9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I have been having gaming rig problems for most of the year. I thought it all started with a bad video card driver revision install in Vista when I installed back in March. Big problems. I fought it for months. Random game crashes, a whole slew of errors. Vista was a pain.

So in order to cut down on the issues, I reverted back to XP about a month ago. Still had problems. I finally conceded that I must be having a hardware problem. It had to be. The issue was so nebulous, so weird, that every time I tried to hammer it out or narrow it down, it just seemed to change shape or fail somewhere else. I tried everything. WMI repairs, driver cleanups, beta drivers, video card config, motherboard config (a bad bios flash, a new bios chip), burning candles and performing occult rights… the list is long, and dangerous, and possibly mad. But still, TF2 would crash at least once or twice a night. Regardless. Talk about frustrating.

Last week I fixed it. I pulled the memory out. I felt compelled to compare the labels. And…

THE FUCKING TIMINGS WERE DIFFERENT.

How did I miss that when I installed it (right before I installed Vista)?

Gah. What a unbelievable waste of time.

So since I fixed it, have I had a single crash in TF2? Not one.

Not only did I miss the timings, I missed the casual relationship with the issue. The memory install prior to the Vista upgrade. I made the bad assumption that my hardware was solid, it was the software at fault.

One must always remember to question one’s assumptions. Nothing is sacred, everything is questionable, especially the unquestionable.

We come from the old. The ageless. We are dark. We are lost.
We come to this. This time, before the end of all things.
And we shake our hands at the earth and scream how dare us.
And we shake our hands at the heavens and ask what can we dare.
And we toss our lot with the greater good. Knowing it is filled with fault.
We are the snake charmers without charm. We are the wistful without wit.
We are a contradiction known.
This is the time we say we have found our way.
We think we are the light.
We think we know the path.
We are mistaken.

Windows 7 can’t seem to come soon enough. My Vista annoyances are really getting to me and I just want to put my hands into something different.

Vista, I hate you. Seriously.

According to the Windows Blog, the final version will be coming to Technet and MVLS subscribers a few weeks after the RTM announcement. I have both, so I expect to start chewing on W7 by the end of August.

Because when XP is a better user experience than Vista, obviously something is wrong.

There are two things that could be defined as Psychohistory.

1. The real study of the psychological aspects of historical events.
2. The fictional study of mass human behavior to statistically predict future events.

I am making my way through the Foundation series by Asimov, and I am sure that I am not the first nor the last to think that the basis and potential for the latter could be quite real. But then again, Asimov’s axioms for the fictional psychohistory are way beyond the scope and nature of our current state as human beings. We are far too constrained.

But are we?

What we call government and economy are nothing but human systems. Systems that are made up of irrational human actions that lead to the inevitable logical results. In hindsight, it is immaculately clear, isn’t it? That is really the holy grail of sociology and economics… understanding human behavior to the point that you can accurately forecast the future developments of groups of individuals. Thousands of ideas circulate around this idea of observation and prediction. Media pundits and personalities are always pointing out the obvious and then postulating as to the why. My guess is they are erring on the side of caution and sticking with what everyone knows is true.

Because if someone were to figure it out. If someone were to be able to predict the forces of mass human behavior and the outcomes that would result, we all know we would ignore them. They would be labeled as nutcases, and shuffled off to some dark corner to warn and be duly ignored.

Psychohistory may be possible in the fictional sense, but if it were to approach any sort of scientific level in our real world, it would be ignored. Psychohistory scientists would be pushed into the realm of whackos and psuedoscience, along with the cryptozoologists and alien abductees. Because who would believe that an equation could account for mass human behavior?

It makes you wonder just how possible it could actually be. Of course we may never know. Because another of Asimov’s axioms is that the mass of individuals could not know of the study of psychohistory, because that would change the outcome. Observation changes the results (ie the observer effect).

Ok, so I am a fanboy, a trekker, a trekkie, a dork extraordinaire. I could be worse things.

But come on, it’s Star Trek. Who cares if it sucks? I will still love it.

I can’t say the same about Star Wars. Right around the middle of Attack of the Clones, I lost all hope for the new Star Wars in my life. I still watched it, but I cringed every few moments.

It would take a shit load of bad movie to feel the same about Star Trek. Rick Berman hasn’t ruined it for me yet, so I suspect JJ Abrams will do ok by that measuring stick.

Fingers crossed, mouth foaming. Can’t wait.