SirSpanky.com - The Secret Diary of James Pearce Aged 20-Something

Well I just watched the rest of Heroes, up to the season finale. I have to say that the girl who plays Claire is cute. I IMDB’d her, and it’s Hayden Panettiere. Now, she’s actually 3 years 356 (i.e. just under 4 years) younger than me. That means she isn’t 18 yet, so I’m not going to even bother rating her. She does have awesome emerald eyes though. Maybe they’re just pretty to me because I don’t meet many girls with green eyes, but I still think they make her stand out

It will be interesting to see if she can maintain her sanity given she’s so young for such a high profile position. It appears to me that somewhere in the 15-25 range, everyone (high profile or not) goes on an activity bender…either that, or they bottle it up, and explode in a mid-life crisis at 40

After counseling with someone today, I listed out my reasons for building my business. None of which corresponded with “this will deliver my dream”. For a long time I’ve blamed my failure on that, because I’ve always been told “If the dream is big enough, the fact don’t count”. I believe that statement. But just because there is a point x, y (have dream, will be successful) doesn’t mean that there is a dipole at -x, -y (no dream, will fail).
It just means that I need to be a little more disciplined! I mean, I still have reasons for being in business. They just don’t correspond to a dream. So I’m probably not going to build my business with much passion or fervour, but I will build it. It’s technically and economically sound, so it will work anyway. It just depends on me.

I’ve been using SSHFS via the FUSE device for a little while now, and it’s cool. It correctly preserves the permissions of files because you have to login as a user on the remote machine to actually mount the filesystem! Just like SFTP or actually SSH’ing into the remote machine and creating the file manually.

SSHFS is cool though because it’s totally transperant, like NFS. Well. Almost. The things is, I have to keep mounting it when I boot using a shell script I wrote…then I enter my password, and it works. Well I’m shifting away from NFS because it

(a) Fails on permissions half the time
(b) Requires the NFS server to be enabled on the client, which sometimes causes problems.

Now NFS is not really portable to Windows anyway, so I’m not going to lose anything there by disabling it. What I will lose is the ability to plug any Linux machine into my network and access my NFS shares. Oh well, it’s insecure anyway.

So I want to autmount my SSHFS shares. The ones that used to be NFS. I used the mount script for fuse from John Hunt’s Blog, and tried to follow his instructions but…well they didn’t work so well. So I used his mount script, and the instructions for actually setting /etc/fstab up from the BTreeHugger’s Blog. The BTreeHugger instructions were really cool, because it’s passwordless and it works in Ubuntu. Plus, I’ve never used pregenerated keys before so that was fun

Ok I watched another movie, and it had another hottie in it, so I’m blogging. This time it was Cruel Intentions. I’ve seen it a few times before, and I always thought Sarah Michelle Gellar was the sexy one…and she is. But the personality of a harlot in a real girl is just not appealing. So Reese Witherspoon wins

So I went looking for a photo to put into this blog, only to find that she’s no longer that sweet looking blonde lady she was before 2000! Photos were hard to find though, the best source I found is from the Actress Archives. The photos of Witherspoon now…well she’s over 30 now, and dressing her age. She does still have a pretty smile though

She looks like someones wife, which would be great, if she was. Not really sure what happened there, her personality bio reads like a sweetheart. But then, maybe I’m just not too good at interpreting personalities from paper. Maybe I should go to the USA and ask these ladys

Well I give the pre-2000 Witherspoon a 9, but minus 1 for not having the x-factor. Final score: 8. Now I’m off to watch Spawn 2: The Animated Version, and finish my teaching plan for my students today!

I’ve just watched Daredevil again, and I’ve decided that Jennifer Garner is a hottie. Her age confused me though, I wouldn’t want a 20 year gap. The fact is, she only *looks* 30

So I’m giving her a weighted ranking of 9. She has all the features of a classy lady, and scores on all the dynamic weightings. This is based on how she looks in the ballroom scene in Daredevil. I couldn’t get a good photo of it, and it’s too dark in a direct capture. So I settled for a putting a pic of her in skintight clothes on here. It’s a pity she’s not smiling though, she has a nice smile

Weightings are based on bust, waist, ass, hourglass figure, face, movement, height.
Dynamic weightings are changable: hair, makeup, clothes.
1 point each, and I’m keeping it integer based, because I’m always told I’m too fussy, and thought I’d juxtapose

By the way, I’ve started linking in my posts

I was thinking a few days ago about changing. No matter what changes, it always seems to cause discomfort to me. OF course, changes we do not want or expect usually hurt more. Like, when I broke up from my last long term relationship, it sucked. One of the main reasons it sucked, is the change from spending 70% of my time around one person, to being alone. Big change.

But even good changes hurt. I’m in the process of getting fit. Frequent sports, running, diet watching etc. It’s working. But my muscles hurt, I get puffed out, I’m tired, I’m lazy, it’s cold…I don’t always want to go through what is necessary to make the change happen! It makes me most uncomfortable
Of course, the results are awesome, so I put up with it.

Now, I was also thinking, what happens when we “arrive”. What happens when we are at the location we wanted to get to (i.e. when I’m fit). Well, I don’t see how it’s possible to “stand still”. Maintaining a status quo requires work. Like if I don’t keep exercising, I will stop being fit. But even with a routine, the world has a way of making it so we need to adapt, and change, just to maintain that status quo. In Perth, it can get hot in summer. Sometimes we get heat waves where the whole week is about 40 degrees. Now, I could run in that, and kill myself, and not be able to run the next day. Or I could change my routine and do some other exercise, or just less running. Or do it at a different time.

So, everyone is changing. You’re either changing the methods used to keep your current situation active, or your working on changing your current situation. That means everyone is always going to be in some level of “natual” discomfort. Unless you learn to accept that the results are more important than the discomfort. Learn to ignore the discomfort. Go with it. The greater my discomfort, usually, the greater the change that is happening. I think thats a pretty good bright side to look on when I’m uncomfortable with the work required to make something happen

I lack discipline. Or maybe I just lack focus. Or both. I shift interests fast, having a habit of leaving things uncompleted. See, if I was disciplined, I’d complete it whether I like it or not. If I was focussed, I wouldn’t shift interests in the first place.

So heres what I’m gonna’ do. I’m going to produce the results, and hope that it produces the catalyst retrospectivly. Now I got flamed by the students I teach for writing English that doesn’t make sense because I use words most people don’t understand. Actually I get flamed for that a fair bit

Discpline and focus - whats the result? Finishing things that you start. Doing thing things you say you will. Ultimately, the result will hopefully be increased integrity. So all I have to do is finish the things I start. And hopefully that will breed a habit of that. Which is discipline. And focus! Maybe I’ll actually be able to “succeed” at uni, and business

No not X Box. Mac OS X.
Ok heres the deal. The HDD in my Powerbook is failing. I.e. it does not pass a SMART verification. I think it has something to do with me leaving it on 24/7 while we were in Melbourne in Febuary

But anyway, it no longer passes an fsck. It fails on checking the catalogue. And because the drive was uncleanly unmounted, OS X tries to do a check on startup. And it fails, which means it tries to do it on the next boot. Which fails. Repeat, frustrate, repeat some more.

So the question becomes how do I bypass the fsck? There isn’t any key command to do it, or an optional start up. What I DID do is boot into single user mode. I.e. BSD terminal. It skips the fsck when I do that. Unfortunately, the terminal is limited in the sense that you can’t run your GUI apps!

I’ve found that if you just exit (type “exit”) the terminal, it tries to boot to Aqua…without the FSCK!!! Of course, it fails to load a bunch of stuff because of corrupt data, but I did get it to boot. I also found a nice reference for Mac OS X single user mode commands.

Unfortunately, every app I ran crashed instantly on startup. Oh well. At least I know it works

I came across pics of my old iBook while cleaning out the old site. I bought it in 2005, but didn’t use it much. About 6 months later, the iBook started exhibiting logic board problems: The video would scramble, and the laptop crash, sometimes it would make the sounds of booting, but not show any video at all etc.

I fixed it with a shim about 3 months later, but a few weeks after that, the HDD died! It refused to hold partition data. So I dissembled it and sold the parts. But it still looks pretty

And heres me dissembling it. What you’re looking at is an iBook G3 900Mhz
640MB PC133 RAM 40GB 3600RPM 2.5″ HDD 24×16x40×4x CDR/RW/RO/DVD-ROM !

It’s a song

But anyway, I was thinking about what it means to be faithful to someone. I took the approach that in order to define this, I need to know what a relationship is. Because you need to have a relationship with someone in order to be faithful to them. Now, I’m going to use intimacy relationships (friends, family, partner) as the benchmark, as opposed to proximity relationships (like ‘the boss’).

So, intimacey relationships are based on love. So whats the defintion of love? It’s more than saying ‘I love you’ in my opinion. Well, we can love all three types of people there, friends, family and our partner, but it’s not all the same. So I’m going to infer that love is the commonality between these relationships. Whats common?

Well, I care about those people. A lot. And it’s not quantative, it’s qualitive.

Those people also care about me. That is, they know how I feel, and reciprocate to some extent. Possibly not to the extent that I do, maybe more, maybe less. But they know. And they reciprocate.
On the flipside, if I ‘love’ someone who doesn’t reciprocate, i.e. they don’t know how I feel or don’t reciprocate, and I die, they may not care at all. There was no love. Love is a bond between two people.

For love to be known, it must be shown. I believe that actions speak louder than words, and are often a truer reflection of how we feel than our words are. Lip service love is easy. Putting action behind it requires effort. That’s physical intimacy.

Mental intimacy is also required in my opinion. This relates to the way that we all create our own version of ‘the world’. This is formed, I believe, by our beliefs, attitudes, and values. In order to share mental intimacy, we need to share our worlds.
And it needs to begin with values. Values don’t really change. Values are what help us distinguish what is right from wrong. What is just from unjust. They are generally fixed when we are young and impressionable. When we use our five senses to help tell us about the world.
Beliefs are manifestations of values. For instance, some people believe that the police are corrupt. Some people believe Microsoft are a bad company. And so on.
And attitudes are reactions to beliefs, our own and others. When someone brings up a belief that we do not agree with, do we beat them down and impose our beliefs on them? Or do we accept that they are different? Or maybe adopt their belief as our own, and change ourself?
These are my definitions. If you love someone, you need to share values, because otherwise there will be a lot of cognitive dissonance, and you will either change your behaviour or change your values. Since values don’t really change, it is more likely you will change your behaviour and not be around that person. Thats not love.

So love is:

- A caring bond between two people
- A sharing of common values
- A sharing of worlds, mentally and physically

Developing these requirements takes _time_. How much time is subjective in my opinion. Everyone is different. Also, we seem to get it wrong a lot!
Developing these requirements also takes _effort_. To put effort in, people must want the reward. So it also requires both parties to want to build a relationship.

With these requirements, it can be seen that there are different qualitive levels of love. For instance, even though I don’t share the same beliefs as all my friends, because our values match, I am able to have a working friendship, and love them for being who they are, my friend. Thats one level.
But for my partner, I share my whole world with her. And it’s common. Our values and most of our beliefs and attitudes. And that sort of love results in me not needing or wanting to give my whole world to anyone else.

So now, back to the original question, what does it mean to be faithful?
At a basic level, I think it means sustaining the love.
This will result in different meanings for different levels of relationships. I.e. for friends, I do not share everything about me, or all my attitudes and beliefs with them. So the expected level of faithfulness is less than my partner. With my partner, I share my whole world. So I have to continue with that level of action to maintain that level of love.

This definition of what it means to be faithful explains why one couple can be in love and maintain that love, but share parts of their world with others. For instance, I can have a friendship with a girl, but my partner knows that I love her and that my partner is the only one I share my whole world with.

For me, with my beliefs and attitudes, I also have additional constrains on what being faithful means to me. If my partner wants to kiss someone else in passion, and does not, then it is almost as bad as if she actually does it. And if she does not tell me about it, then she has started blocking me out from her world. Which degrades the love.

Do I think I can live up to these definitions? Absolutely…If I have the right girl! Someone who rocks my world, and continues to. Someone to take on my yacht, just the two of us, and never feel lonely