I’ve been intending to update in here for the past four weeks or so since school started (perhaps re-started would be more accurate to my case), and talk about my classes, my commute, whatever. But let’s start small: philosophy. I’m taking a course that’s starting with a bunch of historical philosophical foundations of the study of mind. Reading philosophy in general drives me absolutely batshit, because I generally find it to be incoherent, idiotic, or both.
Enter John Searle, a Berkeley professor and relatively famous modern philosopher who wrote the book we’re reading at the moment. I enjoy his style immensely. He’s concise, coherent, and pragmatic, and this sentence, which bade me stop reading to write in here, really captures his essence nicely:
Philosophy begins with a sense of mystery and wonder at what any sane person regards as too obvious to worry about.
Prepping to do some in-between-studying updating of my website (finally!), and after having just backed up all my computer files for the first time in . . . too long, I found that I was running an out-of-date version of WordPress, the software that makes all this yabbering nice and pretty and coherent. DreamHost, my webhosting company, provides a one-click install and upgrade of a variety of popular software pieces, which is how I keep this site and my photo gallery running on up-to-date software with minimal effort.
Well, in the upgrade process somewhere, I jumped the gun, did the finalizing steps in the wrong order, or whatever. The point is, all of a sudden, my website was BLANK. Nothingness. I started searching around, and for a moment, had a wave of nauseated panic envelop me fully. I had chronicled the last three years of my life in these electronic walls, to some degree, and to lose that amount of work and remembrance would be heartbreaking. It’s happened before, and it was awful, but this is a particularly notable phase of my life enshrined in textual form.
Needless to say, my fears were assuaged when I realized that [boring technical explanation omitted]. The first thing I did, of course, was back this baby up.
More later, after my heart-rate goes down.