actuality.log

Or is that I.

So you see this lady across the street trying to get into her car. Fairly common a sight, until you realize she’s apparently recently been in some sort of accident, and is using crutches to wobble along. Clearly, she needs help with her bags, the annoying dog, the car door, and continuing to not fall through all of this. No you look, smile and approach her offering help (no, I don’t mean kicking the widdle puppy). You then have to face the wrath of her cold “how dare you give me that condescending-pity-filled look, don’t you think I can take care of myself?, just watch me” look.

Or you pretend to not notice and assume that she’s fine and go about your business, and end up facing the wrath of her cold “can’t you see I need help here, what sort of evil self centered bastard are you for not having the basic decency to help a soul in need?” look.

You can never win.

OK, so you’re at this restaurant with this woman and the waitress is ready to take your orders. You, through keen observation, extreme attentiveness and acute memory, know what she orders each time, and go ahead ordering for the two of you. You then have to face the wrath of her cold “how dare you? you control freak, you think you know what’s best for me?” look.

Or you pretend you don’t know what she likes and go about just placing an order for yourself. You end up facing the wrath of her “you’re so fishing inattentive. you have no clue as to what I want, or know my needs. I can’t believe I’m so invisible to you” look.

You can never win.

Or maybe it’s just me.

It was cheese, or the lack of it actually. When I slammed the door (for effect) and stomped out (for effect), I happened to walk past this pizzeria where the guy was just taking this huge pie fresh out of the oven. It was the usual fully cheese covered base with a heart-attack-lovin’ four or five further varieties of cheese generously poured (yes poured, not sprinkled, not grated) on top.

A couple of slices of that and I felt better than ever. I shouldn’t let primary nutrients like bodily cheese content go down to such critically low values. I get all mean and furious for no real reason.

If there is something such as arbitrarily directionless pure anger, I’m experiencing that state right now. Actually, it isn’t as much anger as it is majorly annoyed. And it isn’t as much majorly annoyed as .. no, it’s rage alright.

The weird thing in all of this is I don’t even know what I am angry about. Instead of feeling free and so on considering I am all by myself now, I feel fishing stifled. It’s like I’m trying so damn hard to get some extremely long and quality alone time, but I’m just constantly being hounded. I don’t feel.. free. I don’t feel in control. I am not at peace.

Summer’s over, and things are hectic at the uni, which believe it or not used to help keep me extremely calm. Now, there are these marathon classes in totally weird subjects (being ambiguous because that’s what chickens do) which make me want to.. I don’t really know. I just feel fishing stupid. And even more angry.

The useless computer issues, lack of stability in not-entirely-honestly-procured internet (long story, again being ambiguous because that’s what chickens do), having to check prices in stores, god awful tasting “store-brand” dew, still hurting and damaged nails from the move, perpetually .. ah forget it.

To top this all off, there is some maniac spam bot thinking that (rather useless anyway) shoutbox is a place people come to read advertisements. I’m leaving, if you’re disturbed or some such, probably this should soothe you, in theory.

You have to believe me when I tell you that’s Madras.

There was some left-over cruft from some extension (enigmail to be specific) that Thunderbird thought was installed when it really wasn’t. Cleaned up said cruft, and now I can read e-mail.

You probably already know I am not a big fan of competition. This is especially true for physical competition, sport, where attributes like strength, flexibility and endurance dictate who comes out on top. Since I have my I-detest-sport reputation to upkeep amongst my immediate circle, I had to utilize some extreme stealth during the past few weeks, because I was curious.

So here’s my dirty little secret – I did catch quite a bit of the Olympics.

At points, I was quite excited by what I saw (and I don’t mean the young nubile gymnast sorts doing their thing). I was cheering, I attached myself to some of the participants and rooted for them to win. I felt happy when they did, and almost sad when they failed. Within 10 minutes of seeing a sport I had never known existed prior, I would become some sort of expert and comment on how poorly or well the athlete was doing, in “technical” terms. Now that got me thinking. I seemed to be almost having fun, what was it I really detested? Was it the concept of competition? or the realization that there are various things in this world out there at which there are a ton of people who are insanely better than me.

There are a couple of competing schools of thought in my head, and I always end up picking the “better” one purely as a matter of convenience. On the one hand, you realize competition helps people push boundaries, and gives them clear goals to make themselves better and better at various things. Forget sport, this is entirely valid across most fields. Even something weird like military technology or space exploration. It’s fair enough to believe we’ve made progress at the rate we have in such areas purely because you’re always in competition with your “enemy” to be better (or in this case, too scared to be worse) than them. So when our lil-green-alien friends attack, for instance, we might be ready with the thermo-nuclear war head (or enhanced communication skills to con them into believing we’re a peaceful and harmless race) or whatever it takes to save our behinds. If you’re still not out of sport mode, let’s assume said lil-green-aliens have firepower that moves at (the appropriately convenient rate of) 10 m/s on small ranges. At least, as a result of competition like the Olympics, we will have the Maurice Greens and the Yuliya Nesterenkos who can outrun said bullets and survive to procreate later and repopulate the earth.

All this is nice and all, but I usually lean on the other school of thought, the one that avoids competition and declares it evil. You see, it is just as possible even greater progress could have been made if the bright minds on these “enemy nations” trusted each other and openly shared intelligence. That way, ideally, they’d be no duplication of work and no great ideas would be missed because of stupid trivialities like that country being wiped out in a war. And once you’re smart enough to do what you want, you have little to fear from our lil-green-alien friends. No matter how slow we run, or how unfit we are, or how far we can’t throw a heavy ball-and-chain.

I might not be a big fan of sport, or always understand the subtle nuances of most of them, but I do realize it feels good to win. Being better than someone (or everyone) at something and knowing everyone knows this does tend to make people all warm and fuzzy on the inside, at times. It’s too bad that Phelps can’t represent the uni because he’s pro. It’d have been nice to dominate.

Even if it isn’t you doing anything toward it. Or actually dominating anything.

I have a very strong belief system. Though I consider myself an annoyingly rational person, I also seem to have unexplainably strong faith in things that don’t necessarily fall under the realm of reason. At times, I am oddly superstitious, and I won’t blame you if you find my antics laughable. For obvious reasons (maintaining a serious tone, if it wasn’t obvious enough), I am not getting into those details. As for the things I am willing to admit however, I strongly believe in things like karma.

Now you might think that’s the sort of thing a poor farmer might tell his child after the kid comes running crying to him and tells him how he has to work so hard on the field all day and go hungry, while rich neighbour girl gets to pig out all day and does seemingly nothing toward it. I haven’t been through an analogous circumstance, and no one’s had to make something like this up to pacify me, but I believe in it. I think I sort of like this concept because of the nature of the global governing “balance law” feel. It’s always consequence. You always get what’s coming to you. You’re always the one in control.

Stuff happens. Computers crash, women leave you, planes crash into buildings… . Some good, some quite bad. Some with reason, some without. You’ve got to be able to relax and deal with it. The world’s been good to me. I’ve done nothing particularly of note in return. I haven’t worked toward anything, but at almost every point things have magically fallen in place without reason. And since I don’t like things happening “without reason”, I will make up a pseudo reason and believe in it very strongly if I have to. I attribute it to karma. I must have been exceptionally good to the world at some point, and I’m reaping the benefits. Actually, it’s not entirely true that I don’t work towards things. I just tend to do it in a rather roundabout way. I’m a gentle, kind, nice, generous, understanding person most of the time to the world, and (but only because?) I expect no less in return. You have a tough exam the next day, you could work real hard on some differential equation you’re not going to solve, or you could spend the day helping an illiterate kid take her first steps on her path to literacy, and hope karma does its bit.

People, black rappers mostly, scream things like – “Don’t fish with me because I’ll fish you (I’m guessing in a bad way)” or something. Now I sing “I don’t fish with the system because I don’t plan to be fished by it”. And actually end up doing “I do fish with the system, but only when I’ve reasoned out to myself I have outsmarted it.”

Which unfortunately translates to, when I feel I have karma to burn, I have no real problems in being evil myself. Hey, I’ve done more than enough good to make up for it sort of thing.

You see, it’s easier to believe in an all-controlling-law, when you believe you control it.

My computer is quite screwed up. Currently, it “runs” windows. By which I mean, I can get it to boot without bad-sector-ridden boot floppies. It now hates the internet.

And I thought Windows XP Professional was more networking friendly than the “home” variant. I thought wrong.

The mail client renders its own gui wrong half the time, but fails to read mail off servers properly all the time [Update: For those curious, this is apparently window’s idea of someone checking e-mail]. Visual studio grinds to a halt each time I mistakenly hit “properties” on a source file, and that source file happens to be in fortran. McAfee prevents clean shut downs and causes an infinite “hang” state. McAfee also conflicts with DLA and the “windows installer” preventing me from removing or installing any software. McAfee also prevents itself from being disabled anywhere. I guess if you don’t have any software, you can’t really have a virus? Intel things like to install themselves in “My Pictures” no matter where I ask them to go. I have no codecs and can see/hear very little of my media. Windows attempts to update drivers for all devices on my machine by itself, but doesn’t know how to do it, so it complains. It then complains when I disable “auto-go-ahead-and-screw-everything-up-myself” mode.

Of course, since it wiped out my MBR and I lost my boot floppy to bad clusters, I’m burning a distribution install disc to see if it is smart enough to get me out of this hell hole and to a place where I can work.

And play.

Deviating to some informatively non-negative news. Though delineate‘s interface looks rather simple, the backend data holding and classifying scheme is quite capable, and complicated. I am currently figuring out how to unleash these features on to the page without cluttering it. What am I talking about you ask?

For instance. Hmm.. if you’ve seen the permanent links for the current images, they look like so: domain/shoebox/picture-title/. Now I picked “shoebox” specifically to give it an unclassified feel. I mean, you randomly dump old photos in a shoebox right?

But that’s not the only way of accessing images on delineate. Consider for instance, domain/genus/flowers. Sweet huh? (Yeah, it renders funnily on IE, but will be fixed before the official release of such things.) Internally, images hold some meta information related to their content, so such nifty look ups are easy. There are a bunch of other things like this which will be fun (and probably necessary) once the number of images grow.

I’ll leak said features a lil’ bit at a time.