I feel like school is hurting me emotionally. I have signs of depression (constant tiredness) and I can't bring myself to do any work for school.
But there's light at the end of the tunnel. I'm tearing up just thinking that I'll soon have relevant work to do when I start working again.
...
I've long called school dehumanizing. It's like communism[1]. You're forced to do work without any real benefit to yourself, or, much more importantly, benefit to others. You're compelled to continually labor under a capricious system that merely discards your work when you're done with it. I don't know about y'all, but receiving a mere letter grade for the effort doesn't provide enough motivation to overcome that.
Plus, for anyone who has any genuine intellectual curiosity, school is likely to be stunting to your mental development. Even in the rare case when I'm tasked with something I'd have wanted to study anyway, I avoid it because I'm forced to do it. It's really sinister, because rather than reading it to gain knowledge for myself, it changes the motivational direction completely around because I'm now reading it so that I can regurgitate something on an irrelevant test.
It's like, if I was going to be a fighter pilot, I'd make damn sure I knew what every button in the plane did, the exact amount of stress everything including my body could take, I'd want to understand how everything worked, I'd spend a ton of time practicing, and so on. If you change the situation to one where I'm learning everything so that I can pass a test on a flight simulator, I'm really not going to be very motivated.
...
Oh, one more thing about how school destroys my psyche. With work, you have work, and you have home. When you're at work, you're working, and when you're at home, you're not. The separation of concerns helps keep you sane. Of course there are times when you work 30 hour days, and when you have to take work home, but those should be the exception (unless you're at a startup 
). My point is that with school, you never don't have work to do. You can always be studying, reading ahead, doing problems, working on a paper not due for weeks, etc. There's never a time you have to yourself when it's ok to do something other than schoolwork. You feel guilty when you're not doing schoolwork you should be doing, and you get into a procrastination/guilt vicious cycle, and you wind up getting nothing at all done. At least that's how it works for me.
In contrast, with work, you know what needs to be done for your job, you know what you need to know to do what needs to be done, and you plow in and learn what you need and do what you have to. If you're working at a job you like, you'll also enjoy almost every bit of it!
Footnotes:
[1]: Which I guess is why it's overwhelmingly liberals who choose to work in academia? In any case, I've been trying to figure out why that is...
Bill Hobbs: Meet the new Pope, via, via:
Eternal truth is eternal truth. If Pope Benedict XVI stands up for it, and stays committed to it, the world will be better off. The last thing the world needs is a post-modern pope who believes the church should change its teaching based on public opinion polls.
But, it looks like he's a hard liner for Church Tradition, so it's unlikely they'll reform their celibate priest situation. I think letting priests be married (heck, requiring them to be as the Bible's pretty clear about) would do a lot for the health of the Church. Of course, quitting all the idolatry and Mary worship would be good too, but that seems to be pretty central to Catholic practice.
Of course, as Bill points out, the Papal system itself is without Biblical warrant. Sigh.
- Thunderbird: C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Thunderbird\ and change the Path location in profile.ini, and every path contained in prefs.js (or user.js?) in your profile directory to match
- Palm Desktop: //HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/U.S. Robotics/Pilot Desktop/Core
- Trillian: Preferences->Activity History->Save History to...
- Firefox: Stored in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\, but practically the only thing worth moving is your bookmarks. You can specify the location of your bookmarks by setting 'browser.bookmarks.file' to the location of your bookmarks file in about:config (update: tried this and it didn't work. I may just wind up making Linux use a symbolic link to the bookmarks file). I tried moving the whole folder, but there are so many places you have to change the paths to extensions that I didn't get them all and the browser would freeze on startup. It would be nice to be able to share cache, cookies, and saved passwords between Linux and Windows, but it seems that's more trouble than it's worth. Firefox doesn't use relative paths in enough places (with extensions in particular). Though, extensions are often platform-specific, so it's not possible to share those anyway. Also see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Roaming_profile.
- K9: Go to the statistics tab and click "Change data storage location".
The goal of all this is to have as much as possible shared between my Linux install and my Windows install. Unfortunately, since I use K9 on Windows, I connect to my mail servers through localhost, but on Linux I obviously don't have it set up that way, and included in the profile I'm sharing is the connection info. So if I change it to match my Linux install it won't work on Windows, and vice versa. Argh. But since TextDrive is about to role out service-wide server-size Bayesian spam filtering with DSPAM, I won't need my local K9 anymore, so I'll switch things to use my POP server directly.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
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