Yet more proof that all that time I spent improving my mind while not really paying all that much intention to my body was a total waste.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Anyway, he was sorta just half wrong. It is Columbia, and you have to admit that D and B both look and sound kinda similar...

But I wouldn't hire him to make my travel arrangements. I like to know when I need my passport.

I'm just cutting him a little slack for confusion. A lot of people don't know what the DC stands for, and sometimes concepts get sorta wired together wrong.

I spent many years (granted, pre-college) wondering why the English referred to two separate historical figures, both with the same name, without specifying which one they were talking about.

Because I for some reason never realized Churchill and Cromwell were different until I finally saw them in the same sentence. No idea why.

I think everyone prefers smart to stupid in a relationship. At least, everyone worthwhile. The problem is that almost all relationships start with appearance.

Which reminds me - I need to order some new shoes...

Umm, yeah. I'll just take the "Hooligan" for "run as fast as you can", Alex.

I also worry about people that brag about four years of college. It's just not an accomplishment I find that brag-worthy. Not that I expect everyone to have done it, but for those of us who have, it ain't exactly Mount Everest.

Anyway, my apologies. I'm just kinda bitter without, honestly, having reason to be. Like many people, I don't do a damn thing about my situation except bitch. Which isn't particularly attractive, either.

And we all get burned...

The Hamptons are "dark" again this evening, because they're still recovering from the New Year's Eve party. As soon as I get an eVite for the next one, I'll make sure to check you have too. The only reason you wouldn't be on the list is that Alex forgot to add you.

I have a 60GB IDE, and/or a 30GB IDE attached to a Dell C600 laptop I can give you on temporary loan, to help transition.

I was about to say that it looked like the disk was fine, I think it's a connector problem - when TrueImage complained about the disk.

Which should make the backup, now in progress, um, interesting. It appears the thing occasionally doesn't respond. So I may just need a new drive, which is easy enough.

Doesn't explain why it no longer recognizes the DVD drive - which happened a while ago.

Aaand the backup just failed. I'm gonna let it cool down a while before trying again - that seemed to have an effect earlier...

What is this 'should' word?
Would is more palatable, especially if it respects the boundaries of will of all parties.

But I think the more general problem may be not just in the usage of the English language, but in the imprecision with which all humans operate in emotional circumstances that call for understanding the distinctions between these:
want, wish, dream, will, shall, would, should, can

[And, of course, lj now indicates to me that in order to communicate this I am obligated, I should, "Submit" :-/
Okay lj, I bow to your will. ]

The question in this case is not so much that of the respective boundaries of will, but that of likely consequences.

But I submit
[obligatory Princess Bride reference:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ]
that for fully operational wills (plural noun) an evaluation of the consequences is part of the Boolean calculation leading to the state of "will "(auxiliary verb) or "will not".
"Should" (auxiliary verb) invokes the notion of a third party in the negotiation, which may be true, but if so the contractual terms of interaction with that third party are best when explicitly included in the calculation of "will".

So, if I understand correctly, the phrase isn't "There are things I feel I shouldn't do," but "There are things I feel I wouldn't do."

Which, offhand, is not the way I think things should be stated.

But in English to say "would" is to open the door of ambiguity (already likely open due to the subject matter) even wider.
Is that past tense, or habitual, or conditional, or subjunctive?

Would is one of those words whose effect resembles GOTO in a programming language, for understanding the state of things upon reaching the label which is the target of the GOTO requires complete understanding of the rest of the code.

Tapioca, spaghetti, what's the difference?

Well, in this case, I'd say the difference is that you're arguing "should" out of existence. Which is sad, because the two are actually quite different animals.

"Should" speaks of paths to be taken for an optimal future.

"Would" merely speaks of personal tendencies.

I'm not gonna adopt a Yoda userpic, but yes, and I'm not sad.

Will, or will not. There is no should.

I. Hate. That. Quote.

It is so amazingly asinine.

Try or try not. There is no "just do."

True for the external universe, but I was under the impression that this was a discussion about expressing the state of your internal universe to another.

If not you, then who is in charge of your internal universe?

In the case of this sort of contract negotiation the action depends on the Boolean AND of two wills.
If will is mutual, then action follows.
If will is not mutual, then no action follows.
In either case further discussion is usually a good idea.

And like Captain Kirk, the state of "will" is not required to be immutable, but by making it clear what the "will" is "today", the emotional pressure is relieved and interaction can continue with a smile instead of a grimmace.

My internal universe is in control of itself, thank you very much.

"I" am a result of "it," and not the other way around. I exert a fair degree of control, and can dampen or increase emotional responses as their occur, but that's about it.

The things that drive us are emotions, both etymologically and in fact. And those don't arise at the conscious level.

I can't even begin to count the number of times I've attempted to work on a task without success.

First of all, I'm not against the use of "should" in all circumstances, and the IANA is holding documents that I've authored, including an RFC, which make liberal use of SHOULD in the RFC 2119 sense. It's that the circumstance under discussion is not one for "should".

Look in /etc/services and think of the late 1980s with BSD Unix or, more recently, the out-of-the-box state of Win2K. Those machines have lots and lots of ports open running lots of services. Few of those services are actually necessary, and nobody can tell whether they should be running. The question for the sysadmin, or firewall admin is will they run, or will they not run.

But humans, at least fully functional ones, have certain services running all the time, so the metaphor gets pushed back a level -- say to the configuration of apache httpd. Any given instance of apache has configurations which set the policy for various hosts and domains, and furthermore, there is an option to run in default allow or default deny. So given that httpd is running, the web admin has a choice of whether to allow or deny contacts in general, and with particular hosts.

And once there is a daemon running and the firewall/server policy allow contacts from a particular host, then it becomes relevant to have read the RFCs for that protocol and consider the SHOULD stuff.

Even there the policy is best when the protocol is implemented very clearly with yes or no, for otherwise the negotiation can become some sort of game where the correspondents attempt SQL injection and shell escapes to see if the other has adequate input sanitization.

And whereas that makes for a very funny cartoon, it doesn't seem to me to be an element of a good relationship.

If not you, then who is in charge of your internal universe?

That sounds like something straight out of Morgan.

Yet, oddly, it took a great deal of effort...

And I think that a slight variation on Captain Kirk's lines in A Taste of Armageddon works well here.

All, right - it's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings [...] We can admit we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that you're not going to kill... today.

Ha, and the metaphor is all the more appropriate given that your computer has just been destroyed.

I'm going to shut up now.

So far the latest backup of the disk is working - about 2/3 of the data has transferred...

Eh. It's not so much a matter of leagues, as a matter of being willing to quibble over semantic details.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to his latest comment...

And: Woo!

Check out the update sheet. ;-)