Checksum Arcanius

One of the greatest perks of joing the Libertarian Party for me has been getting onto the email distribution list of our esteeemable campaigns coordinator, Jeff Jared. While many people loathe getting onto any list, this one is literally a constant stream of good ideas, mostly in the form of published letters to the editor from libertarians.

Some examples:

2005-05-17 KING COUNTY JOURNAL Letters to the Editor

HOSPITAL

Washington’s Department of Health squashed building a new Issaquah hospital. Sorry outer-suburbanites, you’ve got to come to the inner-burbs to get medical care because the state has decreed it so.

This is just another example of how socialist central planning strangles market forces in health care and raises costs through bureaucratic entanglement.

Let’s deregulate health care. The state Department of Health should take a chill pill and let market participants like Overlake Hospital build another in Issaquah if they want to.

Jeff Jared

Kirkland

(more…)

The last two days haen’t gone too well from a resolution standpoint. After gettting donr with my presentation in my technical writing class and a major homework deadline in my electri circuits class, i forgot all about the libert6y forum and instgead ended up playi ng basket bll with a church grouop until a bout 11:00. I started out poorly, but e nded with the wi n ni ng shot so it nturned out o0k, After getti ng home, i i set to work on lau ndry and encded up satyi ng up uiuntil abou t twso amj playing cs wyhile w azitiing for the dr yer to finish up. Redsukltaz ntly, i d idn’t msake it uinto work u ntil s bout noon o n thursdasy .I stayeed late sin ce all i had in teh wiriti ng 2was listeni ng to presentstio ns. last night wassd a bnout /the same, bu twithoput thne lau dnry. I did well, but tgot to sleepo prewtty lastge. I still made uit into weork, todasy. Pretty mcuh no0thi ng welse on the lists got done thosre days. c

Now i am in a cafe in seattlw iqwht dan and jay marashm wiri9tn g thsisw piost on dan;s journada.c in cawse4 you hav ew nm;t noticed, i am no vgoo d at typi ng on this kry board. i gave up try7i ng to fix the writ6jgn a whiel ago since it was taki9ng too long. I hope you are a ble tgoi u nderawstgand the post.l

The web statistics for SilverFir.net continue to astound me. May was a record-breaking month in nearly every category. Total transfer approached five and a half gigabytes, more than a gigabyte and a half more than in any previous month. Average hits surpassed 5,000 a day for the first time ever, fueled primarily by explosive readership growth of the Well of Mirmir, a newer silverfir.net-hosted blog that is already accounting for an astounding one fifth of all traffic on the server.

June, from the looks of it, is going to be even hotter: so far, less than two days in, its averages already well exceed those of May. On an interesting side note, just minutes ago, sf2 had become very slow and unresponsive. MySQL, especially, seemed to be having problems. A reboot seems to have cleared things up just fine. We shall see how things hold up in the future.

Yesterday, I was in bed by midnight (or so), I read several pages, and Counter-Strike hovered around an hour and ten minutes. Not too bad on those three, but I didn’t get anything done in the exercise section.

Stress can be a great motivator that causes me to accomplish tasks. However, introspection has led me to the conclusion that I usually respond badly to stress and that I have very poor stress management techniques. This comes somewhat as a surrpise, because I tend to think of myself as a mostly calm and collected individual. I now believe this calm under fire to be mostly a facade. For example, I now believe that my episode of insomnia leading up to the 2005 FIRST Robotics Competition Championship is an indication of my unhealthy response to stress.

Insomnia alone is not to bad. However, when stressed, I find that I often fall into a rut and spend vast amounts of time going down paths that lead nowhere. The two most common ruts seem to be compulsive Counter-Strike playing and mindless internet surfing through online forums, news, porn, humor sites, and other dubiously useful information. These episodes are not short-lived either. I have spent hours in these ruts, going nowhere, but going there quickly.

I believe that it would be highly beneficial to me to retrain myself so that my response to stress is an immediate and direct response to the stressor, or at the very least, a healthy coping technique such as running, as opposed to my current techniques which make me feel bad about myself and get nothing useful done. If only self-mastery were a pill I could swallow. Instead, it is a process that only the dedicated few can truly harness.

Here’s to not giving up.