is that I’ll have people pestering me for help. Truthfully I’ve been picking at this and making slow progress for a few weeks; but its been worth it, if only for the knowledge I’ve gain.

Well, I’m not sure who reads this if anyone. I keep having plans to revive it, but I don’t seem to manage to get much done. I’ve wiped out the old system completely (mainly because I didn’t feel like fixing the things that were wrong with it). At this point I’m hoping to bring this back to life, but it’ll take a bit. I’m also not sure about the new theme, we’ll see if I can find something better.

Have you ever looked at your buddy list, hoping to see someone you could start a conversation with; only to realize that you’re the only interesting person on, while simultaneously being tempted to IM yourself saying, “Hey, it’s me!” just so you could write a blog post about your great day? No? Me neither.