One such Wikipedia loser posts on his user page, “I am presently an unemployed Aerospace Engineer …”. Oh guardian of objectivity, if you are unemployed, how can you be an Aerospace Engineer?

A friend of mine once said that there are problems and there are difficulties. A problem is something you savor. You say, “Well that’s an interesting problem. Let me think about that problem a while.” You enjoy thinking about it, because when you find the solution to the problem, it’s enlightening.

And then there are difficulties. Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn’t tell you a thing. It won’t be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties.

The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn’t the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that’s because there’s something to be learned from mastering that complexity.
Ward Cunningham

So true.

Thank you, Microsoft COM for bringing me an even deeper understanding of this. Who needs documentation when your source is closed?

Oh shit.

It’s gone. My wallet.

The Jamaican mama occupying the ticket booth must have cottonballs up her ears, she takes so long to respond to my plea for help. When I tell her my wallet is missing, she barely hides her irritation; Don’ gimme none o’ yo problems, her expression warns. She’s doing me a favor, you see. Out of the kindness of her meager heart, she begrudges a sarcastic jab.

“What do you want me to do, call the police?” How ridiculous are you? she adds, without saying.

I know what’s up. Some people just want to make themselves feel better at your expense, no matter the situation, no matter the shamefulness of it.

She doesn’t know just how much she reminds me of the inconceivably rude train ticket agents in China. Give someone a modicum of influence, watch it go straight to their heads. How haughty they are, sending the helpless back to the end of the line at a whim. How imbecile their exaggerated frustrations, the melodrama of banal existences. How dead their spirit of justice, serving those who cut the line as if it were their birthright.

Thank god this is America, where some people still do the right thing.

Meditation at MoMA, a message. My wallet.

Tracing back through my original frustrations, I remembered that the single most vexing problem was that of the user running the CUPS programs. After a wasted evening digging around, I discovered that CUPS 1.2 changed the way CUPS runs its programs, in the name of enhanced security:

RunAsUser Removed; The insecure RunAsUser mode has been removed in favor of OS mechanisms such as SELinux
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/whatsnew.html

Setting

User root

in /etc/cups/cups.conf for some reason is not able to override the user running the programs. Since cifmp500 insists on being run as root (as I mentioned previously), printing will always fail in CUPS 1.2 with a cryptic debug log to /var/log/cups/error_log:

Error: invalid printer model name

The only solution I had was to roll back to CUPS 1.1 . I followed the ArchWiki directions on building obsolete packages to create a package based on version 1.1.23 . Unfortunately, I ran into an issue with the PNG library using a deprecated function. I did not want to downgrade libpng, so I resolved the issue (hopefully) with a patch. Here’s the CUPS 1.1.23 package source with the PNG patch. To build and deploy:

% tar xvfz cups.tar.gz
% cd cups
% makepkg
% su
% pacman -R cups
% pacman -A -f cups-1.1.23-5.pkg.tar.gz

I still had to go back and twiddle the user setting in cupsd.conf … but an invocation of cngpij finally woke up the printer and did something! Hooray!

Guess what I’m about to do right now?

/etc/pacman.conf:

IgnorePkg   = kernel26 cups

Religious Hatred => How do we determine which thought to respect?

Half-erased, it’s been sitting there since I read a Harper’s article on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy more than a year ago. The essence of the question I intended to explore was, what are the criteria for thoughts and beliefs we should respect? And what is the behavioral manifestation of respect? In the case at the time, did the beliefs of the incensed Muslims qualify for respect? And if so, what did that respect look like?

Last night I watched What the Bleep Do We Know!?. This afternoon I’ve been sifting through information about the movie, including criticisms, on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Before that, I had already begun to draw some conclusions.

The question, “What thoughts should we respect?” can be taken on two levels, depending on the intended effect or the value placed on different effects. I answer one way for circumspect diplomacy, and another way for personal honesty. I consider the latter way here.

I think the only thought worthy of respect is the thought that does not perpetuate a myth. A myth is a belief, held on any level from the conscious to the deeply subconscious, that stunts the growth of an individual. Binding influences, if you will, or “chemical addictions” as the movie refers to them. Insofar as a thought suppresses the pursuit of happiness through creative, honest expression, of either the individual thinking the thought, or others, I would say that it perpetuates a myth. The myth is of the strictly demarcated, limited potential of the individual.

It’s a given that the trio of directors for Bleep?! are trying to express some shared sentiment to a wide audience. They took significant liberties in editing the content to appear consistent with that sentiment, which understandably raised many a skeptic’s eyebrow. It’s easy to lambast novel ideas – preemptive criticism, no matter how unfair, often has the effect of making the unmade-up mind. This is the sort of criticism I’m seeing for the movie. Character assassination of the speakers in the movie (the Wikipedia article repeatedly and pointedly refers to them as “purported experts”), as well as labeling of the concepts as “New Age” and the organization the directors belong to as a “cult” are proven as effective techniques for discrediting any message, quick and dirty like.

But was the intent to deceive and manipulate the viewer through unethical editing? Far from it. I believe the directors simply wished to expose the viewer to fresh and potentially liberating ideas. In contrast, negative reviews of the movie do nothing but trap the imagination, while at the same time indulging the reviewer’s egoistic pseudo-objective judgmentalism. The myth being perpetuated here: the reviewer in his profound insight has the viewer’s best interests in mind. On the contrary, negative commentators generally have nothing to say regarding the more powerful messages presented in the movie, such as of the value of individual agency. Bleep?!’s directors express as much in their repartee to the media response:

Today we use the media to publicly crucify people and new ideas. The media helps us correct the errant ways of radical thought. Anyone who steps out of line is verbally ridiculed, so that the general public can feel safe that another nuisance has been dealt with. It seems that some journalists of late have been ‘heroically’ challenging, ridiculing, and snubbing the ideas presented in “What the Bleep Do We Know?!” They have once again protected the safety and sanity of the general public….

…Or have they? The consensus reality of the people that the media is protecting is, by and large, on closer examination, extremely unhappy. One only has to look on the street, or in the news, and then listen to the quiet desperation of people’s thoughts to see a deep well of sadness, grief, anger and unhappiness in this current culture.
An Open Letter to the U.S. Media

Indeed, sometimes the media response to Bleep!? seems much like it would be from Church to heretic. In other words, “Religious Hatred” as written on my board – intolerant, repressive, dispassionate. Not worthy of my respect.

To the directors’ point on the media which has shed little light on elevation from a culture of dissatisfaction: before watching the movie yesterday, I was reading an article entitled Manufacturing Depression from the latest Harper’s. The author describes his experience as a test subject for a depression-related pharmaceutical research experiment. The process is impersonal and, ironically, not at all uplifting.

The HAM-D questions, Dording’s unconvincing solicitude, the banality of this exercise, the tyranny of the brain – they all seem as unassailable, solid, and impenetrable as the office building itself.
Gary Greenberg, Harper’s Magazine, May 2007 (45)

For depression, chemical subjugation of the mind seems to be the greatest promise of the defenders of the status quo. Interestingly enough, the author also comments on the role of the placebo effect in evaluating drug efficacy following lab experiments, as the unwanted “pain-in-the-ass brother-in-law” who keeps showing up. Perhaps this effect is less troublesome than it is auspicious, however – could it also argue for the transformative power of the mind upon reality?