jessehattabaugh:
About jessehattabaugh:
jessehattabaugh's "Real" Website: http://friendfeed.com/jesse
Team jessehattabaugh:
Please whore this link, I paid $100 for it and it only lasts 48 hours!
I am trying to find a good name for my pet website, and this site lets users vote on what they think it should be. It also pays you if you choose the best name.
Get your shit together with Agglodex!
Y'all have been such great sports playing with my anon-app that I thought I'd just tell
you about one of my other projects; Agglodex. This one's
actually useful.
See the problem is that I have so many accounts on so many websites
including this one. There are sites like Tumblr, FriendFeed, Soup.io,
and Swurl that take your content from other sites and mix it together,
but sometimes they don't work with every site you use. But every site
you use makes an RSS feed right? GTI does. So the first thing that
Agglodex does is aggregate all the feeds that you create online (not
the ones you read, the ones you want other people to read about you)
Your blog, your del.icio.us links, your Flickr favorites, anything at
all that you do online that creates content in a feed.
But if that were all I was trying to do it'd be boring. Any of those
other sites can mash your content together. What Agglodex does
different is to *analyze* the content of your feeds to try and
determine what you're interested in. With that information I can start
to recommend, people, and entries that might be of interest to you.
Thats cool right?
Well go sign up, enter in a couple of feeds that you regularly
add entries to and let Agglodex chew on them a while to build your
profile page. Then go back to see if it finds any interesting people or
entries for you!
I built this thing that will annoy the crap out of you. TRY IT!
So I built a web-thing that lets you send a message to a randomly selected person's email address. The catch is that you have to sign up first and thereby open yourself up to the potentiality of random messages in your inbox. However, you should know that it's pretty much just me using it right now, and since I seem to have worn out all my guinea pig friends, I'm kinda having trouble getting people to sign up for it. I went on IRC but they called me a spammer. And then I remembered GoTeamInternet. Those guys are just the folks for something as pointless as this. So give it a shot for me, I won't do anything bad with your email address; pinky swear! I'll make it real easy to turn it off, I just want to see what happens!
What's the point of building my team? How does this benefit me, or my team mates? I think that teams need a way to compete. So that the awesomeness of my team can shine through. However, I think that this would be diluted by the way that everybody has a team, and can join as many other teams as they like. Sports players can't do that.
The Purpose of Life
There is only one "purpose" in life that I can see; make sure your genes stay alive. Every organism on this planet seems to pursue that goal almost exclusively. Most human endeavors can be found to be rooted in survival and reproduction as well. Owning nice things for example increases your social status, and the likelihood that you'll find a mate. Our bodies make sure we adhere to this rule in myriad ways, and I don't think it's possible or advisable to ignore it.
But that's the purpose of life in general, not human life persay. The beautiful thing is that, though we are just as wired to propagate our species as a bee or a cat, we are endowed with enough intellectual complexity to see beyond the survival of our own genes and find higher purpose.
The general consensus seems to be that human happiness and pleasure are good, and pain and suffering are bad. The problem is how to achieve the most pleasure for the most people. As you pointed out there are two schools of thought on that subject. The first which I'd call the Socialist view says that we can make ourselves happy by making everyone else happy, because we are only as happy as those around us. The other which I'd call the Libertarian view, says that we should all make ourselves happy because we are the ones best able to determine what we need.
In typical American fashion I find myself a centrist. I believe that in the end, no one is responsible for my happiness but me, and if I'm not happy I have no one to blame but myself. However, I realize there are those who don't have the advantages I have (education, white-male-ness, and IMHO good looks) and so, I think it's also necessary to contribute my surpluses to those who need them.
The beauty of sharing is that it not only improves the collective happiness of society, but also serves to assuage my body's need for social acceptance. Every time I reach into my pocket and hand something of mine to someone who needs it, I get back their appreciation, their acceptance and deep down my genes are sure that they are in a better position because of it.
