Quaere Verum

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my entire PC...well, at least most of it, after my video card failed. To be honest, I was quite happy with the performance of my old Athlon 64 rig, but after being faced with the prospect of a defective video card, it didn't seem right to invest in a new mid-range AGP video card, considering that PCI-Express is now the de facto video card interface, and AGP is on its way to extinction. It started innocently enough. For no apparent reason my PC started crashing, and the startup screens started showing columns of weird checkerboard patterns. Strangely enough, I could run the PC perfectly fine when the video card was in VGA mode, but when I installed GeForce drivers and rebooted, nothing happened. Literally. The PC would just sit there, with the monitor blacked out. I could reboot into safe mode, but that was about all that I could do. The symptoms my two-and-a-half year old Inno3D GeForce 6800LE showed seemed strangely similar to the symptoms exhib...

Happy 12th birthday son! :-)

This blog is almost four years old. It's no longer as popular as it once was, as I haven't been updating as regularly as I used to. I don't really blog hop that much anymore either, so I haven't been getting many visits from my peers and contemporaries anymore. Yet I still write when I have the chance. There aren't as many people I can talk to as before as I sort of gave up slowly on some of my friends during the past few years, and the few friends that I still have, like most people, are busy with the humdrum of their own lives. So blogging ends up as a form of catharsis for me, a chance to commit my thoughts to keyboard, to get my ideas in order, and free my mind of things that haven't really been sorted out, never mind if my posts are hardly read anymore. It was never really the point of this whole thing. I started this blog for myself, and I have stayed true to that all these years. A lot of my fellow bloggers, particularly those whom I started blogging with...

I've often asked myself this question, though I could never really come up with a sensible answer. It's a good question to think about though, seemingly contradictory in its inanity and its poignancy, yet, try as I might, I could never seem to rationalize where this question came from, or where it leads to. We're all alive right now, here, in the present. If you follow a religion, any religion, chances are you share a belief in a life beyond this one, that the death of our physical bodies would lead us to a place of eternal peace and happiness...that is, if we are deserving, based on the actions we perform in this life. Not to be blasphemous or anything, but I have always had a hard time dealing with that concept, even when I was very young. For one thing, I have sort of turned into a moral relativist over the years, and I have come to accept that it is not always proper to label one action "good" or another action "evil". It depends on the circumstances...

For those of us outside the United States who have no idea how their elections work. Note: Turn off the background audio first at the bottom of the page before clicking the play button.

patronus922 . My CABAL Online character, a level 136 Force Shielder. Dual Transcender. Name is Latin for "guardian". Favorite skills: Shield Break, Shield Splinter, Blade of Judgement, Storm Crush. Just one of the diversions I turn to in my solitude.

A few days ago, a senior official of the government agency I work in summoned me to her office. There, I was told in not so many words that in view of our office’s poor performance when it comes to implementing information technology thrusts, she was planning to propose to top management the hiring of a Chief Information Officer (CIO), more than likely a consultant, to oversee IT development and deployment. She subsequently asked me if I would be willing to act as a special assistant/liaison to this proposed CIO. While I did not refuse the assignment (in the grand scheme of things, I’m not in a position to refuse anyway), I found myself somewhat disturbed and somewhat revolted by the idea. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with hiring a consultant for a particular task...virtually all large corporations do it at one time or another. In fact, large corporations do it all the time. It just got me thinking; just what is it about consultants that seem to give people the impressi...