Life, Philosophy, and Everything

Alt Title: Life, philosophy, and Everything else that happens to pop up in my head at any given time.

I had a nice weekend. Got to play BattleField 2 on Saturday, took the kids out to a cherry orchard (note to Cherry orchard operators: weigh the kids, not the baskets), and I basically slept all Sunday.

But on Saturday, between BF2 maps, one of my friends and I had the beginnings of an interesting conversation. Unfortunate, BF2 called before we could finish. My friend is an ex-philosophy major who has since reformed and asked for forgiveness (not to say he isn't still minorly warped my the experience). Me, I'm a college grad with a BSCS and two philosophy courses under my belt. Therefore: I am now an expert. :)

The discussion was about the use of philosophy (or lack of use). Most people agree, philosophy in its current form is useless. I have not heard of any philosophers striving to answer any important questions in a really long time, and it seems they are just trying to be proven wrong (the ultimate failing for a philosopher).

My counter to this: philosophy has one redeeming factor, it is useful to help determine how our culture thinks and sees itself. The actual philosopher countered with an inescapable answer: the current culture doesn't think. I would mostly agree with that. Our culture doesn't think -- for itself. Instead, it is force-fed by others who deem themselves worthy to speak for others.

So hear is what happens: someone with a high opinion of him/herself come up with a high ideal. They spread that ideal around to other less qualified, but still with high opinions of themselves. They dumb the ideal down and pass it on. That last step repeats itself many times over. Finally you have that high ideal in the general populace, albeit, extremely watered down.

The same thing happens in the fashion industry. My wife loves going through fashion magazines, especially the ones that show scenes from the latest runway event in Europe (usually France). The clothes are very interesting, but very unapproachable -- much like the models themselves. But in attendance are other designers. These designers take those clothes, and dumb them down to where an actual person might wear them.

Not that the original designer clothing wasn't beautiful, but it was designed for a idealized world market. Tall, skinny women with slender hips and no breasts. Most women do not look like that, and would look like a hippo in a tutu trying to fit into them.

The same goes for philosophy. Generally, your mechanic is not going to start spurting Kant or Hume, much less know who they are. Most men (half the world population you know), could name a high fashion designer if their life depended on it (Levi and Osh-kosh are not high fashion). But just as there are pieces of that high fashion in those Levis you wear, so there is some modern philosophy in the rubbish your taxi driver is saying.

Unfortunate, high fashion still has the same problem that modern philosophy has: it is still useless in the day to day world.

Battle Field 2

OK, I have been pretty non-committal about most games recently (out-side of Half Life 2 anyway).
But I've been looking at the screen shots of BattleField 2...they look really darn cool!

Not that I'm a graphics buff (ooh, look at the pretty pictures), but I do appreciate what some of the graphics could buy you. Combine that with the BattleField 1942 game play -- this is could be cool.

http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/677/677882/imgs_1.html

What I'm actually hoping for: this could be the game the re-unites my game guild! Finally have a group game good enough for all of us to buy. Old games in that category: Battle Field 1942, Raven Shield, and Call of Duty.

But really, I miss my tanks.

Flash Filer? Is that you?

Saw a post on the Flash Filer news group today. It is about a guy supposedly carying the torch as it were.

The results can be found here: http://www.datainfosoft.com/fsql/

From the information on the site, I'm still not really convinced. I'll have to look deeper later.

Efficient Export To Excel

A little problem I've had over the past while, all of the web sites that show how to do export to Excel from ASP.NET are horribly inefficient.

So I wrote my own. You can find details here.

SQL Server 2005 release date: Nov 7, 2005

We, I saw the first rumors of the release date this morning...now I'm seeing more.

But according to reports, SQL Server 2005 will be released Nov 7, 2005.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/cwebbbi/Blog/cns!1pi7ETChsJ1un_2s41jm9Iyg!243.entry
http://blogs.msdn.com/mrys/archive/2005/06/07/426394.aspx
I had others, but I can't find them now.

That in conjunction with other announcements (Apple going Intel, Office opening up file formats -- xml and zip), this has been a busy week.

My 15 seconds of fame

That is it. I had my moment of fame now. Carl Franklin read my little flame on DotNetRocks. And only one spelling mistake! Man, if my English teachers could see me now.

Holy mackerel do I hate to hear my own bad writing read out loud! Thank the Lord Michele lark's Bostonian's was there to move things along.

That said, knowing my own abject humiliation is immanent I will say this: at no point will Carl Franklin .NET language persuasion sway me from wasting a perfectly good hour listening to .NET Rocks. I do realize that Carl Franklin makes his living off of VB.NET -- as do others. He has every right to promote it...and I have every right to gripe about it.