Last night I was finally able to catch The Silence of the Lambs, a film I’ve never seen but has been recommended over the years. I must say, it was interesting. The character of Hannibal Lector is facininating, although I don’t condone cannibalism lol.

Lector is recognisably adjusted to his confinement, or should we say, I can understand how it feels to spend so much time with the same four walls, that detail is the spice of life. The thing that really piqued my interest however, is how sharp a mind Hannibal Lector appeared to have. Almost makes me wonder, what I would be like if I was that far off my nut o/. Seriously though, who eats people!? While the subject matter is kind of disturbing, I’m not easily disturbed. The application of a strong mind, is well used in the service of others: even if that is by the catching of criminals. Problem solving is always as interesting, as the challenge to solve it.

Interestingly, my train of thought was almost dead on accurate about how Lector escaped. It was when they opened the hatch on the lift, that my gut feeling really cliqued into place :-D.

Since the film was based on a book, I’m obviously curious whether or not the library has it, which they do. Even more curiously, looking it up on the ‘net shows that it is actually the second of four books, and the library only has the last three :-(. Alas, nothing is perfect.

While I do generally like horror films, if they are able to maintain my interest, or entertain my wit (rare), the former never scare me and I rarely watch them  :-/. The only film to come close to disturbing me, I guess, was 2006s Silent Hill—which only bugs me in the sense that I feel its very graphic violence is done in rather poor taste. I’ve seen worse, lol.

Spent most of Halloween passing time in Visual Studio (barf), until The Walking Dead premièred, the show was an awesome start. I especially liked near the end when the sheriff turns a corner in Atlanta, and the street is wall to wall zombies. Can’t wait for the next episode on Sunday :-D.

Also there was some what of a blessing in the making. Friends of the family were cleaning out their garage and getting rid of a lot of stuff, including some bicycles that have been sitting around for years. After the walking dead, I was studying the mechanics of how they work (quite simply) while watching Poltergeist for the first time on TV. Today, my main focus has been on fixing those up in order to get one ready for riding.

The real issue, is I never learned how to ride a bike lol.

Been rather busy of sorts. Times been intermixed between matters of philosophy, you could say; and a small web related gig. I must admit, it is fun to see just how fast my brain can slurp up a large web framework.

That is something that kind of separates people like me, from the average user. We have a sort of “Web fu“, that lets us quickly gather tons of information. It goes beyond that though, deeper into all sorts of information sources. You should picture Sherlock Holmes explaining what a glance at a customer tells him lol.

If we can think about it, there isn’t much my sort of geek can’t figure out, given enough time and resources; each of which create an interesting expression of how long it takes to figure something out.

Now if only I had time to study rocket science!

I knew I should have stayed in bed this morning

Well, I’ve about had it for the day. The one goal I’ve had was to shave and get cleaned up, her royal pain decided to go shopping before her job interview, so that was delayed. To top it off while passing the time with my laptop, waiting for her to get back from the interview; I found an error in the systems git package.

When leaving, we was pulling out of a very tight space and this little piece of plastic sticking out of the bumper caught on the neighbouring car. It left a small ~1″ scratch on the other cars fender and took off most of ma’s bumper. The fords front bumper has been hanging by a thread for over a decade with a large gash and shards sticking out, because when it was smashed up back in Florida by someone that ran a red light, my mother didn’t spend any of the insurance money on fixing her bumper lol.

Waited for the owner of the other car and apologized for the scratch, she didn’t care but took ma’s insurance information and gave us her name/number just in case. Unlike some people in my family, I hold myself responsible for my mistakes; some people just drive off. If I fuck up, I admit it.

Tending to the family ford wasn’t much problem, the bumper is just like 3mm of painted plastic with a strip of hardened rubber glued on the front. Borrowed a scissor for cutting off the rubber link and adjusted the straps to keep the bumper hanging. Ma has had it hanging half off in one corner for years with plastic cords hooking it to the hood anyway.

Afterwards my mother asked if I thought I should still have my license after this, and I told her that I’ve seen her do much worse herself, and reminded her that she has been driving for over 40 years; by contrast I only started driving about 10 months ago. Actually now that I think of it, I haven’t even been driving for 10 months, because ma pissed away like January through May or April before she even let me drive the fucking car <_<.

As to what sort of things she has done over the years, in fact, if you search through my journal far enough, you’ll find a record of ma smashing the rear bumper in the grocery store parking lot, and just driving off illegally. Now how is that for being a responsible senior citizen?

God’s Gonna Cut You Down

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down

Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler,
The gambler,
The back biter
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down

Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news
My head’s been wet with the midnight dew
I’ve been down on bended knee talkin’ to the man from Galilee
He spoke to me in the voice so sweet
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet
He called my name and my heart stood still
When he said, “John go do My will!”

Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler,
The gambler,
The back biter
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down

Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down

Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler,
The gambler,
The back biter
Tell ’em that God’s Gonna Cut You Down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut you down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut you down

God’s Gonna Cut You Down—Johnny Cash

I think this is my theme song for the year.

Random codeness

Been contemplating about a few things, that are arguably, the programmers equivalent to several mortal sins. One of these involves standardising my world around a given language setup. Yes, choosing the best tools for the job rather than the same tools can sometimes be troublesome.

The languages I’m considering, are C++ and C#. Python would be a good candidate except that I’ve waay to many lines of Python over the years lol. Behind the C++ factor, is simply put, Richard Gabriel was correct when he said “The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++”. Frankly programming in C++ is a bitch. It’s not so much the language, which has plenty of warts, as it is building projects causes headaches. Most of which is a mixture of complexity and the inability of people to manage that complexity before shipping it. The other factor, being C#. I’ve come to rather like C#, because it takes the best part of languages like Java, i.e. using bytecode rather than native code, but unlike Java 6, C# 3 and up is actually a modern fucking language. Java can kiss my rebel dick. It’s retarded.

C++ gives painless (as possible) support to C code, while adding some goodies: automatic ctor/dtor invocation, formal namespace schematics, semi-generic data structures, and often disabled or unused support for exceptions and runtime type information. There are also a lot of libraries written in C++, that are less than easy to use in other languages; the fact that many are often less than easy to use in C++, is aside from the point obviously ^_^.

C# is more convenient than C++, because of a more modern syntax (Java can really fuck a duck for all the modernness of it), and because it has the ultimate in language killers, which C++ lacks—A big fucking library. Where as C++ provides stream based I/O, container based data structures, and not much else beyond your systems C library. C# has a large cross-language class library, which essentially throws networking, XML, basic graphics on top of that, and a much more portable interface to system stuff, like Process class and the file system code.

That is the big killer: libraries that are easily incorporated. C++ lacks that. In fact, about the closest you can get is throwing in Boost, POCO, Qt, or Wx. Plus a few other odds and ends.

C# is a much more pleasant language to work in and takes the pain out of compiling projects, because it really can’t get much harder than which defines to set and which files to compile into what. Something that life would be fucking great if C++ could say the same, even on a single platform group. Unlike Java, it’s also possible to build C# projects promptly and trivially combine code with many other languages.

C++ however has a much wider range of libraries readily available without needing glue code, if one can stand the bitch and a half of making them work o/.

I decidedly prefer Qt over GTK, and wish it’s third party language bindings were better, outside of Pythons o/

When there’s long stretches between entries, that is when I flush thoughts to my journal; there’s usually one of three causes. Either I’m to busy to breath, hitting rock bottom, or both. Looking at my posting records over the last four years, this seems to be fairly consistent o/

It’s been a bit busy lately, I’m very tired right now. Friday a friend figured out a way that I can get around my mothers’ communications block sufficiently, so I spent most of today (well, technically yesterday in another 30mins lol) filling out another round of job applications. Somehow, I think that I’ve learned that GOD and friends make better obstacle removers, and family better obstacle creators.

With a little tweaking to get my laptop into the loop, I should now be independent of ma’s phone systems, and thus her control over that aspect of things. The past couple weeks have been rather lax, largely because of losing the commu’ block. I can apply all I want, but a lot of good that would do if any calls back get routed to /dev/null, now does it? Using this new setup, I’m free of that delema. Finally!

Family may as well be the most vocal proponents in favour of the idea that I’m a useless bastard worth less than the lump of flesh in front of my computer, yet also tends to be the most obstinate bunch about helping improve life’s situation rather than hindering my plans.

Really, it is annoying. How people can act saintly and blameless as a white sheet while dangling the knife they’ve been stabbing with, and do it in such a way they can fain innocence. At least, that’s what it looks like. Yeah, I believe 0+6 can be > 0, don’t you? Not.

Hurt

Somehow, this really makes me think about the life of Johnny Cash.

I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
the only thing that’s real
the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but I remember everything
what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
upon my liar’s chair
full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
beneath the stains of time
the feelings disappear
you are someone else
I am still right here

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

I will let you down
I will make you hurt

if I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Hurt—Johnny Cash