[General] What is essential in life

I use my computer every day, but is it necessary?  Today I kept looking at it folded up on a chair in my bedroom and I ignored it.

Facebook?  I've disabled the account and removed the app from my phone a number of times.

Television?  My father watches it for hours a day (he doesn't use computers) but his father didn't, and I don't have a television.

Is my Wii essential?  I've lent it to a friend (largely because I have little access to a TV on which to play it). 

Is it books?  I have been reading only one or two per semester for the past two years, due to school.

Is it tea?  When I lost my tea flask, I dropped from 700mL-1L of tea a day down to 0mL most days.

Are people necessary?  I haven't felt like I've had anyone close to me (personally) close to me (geographically) for a few months now.  This is admittedly not the easiest thing to do without.

Is it knowledge?  I used to pick up information like it was chocolate, but my interest in general domains of information has shrunk (I still like many domains, but I don't put as much effort into learning about things not needed by school now).

Is it a hobby like iaido?  Maybe, but I haven't be able to practise it seriously for the past couple of weeks, and I broke from kendo for years before picking up a sword again.

Is it thinking?  Maybe all someone really needs to do is to be able to and reflect.  Maybe tea isn't necessary, but it's welcome.  Perhaps a book itself isn't necessary, but having some sort of new input to keep thinking on is useful.

The continual distillation and simplification of life.

[General] Idyllic Winter Village

Walking down ice dusted sidewalks, watching a light show reflecting off individual flakes of snow and ice, the pattern changing rapidly as I steadily progress forward.

Ice crystals saturating the sky, capturing vertical columns of light.

[General] 3-2-1 Cookies, Christmas edition

My Christmas variant of my 3-2-1 Cookies!

Ingredients 

• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup vegan margarine
• 1½ cup all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup pumpkin puree
• 1/2 cup Fair Trade chocolate chips
• 1 tbsp cinnamon (or 2)

 Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Put margarine in mixing bowl
3. Dump sugar onto margarine
4. Mix vigorously!
5. Add half of the flour, blend cautiously then vigorously
   It should be dry now
6. Add pumpkin to undry it!  Mix until its mushier
7. Add the other half of the flour and mix until perfect
8. Dump in chocolate chips, mix evenly
9. Insert into oven
10. Baked for 10-14 minutes

Outcome

pre-bake

post-bake

[General] Calm

http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/27/ups-and-fedex-buckle-under-holiday-load/

So Santa failed to make it this Christmas for many homes.  On the news, there are lots of irate and furious people.  I think this is a useful moment to reflect on the reasons people are frustrated here and see if there's anything useful to learn.

• Perhaps there's too much emphasis put on the specific date and time.  Perhaps it doesn't matter if parcels and gifts are a day or two late.
• Perhaps it's a problem that many kids believe there is a fantastical person named Santa who is obliged to reward them for questionably good behaviour by bringing them gifts on a specific date.  Perhaps it's difficult for parents to explain the delay without disillusioning them.  Perhaps it's not worthwhile lying to your children, given that reality happily and necessarily contradicts lies.
• Perhaps people worry too much about things working out a specific way.  Perhaps people could try to be more flexible.
• Perhaps people make themselves unhappy unnecessarily by being intentionally inflexible.

I've been trying to have more moderate and reasonable expectations for people and things, and to be accepting and indifferent to things like delays.  I don't always succeed, but I'm sure I'm doing better than I used to.

I used to get very frustrated very easily, but I think that was because I maintained a very high level of stress.  Since I gave up on stress, I've been much less frustrated with the world around me.  I spend much less time angry at others (almost never) and when I do, I try to figure out why and what I can change in myself to change that.  I don't want to hold unreasonable expectations for others, and if I find myself holding them, I want to drop them.

I wouldn't say Christmas has gone the way I would have wanted.  There was a friend I had hoped to see that I haven't gotten to.  There was a material item I had hoped to acquire but didn't.  There was a movie I wanted to see, but haven't been able to*.  I've managed to be comfortable with all of that, which I'm grateful for.  (* regarding the film, I've actually been affected by the circumstances, but not specifically failing to see the film itself, as I don't think seeing films in theatres or in a timely manner is particularly.)

I've gotten better at being on time myself (because it matters to some others) and not worrying if other people aren't on time (because I'd want others to understand when I encounter delays).

So, my key to avoiding disappointment and maintaining happiness is trying to minimise unreasonable expectations and to avoid blaming others when plans don't work out.  It doesn't always work, but it has helped. :)

[General] New Goal

I've felt kind of directionless for a little while, but I have a concrete, real, near goal to pursue!

I'm taking my father to Germany.

For a variety of reasons, I'm valuing my father a lot more right now.  For the past couple of years, I've been a bit remote from him, a bit embarrassed at where my life has been going, a bit frustrated that I couldn't be who what I want to be for him.

But he is consistently my strongest supporter and I want to make sure he enjoys as much life as possible, and I don't want finances to impede him.  So I'm going to finish my Masters and I'm going to get a real job and I'm taking him by August (around when I want to go to Strasbourg, France, anyway). 

Here's we go!

[Microblog] Transient Thought

Mezzo Forte was the anime I wanted to recommend yesterday!  Note to self.

[General] Books to read

Here are two books that are newly on my to-read list.

• 
  
  "How to Avoid Huge Ships" by Captain John Trimmer
  I strongly recommend the Amazon reviews.
• 
  
  The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague
  I strongly recommend the Amazon reviews as well.

[Microblog] Merry Boxing Day!

That special day every year where cats claim leftover boxes to be their personal towers.

[Microblog] Camerography

Why I look at Micro 4/3 cameras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Four_Thirds_system

[Microblog] Transient Tickliing

Listening through the stereo channels of Rae Spoons' song Bones in the Museum with headphones tickles my brain.  I mean, the sound keeps alternating so quickly and softly that it's disorientating and it feels like someone is tickling either ear with actual feathers.

[General] The Challenge of Living

Streamlines is my idea and prototype for a publishing platform for a regular user.  Not for writing books or a professional blog, but I like to write in journals and sometimes on social networks and sometimes to friends in the forms of messages or letters.  It keeps expanding.  Basically, the whole point is to entirely streamline my expression and consumption of ideas.  I want it to have two directions, out: the stuff I write, and in: the stuff I read.  I want it to blend RSS subscriptions, e-mails, personal messages, texts, etc.  I want to be able to selectively send out writings to individuals, to blogs, to phones, etc.  I want the UI to be incredibly sparse, almost entirely whitespace in which to write or read.  I'm sad that user interfaces today often are clunky because they try to be flashy; I'd often like something dead simple and super fast and responsive.

Charities are weird.  I get addicted to contributing.  I was contributing to more than I could afford for a little while :o and had to pare down as my financial situation constricted during my Masters.  However, I'm happy to have just contributed to the Project for Awesome, a Nerdfighter/Foundation to Decrease World Suck project, and the Georgian Bay Turtle Hospital, a care centre planned for my local bay :).  I wish I had participated earlier, during the actual 24 hour period, but I was in transit and had a lot of work to do.  In the future, I imagine taking the day off any responsibilities I might have to enjoy and participate with the community life.  I look forward to my perk.

VlogBrothers is kind of like having surrogate brothers who don't know I exist, though one of them once read words I wrote.  I've been annoyed at them for the odd sexist, carnist, and anti-Google+-ist comment from them over the past couple of years.  However, having caught up on the past 3 months of videos tonight (see busy-ness) it's clear why I sort of love them.  I took notes on things I want to write about, but briefly it's curiosity and my desire to feel it again, the joy of being able to relate to John's experience following his 24th year of age, the claim that sugar does not induce hyperactivity (a claim I've suspected), and more.

Music is weird for me.  I mostly get it in binges once a month or once every few months.  I have an interestingly limited catalogue to choose from, through emusic.com.  Sometimes I run into albums that have a couple tracks already downloaded not by me, like today, and that's strange.  My goal for the next decade will be to go see an order of magnitude more live shows.  And buy from more YouTube musicians.  Also, I may have found a real person to teach me how to use my violin this time.

Feminism remains important in life and to me.  A friend has been notably harassed twice in the past couple of months and had others make hostile comments in support of the harasser.  It's the type of behaviour that is easy for me to believe doesn't actually exist, because my social circle doesn't generally feature it.  Feminism isn't just about improving culture to reduce harassment and sexist remarks, but just generally about rectifying systemic inequality, which is unsettling to look at already, especially when I see where I'm benefiting.  Sigh.

Cameras are a thing I'm thinking about now.  I'll elaborate on why I have started to later.  For now, I'll note that Kody (my camera from 2004-2011), capturer of many spectacular memories, has been dissected.

Languages are a lot of fun.  I wrote here before about duolingo.  I've picked it back up, and have finally doing French regularly in advance of going to Strasbourg in August.  Hooray for goals.

Stories are things I enjoy working on, but I've lacked the skill and confidence to really build on the ones I value.  G21, Afawnoly, Plush Vikings, SDK Advenures.  There are four that matter now, and I've started at least collecting thoughts for one of them on a public blog (oooh, secret location) and the other has initial sketches for its web comic format out (hint: my art sucks).  Like my writing for this blog, my fictional writing and my drawing lacks personality, purpose, and meaning.  It's mostly rambling, an exercise in moving my fingers.  But that's still better than nothing.  Hopefully I can find a voice I like in the future and do my stories justice then.

Iaido and jodo are becoming more and more a core part of my life.  I'm wary of letting them become my major trait.  I don't want to be singularly defined by any one thing.  Not by veganism, not by open source, not by martial arts.  If you notice the above, you might notice a relatively broad variety of interests.  That's really intentional.  A part of it is fear, of becoming pigeon-holded into a narrow set of interests and becoming unable to relate to other people.  I suppose I'm afraid of being unable to connect with others.  I think that the fear is a problem, not the inability to connect.  I should be able to calmly do away with others. 

School is progressing.  I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed that I'm still going at it.  However, I feel heartened when I read that one of my favourite professors took four full years to complete his.  I suppose I just fear having productivity derailed again.  Yikes!

Growing up is still an idea I don't subscribe to per se, as in I don't mean to sacrifice my values of my youth that I've kept alive, but I've now gone over the G1 driving manual and the plan is to go for the test the week before my birthday.  Meanwhile, my German passport appointment is scheduled for a month after my birthday (3 month wait-times for 20 minute appointments; yikes!).  This is actually notably more complicated for me to pursue as a person than I'm going to ever elaborate on here.

Merry Christmas.

[Microblog] Like a crème brûlée

Snow.  Mountains of it.  The thermometre pops above 0°C.  The snow puddles like the water it is.  The thermometre drops below 0°C.  The water sheets over the snow like the ice it is.  A cold crème brûlée, crisp outside, soft inside.  Crunchy to fall into after midnight.  Happy hometown.

[Microblog] Microfinancing joy

Kiva loaned a new $25 in my name today.  Awesome!  I wonder who contributed that money to Kiva; I hope I will direct it well.

[General] Learning and age

I've been told by teachers and professors that when you're younger, you can learn much more easily, that kids soak up information like a sponge.  I've often been paranoid about my ability to learn as I age.  But reflecting on life, I actually don't feel like it's harder.  Often, it's easier.  I'm not that old yet, but at least at almost three decades, I'm still doing fine.

One thing I notice is that I'm more complacent in a lot of ways; if I want to be productive learning, I have to want to, and to do so actively.  Perhaps it's easier when you're younger because there's a large vacuum in your understanding of the world around you, so the first time you encounter types of knowledge, it has to leave a strong impression.  Especially when it's relevant to your life or interests; the first time you read into a new field, it can be so fascinating. 

As I get older, I have lots of models of how the world works.  Most learning now requires modifying those.  Perhaps existing knowledge is supposed to offer some resistance to knew knowledge and understanding. 

However, I feel that any increased resistance here is offset by having a great framework of understanding related concepts that makes learning new things much easier in some ways.  I have a much easier time now re-learning French (I haven't seriously touched it in 12 years, and barely knew anything before) thanks to my related knowledge of German, and thanks to my more thoughtful approach to it.  Same with swimming, martial arts, etc.  Before, I didn't know how to learn, I would sometimes get anxious and flail.  Now it's calm and structured and productive.

I hope this can be maintained as I age, and that I can be resistant to inertia in my ideas.

[General] Language learning tip: Genders

My advice is to not memorise specifically the word itself and its named gender as two related parts. Rather, learn them together using the gendered article and the noun.  Also, learn them using both the textual representation and the audio, so you'll have double the memory to cue recall.

So, not "Apple is Apfel and it's masculine" but rather "'The apple' is 'der Apfel'".

The reason in part is because if you start learning two gendered languages, like German and French, sometimes the genders are different.

Apple: Apfel (m), pomme (f)

The gender and the word are a bit detached here.  If you can memorise them with their gendered article, though, and get used to the sound of it, it can become much easier to recall it reflexively, with  auditory memory helping.

Apple: der Apfel, la pomme.

In theory, you would not encounter the wrong ones in examples:

Apple: die Apfel, le pomme

Whereas if you remembered it as Apple -> Apfel, m, pomme f, it can be easier to accidentally swap the gender, since they're just generic labels shared by the two languages.

I am using duolingo.com again to review my German and to relearn French.  Mwahaha.

[GNOME] Public Service Announcement for Fedora users upgrading using fedup

Consider updating fedup to 0.8.0 from updates-testing

# yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing fedup

Or else you may end up with a broken System Upgrade.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044346
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044086

[Technology] Another disappointing upgrade experience

So, sometimes, I'm actually pleased with Fedora upgrades.  Not recently though.  With Fedora 20, I again run into a crippling, opaque problem, which ultimately isn't a huge barrier for me, but I can imagine my friends being lost.

This time, at the time of its release, an appropriate version of fedup (the official upgrade tool) is not available in the Fedora 19 repositories.  You want 0.8, but instead you'll use 0.7, and after downloading a ton of packages, you'll go to restart and then it will fail to upgrade, complaining about things like

-- Unit boot-efi.mount has begun starting up.
Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain mount[768]: mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'
Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: boot-efi.mount mount process exited, code=exited status=32
Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: Failed to mount /boot/efi.
-- Subject: Unit boot-efi.mount has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit boot-efi.mount has failed.
-- 
-- The result is failed.
Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Local File Systems.
-- Subject: Unit local-fs.target has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit local-fs.target has failed.
-- 
-- The result is dependency.

I mean, if you can even find that in the voluminous journal output once you're on the command-line.

The solution is to update to the version of fedup in the updates-testing repo

# yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing fedup

Then re-run fedup.  However, if you tried with 0.7 first, 0.8 wants to download the packages in a new directory configuration, so you'll end up with 1.5GB of duplicate packages on your system O_O.  So, I hardlinked the ones in the 0.7 directory (/var/lib/fedora_upgrade) into the various repo-specific directories from 0.8 (/var/tmp/system_upgrade/SOMEREPO/packages).  Those directories might not be quite right, as having eventually succeeded in upgrading, the latter one is gone (the former is still around, wasting space, of course).

Why would the current version of fedup at the time of release be non-functioning, when it's the recommended tool for upgrades?  Yeesh.

The relevant bug is here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044346

[Microblog] Drawing

Tonight?  Just drafting the SDK Adventures web comic...  :D

[Technology] Fedora 20's System Upgrade with FedUp fails to boot :(

I bet it's because my file system is encrypted.  Sigh.  That used to work.  Silly Linux.

[Technology] Netflix on Fedora, working thanks to Pipelight

I had previously tried to get Netflix to work on Fedora through recompiling wine with associated patches.  It never quite worked (segfaults).  However, thanks to Pipelight, I can now install it relatively easily on Fedora.  Pay attention to all the steps, but it works!

[General] A Journey

Late night ramblings from Flesherton

I saw photos of a friend in India.  She moved there for this past year and studied yoga and traveled.  This idea of getting up and going, independent of possessions and free of anchors really appeals to me.  I appreciate some of the courage involved to leave your comfort zone by entering a different culture, alone, with the associated risks to safety and well-being.

It's that time of life; I've been in one spot well too long.  I see people as concepts recycled across people as physical realities.  I mean, new friends have become old friends and many have left my daily life (still friends, though!) and new new friends have replaced them, but despite being different people physically, it's all very much the same conceptually; the people themselves are interchangeable.  I'm resisting routines now.  I've moved twice in a year.  The only thing really keeping me is just finishing my prolonged Masters (mere months) and ... iaido and jodo.

I've been managing stress in my life well, to the point of it being typically absent, but I've started building too many commitments, a dangerous creator of stress.  At least this time I've been good about curating them; giving up old ones (pulling back from GSETA, leaving a GRA, etc) to make room for new or more important ones (iaido!).  It would be welcome to release all the specific obligations I have from my mind and move freely again.

I'm not sure whether my friend's adventure will be my adventure, but I do want to visit India and I do like yoga.  I haven't practised it much recently; the last time being two years ago when I picked it back up after 5 years.  Why yoga?  Functionally, I find the stretching useful.  I've become a big fan of stretching since I started cycling regularly last year.  (Finally put my bicycle inside this morning!)  For many people, it's apparently spiritual.  I don't generally identify with spirituality at all, which I think sometimes creates an unfortunate chasm between myself and some of my friends.  It's unfortunate because I think we share similar experiences but I identify them differently.  It's unfortunate that the words we use to describe things can also limit our ability to engage in a thing.  That we can be easily put off from something because of associations that aren't fundamental to the thing.  I think I used to put off by yoga for that reason, though the act itself is productive.

I try to present my interests in a generally palatable way.  As a vegetarian and now as a vegan, I want to be able to present myself, the diet, and the life style in a way that won't alienate others.  That means not being adversarial, and not using exclusionary language, jargon that others can't relate to, or fixating on ideas that others can't readily subscribe to.  When I do something like yoga or tarot, I try to do the same thing; highlight the elements that people can readily accept in a palatable presentation.  You don't need to believe in harder-to-swallow spiritual beliefs to find them interesting and useful, to find meaning in them.

I've started finding meaning in everything, for the past few years.  Even bands that I once criticised or dismissed.  I used to look at things and judge them whether they were relevant or worthwhile or "missing the point" (which was quite a narrow-minded perspective as to what the "point" in life is).  Now, though, that's almost impossible to do.  Almost anything that is done has meaning, its act or existence is the result of something, of a motivation or an intent, which is based in a belief or a value, which is the result of an application of logic or the product of a feeling or of a complex combination of interacting factors.  And those are interesting.

I'm not a very articulate person.  I don't spend enough time or I'm not capable of composing my thoughts meaningfully.  Especially for blog posts.  But country music has meaning I can find.  Kung fu has meaning I can find.  (I just watched the new Karate Kid with my father and suddenly kung fu was awesome.)  Yoga has meaning I can find.  This connects with a belief I've carried for longer than I've followed it, but that when I dislike something, that's a "failure of appreciation".  It's not that the thing has nothing to appreciate about it, but that I have failed to appreciate it.  I used to use that phrase usefully with others, to sometimes persuade them that there could be a worthwhile aspect to something they disliked (like drinking tea or eating olives!) and I sometimes wondered at my hypocrisy when I would dismiss others' ideas or interests.

So, like finding a "silver lining", I like to find meaning and benefit in things, in inconvenient situations, in compromises, in strange and weird things, in things foreign to me, outside of my interests.  "Oh, you do ninjutsu?  What's it like?" rather than laughing at people for playing at being ninjas.  (Aren't I just playing at being a samurai? :D)e's

I expressed to a friend the other day that it felt like my identity becomes diluted the more prejudices I surrender.  I'm a less sharply defined person.  I'm less of a person.  It makes having excitable conversations over interests more challenging, I think.  I can't simply advocate for my own interests above others.  That's probably for the best.

So, the summation of my late night rambling:

• I need to get a move on
• I am compelled to journey freely through the world
• I should resume yoga (so many things to do in life already; but can be efficiently integrated?)
• I find it sad that words and perspectives separate people who have the same interests
• Communication is important to share ideas and activities without alienating others
• I think everything that is might be meaningful and interesting, at the very least because existence of something represents some information and consequences that are at least curious
• I'm always a recovering hypocrit
• My identity is dissolving

I need to get up and go.

a wandering tomcat

[General] Words, Culture, Feminism

I like this commercial.  I have an interest in the choice and effect of words in culture, and how it helps shape beliefs.  I see the problem this video highlights in real life.  I feel it sometimes in my instinctual reaction to people related to their gender, and want to resist that.

[Microblog] Home again

Idyllic Flesherton.  Watching the Karate Kid on Netflix with my father.

[General] Life's Pilgrimage

Remind me to talk about what Scott Pilgrim means to me some time.  In the meantime, I'll note some recent life craziness,

• wandered the Tulgey wood
• random trip to Niagara falls at night
• addressed some tax stuff in my favour, giddy
• winter walk with MW, planned for time travel
• hung out with MC and his housemate to fix a computer (I got to disassemble every part of the laptop!)
• hung out with SS and wandered the Bookshelf looking at pictures of old churches and bull seals
• hung out with BF, her cat and dog, and helped with calculus homework (even a decade and I'm still a Math Wizard!)
• hung out with BF, SR, EW, JM and Chi the cat; watched a documentary about an invasive toad in north east Australia (hilarious) and Scott Pilgrim vs the World; so many thoughts

[Technology] Android phone; remote locate, ring, lock and wipe

I remember reading that Android could now locate, ring, lock, and/or wipe lost phones using the Android Device Manager but I never tried it (or enabled the remote lock or remote wipe) until today. Triangulating my position via my cell service isn't very useful or accurate (in part due to WIND's relatively few towers, I presume) but when wifi or GPS is one, it works well. I wish I could remotely activate those, too, to get a finer lock. Sadly, nothing so exciting as losing my phone tends to happen. :'(

[Microblog] Hour of Code

US President Barack Obama wants young Americans to learn how to code. Non-Americans could probably benefit too.

[Microblog] Transient Thought

Wood finds its true purpose in Kim Taylor's hands.

[General] Opportunities

Something I'm trying to remind myself to do is to take early opportunities to do things with deadlines.  I don't just mean work and academic deadlines.  I mean domestic life too!  Here are a small list of examples

• use the washroom; sure, you don't really need to now, but when you're an hour into iaido practise and you want to, you'll regret it
• hydrate; sure, you're not thirst now, but when you're two hours into iaido practise, you'll regret it
• buy toilet paper; sure, you have three rolls left still, but when you realise you're down to none, you'll regret it
• eat; sure, you're not hungry now, but when you've been running a lab for 3 hours with no end in sight, you'll regret it
• fold your hakama; sure, you're in a hurry and it's still got its creases now, but when you're a week from a grading and those creases are more an idea than a thing, you'll regret it
• clip your nails; sure, they're not that long now, but when you're doing seated kata and your toe nails bend the wrong way, you'll regret it
• visit your family and speak to your loved ones; I don't want to explain that type of regret
• pick up soy milk; sure, you've still got some, even if you are at a supermarket right now, but in two days when your fridge is empty and you're too busy to shop, you'll regret it
• file your taxes; well, let's hope you don't get into a situation where you'll regret it!
• test your code; sure, it worked last week, and you've got a deadline, but once it's in production and easy-to-test-for bugs pop up, you'll regret it
• upload and share or sor your photos; soon, it will be two years since you've gone through that mess and you'll wonder why you take any to begin with if no one sees them
• practise seitei; sure, it's months from the next grading, but when there's four weeks to go and you realise you haven't practises seitei for a year before your nidan, you'll regret it
• spend time with the person you love; sure, you seem them every day and you're busy right now, but when they leave you, you'll regret it!
• record what you've learnt; sure, practise just ended and you're enjoying fries with your fellow budoka and it's late and you want to do it in the morning, but when you've forgotten that insight from the night before, you'll regret it
• do your dishes; sure, you could just let them soak for 72 hours and you'd rather play Skyward Sword, but when your housemates start throwing them at you, you'll regret the porcelain shards in your eye
• read the assignment outline and at least prototype it early; sure, you've two or three weeks before you need to submit your 2750 assignment, but when you've left it until two days before and you discover why the course is called the Angel of Death and that TA Richard will happily give you a 0, you'll regret it
• brush your teeth; sure, it's almost 3AM and you have to wake up in 6 hours, but when you're in the dentist chair getting a root canal, you'll regret it
• go for a walk; sure, you've work to do, and there'll still be nice leaves or snow or sun or cool air or fun rain tomorrow, but when it's been six months and your village stakes you for suspected vampirism, you'll regret it

Ultimately, I never really know when I'll have my next opportunity to do these things.  Do you have any tasks that you feel should be done promptly?

[Microblog] Intransient Warmth

One of my favourite students that I've TA'd a few times sent me a very beautiful message today that I'm not sure I deserve, but inspires me to live up to their perceptions. :)

[Technology] 12 Days of WaitingforFedora20

Fedora 20 is coming!  With GNOME 3.10!   On the 17th!

A friend recently had issues trying to reinstall Ubuntu a few times and has agreed to give Fedora a try.  I haven't used Ubuntu regularly in a while, but I don't have much inclination too given my affection for GNOME Shell.  I'm curious why a friend recently told me they switched from Fedora to Ubuntu and that perhaps I should be able to guess why, but I'm not sure what they were suggesting in the end?  Ah well.  To the future, where everything is GNOME!

[General] Birth

I'm delighted to note that my friend Victoria and her partner have officially spawned! (as of December 1st)

[Microblog] Transient Travel Buddies

The Third

[General] Richard: A Fiction in Progress

I never know what to write any more.

Solitary moments are useful for me.  They help me recollect myself.  In high school, I would roam the mean streets of my hometown for an hour a night, even in the worst weather, especially in the worst weather.  Walking and talking are often said to be my favourite activity.  I don't have many walkandtalk partners any more.  People are busy.  I'm busy.

Tonight I was with friends, and I abruptly decided to leave, to catch a bus home, and I ran very hard.  My willingness to run is important to me.  In a time where my identity feels fuzzier and fuzziers as old prejudices fall away and are replaced by a hollow openness, myths matter a lot.  The myth of me being olympian in my running, of the time I beat friends back to my housing complex when they were cabbing and I was running on thin ice.  Formative.  Like how Ninja Turtles determined my favourite animal, colour, career, and hobby (swinging swords and sticks).  Thanks Donatello.  So today I ran, and I ran hard, and I ran well, and all the running in the world can't account for buses departing at 23:44 instead of 23:45.   7 metres too late.

I caught another bus back to my friends, got off on their block, took a few steps, and then changed my mind.  I do it a lot.  I cause commotion in busy pathways when pedestrians are milling about by changing my mind.  I don't make good plans.  I'm not good at sticking to them.  I abruptly stop and pivot.  I spend a lot of time distracting myself with friends.  It pre-empts unhelpful thought patterns, a distraction, but a useful one.  I need more time to talk to myself calmly.

I watched locals perform at the Cornerstone, singing, wondering whether it was supposed to move me, actively letting myself feel moved, imagining their experience singing and guitaring, comparing it to memories of experiences seeing bands previously, to memories of high school, where everything was rife with meaning, when connecting with others was less perfunctory and more overwhelming and bubbly. I wonder whether I'm growing unassailable and inaccessible by the world I live in.  I steel myself against threats, against potential criticism, dismissing the critics when their mouths open, intolerant to hurt.  I think it leaves me detached.  I'm invulnerable while I remain uninvested in the going ons around me.  I've felt a lot already, more than I would have wanted.  I'm on a hiatus from feeling, and it cheats me out of my life a little.

But there is no truth to the above.  Nothing is true, everything is permitted.  I used to have a textbook understanding of truth, of reality, of objectivism.  There is an objective reality, and truth is what agrees with it.  It turns out that whatever shared reality there is is pretty irrelevant for my experience of truth.  It doesn't matter what's actually happening if everyone operates on their experience and skewed perception of that shared reality.  Side note; in computing if you write a program and the compiler gives you a warning and you don't understand why, some blame the compiler, but in reality, it's the human; a good developer should be skeptical of their own understanding of a situation, and I want that to apply to my daily life as well.  Nothing is necessarily as it seems, and some things are multiple, disjoint things at once.  So I say that I harden myself against feeling, and yet every day I am overwhelmed by feelings, I'm fragile and porous, a mighty sand castle, whose foundation is still but sand.

My truth does not reflect an objective reality anymore, but instead meaningful plausibilities.  Tell a story as accurately as you can, and perhaps that makes it true, perhaps if someone fact-checks it against hard evidence, and most of it can be verified, your recounted version is true.  Now generalise it, abstract it, replace individuals, substitute situations, but maintain the complete plausibility and likelihood of events, and the meaning of its consequences.  You're telling truth still, to me.  Attempts at precise repetition seems like vanity to me, given our woeful perception and encoding of our experiences.  But perhaps it's just how I excuse my poor performance.  Perhaps you remember things crisply without error.  Perhaps modifications dilute all meeting and erode the purpose behind life.  I can't tell because my knowledge and understanding of what happens to me is deeply flawed, so I give up to it. 

But I still must operate in the world, regardless of what's true.  I still need to reflect, try to minimise my errors, and be open to learning and relearning through my experiences.  I make decisions on what I probably know.  Confidence intervals are wide with this one.

So I walked home.  I like walking.  I like walking in the cold.  I like walking in miserable weather.  I like walking when I'm tired.  I like walking when I should hate walking.  A little attempt at contrarianism.  A little attempt to foil expectations, of others and myself.   I don't want to be classified, boxed, and shelved.  I want to exercise my freedom to live life in any way I want.

As I walked I watched my shadow and thought about the fiction of myself.  I thought about my fiction while I sat in the Cornerstone listening to the music, by myself.  I am the moody, solitary stranger, whose moods are to the public eye a sad cheerfulness.  Something pretentiously romantic, without the romance.  I sit with a straight back, a square face, my beard anchoring my expression, my hair an unintended masterpiece by my own evaluation in store windows and mirrors.  Today I have my crimson red dress shirt on (you know the one), a grey vest (rarely worn, a recent acquisition, but it actually fits), slacks, and (you may have guessed) my tail coat of consequence.  And my black wide brimmed hat.  You know those pretentious nerds you see, who walk around dramatically like Neo in a trench coat?  You know how awkward it makes you feel to see them, how your conclusion must be "This person isn't dark or mysterious like in a show, they're sad and pathetically detached from the reality they wander through."  (Ha, reality, that word again.)  That's me, I'd like to think.  The fact that I smile when I think that is indicative of my contrariness.  I'm happy to seem ridiculous to others, in mild contempt of them.  Don't box me, I say wordlessly.

So, to avoid seeming pathetic, there's always a faint smile, and hopefully never a smirk.  I sit there quietly smiling inward, while people sit all around me chattering.  For a long time I wondered if I was socially incompetent, as I'd wander singularly around the downtown while seeing so many others with others giggling and chatting.  Am I defective? is the standard question.  Two important realisations is that I too can have others to wander with if I express my interest in it.  It turns out I'm normal and nothing special; people will hang out with me as statistically likely as with someone else.  Another realisation is I enjoy being alone in a crowd.  I have my thoughts to dwell on without taxing conversation, and I feel less alone for all the fellow meat bags pounding the surrounding pavement.

So I sit there in the Cornerstone as the musician plays, accompanied by another who might be delusional and pretentious, but is clearly happy tonight, which I think is good enough to validate her delusions of grandeur and her pretentions of classiness.  If it works for you, ignore all the haters.  I sit there with my straight back, and faint smile, not registering what the musician is singing, with my hat next to me, and I skip the next bus home so I can sit out the whole evening, in the company of strangers who don't even notice the dark dressed silent stranger smiling to himself in the centre of the room with nowhere in particular to be.

I used to have more purpose, and I think about that as I walk home.  I'm walking since I stayed long enough for the bus service to end, and as I walk, Out of Service bus after Out of Service bus drives by me towards my home.  Perhaps I should try to hitch a ride.  But once I'm home, I'll just sit in front of my computer as I do now, but with no purpose, except to feed my mind certain sensations to silence it.  It's cold, there's drunk chatting with me, and my right foot feels broken for no particular reason; I'm pretty happy.  I'm happy because of everything that's wrong in the world.  Inside the church where the choral concert this night had been, I'm happy that the paint is peeling, not out of contempt, but out of acceptance that everything is continuously falling apart.   That's normal.

So I'm walking, and I know which route is most direct, and best trodden, and I take the other route.  This is not that poem.  I walk along the train tracks, of course.  And I realise what I realised earlier in the kitchen, and previously, that I make choices that don't reflect what I want or who I am, but who I think I am and who I think I want to be and who I think others think I am and who I think others think I ought to be.  I am untrue to myself to be true to an image.  And as I expressed earlier, there's no difference; I'm many things at once, I'm my pretensions/pretenses and my sincerity and my aspirations and my failings.  My mind entertains contradictory beliefs and handles that very well, thank you.

So I choose to walk on the tracks, in my costume, which serves not to emphasise me as much as to alienate me.  Others see me and I'm not someone cool they want to include in their lives, but rather some unpredictable variable that poses a threat.  But that doesn't matter, because I don't mean to be cool to them.  There's only one person I really made choices to impress, and that's only because they seemed to delight in it, so that was a Good Thing.  I've done well now to learn to do things not for the sake of others' response to me, but for the sake of the thing.  I can share a cupcake with a stranger and walk away without fishing for gratitude: I am progress!

So I do this for me.  I do this so that in another 45 years, I can be 74 and walking through the future as an anachronism, and at that point a couple people can exist who think and wonder about that weird old antique who wanders the streets. I look forward to age.  I'm resigned to my fated demise.  Let it run its course, and be glad that I lived and not sad that I die.  But for now, and forever, I do this for me, because it makes me happy to be a thing that I enjoy.  Like practising jodo with the laminate jo staff, a bit more fragile then a blank one, but very aesthetically pleasing, I do it because it looks cool to me others be damned.  I walk along the train tracks, my black wide brimmed hat on, my black tail coat tightly buttoned to keep me warm, my flashy Legend of Zelda gloves and Converse clones breaking the theme, adding the contrast and contradiction I delight in, as I walk down train tracks I've never seen before.

I like adventuring.  I like exploring.  I don't do it as often as I used to.  In New Zealand, I failed to make use of a lot of opportunities to adventure, but mostly in the conventional sense of traveling the country; I wandered those streets like a bored local though, but without the boredom.  I walk until I find graffiti.  Graffiti is almost predictable, it's the same type of thing (I've boxed it in, you see; I've clustered and classified in human vanity), and it's awesome.  It's what I would hope or expect to read, and it satisfies those expectations completely.

So this contributes to my myth.  The dark gentleman (my standards have twisted about, but the concept of gentleman still holds appeal to me) who likes anachronism, contradictions, train tracks and graffiti, who runs.  The goal of unconvention, of eccentricity, of a spectacle.  And I wonder about whether it's a waste of time or whether cultivating my own myth is valuable.  I don't think it's exceptional.  I think most people get a sense of what they are supposed to be, and they make decisions in its favour, without evaluating how applicable that sense is to themselves.

For instance, I had to pick between living in a modern house with modern amenities in a new suburb of Guelph, with all the conveniences of modern life.  Or, I could live in the ward, an old neighbourhood in Guelph, with a strange lady and the creeky floors of a decrepit century home.  I very much wanted to choose convenience, but in my continual self-definition, I chose the quaint, rustic home that promised weirdness and adventure and inconvenience.  And I can say that it was a good choice.  I've been immensely pleased with it, and it's been the best living situation I've had in years.  Making the hard choice to be who I wanted to be rather than who I am paid off.

So the myth.  I'm not a real person.  What I feel doesn't strictly matter.  What I experience is relevant to only myself, bu thanks for reading.  I wonder what fiction of me you see, and how it is that two individuals ever manage an understanding on anything.

Good night.

(P.S. if you actually read all this, I'd be happy to know; I suspect no one reads anything I write, which is liberating)

[Microblog] Transient Thought

Alone time in crowds.