An orange in an apple orchard
Somehow it figures, that for a rare change where I’m feeling good about a piece of news…. Friends and peers have congratulations and wishes for good luck, my mother on the other hand treats me like an ass and resorts to the evil eye!
I learned a long time ago, no matter what it is, if I want to be happy about something, it is better if my mother hears it last rather than first but when will I learn to implement that?
Somehow it fits, that I was having a rather pleasant yet unpleasant sort of dream this morning, got up with an uneasy feeling, and was soon vindicated in having one, lol.
In going to uncover the car this morning, I noticed something plastic in front of the car, gave my usual sigh about how everyone here but me seems to litter o/. In pulling the cover off the car, the bloody thing wouldn’t come off, for some reason it was stuck on the drivers side view mirror. I saw it had ripped open the car cover, that’s happened before (the covers are shit) but I wasn’t pulling that hard, and usually that only happens after a good freeze.
Then I saw the whole fucking side view mirror was hanging by it’s electrical wire with the mirror plate missing! My first thought was how the hell can a car cover break a side view mirror into pieces? Seriously, the material the car cover is made out of, is almost paper thin, lol. Car covers ready to break a hole at the bounce of a dime don’t break Side view mirrors, side view mirrors break miserable excuses for car covers, not the other way ’round! The damage to the body of the side view mirror was ludicrous, like it got a hard mashing the other corner, not like it got pulled off by the cover. If it had been done by the cover, I would also have *heard* it quite loudly, there was that much plastic shattered off of it.
What made me suspicious however was every thing about the mirror. Under the car were several shards of plastic from the mirrors support and frame; sufficiently covered in water and sediment, that I’ll eat my hat if those things had just landed there. They looked as if they had been there for hours. The real clincher however was the mirror itself: after putting the cover away in the boot, on a hunch, I walked around to the front end and picked up the plastic thing I saw coming down the walk way. Sure enough, it was the side view mirrors plate with the mirror, broken into several pieces, face down, and equally dampened with mud.
All evidence points to someone knocking it off, and conveniently it was the parking space right next to it that was empty this morning. Don’t you just love Georgia drivers?
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!
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?
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 downGo 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 downWell 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 downYou 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 downWell 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 lightYou 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 downGo 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 downGod’s Gonna Cut You Down—Johnny Cash
I think this is my theme song for the year.
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/