Busy times with IRC

"So much time, and so little to do!" -- Willy Wonka (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

Recently I found myself starting another IRC network within a week. This was done for many reasons, but ultimately it thrust me back into a role I was depriving myself of. The feeling of starting it all against was actually pretty good, like being allowed to have sex again. I originally quit on being an Network owner and IRCop a few months back because of the politics that came up about it. I will admit that I was somewhat into micro-managing back then which didn't make me very popular, but one thing I was at the very least was fair.

What I did notice from IRC is that you get certain people (even in life) who feel they have to horde power and to question them in any way would have them consider you an enemy. Suspicition is proof to these people and they attack you first to save the trouble of having you strike them. The problem with this mentality is that most of the time the person that they feel is betraying them is just trying to be fair. I was snow balled originally by a group of people with this mentality and so I left to just get away from it.

It is ironic now that I'm back running an IRC Network because of the same reason. I won't go details, but I will say that it's pretty easy to setup a network to a good standard within 3 days to a week if you're really commited. The main reason I started up my network was to (try to) return the fun to IRC and give the users a choice for a change. So far we're doing pretty good.

Quest for a proper Ubuntu Blogging client...

"How many times da I have to tell ya...the right tool for the right job!" -- Scotty from Star Trek

One of the most interesting challenges about Ubuntu is finding a proper blogging client, because it's seriously lacking. I've tried several different ones, as is evident with the previous post, but none seemed to meet my needs. This led me to google a bit on the subject which luckily led me to stumble upon FireScribe.

FireScribe for those that never heard of it, is a addon for Firefox which allows you to sync with several blogs of various types at once and even include catagories (labels on blogger). Not to mention several other useful features to it like links, fonts, pictures, youtube, links, text colours and many many more! Even better is that it runs on all platforms that support Firefox which means it works just as well on Windows as on Linux! Not bad for a 500kb Firefox addon hey? It's ironic how many Free Firefox Plugins are of higher quality than many commerical products. This just goes to show yet again that just because it's free doesn't automatically make it's crap.

This is offically my first post using it and so far I'm loving it. I will keep you all informed on my adventures and misadventures with it in future posts.

My first few months with Ubuntu Linux

"Linux is more compatible with unix than windows is with windows" -- fanf1 (Grabbed from Bash.org)

I will admit that my first few experience with Ubuntu was complete and utter annoyance. Those that know me would actually expected this reaction from me. The thing with Ubuntu was that I just wasn't used to this whole Linux way of doing things or how the package system would work for me. I was expecting huge packages and difficulty finding quality software to use, because nothing worth using is both small in size nor free.

Thankfully I was wrong on both fronts. The reinstall of Firefox was a whopping 1MB compared to the ~8MB you normally have to do with Windows. I also found lots of support from the localized #ubuntu-za channel on freenode, which pointed me in the right directions every time. This alone turned me from a Windows Enthusiast into a Linux one.

I'm actually so used to linux now that I even hacked up a way to connect to the internet using my mobile with the base installation. I didn't have to mess with modem drivers and compatibilty issues with the services provider. All I had to do was throw in a few information into the handy pppconfig command, type 'pon' and I was online! How is that for ease of use? Not to even mention all the software that comes with Ubuntu. Open Office being the most notable. It can edit just about any format and can even save in the pdf format. It's .doc formatting with tables is a little screwed up, but otherwise it's pretty cool.

Anyway, I just want to say that for anybody that is looking to get away from Windows and Microsoft's corruption, then I would recommend Ubuntu. It may have a slight learning curve, but with all the support you can get for it, I doubt you'll be stuck for too long.

More reflection, less regret

"Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting." - Arthur Brisbane

Thinking of things in hindsight is actually pretty useful, because it allows us to learn lessons we missed while the event was happening to us. This is however harder to do when regret is involved. Regret is small amounts isn't bad and might help us mend broken relationships, but sometimes we tend to regret things we have no power to change or fix. We constantly rebuke ourself about how stupid it was and how badly it makes us feel, almost like to linger on it would make it better. The thing we sometimes forget to do is to actually learn from our mistake rather than berate ourselves about it.

The easiest way to let go of past regrets is to reflect on them, not from a regretful perspective, but with a shrewd detached eye to see what can be learn from them. This kind of reflection allows us to learn how we made the mistake in the first place, what we learned from it and ultimately how not to make the same mistake again.

How to reflect rather than regret

I've learned in my own experience that to replace chronic regret with something useful like reflection is much harder than it sounds. So in that vain I decided to list my tips on how I get my mind out of regret and on to reflection:

1. Write it down.
2. Remind yourself to reflect.
3. Just move on.

1. Write it down.

When it seems to make allot of sense to have those regrets in your head try writing them down. I found that when I write down my the things I regret about, it tends to be allot less of a issue that it was in my head and sometimes that's enough to make me realise that I should rather just take what I can from the experience and just let it go. Writing also seems to help me order my thoughts better and makes it easier to make sense of some things.

2. Remind yourself to reflect.

Regret has a way of sneaking up on us, so when you find that regret is creeping into your head, the best way to make it go away is normally just to remind yourself that there is probably something to be learned from it. Sometimes just looking for the lesson in it, tends to turn your regret in to something more useful. I have found that even in the worst and hardest experiences in my life that I learned allot from them, even giving me skills I would never have learned in any other way. I could go on regretting those hardships in my life, but then again, it was those same hardships that made me the person I am now. In that way I'm grateful for it and I'm grateful for what I learned because of it. Remember, even with the worst things in life that there is something your learning from it, maybe even without you knowing about it.

3. Just move on.

This is probably the hardest tip to follow and I tend to make this mistake allot. Even with reflection on something that happened to you there will be times it will just be hard to let go of it. I had moment in my life where I wish I said or did things, which now I will never get the chance to do. When I reach this point, I tend to try doing the above two tips again and again, but ultimately, I just needed to move on. The thing about regret is that it's a very attractive and safe thing to do while moving on is allot harder because it requires courage. I find this courage by telling myself that no matter what, I can't changed what happened and probably will never be able to. The best thing for me would be to just move on, allow the ghost of my past to rest and bury themselves while I get freed from them. This tends to work when you truly try doing something to make it seem like you already moved past it. It sounds weird, but sometimes we need to pretend until it becomes real.

I leave you with the words that regret is a powerful thing and can cause us to be stuck in the past, but reflection can turn those moment of regret in to moment of character building. We don't need to regret things that make us stronger and better people. You are the person now, because of what happened to you and that even though you regret them it still made you the great person you've become.

Greed in the modern world

"A person is born with a liking for profit. If he gives way to this, it will lead him to quarrels and conflicts, and any sense of courtesy and humility will be abandoned." - Confucius

Recently, something very strange happened to me. I got into a fight by e-mail with certain individuals from a rival IRC Network and the reason was that one of their lower ranking 'managers' decided that he could impose his networks' rules on all of IRC and demand us into reprimanding one of our 'managers' because of it - without proper proof. This lead me to throw evidence back at them and demand the same from them, which then lead to stone throwing between the higher Network Administrators (The CEO's of the Network) - to the point of one of them threatening legal action against me.

This lead me to see that in this world, unreasonable greed is pretty much always around, even in a free and insubstantial medium like IRC. I also honestly believed this individual just wanted to make a quick buck or scare me away by throwing the law just because he had a disagreement with me. The thing about the modern world is that there are still people that believe that their entitled to things that really they aren't. This belief causes them allot of frustration and also gets them into allot of fights, some which they may win, but most which they lose. This belief is even known to cause road rage, because the other drivers aren't doing what the person wants them to be doing at the time. It can causes rage within relationships to the point that they might abuse or hurt others. It can also lead to reckless actions which leaves the person on the brink of destruction financially or health wise. Like Confucius said in the quote, these poor people give so much into this mistaken belief that they end up destroying themselves and others around them in the process.

There luckily is a cure for it.

The Cure for greed

The best cure for this kind of greed is introspection, which means to look inside yourself rather than the external things. This will then allow you to see that the only thing you have control over is yourself and that your desire to 'own' the world, while useful for motivation, can be destructive if you allow it to overpower your thinking. This comes with the realisation that there will still be people out there that believe they own the world and that there is very little you can do to stop them from destroying themselves. This comes with the realisation that you have the ultimate choice in what happens in your life and that these people, with their reckless actions can't harm you at all, unless you allow them to. Ultimately, you have the power, not them, to choose, but not to expect, to gain, but not take and to be whatever you want, without the need to step on other people to get there.

Hopefully, everybody will realise that greed is only useful as motivation, but if it runs their lives, it will only end up destroying them and worse, by their own hand.

Direction of this blog for 2009

"Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction." - Al Bernstein

Blogging seemed to have taken a back seat in my life and I've been feeling the loss. I have a weird desire to write and actually suffer withdrawal symptoms if I don't. To that effect I'm starting to write again, not to get readers (which would be nice), but more to write about the things I care about. This will however result in a mix bag of things, because I will be writing about how to write, some 'lazy man self-help tips', which are just self-help advice that doesn't need any practical work, just simple things you can put into practice now that have big results and some other post centred around things I have a new found passion for or I just found thought provoking.

On my life's front, I'm trying to find some semblance of balance, which hopefully once found will help me survive this year. I hope to achieve allot of things this year so that I can spend my new years with somebody very special to me on equal grounds.

Anyway, this is my first post of the year; which hopefully leads to many more, so see you soon...