Taren's Journal
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Taren Nauxen" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
12:18 am
[Link] |
Last Day! / Nostalgia Time
Today was my last day at my internship! It is a good and a bad thing. Good things: frees up about 800% more time to do other things. Less money spent on transportation. Bad things: lack of income, and that (albeit small) sense of accomplishment and recognition.
My manager took me out to a pub for lunch and I got a cheeseburger and we talked about shit like the weather, gambling, manly crap like that. I could tell that I had been a valuable asset to their team. Glad to know that option is always open for next summer if I'm still a starving college student. Who knows!
Yeah, yeah, I said I hated it, but once you're out, it's a different perspective, you know? I'm an asshole; I can flip-flop like that.
Here's a little bonus for you all: I was being vain, as usual, and googled my name. After sifting through all the LJ bullshit, I found this little gem: http://www.lastfm.ru/music/Taren+Nauxen
Apparently somebody managed to download my garbage off of mp3.com back when it was still alive, and it turned up in somebody's playlists years later. That's really cool. So, I thought to myself, do I even still have that junk? Sure enough, I do. I had put together an "album" (hahahaha) of the stuff I threw together on my keyboard at home one summer. A while back, I really wanted to try being a musician. Music is math, and I'm good at math, so necessarily I'd be good at music, right? Wrooooong.
Here's some stuff from July 2000: "Alpha Initial". Dunno where the cover art is. It was pretty crappy anyway.
There are 9 or 10 tracks on the "album" and it's pretty awful stuff. Music theory? What's that? The Ambience series was completely improvised, and it's pretty obvious. It's not too bad if you don't pay attention to the dissonant chords and such.
But if you check out the "Project" series, they're actually listenable, probably because they're all written in Acid with loops and samples. Some of the stuff is in low bitrate 'cause I was on dialup (read: AOL 4.0) at the time. Whoops!
Not-so-subtle musical influences at the time: Nobuo Uematsu, Brian Eno, Cowboy Bebop. CB is only really noticeable in Project22. #7 turned into #12, which eventually got turned into #31, for which I made a partially completed (and never released) DDR stepchart, called "FKAP31". It's not pretty. Stuff like that doesn't lend itself well to music written in 13/8 time.
Either way, god-bless my parents for encouraging me to try out new things. I really wanted a synth for my birthday, so I got it, and was too overwhelmed by it to do anything. It was a Casio CTK-731. I'm surprised I remember that. I was too fascinated by obscure time signatures to be bothered with learning actual fundamentals of music! So music didn't really pan out for me.
Bonus 2:
 | Holy SHIT I can't believe I found this again. It's an old old old old old (did I mention old?) picture I had "commissioned" back in the day of Taren. This picture is from September 1999, and done by Aido Rakaen. If anyone can find the original I'll give you a dollar. This is such an amazing picture, I can't believe I was such a douche about getting free art back in the day. I wonder if she still has the original? Would anybody happen to be in contact with her? |
OH WE'RE JUST GOING DOWN NOSTALGIA LANE, AREN'T WE. Now all I need is to find that picture of me with long hair from 7th grade.
P.S.: mp3.com still owes me the 16 cents I earned from having listeners.
|
|
10:22 pm
[Link] |
Genie Paradox
I don't know if this has been done before, but here goes:
Suppose you have a magical genie that grants wishes, and you have one wish. The genie must grant this wish, the wish must be made immediately, and you may not wish for more wishes.
What happens if you wish to make your wish at a later point in time?
|
|
07:12 pm
[Link] |
Blah.
Today went pretty well but ended on a sour note. I got out a little late, but that's not that big of a deal. When I got out to my car I had a nice love letter (read: warning notice) from the police. "Blah blah blah out of state registration" I got this letter last year too. They just want my money, but I'm exempt on account of being a student. What I didn't realize was that "apparently" "Scottsdale Enforcement" encompasses part of Phoenix, and they have the right to enforce on business property. Well, I did get the other one at the apartments last year.
It's a little unnerving to see a paper from the police on your car after work, even if it has no consequence. Buh.
Went to a bank on the way home (which apparently wasn't listed on Chase's website on account of being "too convenient" I suppose) and got part of my account nonsense taken care of. Have to do the other shit in person.
After I filled up, I had to box up a head to get shipped out, and the ONLY post office open past five is halfway across Tempe. THANKS FOR BEING CONVENIENT. I had to waste a good portion of that time looking for something to mask the FedEx labels on the damn thing. So I get out the door with about nine minutes to spare, it's rush hour, and I hit two red lights in a row. Noooot gonna happen.
What is it with these places and having the most ridiculous hours? Post offices and banks are only open when you're not available unless you're A) unemployed, or B) starving yourself lunch. Sure, there's Saturday but that's a privilege, and they have teeny weeny hours. Sundays are strictly forbidden. I can understand postal employees having some obnoxious labor union or government red tape prohibiting them from doing anything constructive, but banks? Serious business? Give me a break. What we need are banks and PO's open at different times. Have some PO's open early in the morning, and some late at night. Instead of ALL of them being 8-5, have some be 6-2 and some be 12-10. IS IT REALLY THAT DIFFICULT PEOPLE.
Shoot, that wouldn't work because of package pickups and stuff. Augh, just invent teleportation already and obsolete the postal system.
Never mind this, I just had to vent a little. Everything's fine. He'll just get the head a day later, and the bank can wait until Saturday. Whatever.
|
06:46 am
[Link] |
can you spot the difference
one of these things just isn't like the others
one of these things just doesn't belong
can you figure out which isn't like the others
before i finish this song
|
|
11:07 pm
[Link] |
hey this is pretty cool
I am now a maintainer of the ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) bm_iidx community! What a pleasant surprise. I thought it was an April Fool's joke, but he just messaged me on VJA about it. e-fame UP!
mochusgarcias al rmz! I feel pretty.
|
10:21 pm
[Link] |
Awesome
Today's Entry in Easy-To-Digest Picture Format
Now with 80% more pictures!
 | Finished my digitgrade body suit pattern. | | Went to a Cubs game last night!
Astute readers may have already noted this. |
Three days left at work, excellent. They're going to go by fast. Tomorrow I've got a meeting at 2pm, where I get to talk about the stuff I've worked on. Thursday I have back-to-back phone meetings, one of which I'll probably sleep through. Phone meetings suck, especially when you're with other people. If you're alone, you can space out and nobody notices. When other people are there, you gotta look the part too. It's awful. Distorted telephone voices make me sleepy, too.
The second meeting on Thursday is the all-interns meeting, which suuuucks. It's broadcast over the phone so the speaker is usually nowhere near the mic, and the online chatroom is full of snotty undergrads asking what certain acronyms stand for. And every so often you get to hear somebody fat-fingering their keypad because they can't figure out how to mute their line, hahaha.
After that it's Friiiiday. We're thinking about hitting up a casino in the next couple of days. There's one about 5-10 minutes from our house. THIS PLACE HAS EVERYTHING.
|
|
11:41 pm
[Link] |
Quotes of the Day
"I'll be adding that to your final review: was able to help knock potato chips loose from vending machine. Easy bonus points!"
My manager was buying chips from a vending machine at work and they got stuck. He bought a second bag, but that ghetto broken Doritos bag kept blocking it. I told him, "hold up," and threw myself at the machine, dislodging the chips. Easy bonus points indeed.
"Augh, save it for Hannah Montana. Christ!"
In response to some really annoying middle-school girls shrieking at the Cubs game tonight. Cheer on your team, whatever, but when it's the same, high-pitched chant over and over, at the most inappropriate times, I was beginning to hope for a ball to zoom in and cream the bitch.
"For each step, there is a factor S = secant(T) where T is the angle formed by your crotch divided by two. Actually, it could be simplified, but I just wanted to use an obscure trigonometric function and the word 'crotch' in the same sentence."
The formula really did work out, too. I would post the formula here if anyone actually cared.
Anyway, for those of you who can't read, or simply don't want to, here's a funny picture.
|
|
11:19 pm
[Link] |
Memory Card lols
I have a Memory Stick Pro for my Sony camera, and I've been having some issues with it. Every so often, I would notice that pictures were missing. I thought I was crazy, and it only happened a few times.
Well, today Sema took some pictures of a suit we're doing for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kijani_lion, handed me the camera to upload them, and the pictures were gone, along with several other pictures and videos. Windows didn't detect any file system errors (like it would) and they didn't even appear as corrupted files- just gone.
What would be causing this, and what should I do about it? I'm thinking it might be because I pull the card out of my computer's reader while it's still blinking, but I do that all the time and this never happens. In this case, files were lost before they even touched a computer.
If this isn't a dead giveaway I don't know what is: the size of all visible files is 40MB, but the Properties tab says it's using 250MB. Hurrrr. I think I'm going to format it, which should take care of the space issues. But will this happen again?
-------
http://superwailingbonus.com/passion06/image/18408/DSC06617
Here's that tower of water I was talking about.
We have enough water to survive the apocalypse.
|
08:54 pm
[Link] |
yo superman
What an interesting weekend.
Calling all Freudians: what do my dreams mean?
On caturday, I dreamed that I was on my way to RainFurrest. The flight was going great until for some reason the plane began to lose altitude. I was talking on my cell phone to tabbicus as the plane dropped. It was pretty scary, but I was convinced my phone call would wind up on YouTube, so I was laughing. It crashed into Portland, Oregon, and simply skidded across a large open area. Everyone survived, but the plane was trashed. Everyone got out and just chilled there. "Well I wasn't planning to visit Oregon, but whatever."
Last night, I dreamed that I was running areas around a large metro area. It was kinda like Rockford, only slightly less ghetto. At one point, somebody stole everything out of my car. Even the trash! Not a bad trade-off, I guess. I went shopping in dreamland Wal-Mart, which was pretty messed up. At one point I left my personal belongings on a counter. The clerk grabbed the pile of stuff and hid it under the counter. "It's gonna cost you $15 to get that back. Store policy." He was a large, angry-looking black man with a don't-fuck-with-me attitude but ho boy I screamed and cursed up a storm until I got my stuff back. In real life that would never do that. Well, probably. Went back out to the car and I now had three ipod-knockoffs in my car along with most of my stuff back.
What could all that mean?
I got some free bottled water at the grocery store today, so our tower of bottled water cases is almost as tall as the fridge. We have about 20 boxes of cereal too. It's nice shopping in Mesa, because it's right down the street, and they don't charge sales tax on food. Fifty-dollar order today with a total tax of ZERO! Take that.
Speaking of money, I spotted a really interesting article in the paper today. A full-page advertisement article about the "World Reserve Monetary Exchange" offering "free" "ballistic rolls" of "uncirculated" US currency. I'm all for free money, so I did the smart thing and read the fine print.
Did I say they were free? Yeah. There's a $124 fee, plus shipping. They were required by the US Government to stop production forever- and here I thought the Mint was the only one allowed to produce currency. Amazing. It'll weigh as much as a .999 gold bar! You'll need two hands to lift it! Did I mention it's as heavy as a solid .999 gold bar? Check out this random picture of guys in jackets hustling with dollies! Check out those emblems! Did I mention this is the only known picture of them EVER?!
How would they know investors are "fighting to get in on this deal" if the offer has never been made publicly available before? And why are the coins "never circulated"? Don't you mean "uncirculated"? Googling leads to some pretty interesting answers! I gotta scan this thing in, it's a comedy goldmine CALL NOW. God, I feel ripped off just researching about them. They might not have my money but they got my TIME, geez.
More posts later tonight- we got some cool stuff going on today.
|
|
09:29 pm
[Link] |
oh snap
Angry bigoted rich white people clinging to god and guns, or something like that.
We were seriously the youngest people at the Glenn Beck "live" showing. It wasn't even freakin' live. Three-hour tape delay and we still have to pay twenty bucks to watch some pizza-face play a media file in Windows? Yeah, there was a Windows task bar showing prominently at the end of the show, haha.
Fuck Dark Knight, go see this. But it's too late now! Speaking of which, there were people lining up to go see DK at 8pm here. They had 'holding pens' set up with Tensabarriers to keep the young'uns in line. When our movie got out at 10, I had the sudden urge to stay and announce spoilers. You see, Arizona is three hours behind Eastern, so the movie was already an hour over in New York. If I had waited a few more minutes I could have told everyone about how [[censored]]! That's good YouTube fodder.
Those are some scary scary people at that show. The constant applause and occasional standing ovation confused the hell outta me. I can understand it for a live show, but this is a movie theater. And it's not even live! What's even funnier is the number of "angry rich white geezers" with cameras taking pictures of themselves.
Agnes: CHECK US OUT GLENN BECK LIVE 08 BITCHEZZZZ
Bud: THIS IS GOING ON MY MYSPACE
Jethro: OLDFARTAFFINITY HERE I COME
Mortimer P.: IM IN UR THEATER EXERCISIN' MAH 2ND AMENDMENT RITEZ
The show itself was funny stuff. It's half stand-up, half political commentary. The overall theme of the show was "what the fuck is wrong with people". I'm a little on the heartless conservative side; there were some things I agreed with, others where I just said "that's common sense dude but it's a shame nobody gets it", and other times where I just "smile and nod".
---
Anyway, what's going on with LJ that it's all but broken on my browser? I can't do anything with my Messages screen, and this update page is all retarded and old looking. (Fun fact: I use Firefox 1.0.6)
I've got other things on my mind but I'm just worn out. blah.
|
|
11:26 pm
[Link] |
Denjin K Review
As much as it hurts to say this, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Denjin K is a sub-par album.
I'm a huge LED fan, but it feels like his album is just a collection of his really recent, overrated stuff. Some of it is okay, but others just haven't grown on me. For example, The Deep Striker is always a favorite. Jewellery Storm is pretty catchy too. But then you've got stuff like Acid Immortal- great when I first heard it, but this version is just C&P with extra vocal samples in there. And how many songs do we need with Maiko Horisawa? Seriously.
The remix disc is pretty neat. Sota's take on Denjin Akatsukini Taoreru (a.k.a. Fatal Attack) is excellent. Slake's HBG remix is even better. Ryu's Infinite Prayer remix is awesome too! The rest aren't all too memorable quite yet. Maybe later on when I'm not looking for stuff to jam out to in the car.
If I could change this album, I would add more of his older stuff. Lots more. Why focus on all the hyped up stuff from the last handful of Styles when you have all of his classics to choose from?
Specifically, things like: Outer Limits, Something Wonderful (Another ver., plz), any of the Denjin J songs, MGS2 Mission R, maybe Ghost Revival; as well as more recent CS works such as Outer Limits Alternative and eRAseRmOToRpHAntOM. Quantum Teleportation was another one of my favorites, but the remix is really quite... boring. Okay cool chords... uh, is this going anywhere?
I was really really really looking forward to a EMP long version. Sure, it's got Eraser Engine DistorteD, but that's the boring GFDM version with a ton of unnecessary censors. Although the SHUT THE ---- UP part is hilarious. Erasermotor Maximum would have been nice.
I'm sure I'll grow to like it more, but I was really expecting a lot more nostalgia from this album. In the mean time, there are other things to complain about on the internet before Sota's album comes out. I'm sure that's going to have 50 remixes of LTTS on it, haha.
|
06:28 am
[Link] |
dawwww I'm a retard
I was looking through my logs for that project I did last night and realized there were some Cool People that I haven't added to my friends list!
I'm really bad about this stuff you guys, el oh el.
midori8 wolff_slaven carson10us retardedhusky frazzy_626 sushicougar = fresshhhhhhhhh
So here's an appropriate clip, ganked from AIJ:
Instant comedy goldmine. If you're not familiar with the game, here it is in plain English: The guy on the right finishes the song with a perfect score (no easy task), but he fails to hop over the mines at the end because he's too busy celebrating early. Not only does he lose his 100%, it costs him the match as well! Liquid Boom! The crowd's reaction is priceless.
|
|
11:13 pm
[Link] |
gifbeacon test
If you can see this, you are participating in a test!
I have set up a simple db and sql script to track hits. It's a php page that imitates a 1-pixel transparent gif. Yeah, child's play, I know, but this is fun. Now I can see how Google caches my LJ posts in under two minutes.
$file="unittransparent.gif";
header("Content-type: image/gif");
readfile($file);
And then sprinkle on some cheese, and you're good to go.
I can tell my coding skills are really really rusty thanks to SAS and this job, ugh. SAS is a semicolon-delimited language, like Java and C++, but has just enough weird quirks that I'm getting into bad habits that I need to dump before I go back to school. Consider this chunk of nuts:
dbcon(); //this is PHP
$foo="bar";
function dbcon() {echo $foo;} And it took me like TEN MINUTES to figure out why it wasn't working! (nb: I even had to correct typos in that after I typed it out!)
I was thinking about participating in Google's Code Jam, but there's a date on there that conflicts with my schedule, not to mention it's such short notice suddenly. And then I find THIS out! Gah. I'm better off just using August to brush up before I go make an ass of myself at school this fall.
The most interesting thing that happened today was some clowns at work put up Halloween decorations. There's a block of cubes just down from me where they put up spider webs, tombstones, some mannequins, and a giant doll hanging over somebody's office door. It's funny stuff. I'll take more pictures tomorrow when I can be all secretive about it.
EDIT:
Awww yeah
EDIT 2:
If I'm expecting to get a lot of traffic like this, would it be more efficient to use persistent database connections like mysql_pconnect() instead of mysql_connect()? Connections are very expensive compared to queries, so would something like that cut down on the bw overhead?
|
|
08:58 pm
[Link] |
it gonn rain
wig_snark
Nothing to see here, move along.
kawaii desu neko anime chocolate?
 
It rained again today!
In a matter of minutes, monsoon rains flooded most of the neighborhood as well as a lot of the streets. Here's a crappy video to show you how fun it is. Too bad I didn't record the part where the car started spraying water about ten feet in the air. I had to move over lanes because the right lane was such a mess!
Enjoy my awful taste in music. Bonus points if you can guess the tracks.
 
semjay made some heads today! They are a
- pit bull, (JESUS CHRIST GET IN THE CAR.)
- wolf, (JESUS CHRIST GET IN THE CAR.)
- and lion. (JESUS CHRIST GET IN THE CAR.)
Now I get to fur them...
|
|
08:49 pm
[Link] |
Centroids
Warning: Math post
Okay, maybe I'm being stupid here, but let me see if this makes sense to anyone. (Bueller...)
I'm thinking about adding a feature to Total Recall that tries to make a "chain" of players based on Autorival data. Basically, each player is a vertex in R2, and there are edges between players that are rivals. (I guess they'd have to be undirected now...)
The goal of the "chain" is to minimize the lengths of all the edges between points, while keeping all edges a certain length (e.g., 1).
This can be iteratively calculated by "relaxing" each point until no further relaxations can be made. If player A is rivals with B, C, and D, then find the point that minimizes the edges between them all. Repeat for all other points.
What I'm having trouble with is coming up with a way of calculating that optimal point. At first I thought it would be the arithmetic mean of all coordinates, but that's not the case. Here's an example: Consider an isosceles triangle that's 2 units wide at the base and 2 units tall. The singular point that is the closest to all three is sqrt(1/3) (0.5773) up from the center of the base. The arithmetic mean puts this point at 2/3 (0.667)
I've found some articles leading me to believe that I'm actually calculating the centroid of the set of points, not the actual arithmetic mean? From what it seems like, centroids only apply to 2D areas and centers of mass, but there was one article suggesting that it may be related to my application.
Does anyone know where I can find more out about this? Wiki has this: Centroid of a non-overlapping closed polygon but that doesn't help as I'm not working with polygons. I could always write a function that brute-force finds an optimal position (I may have to anyway due to the restriction that |e|>=1)
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled LJ.
|
04:26 pm
[Link] |
FEAR THE IRON MAN
 
http://www.bemanistyle.com/sims/simfile.php?id=24947
Download, play, die.
CARDINAL GATE course:
Decision -> Kachoufuusetsu -> Contract -> Ganymede -> Waxing and Wanding -> Nageki no Ki
3000+ steps - 10.5 minutes - Average HR: 190!
It's kind of hard. I was seriously thinking about giving up in the middle of Nageki but I really didn't want to have to go through that whole thing again.
I'm having trouble reaching 200 again. I can peak in the 195-197 range but that's about it. Probably a good thing. I probably broke 200 playing Double, but I forgot to turn on my watch oops.
 
Here's a video one someone going so-so on it
What's up. Ub3R R4vE cleared. Thaaaat was a close one. That 700 BPM run at the end is really long.
 
Here's a video of somebody decent playing it
Eggman's Quasar. No sweat. A little tough, but what really made it suck is the fact that I could almost hear it. The audio was actually replaced with Quasar ~PIZZA READY FOR ORDER NUMBER 53 REMIX~ by SNACK COUNTER VALLEY GIRL CHORUS
What's next on the list of popular homebrew boss songs to clear?
I think I deserve a handicap for clearing all of these on a crappy upgrade machine. I get a number of misfires, not to mention the screw heights and sunken arrows. I could probably do a LOT better if I had a decent machine. I wish there were more decent dedicabs around me. I miss BZ Naperville so much. All I have are MGL, which is a craptastic upgrade, Kyrene Lanes, which has zero volume and a faulty coin mech, and a handful of really sweet R16's way off in the west valley. R16 doesn't do SHIT for me.
And get this: I STILL can't clear Paranoia Bros EX. I tried twice. The first time, the 2P-R was crapping out on me, and the second time, I was having the usual up-arrow problems (i.e. I don't weigh enough to trigger it with my play style). Lalala crappy pads and battery life. I'll be honest, I can barely read x1 anymore. It used to be cute but it's kind of annoying now. "oh by the way you fail 'cause this machine is like eight years old and nobody cleans it lol"
|
|
11:44 pm
[Link] |
Party time
Love is a Danger Zone... literally.
Qoppa and Annee sleep under my desk, and that MJ and SJ passed out in the middle of the floor. I think I see where Annee gets her love for lying on dirty laundry.
Oh, right. Surprise! New dog.
http://superwailingbonus.com/passion06/folders/18348/MJ
I CAN HAS 'DOPSHUN PLZ?
Her name is Mari Jane. Or MJ. She's named that because Mari + Qoppa = Maricopa = the county animal shelter = hah-hah so creative that *I* didn't come up with it!
Let's see, how was today. FUCKIN' HUMID. AUGH. It got up to LIKE FIFTY PERCENT. It's rainy season! Which means clouds every day and lightning displays almost every evening. Last night it rained super hard with some areas getting up to FOUR WHOLE INCHES of rain (nb: pffffft hahaha that's IT?!). It made it much nicer outside at the expense of oh god it was so humid. But it was a nostalgic humid. When I left work today it was only 91F/50%RH instead of 110+ and dry. It reminded me of all those sticky/sweaty summertime golfing adventures back in 99-01. Those were the days...
Anyway.
Two more weeks of work and I'm GONE. On one hand, it's going to be nice to reclaim 50 hours of my time per week, but the paychecks are pretty nice to have.
MC, you might be interested in this one:
I emailed Martha about TA positions at school, and they have not sent out offer letters yet. I was beginning to think they weren't going to invite me back for another year. I'm actually looking forward to that, since I'm going to be the 'veteran TA' of 110, with MV out of the picture. I hope they give us COL raises, too. But I'm not expecting a lot since they did say they're cutting back on TA's due to budget problems.
Kind of been depressed all week about certain things. Don't really want to talk about it. Mostly irrational stuff, and summertime blues. You know that feeling you get when it's 30 minutes 'til quitting time on a Friday? It's kinda felt like that all week.
And I'll leave you with this: my fucked up dream of the day.
In this dream, I was in the audience for an episode of The Price Is Right. There were a few key differences: there was almost nobody in the audience, Bob was still hosting, and instead of calling down four contestants, they called down about a dozen. As they called a bunch of people, and the little tiny peanut gallery was goin' nuts. And I had that weird feeling hit me, where you KNOW what's going to happen next, perhaps you will it to happen, but they called me down last. They still butchered my name, even though it's MY dream (how does that work?!). So all 12 contestants or so got up ON the stage... and an all-out brawl ensued.
TLDR version: I dreamed I was a contestant on TPIR Brawl Edition.
That would be an interesting show. "The survivor of this four-way match gets to play pricing games!" And it'd probably be an old biddy with a walker. You KNOW it would be. Forget the sailors, college students, and honeymooners- GRANNY'S PUMPIN' IRON.
|
|
11:58 pm
[Link] |
Top or Bottom?
No, not the perv kind, either!
The other day it finally dawned on me why my software engineering course irritated the heck out of me: it was because it was taught with a focus on top-down design, and I am a bottom-up thinker.
The quick-and-dirty explanation of the difference: a top-down thinker looks at the big picture and breaks the problem into smaller and smaller chunks; a bottom-up thinker starts with the nitty-gritty details and builds up from there. If you want to build a train, a TD thinker will start looking at what cars will be in the train, while a BU thinker will start by creating wheels and couplings.
Put train hat on head. Now you're a train.
The course material focused on building websites from the top-down, and it drove me BONKERS. Okay so you want a drop-down menu that lets users pick this and that and go on to another page. Do you have any idea how absurd that is to program? Box and line diagrams (logical architectures) tell me nothing. You're sending data. How? http, https, ftp, email, curl, grep, sed...
Each direction has its disadvantages. My projects, like Sync and Total Recall, usually start with one small script, and expand as I see fit. So of course that leads to a lot of disjoint functionality. "What the crap is X and why is it calling Y? This is stupid."
How common are BU thinkers, and would I have an innate advantage/disadvantage in a work environment?
|
|
10:48 pm
[Link] |
Taking things for granted
Week 8 of my internship. Of my two contacts at the building, one has been gone since my initial interview and the other has spent a majority of the last seven weeks in Vegas, and will be returning again in a few days.
My body has finally decided that it won't fully be awake until between 10:30 and 11:00. This makes for hazardous driving at half-past-seven. Seriously, it's almost as bad as the "thank god for rumble strips" voyages after White Castle at 2AM.
It gives me a lot of time to think. And if you know me, you know that's a very very bad thing! (grin)
Something that has been bothering me: retirement planning, investing, and a little phrase called "life stages". Most people won't even bat an eye at those phrases, but if you look deeper you'll see there are stranger things going on.
I'm convinced that a large portion of people out there take their lives for granted. People become accustomed to a certain way of life and become unable to see outside the box. The "what-ifs". When's the last time you appreciated what you have right now, and didn't waste it fantasizing about an uncertain future?
I deal with this stuff every day- people are basically roadmapping out their entire lives. So busy worrying about the distant road ahead that they're missing the flowers right beneath them. And then they're gone. And then the next day is gone. And so on, until one day they stop and think, where did all my time go?
Investing is another bizarre concept to me. Everyone thinks that investing in whatever is going to earn them lots of money and secure their financial future. But for the most part, the economy is a zero-sum game. If everybody gains from investing, who is losing? But most oblivious people don't really care beyond the fact that they have been gratified.
Life-stages is a funny word. You're a unique snowflake, just like everyone else. And you will live exactly the same life as everyone else. You will live exactly as long, and have similar, generic interests and activities. You will graduate from wherever, get a job at whatever business, repeat your daily routine thousands of times, and then stop working just long enough to enjoy, what, your wrinkly old body? And the twilight years of your life that may or may not be enjoyable?
I believe the chase is better than the catch. If you're focused on some distant goal, you cannot be happy with your current situation. Kind of like a limbo; you're getting closer to your goals but they're still so far away. You can try to make yourself happy through materialism, but it's only a temporary repreive from your waking slumber.
What do you want to do today? It doesn't really matter because you've committed yourself to a life-long plan. Your plans have been set for today, tomorrow, the day after that, and every other day as far as the eye can see. Almost like imprisonment in your own existence.
I've had this philosophy for ten years now and I can't say a lot has changed. It has all been reinforced. Sure, you might blame my pessimistic outlook on things, but that outlook really drives your attitude. If you're happy with how this all works, then go ahead and be happy. I just have a different perspective.
|
09:32 pm
[Link] |
GET READY
Wed 24SEP DELTA 3658* OK U LV PHOENIX 430P 5A
AR SALT LAKE CI 707P COACH
TY
*Operated by SKYWEST AIRLINES
Wed 24SEP DELTA 1175 OK U LV SALT LAKE CI 755P 25A
TY COACH
AR SEATTLE 911P
taren_ is a confirmed character for RainFurrest 2008, unlockable via Dealer's Den only.
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |
