Life, the Omniverse, and Nearly Everything

Monday, March 07, 2005

Domain hosting follies

My "professional" Web site and domain, seven-sigma.com, is temporarily unavailable, from last Thursday, 3 March. I expect that I will be signed up with a new provider, likely webserver.com.my within the next day or so. (This is Malaysia; things are a bit slower here. My 3-month-old honorary granddaughter can crawl faster than most office-workers prefer to walk. If anybody is trying to reach me by email in the interim, please use jdickey at graffiti dot net or jeff_dickey at personal dot ro. Thanks.

// posted by Unknown @ 3/07/2005 01:37:00 AM (0) comments

Quotes and notes

I spent a little time this weekend Googling for a wallpaper I could use of the Adidas Impossible is Nothing campaign that had the full quote ("Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men...") with the picture of the defiant/triumphant Ali in the ring. (Anybody who knows where I can find such an image for personal use, please email me.

Buried deeeeep in a Google search result was this little gem from the NC (North Carolina, USA) Soccer.Net website that had several great quotes (IMAO) about the nature of winning. Besides the text of the Ali quote I was following,

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they\u2019ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. its an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. its a dare. impossible is potential. impossible is temporary. IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING.

There was also this great, humbling quote attributed to Michael Jordan:

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

That is going to get mounted beneath the Edison quote plaque for reinforcement and encouragement on the days when things not only don't go according to plan, they argue forcefully against the existence of any plan. To wit:

Unfortunately, many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed because every wrong attempt discarded is just one more step forward.

Useful words to remember when, for example, pondering pulling up stakes yet again and moving business and personal life to another place Far,Far Away.

// posted by Unknown @ 3/07/2005 01:23:00 AM (0) comments

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Compasses and directions

I had two curiously connected yet disjointed Web experiences this morning. First, I read Mark Sherman's AP story posted on Yahoo! News about a Federal judge ordering the Bush régime to either charge or free José Padilla, an American citizen being unconstitutionally detained as an " enemy combatant" for 2-1/2 years without ever having had formal charges laid against him. While this should be cause for celebration by any who respect the rule of law and the theory that government should be responsible to its citizens rather than its rulers, many of my fellow Americans seem to take a different view. For those with strong stomachs not easily swayed by utter lack of civility, you may find the Yahoo! discussion board for that article interesting. Those of us who were hoping to be able to go home in our lifetimes to a Constitutionally-governed country may be at variance with foreseeable reality.

The other discovery of the morning was the Political Compass website, which has an interesting little survey - rank yourself along a two-dimensional grid, liberal-conservative and authoritarian-libertarian. Roughly in line with my expectations, my scores came out as :

Economic Left/Right: -8.38 (leaving the neighbourhood of moderately leftish) and
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.15 (somewhat less libertarian than I expected).

One might ponder on the choice of assignment of negative values to the left or to libertarianism. However, for those of you who remember your middle-school geometry and trigonometry, a standard grid is ordinarily drawn with increasing values to the right and top from a central origin point. I'm sure some authoritarian righty will find fair to bash the "negative" libertarians or liberals. It saves him the trouble of coming up with a substantive argument.

// posted by Unknown @ 3/01/2005 02:22:00 PM (0) comments