(song)
Do not forsake me oh my darling ...
(/song)
Americans have taught us EVERYTHING.
If it weren't for us, today we would be. ... Europeans.
Old, heavy. Always thoughtful, with gray clothes and cabs still black.
There aren't people anywhere full of new ideas like americans.
And generous!
Americans never take. They give. They give.
There is no better and more good people than the Americans.
Germans are bad. That's why they lose wars.
But they never stop! They try again! The devil pushes them!
And in the meanwhile, God cheers for the Americans.
For them, the wars are a mission.
They don't do it to take.. No! To give!
There's always a reward for whoever loses the war - it's almost convenient.
Congratulations! You lost again!
*boom* drops a truckload of coffee.
They always make gifts.
Once upon a time the invader would take everything from the loser : women, religions, science, culture...
Americans, no. They can't.
You win the war, conquer Europe.. You find a beautiful 18th century clock..
What does he do? He pillaged.. he take it, right?
Nooo. They civilize! And they put a beautiful quartz clock there, all white.
And Europe, with its small colored lights, rivers, traditions, violins, waltzes..
(fifties rock plays)
And then lights, neons, colors, life, bridges, highways, buildings, planes.... Chewing gum.
There's no stupider people than the Americans.
(Strangers in the night plays)
Culture has never stuck to them.
ON PURPOSE!
Because they're right to distrust our old culture, elaborate, contorted.
Certainly! More simplicity, more instantaneity!
They create... Like that! Like taking a crap.
(Tutti Fruiti plays)
There is no people more creative than the Americans.
Every year they bring out a new movie, beautiful, very beautiful.. But watch out, if there's no superficiality.
There's ALWAYS the western underneath. Even in the dramas they put the Native Americans (I think it's a Gone with the Wind reference).
Americans have a very clear idea on who's good and who's evil. Not by theory. By experience!
They are the good ones.
And they give you cigar boxes, whiskey crates, soap, freedom, ships, computers, sharks, used clothing...
America doesn't do me any good.
Too much freedom. I have to tell the doctor.
America makes me want to see a dictator.
Ehh?!? YES! A dictator! At least you see it, you recognize it!
I haven't seen anything that eats up a man inside like that freedom.
Not even a disease does it so well.
Americans are genial. They put it right there.
Freedom is in reach of everyone, like the guitar.
Each person plays like they want... And everyone plays... Like freedom wants them to.
I received an email from sensei on Monday (sent to every student) – if you’ll be here tonight, bring your fighting gear. Uh-oh. Her sensei was there and taught a few classes, including the adults. The entire class turned out to be pretty much a blur of drills. I’ll be able to dredge them out of my body memory, I think.
A drill about basics – chain two basics together, using shifting. Then up to six basics together, by series of two.
A couple of kicking drills. A few fighting drills – these are important. shift, step back, kick, finish, disengage.
Come in and jam, elbow, finish.
I am obfuscating these on purpose.
This was a harder training session than I’ve experienced in a while, as evidenced by the appearance after 40-some hours of a slight tightness in my upper abs and shoulder muscles.. Oh, and the fact that my lower legs were one solid body, instead of having a freely moving calf muscle.
Of course, I was supposed to the student in the best shape, so I wonder how the others did feel. This wasn’t particularly hard on my mind, just a little bit past my comfort zone.. I do feel like I am more aware that I can stand more than I think. Was my willpower muscle flexed? It seems like it was.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
1) I'm on Google Wave. The bastards probably have succeeded in reinventing email. I want to work there so I can work on the next big idea.
2) I joined ohloh.net ... Now I -really- want to develop stuff. Just need ideas. See next point.
3) Like Mathematica or Matlab but can't afford them? google Maxima, a Computer Algebra System. Works on all OS.
4) I'm meeting two people from OKCupid this week-end. I'm such a pimp. They both have excellent friend potential, which is a good start.. :)
5) custom-locked Tuesday post coming soon.
6) Send email to professor at MIT. Now starting to work on actual application essay. Ugh!
7) Reopened my Abstract Algebra book. Holy -crap- am I behind on my understanding of math! I have got to catch up on this stuff. At least, now I find it cool.
8) Slept 11 hours on Thursday night. Probably to make up for lack of sleep on other nights of the week.
9) Re-watching Music Videos on my computer. I love Rurouni Kenshin. Michael Jackson was an amazing dancer. Rammstein writes good songs, and I need to become fluent in German, just because.
http://www.trevoke.net/Michael%20Jackso
An auto-vivifying hash is a hash that lets you create sub-hashes automatically. This means that the following code becomes possible:
def cnh # silly name "create nested hash"
Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = Hash.new(&h.default_proc)}
end
my_hash = cnh
my_hash[1][2][3] = 4
my_hash # => { 1 => { 2 => { 3 =>4 } } }
This is useful because it reduces the amount of logic in the code. No more “If sub-hash doesn’t exist, create it!”
Courtesy of Robert Klemme on www.ruby-forum.com
Mirrored from Seven steps.
I will have finished 27 years 'here' tomorrow, and will start the 28th. Is this right? I was born in 1982 .. Huh. Yup, I have no idea how old I am. By contrast, this means that when I think of friends from college, I think of those who were two years ahead of me. This means they might be 30 years old by now.
Life is terrible*. There's no future, only more now.
I'm busy building a future. How does this work, when there is no future, just more now? It doesn't. What I am busy doing is building a now, and setting a path for that now.
Is this really what I want to do? Do I really want to spend my time talking to teachers and professors and convincing them that someone random, with a GPA around 2.8 / 4 when he was in college, is worth something?
90-degree turn. Do I want to be immortalized, commemorated, remembered, after I die? Is it worth it? What am I supposed to do with this life? The answer, clearly, is -anything I want-.
I'm bright, but I fear I've let my brain go to waste by spending time in petty offices with petty politics.
As I spend so much time in the dojo, developing further skills on my own is difficult. I consider myself to be low on free time. I probably need to change that point of view if I want to solve this particular problem.
Yet... I want to be around people who care about learning, solving problems, and programming. In short, probably, hacker-type people. The Ruby community seems to be about right for this.
I do think a PhD may be the right way to go.. I may want to teach at a college/university afterwards..
It's so hard.. There is SO MUCH out there that I need to sift through.
Maybe I need a break. Damn shame that I don't have vacation days 'cause I'm too new at this job.
_______
* This is only one point of view. As far as taoism or buddhism goes, the fact that I've realized that probably kicks me a little closer to enlightenment. This brings to mind a zen anecdote...
"One day it was announced by Master Joshu that the young monk Kyogen had reached an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers went to speak with him.
"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow students inquired.
"It is," Kyogen answered.
"Tell us," said a friend, "how do you feel?"
"As miserable as ever," replied the enlightened Kyogen.
Keeping things short - there's been a girl in my life since the end of August. She's been making things complicated, but good.
Keeping things short because I'm trying to get back in the academical side of things for the PhD in AI so I have to first of all rekindle with the milieu, then discover the field, then talk to people, then hopefully somehow send applications before like December or January. So lots of stuff to do.
I found a script that explains everything really well.
Credit goes to:
# CLOSURES IN RUBY Paul Cantrell http://innig.net
# Email: username “cantrell”, domain name “pobox.com”
Along with this blog entry, it’s made the whole deal much easier to figure out.
Now.. Why didn’t I get that when I was looking at LISP?
Mirrored from Seven steps.
Wow. I just watched Dave Thomas’ talk Ruby Metaprogramming: Extending Ruby for Fun and Profit and it explained so many things.
It’s quite worth watching if you like Ruby and don’t know about metaprogramming and Ruby hooks and what ’self’ means, fully.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
Coughs that won't stop suck.
The last time I was ill for more than 24 hours was so many years ago that I forgot.
I feel kinda bad plaintexting this.. You can contact me if you can’t figure it out yourself.
The service password for the R2 unit is in this sentence.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
Someday I’ll come out with a proper revision numbering scheme for it.
I’ve implemented some Cucumber testing, the code now actually parses SGF files properly, including the KGS ones, it’ll work on Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1, so .. It’s all good on that front.
The code’s not as clean as I’d like it to be, and probably not as commented, either.
http://github.com/Trevoke/SGFParser
I am not -saving- SGF files with it yet, but heck if I’m not parsing them. And now YOU can, too !
Mirrored from Seven steps.
Got a haircut today. It's amazing enough to be worth noting. Turns out I have to stress less.. Because I have dandruff and some white hair. You guys know I'm turning 27 this November, right? *sighs and shakes head sadly*
I am watching Rocky III and IV (the only ones I really like), and the driving theme is the power of the human spirit. Rewatching it now, I see a lot of other ideas. They’re not particularly hidden, but I never really noticed them before. This started to make me think about my choices.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
So.. Diet people.. Diabetic people..
When it comes to food, what do you look at on the labels? I know that such a thing as "starches" and .. Stuff.. And calories and other various crap does exist.
What's important? How do you count what you can and can't eat, should and shouldn't ?
If you get this error : Mysql::Error: query: not connected: or one just like it, it’s because you need an older DLL.. Which I just happen to have found, because I needed to fix this problem too!
libmySQL.dll
Enjoy.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
It was surprisingly good. I didn’t feel very good tonight – slight headache, slight tingle in the throat. I wasn’t going to stay for my class, just help teach and then go home, get tea, get sleep.. But only two other adults showed up and sensei was upstairs, so I started the class and took it easy on the calisthenics and the stretches. Those two adults are the two with the most issues of muscle contractions (as in, they have no idea what relaxing means). So I started off real, real easy, taking them back to the basics. I spent the entire class putting no emphasis on heavy force (or rather, an emphasis on the lack of such). All I wanted was high chambers, and then high and with the correct angle, and then high + the correct angle + tight chambers, and then that plus the kicks. So it was five reps of just chambers, then the other side, then five reps of loose, relaxed chambers on the first side, then the same thing on the other side. I did that on all the basic kicks, which took about 30 minutes. It was time very well spent, because I noticed marked improvement in both students as well as in my own body. Sensei came down about halfway through and listened, then watched. She gave a few key corrections to the students and one to me, and then afterwards, she told me I’d done a good thing! WOO HOO! All in all, the light exercise gave me a light workout, keeping my body temperature up without exhausting me.. Now I’m home, sipping Silver Needle tea in a “Mug of vi” from Thinkgeek. Life is good, right this moment.
So tonight, I went to train 35 minutes away from home, at the dojo where my sensei’s sensei teaches. Warmups / stretches, kicking drills, calisthenics, sparring, then fighting drills.
Sensei’s sensei has a son who is now 48. Now — I am fast by normal people’s standards. This guy is really fast by my standards. He also has a really positive energy – very friendly eyes, a great disposition.. And he can dislocate your jaw before you can blink or think “oh sh..!”, so don’t piss him off.
Anyway, as much as shihan (sensei’s sensei) is amazing, tall, skilled, talented, dedicated to his art, as much his son inherited many of the traits, has been training under his dad a long time, and has learned a lot from a ton of sparring and tournaments and just .. being there.
So now he imparts his wisdom and skills, and it’s WONDERFUL to watch him in action, and learn from him, and listen to his way of explaining things. Just like in Dune, “A process cannot be understood by stopping it”, he explains action and reaction within the context of a moving match, which is AWESOME.
I breathe hard when I’m in this class. It’s a bit of a work-out, and excellent cardio.
Oh ! So shihan’s son hit me twice, and I managed to shift out of the way of the third strike, like I felt his movement and reacted. It was sweet. Now I only need to make that happen ALL THE TIME.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
I had a good time in the dojo tonight. Managed to bring a kid back from the verge of tears to feeling good and performing kata with solid focus and intent.. And then good sparring. Kid’s 6, by the way.
My class wasn’t that good, though I got a compliment on my push-ups from sensei. Went through my kicks.. Then sparred..
I fleetingly get a grasp of efficient body movement, and then it disappears, and then I have to train a lot more to make it happen again, and then more again, etc etc, until I can make it happen effortlessly.
I really, really love teaching martial arts. There’s something about the student-teacher relationship, in the study of something which involves both body and mind – and you can’t lie or fake your way through that. It’s all about the truth, and being naked and exposed. It forces you to examine yourself and your relationship with others.
Mirrored from Seven steps.
So, I play weiqi (known as the game of go, but I prefer using the chinese name).
There are some SGF parsers out there for Ruby, but I wanted to write my own – the other ones didn’t seem comprehensive enough, didn’t seem Ruby-like enough in their objectifiying the women data.
My original goal was twofold: write a script to rename all the SGF files in my collection so they can be easily parsed later, and … Learn more Ruby!
Here is the github link: http://github.com/Trevoke/SGFParser
It’s a work in progress. Right now it parses the SGF file properly, but the user has a fair amount of work to do to use the data.. Which, maybe, is the way it needs to be. But I’m gonna try to follow the principle of least surprise to the bitter end! 
Mirrored from Seven steps.
For the past several weeks... Well, I don't know exactly. Maybe it's only been a week, but it feels like I've been that way since May or so...
For the past several weeks, I've gone through ridiculous mood swings. It's not been quite as bad as "hug pandas" and "kill the world" but it has been pretty bad.
I'd wake up and feel ok about the job, and by the time I'm halfway through the commute I want to drive off, take an exit andj ust go back home.
Damn conscience. I make it to work and then I remember I'm working on some Ruby on Rails stuff, and that makes me happy. Woot! Woot! Programming! So I do stuff for a little while, and then I remember I don't fucking have admin rights on the stupid fucking computer because of stupid fucking office politics. FUCK FUCK FUCK.
So I find some stuff I like to do, which has nothing to do with work because my job position's almost fucking useless because I've been hired by a small petty self-serving guy. Nice guy and all. Really. But *clutches head in hands* AAAAAAARRRRRGHHHHH !!!!!!!
So I get home, after getting frustrated and sometimes almost killed by traffic, and then depending on the day of the week (like, if it's Tuesday or Friday I don't have martial arts), I go to the dojo.
The kids are off the fucking wall because the parents should be shot. My mom thinks I should reserve judgment until after I have kids. I think kids need parents, and that means RULES and that means being taught RESPECT, because I am here to teach your kid martial arts, not teach him discipline and shit he needs to be taught at HOME.
And I'm off the fucking wall because I can't take the kids, and I've been working on not using my shoulders when I punch for like a year and I CAN'T FUCKING GET IT and I feel SO FUCKING WORTHLESS.
I also can't do more than like fifty knuckle push-ups without grimacing, so clearly I'm a useless goddamn wreck.
URRRRRGHHHHH.
I got home tonight and I thought, "I hope my mom doesn't talk to me" and then she didn't say good evening, welcome back and I almost snapped at her "What, I don't get a hello?" ... Clearly I have a problem I need to deal with.
I want to quit life. I want to go away from everything, EVERYTHING that I've labeled a part of my life. For a while. And then reappear. I really really want that. Can I do it? May I do it? Please?
To illustrate the important aspect of the mood swings, I'm actually gonna write a happy post, but just about nobody will be able to read it because it's gonna be in a filter.
I'm tired of everything. I just want things that make me smile.
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