Book of Trust
07 Jan 2006 Happy newyearI've been lazy with my blog again and I have a lot of catching up todo. I could apologize, but it doesn't matter. Being lazy is becoming a trademark of mine, aswell as being late with blogging. Maybe it should be one of my 13 almighty works...
I can't even remember when I wrote my last blog, but I can see it was about the new laptop and that was right before christmas.
Thanks to the nice burglars I don't have pictures of our christmas party. We started the party around 6PM, but before we could cook anything at all, we had to clean up the kitchen and do the dishes. That took 2 hours or so and will teach us in the future (and I will look for a way to put this in bold red blinking text) to KEEP THE KITCHEN CLEAN AT ALL TIMES
Due to bad planning we had only finished the main course around 1AM. At that time I went to bed because I was too tired to wait for dessert.
I went to my parents home for the first time in months. It's something I should do more often, but I have no good incentive to do it :( I find it hard to go there because I don't know what to expect. Most of the times, it feels good. My family likes me even when I think they don't. I can see sadness in their eyes when I leave, something I should remind myself of from time to time...
I have no pictures of 22c3. Most of the interesting talks were similar to 21c3. I found time there to fix my laptop. I managed to get wireless networking working, my graphics card with 3D support, the infrared driver and encrypted disk support. I brought back a 22c3 sweater and a tough cold.
The cold ruined my oldyear-to-newyear party for pretty much everyone invited. I was in some weird hazy state and I can't say how thankful I am for all the help my friends provided. You know what its like when you're ill, you sit there and see things around you moving but you don't really realize it. It's like you're in another place, deep inside your own body looking through your own eyes but not able to interact, everyone and everything seems kilometers away...
I watched as my friends started making dinner, cleaning the place up and pretty much do everything I should have been doing. This is probably what "I'll be there for you" means in the Friends themesong.
What are the properties of true friends ? Is it that they can discuss things with you, respecting your ideas while explaining their own ? Is it that they accept you as you are, dispite all your bad sides ? Is it the undefined sense of implicit trust you feel when you're around them ? Knowing you can depend on your friends without having to ask ?
I don't know.
In computer security, trust is very expensive commodity. The default behaviour is to trust nothing and only trust people when it can be mathematically calculated that they can be trusted. Many mathematical principles can be mapped onto computer trust. Since math is never wrong, your trust is never misplaced. Unfortunately, the real world is not perfect and I have been mistaken.
People are not computers. They can not prove they can be trusted, but only that they can not be trusted. It's totally opposite to all I know. How to trust people ? There should be a Book of Trust... Clearly, not trusting anyone is the wrong way to go. If you trust noone, life is very difficult. You can not count on anyone, can't share ideas or (god forbid) feelings. You end up being alone among others.
I imagine that learning how to trust people is a process that starts when you are very young. Weak friendships formed and broken, trust shared and betrayed, getting hurt a lot. Among the chaos and pain, a heuristic is formed, a gut feeling: can this person be trusted ?
I learned very late that there is no such thing as absolute trust. Most people can be trusted only as far as you can throw them, literally. Maybe that's what differs real friends from "people I know"
It must be a good feeling to know that you can offload what is on your mind to your friends and absolutely know that it will not end up on the proverbial 6 o'clock news. That's what trust is about for me.
Friends, extensions of our soul, helping to carry the burden of shared thoughts, standing shoulder to shoulder prepared and equipped to handle whatever comes down the road of life, together.