Anyone who IRCs regularly know of a few distinct personalities that irritate to the core. It's almost as if there is a nest somewhere making sure that the supply of lost AOLers, obnoxious 13 year olds and elitist know nothings don't run out, no matter how many you try to kick/ban off the planet.
The Elitist Know Nothing: This guy talks about everything with complete authority and refuses to budge on any topic as if he were the one who invented it. In all actuality, The Elitist Know Nothing, picked up most everything he knows from biased trade journals written by other Elitist Know Nothings. He has never really ever applied any of his knowledge to see if it's actually true or not. He just assumes that it is, and makes sure that you know your 20 years of programming experience mean nothing in the face of his all knowing intellect.
The Lost AOLer: This guy somehow managed to find IRC. He doesn't know exactly where he is. He is constantly confused as to why the ##linux (must be some kind of kinky sex act) members don't want to cyber with him.
THE 10-15 YEAR OLD: THESE GUYS ARE A MIX BETWEEN THE LOST AOLER AND THE ELITIST KNOW NOTHING. THEY HAVE FIGURED OUT THAT THEIR COMPUTER IS PRETTY SPIFFY AND THAT QBASIC CAN MAKE IT DO SOME KEWL STUFF. THEY THINK CAPS LOOK KEWLER THAN LOWERCASE AND YOU CAN ONLY HOPE AND PRAY THAT SOMEONE DOESN'T TEACH THEM L337. THE BRIGHT SIDE IS THAT THE 10-15 YEAR OLD WILL MAGICALLY LOG ON ONE DAY A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON.
The Scary Asian/Arab: This kid barges in the channel and asks questions in mildly coherent English that most likely threaten every bit of security you have. For example: say you run a shell server, the Scary Asian will come asking for an account.. for stuff and ssh. When you ask what kind of stuff he will give some vague answer. You figure he's harmless because he kinda sounds like the 10-15 year old. Two weeks later all your bandwidth disappears and you find most of it going through a ssh tunnel he set up. The FBI knocks on your door to inquire about some files going through your server.
The I Can't Read The Topic Guy: This guy will wander into the channel and paste 30 lines of code right off. Of course the code is C and the channel is #perl, but that doesn't stop him. He then goes on to ask a question about the code while four other channel members try to explain various things to him such as "this is #perl" or "there's a pastebin for a reason." The I Can't read The Topic Guy will then make some sort of apology and go spam all 30 lines of code in #C.
The Enter Key Abuser: This Guy
Does not understand
that
pressing enter after every
1-5 words
is irritating
and that people would listen
to him more
if he stopped that
Mr. Offtopic: This guy never talks about anything on topic. He'll tell you about the state of his room, the color of his socks, or about how awesome the hot pockets him mom brought him are. Never mind the fact that this is the #cryptography channel and you are trying to explain something to someone. Mr. Offtopic does not actually need any interaction from other users. He will continue rambling on regardless.
The Evil Wizard: This is the guy that's been programming for 30 years and has achieved wizardry. His sole purpose in life is to hang out in the help channels and inform anyone who asks a question how dumb they are. He refuses to part with any useful knowledge and instead tells people to google it or links to the most cryptic documentation he knows of. Delights in making newbies give up on whatever they were trying to do.
The 50/50 Guy: This guy actually knows his stuff.. Half of the time. The other half he cycles between all the annoying IRC personalties. He'll be talking coherently about a C program he wrote one minute and then suddenly go into a string of expletives and tell you about his toenails.
The Observationalist: This guy thinks he is better than everybody on IRC because he is able to lump the vast majority of users into groups. He most likely posts his 'findings' on a popular blog website that has nothing to do with IRC. While he believes his research is good for a few laughs, the truth is he submits his blog to the Digg community, and hopes that a few of the users are at least aware of IRC so that he may derive a few chuckles.
The Expert In the Mist: This guy knows almost everything about the discussion topic. He can program in 30 different languages and can build just about any electronic device from scratch. He has the answer to ALL of your questions. The only problem is he only stops idling for about 10 minutes, 12:00 at night on the first full moon of the year if the ambient temperature in France is equal to the the average temperature of the arctic icecaps multiplied by negative pi.
Mr. Quits: This guy quits randomly, often in the middle of a conversation, with no warning at all. Mr. Quits will be 3 lines away from fully explaining how to fix that obscure problem with your system when he suddenly quits. Mr. Quits never means to leave you hanging but he does it with such frequency that one can only assume he has a subconscious need to frustrate and shatter hopes.
The Drunkard: This si thast guy who stll massags oi got oblime nd talk abt.... stuff... even after he's brought himself 2 drinks away from alcohol poisoning. He normally starts off by listing in detail exactly what beverages were consumed in order for him to bless you with his current state. Then he slowly becomes less and less coherent until he gives a semi-coherent away message and passes out.
The Unknown Idler: This guy has been idling since the channel was started. Upon checking the logs you find that he said "hi" about two years back. May be dead.
The Playlist: I've often wanted to know exactly what song the other channel members are listening to. Thankfully, The Playlist is there to help me out. Shamelessly informing everyone in approximately 3 minute intervals the poorly formatted title, artist and play time information of their blatantly pirated mp3s. To make matters worse, The Playlist normally has horrendously bad taste in music.
The Morally Terrifying: This guy has no discernible morals. The morally terrifying is the only one who thinks a discussion about gun-point rape and the like is a fun channel topic. Freud would have a heyday with this man. We can just hope his mother knows better than to hug him for too long at a time.
Lucifer the Op: Just try to wander off topic or be slightly abrasive and Lucifer will kick/ban for the next 3 months. Lucifer tends to select a few close friends who make sure that he doesn't miss an opportunity to ban someone.
The Uninformed: This guy will join in on the discussion and talk about the topic. Can get very repetitive and infuriating. Whether it be about religion or cars he will contribute something... normally obvious or blatantly wrong. Will make sure you completely understand that smaller tires give you better gas mileage.
The Internet Aggregator: This guy never says anything of his own (other than the occasional lol or yea) but constantly sends links of funny/interesting finds on the internet. A internet aggregator is most terrifying when paired with digg and bash.
The Bot: The Bot is a hideous twisted peice of code that sits in the channel and spams useless information. Normally some withered malicious soul controls the silly thing, making sure that it has all the features nobody wants, such as the google compare feature or the all popular insult generator. The Bot's owner will normally start using his bot during the most interesting discussion of the day, there by ending it. The Bot is often modeled after other annoying IRC personalities, so that the channel will always have an Internet Aggregator and Lucifer the Op.
(unashamedly stolen from Coatzee)
2007-08-13
2007-08-12
Touch Me, Feel Me, Heal Me
[shamelessly lifted from an article in The Guardian, July 2007]
We have virtual friends, choose to live alone and are becoming less tactile with others. But touch is fundamental to our health, writes Laura Barton.
"Everybody needs touch, especially the elderly," says Beata Aleksandrowicz. "Very often they are alone, their partners have gone or have died or they're sick, and nobody is touching them." In a calmly lit treatment room in west London, Aleksandrowicz, a massage therapist, is speaking about a project she launched in June which saw therapists across the country give free hand massages to elderly people in nursing homes.
The response was heartening. "I had reactions such as, 'Oh, I had no idea that I need touch so much' or, 'Oh, it's like I'm in fairyland!'" But Aleksandrowicz found getting the project off the ground difficult - partly because of its name: Touch Me ... Please. The word "touch", she explains, has such negative connotations that some care homes were reluctant to become involved.
Bertrand Russell once wrote: "Not only our geometry and our physics, but our whole conception of what exists outside us is based upon the sense of touch." But our experience of touch is dwindling. Increasingly we live alone, have virtual friends, shy away from any kind of physical contact with strangers for fear it might be unhygienic, or inappropriate, or could become violent.
The effects of not touching can prove detrimental to our wellbeing, both as individuals and as a society. "When you touch or are touched, you get the feeling of being connected with yourself and with others," says Aleksandrowicz, placing one hand on my arm. "When I touch you, you feel my touch - so by my touch you feel that you exist, and you can connect with me. It is a feeling of being important, of being taken care of."
A 1997 study into the amount of touching and aggression among adolescents looked at the behaviour of 40 teenagers in McDonald's outlets in Paris and Miami. It found that American adolescents spent considerably less time stroking, kissing, hugging and leaning against their peers than their French counterparts did.
Interestingly, the Americans showed more self-touching - such as playing with rings on their fingers, wringing their hands, twirling hair, wrapping arms around themselves, cracking knuckles, biting their lips - and also behaviour that was more aggressive, verbally and physically, towards their peers.
These findings are worrying - particularly because research suggests that an absence of touching and physical interaction during adolescence may result in violent behaviour in later life. Touch deprivation appears to lead to a depletion in norepinephrine and serotonin, which, along with dopamine, are neurotransmitters affecting mood. When levels of norepinephrine and serotonin fall, levels of dopamine are left uninhibited - leading to the impulsive, often aggressive, behaviour associated with high levels of dopamine. (Research also suggests that levels of norepinephrine and serotonin may be increased through touch.)
And yet, even though we're isolating ourselves from it, humans crave physical touch. It is one of the reasons people keep pets, Aleksandrowicz believes: "Because they can touch them, they can exchange warmth with them." And we look for touch, too, Aleksandrowicz suspects, in casual sexual encounters. Not that we should. "Casual sex is not about touch, it's about sex, and sex is not necessarily touch," she says. "So you wake up in the morning with the feeling that it was a total mistake, and you still need to be held and embraced."
In many ways it was her own yearning for touch that brought Aleksandrowicz to massage. "I had some problems with my second husband," she says. "We had a lot of problems with intimacy, we couldn't open up for each other, and our friend just gave us the advice to try to touch each other a lot and just see how it goes. And I was amazed how closed I was to touch. I could not receive touch - it made me panic."
Now she offers courses for couples (as well as encouraging parents to massage their children, so they grow up to find touch usual). "You suddenly see these men who open up so much," she says.
Aleksandrowicz was born in Poland. She is wary of making generalisations about a nation, but in Britain, she says, "There is not a culture where touch is natural. We don't feel very confident in the presence of others, therefore touch is not natural, it's not organic, and the word 'touch' is so misused."
However, the situation is improving. Five years ago, when searching for premises for her company, Pure Massage, estate agents told Aleksandrowicz she would have to change the business's name. "We were looking for a property for two years!" Now massage has been solidly reclaimed as a reputable business.
But it is not just the UK where negative or uncomfortable attitudes have prevailed. Aleksandrowicz recently returned from a trip to meet bushmen in the Kalahari. She expected them to have a much freer approach to physical interaction - and was shocked to find that was not the case. "I was in the middle of Namibia, 40 degrees, sitting on the sand, with people who I've never seen before, whose culture is 40,000 years old, and they were all asking about touch," Aleksandrowicz says.
She massaged everyone in the village, sometimes several times over. The first to be massaged was the oldest woman in the village. "Suddenly there was silence, this whole village stopped what they were doing - they stopped talking and started to sing," says Aleksandrowicz. She believes that the political situation of the bushmen - landless, powerless, severed from their traditions and history - has led to this intense feeling of disconnection. "It was very interesting. All of them asked me to touch their chests - the most emotional part of the body, and also responsible for the ego. They don't know who they are - they're lost."
Some would say that people in the west are also losing sight of who they are. We shy from touching each other, but are obsessed with appearance. We would rather, for example, go under the surgeon's knife than accept our own bodies. "We are living in a materialistic time," says Aleksandrowicz, "where if you don't see, you don't have. So we have cars, we have high salaries, we have the right shape of our bottom ... But we stop believing that we have enormous potential inside us."
And what does Aleksandrowicz get from a career that involves touching people all day long? "It's amazing," she says sweetly. "It is a communication on the most basic fundamental level, where there are no words or judgment or ego. It's just the purest possible interaction between two people".
For more information on Aleksandrowicz's work, visit puremassage.com and touch-me-please.org
We have virtual friends, choose to live alone and are becoming less tactile with others. But touch is fundamental to our health, writes Laura Barton.
"Everybody needs touch, especially the elderly," says Beata Aleksandrowicz. "Very often they are alone, their partners have gone or have died or they're sick, and nobody is touching them." In a calmly lit treatment room in west London, Aleksandrowicz, a massage therapist, is speaking about a project she launched in June which saw therapists across the country give free hand massages to elderly people in nursing homes.
The response was heartening. "I had reactions such as, 'Oh, I had no idea that I need touch so much' or, 'Oh, it's like I'm in fairyland!'" But Aleksandrowicz found getting the project off the ground difficult - partly because of its name: Touch Me ... Please. The word "touch", she explains, has such negative connotations that some care homes were reluctant to become involved.
Bertrand Russell once wrote: "Not only our geometry and our physics, but our whole conception of what exists outside us is based upon the sense of touch." But our experience of touch is dwindling. Increasingly we live alone, have virtual friends, shy away from any kind of physical contact with strangers for fear it might be unhygienic, or inappropriate, or could become violent.
The effects of not touching can prove detrimental to our wellbeing, both as individuals and as a society. "When you touch or are touched, you get the feeling of being connected with yourself and with others," says Aleksandrowicz, placing one hand on my arm. "When I touch you, you feel my touch - so by my touch you feel that you exist, and you can connect with me. It is a feeling of being important, of being taken care of."
A 1997 study into the amount of touching and aggression among adolescents looked at the behaviour of 40 teenagers in McDonald's outlets in Paris and Miami. It found that American adolescents spent considerably less time stroking, kissing, hugging and leaning against their peers than their French counterparts did.
Interestingly, the Americans showed more self-touching - such as playing with rings on their fingers, wringing their hands, twirling hair, wrapping arms around themselves, cracking knuckles, biting their lips - and also behaviour that was more aggressive, verbally and physically, towards their peers.
These findings are worrying - particularly because research suggests that an absence of touching and physical interaction during adolescence may result in violent behaviour in later life. Touch deprivation appears to lead to a depletion in norepinephrine and serotonin, which, along with dopamine, are neurotransmitters affecting mood. When levels of norepinephrine and serotonin fall, levels of dopamine are left uninhibited - leading to the impulsive, often aggressive, behaviour associated with high levels of dopamine. (Research also suggests that levels of norepinephrine and serotonin may be increased through touch.)
And yet, even though we're isolating ourselves from it, humans crave physical touch. It is one of the reasons people keep pets, Aleksandrowicz believes: "Because they can touch them, they can exchange warmth with them." And we look for touch, too, Aleksandrowicz suspects, in casual sexual encounters. Not that we should. "Casual sex is not about touch, it's about sex, and sex is not necessarily touch," she says. "So you wake up in the morning with the feeling that it was a total mistake, and you still need to be held and embraced."
In many ways it was her own yearning for touch that brought Aleksandrowicz to massage. "I had some problems with my second husband," she says. "We had a lot of problems with intimacy, we couldn't open up for each other, and our friend just gave us the advice to try to touch each other a lot and just see how it goes. And I was amazed how closed I was to touch. I could not receive touch - it made me panic."
Now she offers courses for couples (as well as encouraging parents to massage their children, so they grow up to find touch usual). "You suddenly see these men who open up so much," she says.
Aleksandrowicz was born in Poland. She is wary of making generalisations about a nation, but in Britain, she says, "There is not a culture where touch is natural. We don't feel very confident in the presence of others, therefore touch is not natural, it's not organic, and the word 'touch' is so misused."
However, the situation is improving. Five years ago, when searching for premises for her company, Pure Massage, estate agents told Aleksandrowicz she would have to change the business's name. "We were looking for a property for two years!" Now massage has been solidly reclaimed as a reputable business.
But it is not just the UK where negative or uncomfortable attitudes have prevailed. Aleksandrowicz recently returned from a trip to meet bushmen in the Kalahari. She expected them to have a much freer approach to physical interaction - and was shocked to find that was not the case. "I was in the middle of Namibia, 40 degrees, sitting on the sand, with people who I've never seen before, whose culture is 40,000 years old, and they were all asking about touch," Aleksandrowicz says.
She massaged everyone in the village, sometimes several times over. The first to be massaged was the oldest woman in the village. "Suddenly there was silence, this whole village stopped what they were doing - they stopped talking and started to sing," says Aleksandrowicz. She believes that the political situation of the bushmen - landless, powerless, severed from their traditions and history - has led to this intense feeling of disconnection. "It was very interesting. All of them asked me to touch their chests - the most emotional part of the body, and also responsible for the ego. They don't know who they are - they're lost."
Some would say that people in the west are also losing sight of who they are. We shy from touching each other, but are obsessed with appearance. We would rather, for example, go under the surgeon's knife than accept our own bodies. "We are living in a materialistic time," says Aleksandrowicz, "where if you don't see, you don't have. So we have cars, we have high salaries, we have the right shape of our bottom ... But we stop believing that we have enormous potential inside us."
And what does Aleksandrowicz get from a career that involves touching people all day long? "It's amazing," she says sweetly. "It is a communication on the most basic fundamental level, where there are no words or judgment or ego. It's just the purest possible interaction between two people".
For more information on Aleksandrowicz's work, visit puremassage.com and touch-me-please.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)