>browsing reddit
(http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mmgk1/do_you_ever_think_about_you_being_the_only_real/)
>reading all the comments
>following links to various wiki articles
>start questioning existence itself
*reaches out to touch keyboard*
*strokes keyboard gently*
>”but it’s so reeeeallll….”
about time!
The iPhone 4S is now on Sprint! (In other news: Man, that was a quiet release! There have been rumors for several months now, but I haven’t heard any official news on the matter until I went to buy a new phone from Sprint yesterday.)
Now I have to decide which pony gets to go on my iPhone case….
Hmmm…. Dashie? YOU UP FOR THIS SHIT?
Hell yeah I am!
— Rainbow Dash
http://www.redbubble.com/people/carnivean/works/7929914-rainbow-dash-sleeping-iphone-case
Pffft.
How I feel about life summed up in 4 pictures.
Reblogged from reddit (http://redd.it/mg5tv)
Whether you agree with him politically or not, you cannot deny that he’s a pretty awesome person.
Dude, I wholeheartedly agree. We need more awesome people in politics. I could care less about where they fall on the political spectrum.
The way I see it: you will always disagree with political figures on at least one issue. So if you’re going to put someone in office, why not put someone awesome into office so they can make the US more awesome.
DFTBA artfaec!
schwoopta like this
http://reidhoruff.com/request.php?url=obfuscated_sudoku
I was gonna write a really good post about how cool programming is… but the thought train got derailed.
The jist of it was:
I’m sure there’s a finite limit to the complexity of a system built in this fashion (e.g: hand-written obfuscated code.) — but I just don’t care! This is awesome. Sure you won’t build the next Social Network (TM) writing code like this, but I think a lot of programmers forget why they started programming in the first place.
Who cares if this sudoku solver is terribly organized, grossly inefficient, and impossible to decipher without great care and determination: programming is about instructing one of the most advanced machines known to man to carry out your whims.
If you can feed it the equivalent of well defined gibberish and get a solved sudoku puzzle out of it, that’s pretty fucking cool.
happy birthday Go!
http://blog.golang.org/2011/11/go-programming-language-turns-two.html
For the non-programmers among you, Go is a programming language created by some incredibly smart and talented people over at Google.
I have been intrigued by Go since the day it came out. I’ve never had the time to sit down and actually learn the language, though.
Every year the Go team announces that their brainchild is a year older… and every year I say something like:
Oh wow? It’s <x> years old already? I thought it came out like… last month….
Today, that all changes. I’ve decided to buckle down and learn a new language, and it’s going to be Go.
I’ll be honest, although I do love computer languages, I try to avoid the politics behind them. I have no idea where Go will be in a few months, or even a few years.
Regardless, it’s a great language, and I’m really excited to write my new project in it: goChanner.
goChanner will be a text-based tool for reading and archiving threads from a multitude of Futaba style image boards.
You may be wondering: “why do we need a textual tool to read imageboards?”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t browse *chans at work because they usually have NSFW images. I want a simple tool to read and reply to threads without the hassle of trying to hide images.
Anyways: that’s what I’ll be doing for the next several weeks to several months. Learning Go, and writing my new project.
Cheers!
stress and the human machine
Today I feel like blogging about something that takes a slight detour from my typical subject matter.
I don’t feel like writing inane jokes about my legacy (although a virtual orchestra would be pretty sweet), I don’t feel like discussing some awesome computing problem that I’ve played with, I won’t go on about politics, or driving, or modifying minivans, or how awesome I am.
Today I’m going to talk about my shortcomings. I’m going to get things off my chest that just need to be said. I’m going to write this post not because I want to, but because I have to.
In a very logical sense, every machine has a breaking point. In software, we call this “scale”, eventually a website (like Tumblr, for instance) will come to a grinding halt because the underlying machines have either failed, or just can’t handle the sheer volume of what they’re being asked to do.
In a real machine, such as a car, it’s usually referred to as stress: you can only stress a part so far before it breaks. Many cars trys to prevent you from reaching their maximums, but in automotive sports: cars are routinely pushed to their breaking points. It’s not uncommon for them to practically ruin an engine, or run through a set of brakes, or blow a tire, in the course of one race. This is stuff that usually takes the average driver months to do, and racecar drivers can do it in an hour or two.
Not unsurprisingly, the human machine also has a concept of “stress”, although it’s very hard to define just how much stress the human body can take. Sure there’s physical stressors, and we can generally determine what person’s maximums are by observing them doing various physical activities.
But mental stress, well, that’s a different ballgame. It’s really challenging to determine what will “break” a person. Some people are trained to withstand torture: tactics that exist solely to reach a person’s maximum stress in a minimal amount of time. Other people break down when they get a bad grade on a homework assignment.
It’s so incredibly difficult to judge mental stress that a lot of us don’t even realize how much we’re stressing our bodies until we just break… and when we do break, we do it in all kinds of crazy and insane ways. Some people go on a murderous rampage. Other’s scream into a pillow. Some people die because of too much stress, other’s begin to cry, and other’s still have a complete mental breakdown and require intense care from trained professionals to recover.
When I break, I like to write. The thing is, writing is a really great tool for dealing with stress. Writing requires structure, and careful planning. Writing forces you to not only acknowledge your stress, but to give it appropriate structure. In a way, writing can become a powerful tool to organize your stress, analyze your stress, and eventually deal with it.
I would argue I haven’t broken yet, but I feel that my shortcomings pose several serious threats to my continued mental healthfulness, and my continued happiness.
The first shortcoming is one that, not coincidentally, has eaten away at me for the longest time: I’m quite shy.
You may not think that’s a difficult thing to admit, but believe me, those three words are quit difficult to type.
Also those of you that know me are probably saying What the fuck? Robbie’s not shy!
For me to explain my shyness, I must introduce a new character to my blog: Y’all.
Y’all is a pretty versatile guy/gal. (S)he refers to my friends that I know in real life.
The reason Y’all doesn’t think I’m a shy fellow is simply because: I know Y’all pretty well.
I know what Y’all likes, what he doesn’t like. I can generally form a conversation with Y’all in my head pretty easily. I know which of our interests intersect, and from that I can converse in pretty good detail with Y’all.
Y’all can hold a (pseudo)-intellectual conversation with me, and we generally share a few inside jokes.
The thing is, it takes a long time for an acquaintance to become “Y’all.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had trouble with conversations. You see, I struggle to keep an immense grip on conversation in my head. I can’t process conversation all that fast unless I know damn well what I’m talking about.
So the more I know about someone, the easier it is for me to create an internal monologue with that person, and the easier it is for me to converse with that person.
If I don’t know someone, I pretty much find myself unable to create even the most idle of chatter. Small talk (not the programming language) pretty much escapes me.
I survived my public speaking classes in high school and college with a pretty simple technique: Pick a topic I know really well. Really. Fucking. Well.
I generally pick a topic that, if given the option, I could honestly discuss for hours.
I tend to go a bit over budget on time, but I never struggle for content, ever.
Also, since I pick a topic I already know very well, I can do the speech with little-to-no preparation.
Real life conversation tends to go in directions I know nothing about.
Ask me to justify my choice of Linux distro, and I’ll talk to you for hours.
Ask me to justify my choice in pants, and I’ll give you a kind of blank stare, and shuffle my feet a bit as I try to come up with an answer (or a way to change the subject.)
In the end, the way I process conversation is… well, what I’d consider “not normal.”
I’m not sure what normal really is, in the context of conversation, but I feel pretty confident that my mode of thought isn’t the standard definition.
ANALOGIES ARE LIKE BANANAS. PERFECT IN EVERY WAY UNTIL YOU LOOK AT THEM. What you are about to read is my best attempt at articulating the way my mind works, I do apologize if it gets convoluted, or if the analogy is less than stellar.
Imagine a forking path, if you will. When I talk to someone, my head instantly forks anywhere from tens to hundreds of paths, in a split second. Each fork is basically a verbal volley, you say something, and I come up with a response to it.
So in my mind, I’m trying to play out how this conversation could go. I might play it out 1 or 2 steps, or I might play it out 10 or 20 steps.
The reason I do this is because it’s really hard for me to talk on the spot. I need a fairly gratuitous amount of time to process your input, and give my output. The problem is, as I quickly learned, the average person considers this speech lag to be an “awkward pause.” - It turns out people don’t like awkward pauses. It makes the other person feel as though I’m disconnected, disengaged, or otherwise disinterested in the conversation.
To cope with that fact, my mind came up with this forking strategy. I think several steps ahead so I can have a response ready, and I don’t have to pause unnecessarily.
The thing is, while this forking strategy works incredibly well, it requires something that, from what I gather, “normal” conversation does not: a lot of background data on the person. I need to know how you think.
Think of any strategy game: the best strategy is knowing how your opponent is going to move, before they make the move. — In order to play a conversation out in my mind, I need to know how the other half of the conversation is going to go.
I can’t do this unless I already know the person, and I have to know them very well.
So, to those of you that know me, my conversation seems fluid, and natural. But I assure you it’s mentally draining. Socializing is not an easy feat for me, because it requires so much mental effort on my part to maintain a conversation. I’m not just thinking of my half of the conversation, I’m speaking for both of us, and I’m doing it 10s to 100s of times, for every sentence I say.
To summarize, it’s really hard for me to talk to new people because I just… I can’t be them. I can’t get in their shoes, I know nothing about them. Take the 10s to 100s of forks I make, and up that number to about 10s of thousands, or 100s of thousands. I’m sure the human brain could do it, but I haven’t gotten to that level yet, and perhaps I never will.
Since I can’t anticipate the conversation, I tend to just avoid conversation with new people altogether.
Really the only way I can meet a new person is when I have other friends around that can smooth out the lulls in the conversation. Then I’m talking to my friends, and the new person is an innocent bystander in this conversation. I get to learn about them, and they get to learn about me, but it’s not a one-to-one conversation. We’re learning about each others interests through the proxy of our mutual friends.
So - I’m not shy per say, I’m just really bad at holding conversations with people I know nothing about. In turn this has made me shy because I try to avoid meeting new people [by myself] so that I don’t have to deal with the mental stress that comes with socializing.
This in turn has led to me skipping out on parties [with unfamiliar guests.]
It’s also led to lots, and lots of internal conflict about girl troubles.
You see, the accepted practice is: you walk up to a hot girl, small talk with hot girl, get hot girls digits, and go from there.
I can’t do that. The only way I could ever idly chat with the infamous hot girl is if I became great friends with her first. This typically leads to the dreaded “friend zone” though, because it turns out most females, once they’ve befriended someone, do not want want to leave the comforts of that friendship.
In short, I wish the accepted practice was: friends introduce you to hotgirl. You have one or two nights of idle chat with the hot girl [with the accompaniment of your friends], then you befriend hot girl, and then you get to date hot girl.
—
So, in a nutshell, that is my first shortcoming. My shyness which has come about due to my own social shortcomings.
This post actually ended up being a lot longer than I wanted it to be, so I think I’ll leave it at this for now.
I may amend this post, or I may just create a series of these posts.
There are other areas in my life which are getting to me, but this is by far the most personal shortcoming, and to be honest, it seems to be the most insurmountable shortcoming.
Feel free to comment, either by using Tumblr’s fairly limited commenting mechanism, or feel free to send me an e-mail. Whatever floats your boat.
There are several emails I check… the one most likely to get read, though, is still:
applefreak07 [at] gmail dot com. I check this daily, if not hourly.
The new one I’m trying to phase in is:
drbawb [at] fatalsyntax dot com. I check this one daily, because it’s hardly used at all yet.
—
P.S: Just clicked Preview. Wow. You know how I said “This post actually ended up being a lot longer than I wanted it to be”, with italics and everything?
This is way longer than I had planned. With bold, and underline, so you know I’m being super cereal.
Sorry for the long read :I
my legacy
I’ve found my purpose in life: to create the next music enhancer.
First we had graphic equalizers.
Then we had the iTunes Visualizer.
Next we’ll have the Robbob Orchestranator 4000 BC.
My goal is to create a virtual orchestra that plays along with your favorite tracks.
The orchestra will, of course, be fully cusotmizable via slidey-bar-things as well as some push-buttony-things and maybe a few drop down menu selector things.
Also we’ll see if I can convince the Rock Band or Guitar Hero teams to do a 3D virtual orchestra.
The ultimate goal for this project is to take a song like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OVbA4YrWM
And turn it into:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2iHSq9gdZA&feature=related
EXCEPT INSTEAD OF TALENTED HUMANS WE’RE GONNA DO IT THROUGH MATH AND SHIT.
cool date calculation thing
NERD ALERT, NERD ALERT!
Alright, so, you can calculate the day of the week for any given day, month, and year as follows:
k = day m = month + 1 (see note) y = (m <= 10) ? year : year-1 d = y % 100 c = y / 100f = (k + (((13*m) - 1) / 5).floor + d + (d/4).floor + (c/4).floor - (2*c)) % 7
m = 3: March, 4: April, …, 13: January, 14 February. (Basically we pop Jan/Feb to the end. because February likes to screw us over.)
Using this you can quickly find out things like, which months of a given year have Five Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. (e.g: October 2010.)
What’s really interesting though is that if you look at the corresponding months (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_the_day_of_the_week#Corresponding_months
The corresponding months ALSO has five fridays, saturdays, and sundays.
So, for instance, January 2010 ALSO has five fri sat and sundays.
(Or 1999, or 1954, or 2004, or 2010, or the next occurrence in 2021, etc.)
Ain’t that somethin? This holds true for any corresponding months where the first of the month falls on a friday.
Sadly, no months correspond with August, my birth month. So I wrote this loop to check which months just-so-happened to correspond with August for 1900-2300, here’s the algorithm and results:
Interestingly enough, August corresponds with February, but only on leap years!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1902!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1913!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1919!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1924!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 1924!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1930!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1941!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1947!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1952!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 1952!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1958!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1969!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1975!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1980!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 1980!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1986!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 1997!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2003!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2008!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2008!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2014!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2025!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2031!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2036!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2036!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2042!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2053!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2059!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2064!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2064!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2070!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2081!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2087!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2092!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2092!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2098!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2104!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2104!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2110!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2121!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2127!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2132!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2132!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2138!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2149!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2155!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2160!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2160!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2166!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2177!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2183!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2188!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2188!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2194!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2200!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2206!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2217!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2223!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2228!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2228!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2234!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2245!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2251!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2256!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2256!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2262!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2273!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2279!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2284!
february had fivefrisatsuns in 2284!
august had fivefrisatsuns in 2290!
Algorithm:
Aww yeh.
” … here is why it will not work.”
This is the script Microsoft’s Clippy uses to berate your intelligence.
