Rambling on Mistakes

I like being able to write about stuff. I feel a little embarrassed though. What if someone reads this stuff? What if no one does? Either option causes me some anxiety. I think a lot of personal interactions in the world today cause people, or at least me, to feel anxious. I worry about my appearance, or how I come across to people sometimes. I also worry about if I’m doing things right even if no one else will ever see it.

The problem that I think I have this way is that I want to be sooooooooo great. I do not want to ever make a mistake, especially one where I look dumb. But that is just silly. Everyone makes mistakes; it is a part of being alive. I believe that only one perfect man ever walked this world and he was deity. The rest of us will make mistakes along the way and our only hope is through that one perfect man. It would be super human of me to not make any mistakes. And I am not super human.

So, we all need to accept that we are not perfect. And that making a mistake is not the end of the world (that is called black and white thinking) and that there are things we can learn from each mistake and that making mistakes gives us a chance to worship God and that making mistakes helps us to realize that we are growing and that making mistakes shows us that we are human, just like the rest of the people around us.

Making mistakes is just a part of this life on earth. Learn a little something from each mistake and go on. After all that is the point.

Terminal Services vs. Symantec

Well, way back when I was right. I managed to get the new version of the Symantec system center installed but I had to remove the terminal services from my system first to do it. Then the installs went smoothly and I have re-installed the terminal services. I need to finish activating the license server for it again. I wonder if I made a mistake there. I deactivated the server in the Terminal Services Licensing console before I removed the service. I thought I could just choose the reactivate when I had reinstalled. But that option was unavailable to me. I was able to choose activate and then managed to go all through the installation to the point where I need a PIN number from the activation server. I’m waiting to see if that arrives, hopefully soon.

INNER VOICES

We all have an inner voice. A book I read suggested that we all have 2500 hours of “recorded voices” in our heads. Unfortunately, most of the “voices” seem to be of the type of negative reinforcements. These voices are, of course, not real voices but the automatic thoughts that we have in response to experiences in our lives. They may even be subconscious to a large extent. These thoughts can cause problems for us though especially when they are unremittingly negative and especially when they are not challenged and especially when they are not noticed.

After reading about these voices I sat and tried to think what are the types of automatic thoughts that I typically have? I discovered that I have a number of them.

1) I often worry about how I look. My automatic thoughts are “you look dumb” “can’t you fix your hair” “your clothes don’t match” “people are laughing at you”. I have sublimated these thoughts out of sight in my life to the point where I would say “I don’t care about my hair or if my clothes match. But secretly I did and the worry and the denial caused internal anxiety.

2) I am afraid of the way other people perceive me. My automatic thoughts are “people wouldn’t really like you unless you please them” “you are not good enough” “no one likes you”. I have suppressed these thoughts too and become a huge people pleaser. I spent tremendous amounts of energy to discover what people expected or wanted from me and then attempted to meet those needs and wants without any regard to what I wanted or what my needs were. As a result I neglected my needs and reinforced the automatic thoughts through behavior.

Then I had a very interesting experience. I was feeling the need for a break after thinking and writing about these things for a while so I thought I’d take a few minutes to watch the Olympic Games. I was watching and ad during a break in the programming and I suddenly realized that this ad was trying to reach one of my inner voices. I had a sudden thrill of realism that this is one of the most powerful ways that advertising works by getting me to act on an inner voice.

I started to listen for the inner voices during advertisements. I heard a number of times the messages “you are doing something wrong” and “you don’t look right”. These must be the advertising hooks that work best with me since they seemed to resonate with my inner voices.

Another way the book I read suggested to identify the inner voices was to notice when you became strongly defensive about something. Chances are, the book suggested, that you feel that way because the external event you are defensive about is resonating with an inner critical voice. It may not be possible to identify that voice in the moment but later reflection should reveal the voice. I’ve thought about some of the times when I was most defensive and I found my inner voices were “you are dumb” “you are doing it wrong” “you aren’t a good dad” “you can’t provide for your family”.


Scary stuff.

FEAR AND MORE FEAR

Ok so I'm a big coward. I have been doing plenty of self discovery in the last year and I just seem to keep learning things about myself. Some of the things that I have learned I haven't really liked very much.

One thing that I've just learned is how afraid I am of things. I have spent most of my life trying to insulate myself from people because of this fear. I've learned how to avoid talking about feelings, I've learned how to get other people to avoid talking about feelings and I got so good at it that I would have denied that I even had any feelings. This fear was so deep and fundamental that I instinctivly ran from any situation that would require feeling.

Oh, I got married, and I had friends and I can function normaly in society but I was running all the same.

I would often play the role of a nice guy or of a caring guy or what ever role I instinctivly thought would assist me to cope with these fears all the while denying I was doing anything wrong. But what I did do was basically create a shell me that did my interacting with other people while the real me felt lonely and sacred somewhere inside.

I'm not exactly sure what I can do about this right now. I am working on being a real genuine person but I notice that some interactions I have I feel fear. The fear I feel seems to be a fear of loss. I think I'm afraid of being pushed away or left alone or even un-considered. I guess observing that it's happening is the first step. I'm not sure what I can do about it, but I know I would like to do something.

FILTERS and EMOTIONS

What is crazy anyway?  How can anyone tell what another person is thinking.  A person can make a pretty fair estimate on what is rational using logic and real world tangible evaluations but how can you tell what is really happening in anothers head.  Sometimes I'm not sure what is happening inside my own head. 
 
If a person says that they desire one thing greatly and then they do things to prevent that one thing from happening it is not rational - from a certain point of view.
 
But is it crazy?  Well, there is no way for me to tell.  I feel caught in a situation similar to the one very briefly described above.  I wish that I could see the whole picture but I am limited in my ability to do so and so must work on a) What I know, and b) What I believe. 
 
This probably looks crazy to you.  Since my counter proves that no one is reading this I guess I could say anything I want to.  However, I feel I must respect the privacy of the people involved and I can't say much more in this forum. 

E-Motions

John Bradshaw wrote in one of his books about the emtions of Anger, Sadness, Fear, Guilt, Shame and Joy. These are fundamental to us all he wrote and went further to name them all as e-motions or rather energy-motions. He said that these e-motions are the driving forces for why we do things.

Anger - we feel when our basic human needs are not being met and it drives us to action.

Sadness - we feel when we have pain and drives the process of healing.

Fear - we feel when our basic needs are threatned and it drives us to action.

Guilt - we feel when our values are not congruent.

Shame - we feel as a reminder that we are only human.

Joy - we feel when our needs are met


My life is fairly complex right now and so I stopped for a moment to think about how I fell into those categories.

Joy - I haven't felt joy for quite some time. I feel that I have many needs that are not being met.

Shame - I have lots of problems with shame especially since when I feel anger I feel feelings of shame mixed with it. I learned as a small child not to be angry but of course I am since I am only human. This is something I'm trying to conciously recognize and accept.

Guilt - I feel mostly congruent with my values in my personal life. I do feel guilty that I don't sepnd as much time with my children as I would wish.

Fear - I have lots of fear especially over my family. I'm afraid of getting divorced (I am currently separated from my wife). Living alone and not seeing my kids every day scares me. Thinking that my youngest is small enough that he may never remember living with dad scares me.

Sadness - I feel sad sometimes, but mostly I put my sadness off telling myself that my fears have not been realized and that they may not be. I feel like sadness is on hold as it were.

Anger - I feel sometimes angry. I am angry sometimes about how I have behaved and the mistakes that I have made. I am angry sometimes about how I feel that others who should be willing or able to meet my needs either can not or will not.

TERMINAL SERVER

Bah! I have a Win 2K server running Symantec Corps 8.0 version of the Security Console and Quarantine Console and Symantec AV Server 8.0. After that I had to install terminal services in order to support some other needs of my work. Now I’ve got an upgrade to the Symantec software to their 9.0 version but attempting to install it gives the message that it won’t install on a terminal server. Bah!

Does anyone know how to get this installed anyway? First, I thought I’d try and stop the Terminal services and see if I could install the software. Next I could remove the terminal services programs, install what I need and then re-add terminal services. At least those are my first two ideas.

WEEKENDS

I’m an IT professional. I spend all day every day working on some type of computing thing. Lately, I’ve discovered that I like getting away from them on the weekends. I aggressively don’t use computers on the weekend unless I absolutely have to.

The point of this post is: no updates on the weekends.

PETITION FOLLOW UP

So I’m going to sign the petition I was talking about a few days ago. Like I said previously, I was inclined to do so anyway. After thinking about it I feel that I should attempt to be some sort of influence on my government to protect the things that I value.

The text of the proposed amendment.

*put on tin foil hat*
I'm not sure that the government will be responsive to what my values are regardless of this proposed amendment or not. I somtimes have the feeling that the members of the government, are so far removed from my daily concerns and beliefs that they are incapable of understanding them. It sometimes seems to me that the Federal government is abrogating to much power unto it self and I have to admit that it concerns me that as a society many of us feel that we need the government to step in and set the rules.
*remove tin foil hat*

BLOGGAGE 2

So does anyone ever read these things? Obviously I'm a new blog but I'm not alone. According to Technoraiti over 15,000 new blogs are created every day and on average there are three blongs updated every second. That is lots to read. Stiff competition. How do people find blogs anyway? I always found mine by links from other pages I was already reading. Any one have a good idea?

SPORK THE SPAM

I hate spam.

Big surprise huh? I’m responsible for the IT functions of my workplace and being a bit of a small shop that means I do most of the work too. For the last year my spam filtering was deleting about 27% of all our incoming mail as spam. For a number of reasons I wasn’t able to just use a public blacklist but I had to create a custom filter list to delete spam.

This was getting out of control, I was spending more than an hour each morning going through my mailbox and adding the offending messages that slipped through my filters to the new filter list. The amount of spam I was receiving was increasing daily and so were the number of complaints from others. I heard that the average worker complains to their IT department about spam at least once a year. I was getting way more than tat.

Finally, it became to much for me to tolerate and I added a heuristic filter to my spam engine. Can I just say wow! What kept me so long? Currently we are deleting more than 50% of all our incoming mail as spam. My personal inbox has dropped from averaging around 200 messages each morning to around 40. A much higher percentage of my time is spent being useful and I spend less time cursing the spammers

But they should be cursed I don’t believe that they have a right to consume my time and computational resources to the degree that they are. I don’t see any really good technical solutions to this problem yet in spite of the options being discussed by the big boys (Yahoo, Microsoft, etc). Jerry Pournell has recommended public floggings for spammers. I assume as tongue in cheek but I think he makes a point that the risk to spammers is negligible.

I think there needs to be some increased risk to spammers. They don’t pay for the delivery or storage costs. Their only real cost is the creation of the copy (which must not cost most of them much judging by the spelling and grammar) and the initial bandwidth to send the messages (which I understand is small since they often use compromised hosts to do the mailings for them).

So maybe we should use public floggings as a disincentive to send spam. Or would traditional methods of legal enforcement work like fines, jail times and impounded equipment? It’s clear that something needs to be changed. What are your ideas?


LATER: A UN Proposal in the news.

SIGN THE PETITION?

Sometimes I get petitions forwarded to me in order to support one thing or another. Sometimes they even ring my doorbell or accost me at the entrance of the supermarket.

Most of the time I refuse to sign these. I admit I’m not often familiar with both sides of the issue in question and something that motivates someone to go around collecting signatures probably means that this person has a vested interest in the outcome. Maybe it’s religious or financial or political. And I have always wondered what don’t I understand about this issue? I suppose that shows my laziness in not being more aware of the political landscape around me. I read the local paper and am generally aware of the broad issues but often don’t take the time to learn the finer details.

Currently, I’ve been sent a link to sign a petition to support The Federal Marriage Amendment. I am a Christian and I believe that at its heart marriage is a religious institution that has been supported by civil and public institutions. I have a faith based belief that unless marriage takes place between a man and a woman it is not a marriage in the eyes of God. Regardless of what man may say to the contrary. So from the basis of my faith I am inclined to add my name to this petition.

Information on this issue is difficult to find. Or rather, calm analysis of this issue is difficult to find. All of the web pages I googled up on this so far have been full of flashy graphics and links and bolded words and rhetoric. I’d much prefer to locate a scholarly analysis of the issue. The opponents state that this is nothing more than legalized discrimination. The supporters state that this is simply an effort to protect the values that maintain healthy families.

The senate is scheduled to vote on this issue in mid-July. News reports show that America is divided on the issue, although, it also appears to have a fairly large grassroots support. I believe I will take a few days to think about the wisdom of a constitutional amendment. Delay is my friend in this since it will give me time to think about it and to learn more.

BLOGGAGE?

I’ve read a number of blogs over the years; I suppose they have their roots in the old .plan and .finger files. I’ve read them too. I have considered writing my own but have often held back. I’ve seen many blogs that go no where. And I have a fear of being misunderstood and also a fear of being inconsequential and finally a fear of being thought dumb and even more finally a fear of confrontations. Writing my own blog would force me to face all of those fears. Maybe no one will read my words, maybe those that do will not understand what I am saying, maybe what I have to say is worthless or silly and finally maybe what I say will cause people to *gasp* argue with me.

I would like an outlet.

The hardest part so far has been trying to think of a name. I always hated that part of playing a new character in a game too. The Tungsten Table has a nice alliteration going for it. I also think the Tungsten Bathtub is a good name, it’s a bit more casual which fits me. I may start with one and change it later if I choose to. Do you have an idea you would like to share? Let me know what it is.