7-17-04 3:17 PM

This is amazing! Just amazing! My dad has just informed me that he had a copy of my old websites. This is so cool ... these are my babies. My very first HTML, my very first JavaScripts, and my very first program in Java are all there. This is awesome, I'm so happy. Just to make a small timeline, my first attempt at HTML is from January 1997, and my first Java program is from December 1998. This program, btw, went into production. So, arguably, I have been a professional programmer since I was 13. I rock.

On my old website, from 1998-1999, there are a few things worth pointing out that will entertain you if you are a huge nerd. First of all, check out my awesome meta-search tool that I wrote. You'll love how it works. You will also want to check out my links page. No, it was not made as a joke - I thought it looked cool at the time. Also, notice the attempt to make money by linking to some advertisement thing that promised me money for all the clicks it got. And it still works! You might also like the periodic table quiz that I did instead of some homework assignment in some science class. I rule! Finally, check out the color-changer utility. I fucking typed every one of those colors and their corresponding hex code BY HAND! Yup. Yup.

You'll also notice that my layout and color scheme is basically the same as it is now. That's because I believed then and still believe that this is the best possible layout ... ever. So yeah, I hope you enjoy this little trip into the past as much as I did. Later.

7-10-04 3:02 AM

Is is a well know cliché that love is not the opposite of hate: indifference is. It is with this in mind that I can say that my life has finally reversed itself. In place of the long-gone hate that ruled it years ago there now sits its opposite: not love, but indifference. The truth is, I am bored. Gone - and missed - is the vindication of that boredom that my hatred of life provided. In past summers, if I got bored, it was still better than the alternative: pain. But now, the boredom is unjustifiable. It is not a needed analgesic, but an unwelcome stupor.

It is not a coincidence that I have not updated my website in so long. I have had nothing at all to say. Worse - infinitely worse - is that I have not thought. O god, how I miss thinking. I know as well as you do that my thinking is always rooted in discontent. In the past, it was rooted in the psychological discontent of loneliness; more recently, it was rooted in the intellectual discontent of deciding my path in academia; but now, now there is nothing at all to present me with any discontent whatsoever, short of the materialistic discontent of frying half of my computer and of my car dying. And while this type of discontent can go a long way towards ruining my day, it is not the type to foster thought - rumination will neither repair my computer or buy me a car.

And so I have languished in this despicable state of half-awakedness, wholly enjoying myself - not realizing that my mind was rotting away from disuse. And I didn't miss thought one bit. After all, how was I to miss something which I did not even remember. In my stupor, I forgot the pure, the irreplaceable joy of thinking. What have I become?

Actually, I know exactly what. I have become the thing that I dread the most; I have become normal. I have become an unthinking mediocrity, a beast of burden lugging around the heft of my DNA and my instinctual urge to keep living. Until today, that is.

Today, probably for the first time in months, I genuinely thought. And I am proud to say that in the absence of an external stimulus, I created one of my own initiative: I read. And sitting there, reading Nietzsche and relating it to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - purposefully and with the contrived juxtaposition of an English prompt - I started to think again.

At first is was just a trickle ... a comparison of Ayn Rand's derivation of the source of our morality to Nietzsche's genealogy of the same. And then my thoughts turned to Darwin, and to contemporary studies of animalistic altruism. And I started making connections between Rand's "Morality of Death",  Nietzsche's "Slave Morality" , and the evolutionary explanation of altruism. I never did get anywhere with that thought ... my knowledge of evolutionary theory and of the morality and philosophy is infantile. But who cares? The point is that I regained that spark, that desire, that impulse to think. What a rush it was to think about something again ... to really devote the entirety of my attention to something global ... to philosophize. And from there, the trickle turned to a flood, and I sat there thinking about everything that I had ignored in the past months. And finally, at the tail end of the tidal wave, came the realization, the simultaneously horrifying and joyous realization, that I had not thought for months and that above all else, I love to think.

And I really don't care if this love of thought makes me a loser in your eyes, you who do not share it. You who feel it is pretentious to be proud to think ... who believe that deep thought is cliché, that philosophy is a sham, and the title of philosopher is pejorative. I have no reason to seek your approval, you who make your judgments on faith and instinct and not on thought. I value your opinions as I value the outcome of the throw of the dice, and would sooner seek the dice's approval. I am proud to think, and I will by every power I have continue to do so as long as I live. For thinking has again filled me with the desire to live: the desire to exist. And while my existence in the past months has been questionable - both in reality and online - it is no longer so, for cogito ergo sum, and don't you forget it!