Epimetheus

Processes.

If I were to run top on myself the output would look like this:

For as long as I can remember, Saboteur™ and compare have been thwarting me at almost every task. Saboteur™ and compare made their first appearance at around age 5 or 6. It was on the way from my house to my Grandparent’s house. My uncles were naming all the cars that went by, so I tried to memorize the make and model of a few cars. Saboteur™ launched and spawned compare. Compare said, “Hey, they are older and cooler than you. You will never be able to remember ALL THOSE CAR NAMES.” I fell for it, “Yeah, you are probably right. I won’t even try.”

Saboteur’s first major victory. Bastard.

Thirty something years later, and he, Saboteur™, is still riding roughshod over me. Well, at least he was two months ago. Saboteur reared his ugly head one time too often. (Got cocky.) So, I decided that Saboteur™ had to go. The question was, how?

The Plan. Phase I: Identify Saboteur™ and His Cronies.

Questions had to be answered:

• How does one go about identifying a certain set of thoughts that have been become second nature?
• There are so many of them. How am I going to keep track?
• What am I going to do once I have identified these rogues?

Saboteur™ took one look at what I had in mind for him - Yes, you bitch, you realized your days were numbered, didn’t you! - and immediately launched everything at his disposal. This was a mistake, as it exposed THE VOICE™.

THE VOICE™

See, to get the job done, Saboteur™ needed an interface that would allow him to influence my behavior. The simplest way was via questions and simple statements presented by a voice. A voice that sounded as if it originated from ME. Sneaky, yes? Once or twice, Saboteur™ tried to make my body sick to avoid a task, but my parents weren’t having it. Saboteur™ gave up and stuck with THE VOICE™.

So, there I was under attack from Saboteur™.

“You can’t do it.”

“What will you do without me?”

“No one can do that.”

“What, you think you can do things? Ha.”

I shouted, “SHUT UP. SHUT UP. SHUT UP.” Silence. During the silence, I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, ran the tape back, and then wrote down and assigned a name for each voice and associated phrase. Once I was done with that, I launched my own program: TheFilter™.

The Plan. Phase II: TheFilter™

TheFilter’s™ main job is to identify any processes launched by Saboteur™, track all messages from the launched processes, delete them, and shut down Saboteur™. TheFilter™ also logs all attempts made by Saboteur™. This was the beginning of a working framework, that I hope to use in the future.

This Post.

Saboteur™ has been trying his damnedest to keep me from writing this entry. “No one wants to hear that. You are the only one who is worried about their self-confidence,” he said. Well, initially, he had some success. I put off writing this particular entry for about two weeks. The solution was to talk to someone else about my new app and framework. I presented my framework/unified theory to vmarks. He said, “that’s an interesting model. I hadn’t formed a unified theory or framework like that. I suppose mine is more the air traffic controller model: thousands of inputs demanding response and guidance, and occasionally a plane crashes.”

ATC framework? Interesting. I wonder how he works that.

Anyway, we had a good chat afterwards and then I presented the results to Saboteur™ and said, “Umm, see, you were wrong. Again. Goodbye.” And here we are with this entry.

top:
 PID     UID     COMMAND
10200    501     TheFilter

Thanks for reading.