Sufferance

One thing is consistent over years and years. My level of boredom is correlated with the level of passion (any unequivocal preferences) of the people in my surrounding environment. There must be a business advantage to this at some point.

The best freedom is the absence of concern. To delete attachments to people, material requirements, and culture. Then you get bored, "aha, what a grand life this is, let me help others achieve it," but you will find that they despise this approach. So they cannot be just as free.

The challenge of life for one who is free, is figuring out how to help people without completely pissing them off from the get-go.

Such is life. It is a matter of curiosity.

Every day I look people in the eye and say, I feel your pain.

No I don't. I just want your money.

:)

I don't really need it.

But I want it. It's the nature of the game for this period of my life.

It's interesting how we are all in business for different reasons.

Ultimately I find people predictable. The only thing that seems entertaining is to troll them all by building machines that are smarter than they are... hence my hobbies in that area.

If it feels like a prison, just remember your training.

Said every soldier stuck in a monkey-suit, ever.

A sad and boring day. Attempting to curate some personal development before shutting down, in an effort to be more productive tomorrow.

Calm and Panic; and Training

The most important thing that one can do at the end of every day, is to unlearn every foolish thing - to carefully, and systematically remove it from the part of memory which the brain refers to in moments of panic.

Today, this is going to take a while. Then there is tomorrow.

:)

Compilations

Reading up on GHC, and learning C++ from MIT open-course-ware at the same time. It's an interesting time in life. Studying Haskell was an excellent primer for learning C++, because the former is both more rigorous in abstraction as well as more complex than the latter. The latter is full of exceptions, but otherwise ridiculously simple (like Lego, after all, except that there are shards of metal and explosives here and there). Writing the Hell framework was good training for the complexities of building programs.

Compiler flags. Linking, loading, object code, byte code. Enriching. Wondering if I'm in the right line, after all. To paraphrase pop-culture:

Every motherfucking computer language, on this motherfucking earth, ought to have a motherfucking wiki page, that is as motherfucking concise, as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_syntax

Trying to read up on how they implemented '&' in C. I mean, what's the exact mechanism by which the compiler returns the address of the variable? Lower and lower we go...

What Tires Men

What makes men tire?

Is it the impious consideration of whether it is nobler to kill one human person instead of two, when alternatives do not avail? Not really a hard problem - this is second semester's fare in an undergraduate's academic program. After a while, you don't think too much of pressing the button.

Of late I've spent much time driving. It's a sobering experience, knowing that at any point you have the freedom to hurl a ton of metal at any of a thousand pedestrians. Sobering, but it's not enough to make one squeamish.

The latter is closer to the entertainment of desperate cries for compliance to the multitude of uncontracted obligations that people on the street expect of each other in those graphs they call their lives. Cries many of us grew up drenched in - whiny, tinny, cries for the satisfaction of mediocre aspirations.

I try to find a thought that makes me truly squeamish. As I drive home, a few cars race by at speed. I drive an old, slow car. I wonder, if a person is trapped in a car, just beginning to have its petrol burning on the seats, pinned by a limb. If I had no tools, would I leave them screaming, or would I break their limb, tear through their flesh with fingers and teeth, fight their efforts to claw me off their body, drag their tattered body for life beyond the flames. Have you handled steak? Meat does not yield easily. Now this troubles me.

This makes me tire.

Amidst the worlds that shape our lives, we all have simpler tasks to do. Floors to sweep, bills to pay, mouths to feed, keys to press, notes to takes, etc. Etc. Et al.

A quiet night, makes for rest to return to ploughing. Another night, another day.

Tech is Boring. Long Live Tech.

We're in the middle of the second dot-com boom, and the time in between the first and second booms has given the masses a lot to think about. More than ever, many people are excited about technology, and tech-money, and all the cool shit that passes for content in all the cool forms that pass for media, these days. I'm over-generalising, of course - if I call contemporary content shit, it's just saying that all content ever is shit. At the end of the day, it's just information, pulsing through the meat that we call brains, and the fractals that we call civilisation. What of it? The most interesting thing to me, this evening, is not the tech, or the money, or the people. It's the fact that people are living in a renaissance and many think nothing of it. Take it from a guy who majored in the humanities (because the long arc of art does not find in most men and women beholders concerned). Things are changing really fast right now, I mean, in these few decades. It's not going to change this fast forever. It will slow down. There will be depression. Because humans are inclined to irrational bursts of speed, incurring emotional debt, and paying for it later. Such is life these days. Such is tech. Long live technology. I am just cruising along with it, watching the stars burn through their own meditations. Where to next. We'll find out tomorrow.

TIL: structured, canvassed, suits

"The real reason to buy a good, canvassed suit is for love of dressing well." - which unfortunately for the fashionable, has rarely ever been my state of mind. I guess I don't take much pride in taste. I may have it, or I may not, but it doesn't make me feel good either way... except when I need it to hack someone else's psyche. Even then it's the knowing-when-to-fire-the-fashion-weapon that makes me feel good, not the mere fact that I fired fashion... :-S