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You know, I actually forgot how much I hated PHP. C love it, C++ can take it, Python is great, Ruby is fun, Perl is handy, LISP just RTFM, Java is livable as long as CTS doesn’t set in. But PHP is just a pain in my neck.

Between the days volley’s and having to tinker with modules written in PHP, I think it’s time for some shut eye before I pass out lol. Now if the dog hadn’t stolen all of the covers already…

With luck I can finish the module tomorrow and get a start on my homework this weekend. A few days off should really help me if I don’t lose any marbles in the process.

I figure, exercise, shave, shower, and hit the books. Weekends actually about the one time of the week I have *room* in my own room to exercise with out being crowed out for storage :

2 Minutes on press ups, 2 minutes to catch a breath, then 2 Minutes on crunches works quite well. If it was possible without being hounded by dogs wanting to go and crazy Georgian drivers that would hit me, I’d add a few miles run to the mix but oh well…

Not fond of exercise by any means (especially crunches!) but its comforting to know my body will hold up to it. I could probably survive the calisthenics fair enough if I ever ended up in basic but BUD/S would be a killer… Physically fit bastards lol.

Would be great to find some way of getting running into the mix. When I used to be a couch potato I could run like a bat out of hell. When I had to do some thing outside ‘tween the commercial breaks; I’d be to the other end of the complex and back with the mail before one commercial had passed hehe. Since I stopped watching a lot of TV these past few years that endurance just isn’t there any more and I fade out after tens of metres with ankles that won’t cooperate :

Well, I suppose that would make a good set of goals for the year. Get back in running shape and be able to pass through my exercise routine with ease. It’s not really hard, not as hard as I used to think and it is easier without a girl sitting on your back lol.

And compared to what the Navy SEALs go through, that’s a bloody cake walk.

My sister in law finally got the papers, her and my brother are now legally divorced after over 8 years of marriage.

Well, what can I say? He’s an asshole lol.

His say’s he doesn’t want to be miserable for the next twenty years, far enough… If you ask me they had enough years before hand for him to figure that one out. So after moving *both* of them into his best [also female] friends place he threw her out flat a month later. Which means Ma is stuck on the couch because they gave up the apartment first :.

I remember when we first heard they were moving in there, Ma threw them both out of the house instantly. Everyone knew it was going to be a bad idea but my Sister [in-law] was willing to try and make things work, my Brother OTOH wasn’t.

And now they are going to soon be three-way arguing over the photo album with my Mother leading the charge from the sounds of things. I know better then to get involved, even if my “neutral as Switzerland” approach to family wars is often disregarded by all participants… I do hope he gets to keep some of the pictures, for Pete’s sake. I doubt he should get much more then the car personally (it’s in her name, not his) but how could you argue over the photo album !?

What can I say.. My family is the kind that cuts deep, then sucks out the blood. That’s the world in which I live. A scene comes to mind, I saw the end of “From Dusk Till Dawn” last week when I was waiting for the next movie to start. In the end battle some one was being chewed on by about ten or twelve vampires… That is what comes to my mind.

I some times wonder what branch I came from because that is not my way. I only intentionally return in kind when I know nothing else will bring them to relent’ment. My ability for anger is limited to all of the about 10 seconds it takes for me to calm down. Unlike my family, I learned to control my temper quite well and to deal with it without hurting others. No wonder we’re known for loud mouths and hot heads so to speak lol.

It’s a shame but it’s his life, when the other woman bleeds him dry I guess he’ll learn better. I remember when I was a child, I used to count the periods of family in-fighting by ‘world war’ starting with IV, lost count many years back around IX or so.

Do we begin to dissolve bit by bit? Or is it just another fragment in a long war.

Some times I wonder if I honestly care any more.

I don’t think that GOD made people this way, we learned it on our own. As the world around us damages us bit by bit, they don’t know any better. So they cut the other deeply with the words, and suck dry the blood that flows.

I know if I ever get out of here, I pray to look back at it as a memory and nothing more. I don’t want to bring that mentality to a new generation… I’m not like the rest of my family but they are still my family, each of them and I love them.

*mutters*

finally some peace and quite..

all but barricaded here since the laundry racks full most of the room. But people have finally let me be, it’s nice to be able to hear myself think again. Possibly I think to much but it is about the only real freedom I have in life next to the right to have my own opinion.

When the house is so loud you can’t even hear the freaking radio without maxing out the volume you know you have a problem! And I normally wear headphones so as not to disturb people.

Humbug.. figures that the second I open my mouth they start again.

Oh what fun it would be to just get out and go to the beach, damn it I haven’t been to one in years.. I really miss Florida some days, not the heat but other things. It was home for half of my life, I still consider myself a [displaced] Floridian at heart.

Hmm, maybe with a little luck people will STFU in a few hours and I can concentrate on getting stuff done if this headache subsides. On a normal day I can here them from upwards of 10-15 metres outside.. So it’s still loud in my room. At this rate I’m going to have to sort out a very loud playlist soon and skip the radio :

A good nights sleep, no family-included headache, and a trip to the beach — my idea of vacation.

Hmm, todo list:

1. Add compress level handling for gz/bz2’d tarballs to mak and a –pass-args switch
2. Finish that doc for Gerard
3. Finish converting/updating/rewriting SOPs for SAS
4. Some work on NPM would be nice — overdue * 2¹⁰
5. Still need to port the next chapter of my book to TeX source

I wonder which will hit me first and what if any thing will actually get done in this rats-nest before the clock strikes 2300. Hell… Even if I enlisted at least I’d be waking up by 0430 for BCT rather then going to *bed* at 0530 for Pete’s sake!.

Can’t even get **** done in my own home… Unless I’m the only moron awake.

Oy’

I was up to almost 0600 in the morning and I was chuckling because my sister was waking up for work — 1000 in the morning comes around and BAM.

Ma wakes me up to talk to Epson tech support 8=)

Oh well, with luck I’ll still have 45 minutes before I’ve got to get ready…

Supplemental:

What pipe was I smoking? Trying to get any thing done here during daylight, let along pre-work time scales my productivity to -1000% :@

Not much of any thing got done today but I have been able to concentrate a bit more on matters of a linguistic flavor.

One thing that I do like about trying to translate texts between German and English is the challenge of it. For the less obvious parts I can generally use a dictionary to split a sentence apart into its words and gather an approximate meaning from it’s context. And even if I do manage to figure it out in my head, to try and express my understanding of it in English adds another level to it. Oddly enough, some times it is easier to understand without trying to repeat in English [as if to explain to another] but I enjoy the effort of it to some extent.

I spent some time for my studies but I’m afraid that I’ll never make much headway towards proper comprehension *without* having a dictionary handy… The cost of not speaking a language fluently I suppose. But where I live, it is quite simply you speak either English or Spanish and if you know both, much the better.

Often when I am thinking or speaking, if I know how to express it in Deutsch my mind mentally sub-titles it with the sounds and words. An attempt to form word-associations (German word -> known object/thing) and keep the sounds from drifting to far out of memory.

The spelling is not to hard, although I’m generally paranoid about it. With English, even if I can’t spell the word to save my life I can generally approximate either the spelling or the sound well enough — as long as I’m not using a pencil or pen xD.

The difference is, I have enough grasp of English to fudge the spellings without [unintentionally] changing the meanings. Any way you slice it, short of the Bart Simpson method I doubt I’ll ever fully be able to express myself verbally in German… In time perhaps I will be able to do so sufficiently in written form.

Although, I admit it is probably a darn good thing that beyond a keyboard I don’t write things in German. With my ‘chicken scratch’ I don’t think I would ever recover from it laugh out loud. A mild curse of using a keyboard at a typing pace which matches how quickly I can think words; the slow-downs are caused my brain keeping pace with my fingers, rarely if ever the other way around… When you start trying to use a pen/pencil to write things afther that it can get very messy. In my case, often around pauses caused by my hands falling to far out of sync with my mind or smudgification around typographical errors while I remember pens lack both the ability to insert words between words the way text editors can and there is no backspace key, only white-out ^_^

Is it a wonder almost all of my documents are written in Vim? I can’t read my handwriting two weeks later if it’s more then a few bits. The sad thing, before 40-60+ hours a week behind a keyboard became a norm for me, I used to have better handwriting then most people I’ve met but twice as bad spelling hahaha !!!

And even with how dilapidated my hand writing has become through computing, it is still clearer and more concise then my teachers handwritting :, hey at least mine can be legible if I paid attention <_<.

Spent some time to night to journal my thought, a brain dump if you will. To place my mind at a computational ease and to execute a back trace upon which to unravel the stack until some sense be made clear.

If I post it here for future reference, it will probably be fed through a caeser cipher with a rotation only those close to me could guess without brute forcing, just enough technological gain over LJ’s privacy controls to out-fox those who would read over my shoulder. I have a little less distinction then most others do between the public, personal, and private separation of things in so far as my life is largely an open book while I remain a skillful one at holding the secrets I have been entrusted within my life time and maintaining operational security for the things that I need secured. Wile yet remaining quite open about myself, as I have almost nothing to hide.

So the issue of posting it with what ever settings is mostly inrelivent because any harm that could be caused by allowing it to be read, would be by those that the task of decoding would be beyond their ability while no security measure available to avoid such a viewing regardless of posting options if it was not to be encoded.

And the closest of my friends generally know of what it would contain, although few among the living know from what rotations I would chose when selecting the key to a Caeser Cipher.

And I look forward to tomorrow, because I will hopefully have the time to play with upgrading the test machine in ways most definitely not supposed or intended by the systems designers hehe.

For now, I need some sleep and I suppose I can forget about the ~/brain-dump.backtrace file for now. I suspect odds are in the future I will add more to it,

 wc brain-dump.backtrace
#    lines  words  bytes file
     225    2344   12081 brain-dump.backtrace

MIT Fights for Clean Power With Holy Grail of Fusion in Reach

This article is quite interesting for me, maybe I’m an old ‘Mech head at heart but I think a practical and eventually miniaturized fusion power source is the real block on some day seeing a real ‘Mech walking about. Well, that and about 20 Billion dollars a year to develop the rest of the hardware and software environment xD.

And to top it off, there research seems to be putting the concepts used in tokamaks to work. Man I ain’t heard hide nor hair of one in ages..

Who knows, maybe in 70-150 years the power problem will be solved, if there’s still a planet left.. Either way I probably won’t live to see it but hey, a lad can dream. If a practical fusion reactor could be developed and put to propulsive uses without needing a capitol ship or any thing else huge to do it, oh baby would that open a few doors to what we could do. But what ever comes up over the next few decades, will still probably be to large to be very portable :

Ahh some time to rest I hope.

Bumped the chair into the roof moving it from the living room to mybedroom… woke ma up which got me sent out to cover the car, which woke up the dogs lol.

It’s only 35 degrees Fahrenheit out (~1.6 Celsius) even with the wind chill so it’s not to bad, just breezy. Call me strange but I’m out in a T-Shirt lol –> Born in Florida I love the cold weather xD.

With a little luck maybe I can get some rest. I know Willow is pissed that it’s to cold to go outside (lucky for me). Hopefully I can catch the rest of Jumanji snd get a bit of work done before any one else wakes up…

:

I sit here trying to concentrate on getting stuff done. I can hear the mutterings of my family behind my back, in both in the idiomatic and physical sense since my back is to the wall which is in front of them. Some how I find the song that is playing in Amarok interestingly a stroke of semi-logic.

The muse to my productivity, hell 13 hours today complete the work I started the day before yesterday — it’s like being at the zoo ! Is it a wonder I may be awake till dawn to complete my endeavours?

And of issues they wish… To release me from my chains only so long as to shackle me anew to another post with stronger bindings. An effort I resist, if I’m made to suffer I will not sacrifice my entirety that others may lounge. It’s of my opinion that if you fail to plan a head, you best be prepared to weep the whirlwind that shall follow…

My mother got a torn stuck in her foot that was tracked in, do I hesitate to help? No, instead I do what I can.. Including tracking down the teasers. I’m not a cruel person by the soul, although I have more then a few brutal bones… The only time I aim to hurt others with my words is when I know from [to much] trial and error that it is all they will understand, or worse all that will keep them from striking at my spirit further.

When there’s trouble, I run, whether I think aid is deserved or not. But I will only go so far.. While I might pull a thorn, I’m not about to go as far as mental seppuku over her lack of planning.

I will not have my future bared from me until I am unable to pursue it further, I struggle enough to reach it now. I seek the opposite path then the one they bid me to take. The one that leads me to a chance, a chance to see my hopes realized, myself validated. To some day walk a free man among my peers with my head held high, that only GOD may choose for me and no other without my consent.

There is a poem that I came across in my web travels awhile back. I think it explains things all to well as I feel them.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

–Constantine P. Cavafy (1896)

In retrospect those words should be required reading in American Schools much like a few others are already. Hmm, what was it that dear Mr Jefferson helped to pen?

“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

About the only right I have freedom to exercise here is my right to life, my right to choose and I will not relinquish it.

My soul belongs to the LORD, to no one else.

oy it’s been a hazardous day :

Sick of laying around, sick of jumping around!

Finally finished my effort to convert the new RoE SOP to LaTeX. The main reason is that I can generate us a crap load of formats out of it and keep the source easy enough for most people to update even without my skillset. I packed it up in a ZIP and sent it to En4cer. I think after adding my sig to the SOP it is supposed to be official going by the finalized En4cer sent but until I hear about it. I’m keeping the files under my hat as far as those outside the SNCO project are concerned.

I must admit I am some what disappointed with the SOP Rewrites, don’t get me wrong its great material. It’s just the issue of workload balancing and time, sheesh man this stuff should’ve been done before I was even a Cpl… Let along sitting on my desk when I was made RSM.

LaTeX is a really good format, it’s pretty easy for every one to edit with a minimal understanding of it. And for some one like me it can become a very valuable tool. I’ve long since gave up on word processors, it’s like the worst idea in typesetting history if you ask me. I think half the bloody books I’ve read were probably passed through TeX / PostScript sooner or later in printing any way.

With my great dissatisfaction with word processing at the WYSIWYG level because it is such false advertising when you share files ^_^ and the crappy selection of portable formats. I eventually took to using XHTML/CSS for documents to be printed.. I’m fluent in XHTML but still it adds overhead to editing. LaTeX on the other hand, the learning curve is there for the sake of learning how to do XYZ when it pops up but it makes editing documents much easier.

Using Microsoft Word was harder then LaTeX haha and tables in LaTeX feel a little less pesky then they have always felt to me in XHTML. I think though one of my fundamental problems is that I’m linguistically diverse by nature.

I’m also some one that likes to work with data in comfort without having to worry about layout on other peoples system. That is one reason I tend to include a PDF version of all of my documents, at least that one will look proper lol.