… if you would be all-powerful? I’m talk­ing of lim­it­less power like the one the Beyon­der wields. Real omnipo­tence. Cur­rently, I’m re-reading Secret Wars II and I couldn’t help but to think of what I’d do with that kinda power. And guess what! I couldn’t think of any­thing at all. Well, sure, there are some things I’d do but, ulti­mately, there’s noth­ing more to do. If you can do lit­er­ally every­thing in the blink of an eye, what do you get out of life? You’ll never expe­ri­ence ful­fill­ment again because you don’t have to strain to accom­plish what­ever task you set your­self to (yeah, in this con­text lim­it­ing your pow­ers is cheating).

Seri­ously, could any­one be happy wield­ing such imag­in­able pow­ers? Are we humans even able to under­stand the mag­ni­tude of omnipo­tence? Which leads us inevitably back to the ini­tial ques­tion: what would you do if you would wield omnipo­tent pow­ers? End wars? Stop death? Force oth­ers to embrace love and life? Hon­estly, I truly don’t know what I would do. Every action has con­se­quences and I would really feel like a child in a sand­box. You know, mess­ing around with stuff and unin­ten­tion­ally destroy­ing things in the process …

…. every­thing seems to be under con­trol again. The last weeks were both phys­i­cally and men­tally exhaust­ing and I can’t even say the result was worth it. I did fine, of course, but the guys in charge messed up big time and we lowly pro­gram­mers had to fix it. Any­way, what’s done is done. Today I decided that I will go on leave for a week or so but I don’t know when yet. It’ll be soon, per­haps the week after next.

In any event, I’ll be back more reg­u­larly. There are some things to catch up with like my movie review of 300. Stay tuned

Last Fri­day, I and my friend Dave went bowl­ing. It was fun but it soon turned into some­thing else. He com­pletely and utterly destroyed me. I was infin­i­tes­i­mally hand­i­capped but I don’t hold that against him. He sim­ply got the bet­ter of me and won most of the games that evening. Any­way, after­wards we dropped into a nice pub where we drank some some beer and talked about lotta things. I brought up a topic which is cur­rently very inter­est­ing to me – Future Shock. It’s a word that every­body should know.

It’s all about reach­ing the Sin­gu­lar­ity which is a pre­dicted future event where a nor­mal human being won’t be able to under­stand tech­no­log­i­cal progress with­out aux­il­iary means. Even now there’s a huge per­cent­age of humans unable to com­pre­hend exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. That leads us to the impor­tant ques­tion: should the Sin­gu­lar­ity be viewed as a pos­i­tive event or a dan­ger­ous one? Should we work to has­ten it’s arrival or try to pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing – if that’s even pos­si­ble? I for one like tech­no­log­i­cal progress and the idea of intel­li­gence ampli­fi­ca­tion. Tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments have much to offer for humanity.

The down­side is that – as it is the case with almost every­thing – it can be abused. Peo­ple can use it to wreak more havoc, to influ­ence and con­trol other peo­ple, or to spy on every aspect of our lives. Just imag­ine, you got some implants allow­ing you to see things before your vir­tual eye just by think­ing of them and you’re read­ing the lat­est tech news your spawned agents have gath­ered on the web when, all of a sud­den, a pretty nasty com­mer­cial sneaks through your fire­wall and keeps annoy­ing you until you can finally adjust your fil­ters and ban it from your vision. You may now think that’s pretty straight-forward, and I agree. That doesn’t mean it won’t hap­pen in the next 20 years. I’d surely make use of such a tech­nol­ogy if could get my hands on it.

Ulti­mately, it all comes down to band­width and that’s what peo­ple in First World coun­tries are in the process of being served. Over the last decade, the demand for high band­width con­nec­tions has grown rapidly and there’s no end in sight. Dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion is becom­ing ever more impor­tant in our daily lives and peo­ple like to access their stuff from every­where. As a heavy inter­net user I own a high speed con­nec­tion (cur­rently capped at 8 Mbit/s) which is more than suf­fi­cient for my needs but it still is very far from offer­ing instan­ta­neous results. I’d very much like to see a phe­nom­e­non called quan­tum entan­gle­ment being uti­lized for trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion. Right now, it may be uncon­ceiv­able but I’m con­vinced that I’m gonna see that far sooner than expected.

Ah, I’m just a dreamer but these dreams have a cer­tain appeal …

Did I men­tion that I don’t like doing over­time? It sucks and you just don’t get the right kinda money out of it. Sure, I can take some days off (well, I should start to think in weeks) but in the end, it really sucks. I just don’t wanna be the first to arrive in the office and the last to leave. See, I don’t have a prob­lem work­ing longer than I have to if I’ve got to fin­ish things. What I really hate, though, is the slowly trick­ling infor­ma­tion flow. I could stay home for a week and fin­ish all the piled work within a few days with­out even begin­ning to sweat. Result: I’m doing over­time for noth­ing because I spend most of my time with wait­ing, doing things I have to undo later on, and doing pri­vate stuff.

That’s not the worst, though. Guess what! Every time I’d like to cre­ate a new post here some­thing hap­pens. Mur­phy is absolutely right. So, you think I’ve writ­ten this short piece of text within a three-minute time frame? If so, you’re damn wrong. Actu­ally, I’ve tried for nearly six hours to get it done. I really love work (when there’s noth­ing to do, of course). Bah, I had some other things in mind when I began writ­ing but I’ll come up with them later. See ya.

Me and a work­ing col­league today dis­cov­ered that our points of view regard­ing some top­ics are quite oppo­si­tional. Dig­ging deeper I fig­ured that the dif­fer­ence is to be found at the very base of his beliefs. He actu­ally thinks the world can be viewed as “good vs. evil”. I told him that this is plain ridicu­lous but he didn’t budge. Any­way, that explains quite a lot I didn’t under­stand before.

This view of life cer­tainly has its mer­its, I grant him that. But it sucks if you crave for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of things like he says he does. Good forces ver­sus bad forces. Just think about it. It’s such an intrigu­ing con­cept, under­stand­able for every­one. It’s so sim­ple and effi­cient that “the play­ers” still employ it as a means of manip­u­la­tion. Isn’t it a pity that so many peo­ple fall for this “We’re the good guys” bull­shit? As a fact, nobody can be absolutely good or evil. We define what’s good and what’s evil, what we like and what we don’t. We cat­e­go­rize things and so it seems unlikely that evil guys can do good and vice versa.

We had quite an argu­ment about that until he finally gave in. As usual, some things can’t stand before the harsh facts. Strangely, I don’t feel good about that. Have I utterly destroyed his point of view? Isn’t it way eas­ier to believe in an illu­sion, if you know that things actu­ally are worse? I cer­tainly have the impres­sion that peo­ple don’t really want to know. That they don’t really look because they want to let them­selves get fooled. That’s some­thing to think about …

It’s well over a month since I last wrote some­thing. I’ve been quite busy and I spent some days off – in other words: I didn’t feel inclined to write some­thing. You know, just hav­ing a good time for myself, relax­ing in every pos­si­ble way was just too good to be true. I really enjoyed it and so I didn’t do much except read­ing books and watch­ing TV shows and movies respec­tively. I wish it could’ve gone on for­ever. Last Fri­day we went out cel­e­brat­ing one of my best friend’s birth­day and we got seri­ously drunk. Beware of these “all you can drink” offers. The cheaper they are the more you’ll wanna drink. How­ever, I didn’t end up with a hang­over, there­fore, I haven’t drunk too much. Presumably.

Any­ways, all that counts is that I’m back and ready to write about stuff that inter­ests me. I’ll come up with some­thing for today. In fact, I already have some­thing in mind. I just need some time to write it down. As of now, time’s pretty scarce. Sadly, I’ve taken on too much work in too lit­tle time. If there weren’t so much respon­si­bil­ity involved I’d gladly step down but then the idiots would be back again, rul­ing my work­ing life once again. That I couldn’t bear. Well, either work, work needs to be done and the faster the bet­ter. With this in mind, see you later on.