Zero Tolerance.

I am convinced that the world is riding the downward spiral of demise and the great collision with the concrete can't be too far away. Before you become concerned for my mental well being, rest assured that I am not about to cap myself or anything. I wouldn't miss the end for anything (Seriously, that wasn't supposed to sound as apocalyptic as it did).

I have thought that I will be around to witness the destruction of the human civilization as we know it for the last couple of years. Really, ever since I started to take an interest in foreign affairs I realised that we are in a pretty hopeless situation. Funnily enough, the inspiration for writing this didn't come from PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Nope, it is a single song that embodies everything that is wrong with the world.

Hopefully if you are reading this you haven't heard it. I don't even know who 'wrote' (and I use the term extremely loosely) or 'performed' (again, loosely) it, but the song is called 'Flaunt it'.

My god. This song is the reincarnation of Satan (I am not religious btw, figure of speech). I don't know exactly what it is about it. It just pisses me of sooo much. The lyrics are typically sexual and overt, which is nothing new for modern 'popular' music. I am not a prude, but for fucks sake, "I'd like you better if we slept together"? Lennon and Mcartney would be proud. I know I sound like a parent in the 50s, but I have to believe that this is different.

Ok, enough about the song. It's just a song. But, its kind of a spearhead for a sociological problem. If you aren't the type that has to witness 18 - mid 20 year old 'females' and 'males' out in a nightclub on a weekend then you may not know of the phenomenon of unbelievable ridiculousness that exists in that kind of environment.

So, bringing this all back in (I could rant for days and never make a point), that song is the soundtrack to the reality tv generation which decided to accept a simplified and dictated version of existence because the real stuff was just too hard. You can see examples of what I am talking about everywhere if you care to look. Most people I know are switched off. They aren't experiencing anything other than what they are told to experience. They think like is just like the tv ads say it is, they think that something like Big Brother is actually something worth associating your self with, they think that watching tv is a substitute for reading, they think that the point of music is to aid in completely shutting your mind down (my personal favourite), and so on.

I am 22 years old now. Too old to put up with people I don't want to put up with. Hence zero tolerance. So from now on I am going to attempt to take a zero tolerance approach with people who choose to, put bluntly, be stupid. Note that stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. Of course there are no clear lines here, considering that I am myself guilty of some of the 'sins' I have declared above. But surely at some point you have to start identifying the result of the cultural catastrophe that was the 20th century and try to distance yourself from it so you can try to make a difference and also hopefully improve your own quality of life.

Perl First Impressions.

I am still working on Cortecs project I have been working on for some time. Part of the fun now is that I have to learn to code in Perl to do some fancy data mangling and processing.

I spent most of yesterday reading through various documentation and tutorials in order to get a handle on the Perl way of doing things. Hot damn. What sadist designed this language? Honestly, Perl seems to have more grammatical constructs than the english language. At least thats what I first thought.

After delving a little deeper, it seems like the language just suffers from uber orthoganality. There seems to be a reasonable number of constructs, it's just that they can be used in such flexible ways that the same construct often appears to be a different one. I could be wrong considering I have only been looking at the language for a day, but the title of this dealy says 'First Impressions'.

It's an interesting language for sure, but so far I am not impressed. It seems way to chaotic and seems to have suffered from rot. I would suggest to only use it if you have to. There are more elegant languages that are getting close to being just as pervasive which are nicer (Python, Ruby etc..) and less obfuscated.