just nate – code is poetry, life is code

There are just some things that you cannot have opinions about.

Let me back up. Today someone told me that evolution is based on “will” and that all animals exercise their will to evolve. When I began methodically removing the several layers of misconception inherent in the statement, my friend exclaimed in a nearly shrill voice, “but this is my opinion! Everyone is entitled to an opinion!”

Really?

Stop playing the opinion card, folks. It pisses me off. Some things don’t allow for an opinion. Math things. Science things. Yes, you’re entitled to believe that the communicative law of addition is false. No, you’re not entitled to shove your medieval, baseless belief on me as some sort of speculative opinion vomit and expect me not to blast it to the ground. No, it doesn’t matter if that’s your opinion. A is A, just as Aristotle’s Law of Identity states.

politicize that, bitches!

I think it’s pretty hilarious, really, the comments that come from bots. They are always generic enough to fit any article anywhere on the internet. Things like:

This is a very interesting article discussing a topic which I really like. Thank you for writing it.

I enjoyed this post very much. Please write more about it sometime.

The only thing I can’t figure out is the reason these bots are posting these vague, ambiguous comments. The link in their profiles just goes to google. They haven’t included any links or anything. What on earth could they be trying to accomplish?

OK, so if you are a bot, stop posting on my blog. It doesn’t make sense for you to be here! And go to hell.

If you hate email half as much as I, why are we all still sending emails to eachother? What gives?

I have many email accounts. I mean, LOTS. Like, maybe 50. They all forward or redirect into 5 addresses: two gmail addresses, a school address, and a yahoo address, and my work address. Between those 5 addresses, I currently have 1029 unread messages.

Not reading a message someone sent me several months ago is akin to just deleting it, but I have 1029 messages that I have never bothered to open. I get as many as 100 new messages per day!

Email has its place: collaboration, receipts, and the like. It’s a nice way to send a file out to a few people, and not allow the rest of the world to see it. Web clients like gmail even provide a cool way to real-time chat. But I am standing tall and proud on my soapbox declaring that we don’t need email for all the stuff we use it for.

You’ve got facebook, twitter, and (yuck) myspace for personal connections with friends, updates from companies, and even updates from online communities (like opensource communities, for example).

You’ve got yammer and google docs for collaboration. And don’t forget svn.

There are lots of other online apps that can replace various functions of email. All I’m saying is “COME ON PEOPLE!!! STOP SENDING ME EMAILS.” Is that so hard to understand?

p.s. I think voicemail is super crappy too. FYI.