GroupThought

The protesters should be throwing the oil at themselves

It’s more than a little hypocritical to hate BP for the recent disastrous oil spill. The oil giant is only a giant because of a global addiction to oil. Blaming BP is like an alcoholic blaming Molson for selling beer. The only reason companies go to such extremes to drill for oil – deepwater drilling and oil sand dredging for example – is because we cannot kick our dirty, dirty oil habit. When companies are driven by insatiable demand to find oil no matter what the cost, they begin to use extreme, untested and unproven methods. These methods pose a far greater risk, as BP recently demonstrated. But, we can’t blame BP for trying to meet a demand that, if they didn’t, would simply have been met by another company. Our dependence on oil is so unchangeable that if it gets prohibitively expensive – we simply nationalize the industry.

Perhaps BP didn’t take all the safety precautions necessary. But when demand for oil is over 86 million barrels a day, BP did what it could to get the product to the consumers. I think BP’s financial response has been impressive and their aid to clean-up and economic restoration is more generous than can be expected.

Maybe this will help us realize that we need to kick our oil habit and change our lifestyles, but for that realization to happen, we need to start internalizing some of the results of our out-of-control oil consumption. It’s easy to say that the gulf oil-spill is BP’s fault, it’s difficult to realize that my oil consumption forced BP to drill deep-water wells in the first place.

A representation of my mood perhaps?
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That’s it for school for a little while. Graduation isn’t officially until May 19th, but from my perspective I’m done. My last paper and exam are written and submitted. I’m done.

I’m moving on from the half-student, half-professional purgatory I had been operating in since February. That dual commitment was limiting in every conceivable way and something I will not soon repeat. To be fair, however, it was a great opportunity to test the limits of my capacity for work and stress and those limits were most certainly stretched. But, I’m done.

Today was my first full day of work; today was the first time that I wasn’t thinking about the 5 assignments due while at work and the 5 projects I am heading which are behind deadline while doing those 5 assignments. It was a nice break and a fantastic opportunity to cross some serious items off my list. It’s nice to be done.

In celebration of my new-found time I will be making my first addition to a plan which has been in the works for months. Before the craziness of my purgatory began, I instituted a template for this plan at www.photo.groupthought.ca. A friend and I are embarking on a photo taking adventure involving themes and the desire to improve on a hobby we have both come to love (in my case due largely to said friend). Each week, a theme will be announced on GroupThought or RandomProcess; a photograph will follow, somehow representing the theme. In case you missed it on the redesigned RandomProcess, this week’s theme is “Spring”. Being the keener that he is, a very “Spring-y” photo is already up on RP. GT is a little further behind, but a spring photo should appear here in the very near future, at least by Saturday. Mostly I’m waiting for some decent weather, the gloomy cold doesn’t help with motivation.

To further encourage my maintenance of the above plan and to integrate a little with my partner, GT will be switching its template over to the template currently in use at photo.groupthought.ca. The GT blog will be moving to a new domain which will be announced in the near future. While text posts may not be as often as photos, they will occur regularly.

In other news, I got a MacBook Pro for work a couple days ago. For most of my computer literate life I disliked apple products because of their nauseating fanbase, ridiculous prices and uncompromising dedication to aesthetic (read: lack of function). Of course, all of this dislike was backed-up with very little proof. Now, however, I feel that I can truly say that I dislike Macs. I have one, it’s very pretty, it was very expensive and after 2 days, I installed windows 7 on it.

You see, it’s not the hardware that’s the problem. Aluminum case, glass track pad and screen, backlit keyboard? Yes, please. Two USB ports? Hrmmm….
The external stuff is fantastic, it simply feels and looks fantastic. My gateway may have for the first two days, but then bits of plastic started falling off. The internal stuff, on the other hand, isn’t exceptional…it’s intel, so it’s pretty much the same as any Dell, Gateway, Toshiba or any other brand.

It’s the unix-based mac os x that is really supposed to set it apart. And it certainly does that.
One of the first things I do when I sit down with a new machine is to customize it; makes sense right? Well, not for a mac apparently. The sense that I get is not so much that the computer customizes to fit individual consumers as that individual consumers customize themselves to be more mac-like in thought and deed. One of the first things I do is get rid of things that I find annoying. For example, I hate when closing a laptop lid puts the computer to sleep. I like being able to keep the lid closed while listening to music to avoid unnecessary scratches/dust on the screen and the distraction of the HIGHLY reflective screen. Well, I guess my mind has not been moulded enough to know that macs just simply don’t do that. They go to sleep when you close the lid and that’s it. PERIOD. Being the persistent (read: hard-headed) guy that I am, I refused to accept this non-option. So, I did some searching and found a reputable third-party application which would allow me to close the lid: InsomniaX. Installation and four reboots later I got the program to stop crashing the computer and put it safely in the trash. Ironically, apple claims that the need for third-party apps is eliminated in macs because of all the wonderfully compatible apple software. I have never had to download a third-party app so fast after initial setup – and that includes windows and linux operating systems.

I could go on for ages about how using an external monitor requires you to start the computer and slam the lid closed really fast. Once booted on the internal lcd, there is no way to get a single display at max resolution on the external without reboot. Awesome. Or I could talk about how I can’t choose how to set up my system’s file system, I just have to accept the folders apple tells me to accept. Thanks Apple! Or, I could talk about how annoying the bouncing applications in the dock get after a 12 hour work day, or I could talk about my inability to import my outlook messages, or I could talk about general incompatibility between pages and ANY OTHER OFFICE SUITE IN THE WORLD, or I could just install windows, use OS X for iMovie, Aperture/Lightroom 3 (when available) and sound editing and move on with my life.

Maybe for semi-retarded cello geniuses like YoYo Ma, who are beguiled by stationary buttons on all electronic devices, Macs are great – they just tell mindless drones what to do and when to cheer.

But, I like to forge my own path and do what I like to do with MY COMPUTER. So, a few more grey hairs later (and I have a shocking number for my age) and I’m back within my infinitely customizable and equally beautiful (in it’s own way) world of windows 7. Plus it’s packaged in the aluminum/glass case of the macbook pro – I couldn’t ask for more.

*Note: While I was writing this in OS X, it shut down my browser three times for no apparent reason. Thank god for WordPress autosave and my ability to prevent myself from throwing the computer out my office window at 5 stories. I am now writing this in Windows 7.

It all comes to an end soon and then, blissful peace.

I’m not dying, but I’m close. Just finishing school. One 60% paper (yes they exist) and a 30% exam (meh) and I can run away from this hallowed place of learning a happy and well-educated man. Except that I have to be back for 8am the next day for work…

I found a place to live next year! An apartment, not a cardboard box!

After I finish my exam at 10pm this Saturday (yes, weekend evening exams exist too) I will post regularly again. I swear. Really. And I’ll take photographs. Seriously. I promise. I’m actually excited to do both of those things more often. Weird as I may be I enjoy both of them.
So, I will see you again on Sunday the 18th of April for a much more serious update.