04.28.07
The first four boxes of books.
I have once again begun relegating my life to little cardboard boxes…
Deciding what I could most live without for 2-3 weeks, I have sensibly, tho’ rather un-geekily, settled on my mostly-just-for-decoration bookcase.
Firstly, I began to realise with trepidation that despite my extremely strict “no new books” policy, that doesn’t seem to quite tie up with reality. Hey, I’m extremely proud of how well I’ve done, but even so I couldn’t quite ignore the prescence of a few additions: The White Masii – bought in a charity shop for £2, so it only half-counts – and Re-engineering the Corporation – actually even the sound of that one makes me feel sick, so in all fairness it probably has to count double.
Why on earth do I still have John Seargent’s autobiography? Ok, an interesting read at the time, but I very much doubt that I’m enough of a fan – or really a fan at all – to ever open it again. Free book, anyone?
Then there’s the books with the bookmarks in… usually somewhere around page 15. Reminds me I really must finish them sometime. Maybe before next flitting.
With a bit of indoor gymnastics I was even able to reach the top shelf of ornaments. I’m sure you could get a whole exercise routine out of it: lean, stretch, overbalance, grab item-with-weight, correct balance, move item along, retrieve item, throw item in a non-breakable direction.
Ok, so finally we close the lid of pot-pouri container, detatch the fluffy toy, decide to bin the sentimental value ‘ornament’ that isn’t really very sentimental, and we have one clear bookcase!
Going back to books, of course there is the collection requiring special care that is too special to be relegated to the bookcase. Not that I don’t love all my books, to greater and lesser degrees, but I always feel a certain sense of obligation towards those books that don’t actually belong to me. I’m afraid this has been my most lax area of late… I guess it is because I’ve not been buying so many myself recently, so I’ve been kept going by the Generous Lenders Society.
Ok, maybe I should just read all the books and give them back to respective owners. That way, I could say I was doing “flitting work” while departing from reality at the same time. Sounds like a plan to me!
*is reading*
04.25.07
not exactly happy…
I just about ran smack into a car today.
Not that it wasn’t obvious enough – a big dark red jeep-branded being. But the fact I had my nose tunneled into my mobile trying to write a text probably didn’t help… or that I couldn’t see past my fire-flaming eyes.
Well, you see, while leaving work with a friend, he happened to refer to something that is a bit of a sore spot. It’s something I’ve frequently dropped hints about, but never really vented my true feelings about very much.
The actual offending event happened while I was still very new to the team but it still has repercussions now, meaning I’m still reminded about how it bothers me. I think at the time I just didn’t know everyone so well, so although I did make known how I felt, I never really “pushed” it very much, just said my piece and let it go.
So then today I was just leading up to full getting-it-off-my-chest mode when someone without the correct security clearance joined us on our common medium of travel. Oh, he’s a decent enough bloke, just not currently in the relevant clique, I suppose.
So yeah, I was fuming, and wanting to talk about my fumes, and had a willing ear to lap up such fumes… but, grr, I couldn’t allow Eve to get a-hold of any of my fumes! Maybe I should have transferred them a single photon at a time…
Ho hum…
Maybe I should just “forget about it”!
04.24.07
On the topic of recursion…
For those firefox users in our midst… (and here I expect everyone to be nodding vigorously!) why not try this.
Metrical Psalms on my pda.
Ok, so technically I should be fast asleep right now.
But instead I’m feeling remarkably pleased with myself. After having wanted to have a decent way of reading the psalms on my pda for years now, I’ve finally achieved just exactly that tonight.
Well, it all started out rather differently, over a discussion of Jane Austen. Before I knew it, I was arguing with my memory over vague quote references from Jane – the Eyre one. The next logical step was clearly to download an ebook… from *the* Project Gutenberg of course. Their new PalmOS format got me thinking, and a few clicks later I was reading MobiPocket Reader documentation… then MobiPocket Creator documentation… then hunting out that random .txt file from out of my “Rachels Unsorted Junk” folder…
After that, I actually had to start trying:
1. Read the documentation to discover the random made-up format for their “heading” parser. \1 for numbers, \x for strings, and just to preserve my sanity, \n for end-of-line (which thankfully didn’t fuss about whether it was a windows EOL or a unix EOL).
2. Realised – as a completely wonderful guess – that a particular selection of comma’s were causing random crashes of the parser. (“No, really honestly, I’m *sure* I don’t want to tell Microsoft all about it.”) Removing them, and I had the first stage on an autogenerated Table-of-Contents.
3. Went in and hacked the html to allow a few extra headings so I could get both first and second version of some psalms. I tried to do this ‘properly’ in the original file, but when it read it in, annoyingly it had to replace my wonderful <h2> with & lt;h2& gt; nonsense, so a “replace all” had to be speedily injected.
4. Did some stupidly-OCD replacing of tab characters with carefully calculated different-sized sets of repeated & nbsp; characters.
Ok, the finished product is far from perfect. But I’ve waited so long to have anything semi-practical, that I’m just plain overjoyed right now! A simple few hours work, and I’ve got another ‘worry’ ticked off my list!
*is hoping I will be awake for work tomorrow… today*
04.23.07
Giving back.
After weeks (or dare I say, months) of having lots of kind support from various friends helping me to deal with all my stresses, I’ve had an unusually upside-down day today.
For the first time in ages, I’ve been the fine-er one, and so it was my turn to do my little bit trying to cheer people up.
At least three friends were the guinea pigs of this process. (And I’m not just talking about the ’specially-fortified’ Lindor chocolates here 
… tho’ if I remember right, there were exactly three of them, to be of benefit randomly to a special few. 
)*
More seriously, considering my real “trying to help” bit, I made a mess of it I suppose! But at least I tried…
Strangely draining ‘work’ though. Makes me appreciate all the more what wonderfully good friends everyone has been to me over the last wee while.
*In case anyone’s wondering what this is all about, its a subtle little ploy of mine to make everyone too scared to eat my chocolate. *Gets caught in the headlights with one mucky paw half-way to chocolate-smeared mouth*
04.21.07
This may seem irrelevant…
…or just not worth your while listening to the end…
It has made me think though. Not in a flamboyant motivational-speaker kind of way, just in a “hey, stop and listen to this, this guy’s saying something” kind of way.
Personally, I hate the phrase “the generation gap”. Ok, I know what people are talking about when they say it, and reluctantly concur in admiting its existence. But I never liked the idea that somehow its ‘fashionable’ for us youngsters to not-be-friends with anyone who’s DOB varies too largely from our own.
What on earth does that have to do with friendship!? Ok, the closest I’ve got to understanding it is that you give people a different degree of respect based on their age. But that still has nothing whatsoever to do with compatible personalities, wonderfully character-ful people, or just what Anne of Green Gables would call “kindred spirits”.
Anyway, I’m off at a tangent… what this post was meant to be about was how curious it is the way that technology exposure ‘divides’ us, in a generation-gappy kind of way. Given my rant, I guess it won’t come as a surprise to you that I’m not happy about this. Yet I must acknowledge that its something that is often painfully noticable to me.
With most of my friends my own age, we just chat. Whether that is IRL, on an instant messenger, via email, phone, whatever… we just don’t care to one degree. We say “oh, yes I got your email” as a way of referring to a particular conversation, but really it makes absolutely no difference to us whether we say “got your email” or “got your text”. In a way, we have learnt to ‘make the technology fade into the background – become invisible’, in a way very much like Bill Gates’ dream in The Road Ahead.
Not so some of my older friends*. It seems their comfort-level has taken rather longer to accumulate, and tho’ they will use new media, they come across as rather ’stilted’. As if maybe in the background they’re trying to get across a cheap-and-cheerful email while their real concentration is on saving the planet or something important like that.
This becomes even more noticable when they first begin to use a new medium – email to forum; phone to skype. For a significant period of time, you can almost see the cloud of fear being transferred over the web-waves. Don’t get me wrong, I have an ‘adjustment’ period too. Yet having grown up with this sort of stuff, my adjustment period seems to be significantly shorter.
Therefore, this clip has reminded me how it is special to me when I discover one of my friends who is uncomfortable using computers finally settle down and “just be themselves” when they communicate online.
So, here finally is the link you’ve all been waiting for. (And for those of you ‘into’ the blogging community, try the creators blog.)
*talking mainly about the non-geeky variety here!
being a British shell-scripter
After increasing frustration at feeling marginalised as a British shell scripter, I have decided to come up with my own custom-built pre-processor for us Brits.
Firstly, I thought I’d tackle something a little bigger. It would be handy if the interpreter itself could have a one-character modification. Instead of using $ to delimit variables we should really be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our £-signs.
After that, as I think I sed earlier, a pre-processing script can be applied. Just for completeness, of course you’d actually have to change the variables along the lines of sed ‘_$_£_’ and just hope for the best that there isn’t a string in there saying “print The $ is really down against the £ these days.” But then, why on earth would you have a script that said *that*! (I’m assuming all you dear readers are at least above the deep and murky depths of having any dealings whatsoever to do with a financial institution, of all places.)
Then it all begins to get rather straightforward.
sed ‘_ize_ise_’ | sed ‘_o_ou_’ | sed ‘_er _re _’
…and gurgling merrily along the pipe to…
sed ‘_big_traditional_’…Oh, actually, make that sed ‘_big_traditional_g’ as there’s bound to be more than one “big” per line.
Now, to avoid boring all those of you who don’t actually care about the mundane ordinary ‘covering all bases’ required to write the script, I’ll just sketch out the basics.
The next stage would involve a rather intensive cross-referencing search of some american-theosaurus-data-structure, suitably picking out all those “big” words, and replacing them with apples-and-plums-on-an-autumn-afternoon words.
After this it gets even more tedious, as we reach the stage where a complete purge of all those yucky complete fabrications of the English language is necessary. Complete obliteration, leaving no trace whatsoever is the preferred option – “deizeing”, I suppose you could call it. “Translate it?” You must be joking! It would send shivers down my spine to even pretend to associate with such words.
Anyhow, I now need to take a break before my body temperature hits -5, thanks to having thoughts of all those adorable-but-hated shivery words.
- 1st prise of a Kit-Kat chunky to the first commenter to make me literally l.o.l.
Ps: In true Rachel style, I have ignored comments in the script. They will be subject to exactly the same terms as everything else, which, if I do say so myself, I thought would be quite appropriate.
04.20.07
is feeling mean tonight
Grant’s been a great help to me in past weeks, not least in introducing me to the book, The Joy of Computers. And so I thought it would be only fair to give his opinion on the subject:
Rach (13/04/2007 09:22:22): I think I’m actually going to read it properly, cos I’m guessing it will be quite amusing
Grant (13/04/2007 09:22:39): it made me the mighty programmer i am today
Grant (13/04/2007 09:22:58): and you can quote me on that (for the purposes of comedy, naturally)
However, tonight I decided that a laugh at his expense might be more fun…
*disobeys orders*
(19:54:21) Grant: i don’t think at all, honestly
(19:54:25) Grant: that
:::
(19:55:12) Grant: you are not allowed to copy and paste that for blogging comedy purposes
Another choice excerpt of Grant’s online conversational abilities!
my DOB is in my subconscious
I think I have been brainwashed into remembering my DOB.
Well, I discovered just by accident just how easily I can let slip such personal information while coding up something at work. I needed to test a part of my code by filling in dates, to see if I was handling those dates correctly.
As a sanity check I just filled in some defaults and ran the test. Unsurprisingly, the 0/0/0000 stubs didn’t exactly get through the “is sensible date” screening, and almost by habit, my cursor again hovered over the numbers and changed them. I wasn’t even watching what I was doing… just typing, tabbing between windows, and running.
It ran successfully.
Sanity test over, I thought I’d go back, and check if the “random numbers” I’d filled in could be changed to a ‘real’ date, hopefully expanding to use a set of dates to test certain boundary conditions.
Imagine my surprise when there staring back at me was a living, smiling, little DOB… and not just any DOB, but mine.
I actually got a fright! It’s not that I wouldn’t – or haven’t ever – used my own DOB as a test case in similar situations before… but it was the complete and utter disconnectedness with my thought-processes that got to me.
In fact, this experience does indeed convince me that brainwashing does work. If by repeating that one number so many times in my life, it can be made to feel “a part of me” so much so that I can reveal it unawares, then how scary would real brainwashing actually be?
04.18.07
Brain stimulation…
…or timewasting?
Ever since I heard that Nintendo had sold their Sudoku package as “Brain Games”, I have been mulling over the theory I’ve had for a while, that ‘logical puzzles’ do have a place in the chaos of concentration.
While a student, I often deliberately turned to brain-stimulating games as a form of relaxation. I used to find this behaviour rather illogical, as it isn’t exactly the most restful form of relaxation, of the “Stop staring at that screen!” variety. Don’t get me wrong… there’s a whole lot to be said for having a “real life”. But there’s something just so mesmorizingly relaxing about such games.
In a way, it actually lets me mull over things in a more focused manner. While allowing my mind to roam free in whatever creative channels it may choose at the time, the concentration required for the puzzles keeps my mind at a “regular ticking speed”.
In fact, if you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about, you could try my current (and long-term) favourite here.
The ‘game’ itself is really not that much more interesting than doing cross-stitch. Well, you get some paint-by-numbers picture at the end, and the satisfaction that you’ve completed yet another puzzle, but really it’s all rather dull. Despite my addiction, I can be quite rational in resisting the temptation, and during the 6-or-so years that I’ve enjoyed these puzzles, I have taken a fair handful of 5-month ‘breaks’ from it after getting rather sick of it. I suppose it is still better than Sudoku tho…
*goes off to do something boring because she’s had enough brain-stuff for one night*
