ironbees:

He Went Loping

booksandporn:

We are the 99% Cookie Monster.. 

my response to a message on okcupid asking about my details declaring ‘atheism and very serious about it’:

i completely understand and respect your type of spirituality. in fact, for a time i was quite religious. i studied the bible, and i began to live life in the footsteps of jesus. i was never much of a church goer. in my personal readings of the bible what i gleaned from it had nothing to do with attending church, but basically to live a virtuous life. what i got from it was essentially the golden rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. it wasn’t the proselytizing bigoted religion one sees in the media today, it was more lead by example.

in my various readings of the bible i lost my faith. the god outlined in the bible reminds me of a spoiled child. it has temper tantrums, mood swings, commands attention, is commonly a bully and destructive only in ways our imagination can process. it was the bible that pushed me away from faith. i got this idea in my head that there was no god. no thing. nothing. we just are by a total cosmic coincidence.

the entire universe is here, and there is absolutely no reason for it. none.

that to me is the most beautiful thing about all of this.

for work, i’ve been tasked with trying to document software procurement and licensing. in addition to a number of bad choices on this front by my company, i’m also having to figure out microsoft’s licensing.

what i don’t get is this: how do you go from a simple concept like ‘we want to get paid for your use of our software’ to the multi-page monstrosity that i have before me - and this is the pared down cliff notes version, not the giant legalese version. it’s full of conditional statements outlining potential scenarios and what the official licensing doc says about them.

what happened to, for every machine you put this software on, you owe us; put it on a bunch of machines and we’ll give you a discount? for server os where many people are using them concurrently, there should be a punch card application tracking minutes logged on per account. when microsoft requests it, you provide it and they bill you accordingly. done. you know, how pretty much any business that wants to get paid implements their billing.

instead, my company pays a handful of people to interpret, redocument, and implement this arcane licensing strategy. it’s virtually impossible to know with certainty how many installations of what we have at one time, what with the ever changing landscape in our data centers and virtual machines, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever pay them properly. it isn’t that we aren’t trying to, it’s that it’s so complicated and constantly changing that we’re unable to ever catch up.

so the bottom line is that as i see it, microsoft is losing revenue to unpaid software installations and my company is losing revenue by having to pay people to sort it all out. it’s a lose lose situation that could be solved so easily.

so it turns out that this is much more difficult than i had anticipated. i thought i’d just sit down and be able to pull up some things i’m grateful for and that would be that, after all i am still a pretty positive person, or so i thought. the last few days i’ve sat down and the first thought in my head was something to the effect of ‘wow. today sucked.’ it is true that i’m going through a particularly busy time in my life right now, but i really thought i’d be able to see through the smoke of negativity for the lights of positive stuff, but no dice. so now i’m doubling down and trying a bit harder …

i am grateful for my friends. i am often annoyed at humanity in general, and certainly the people around me have a way of getting under my skin, but i have a handful of people in my life that really are fantastic. my old college roommate is one of those people. he and i have been friends now for 14 years, and i can’t recall a single instance when i had an issue with him. we’ve been able to be there for one another on many occasions. he literally tells me that he owes me his life, which makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable, but the fact is that he’s also been there for me as well on many an occasion. i may not owe him my life, but my life is certainly better because he is in it.

this is the first post in what will likely be a long and awkward journey. i’m sorry in advance.

it seems like there are a lot of atheists on okcupid. it is most certainly the case that okc is matching me up with people that are like minded, but i definitely see atheism listed as religion more than i would expect. generally speaking i am attracted to atheists as they tend to be people who think critically about the world. even if we agree on nothing else, their atheism tells me that at the very least we’ll have some good conversations and are likely to respect one another.