escaping macromediocrity

I don’t know when it happened, but I find that I’m listening to more internet radio than the regular musical pieces stored in the plethora of digital formats out there. I couldn’t survive without my every-night dose of music while trying to hack or figure something out. It just helps you focus, especially when the family’s running around and making noise. At any rate…

At home and at work I often tap to di.fm’s Trance list when working on the usual web/SQL stuff. I’m often let down by the poor music they play during EEST (+2) office hours. In the evening they seem to have more decent stuff playing… which is something I’m very glad of. I’m sure I would’ve ended up shouting at SQLite a quarter of an hour ago, were it not for the hammering beat in my headphones. It really helps to have music in the background.

I’m figuring SQLite and the Mono.Data connector for a reason too Stay tuned for more info from the research lab veeeeery soon

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my thoughts. Due to popular request, I’ll be filling you out with the latest. Not much has been up, except me acting all silly in the real life utopia ™ and trying to hack on things. I’ve been trying to get myself motivated on whatnot little projects here and there, but I fail to get myself motivated. It is probably my failure as a human being, or then I’m just overworked. At any rate, I even started thinking that having a desktop click’n'play type of system kills my spirit to explore and experiment. I can’t digress decisively here but I do say that I need to start up small… something where I could think even the tiniest details through and create a clean solution. I recently had this small idea of creating a bookmarking system for bash, where I could leave bookmarks tagged with keywords to different places in my system. I couldn’t figure a clean way of emulating ‘cd’, or the means to store the bookmarks. Perhaps the answer will come to me tomorrow. To explain my motivation a bit: I wouldn’t really need this tool, I just felt like fiddling with boost. That’s it: I just wanted to fiddle with boost, and create a solution that seems clean to me. That sort of thing interests me a lot, but I seem to get myself discouraged upon realizing I need to rely on something dirty to do that. There ought to be a way to do it properly, and once I find it, I’ll be all over the project.

Other things are on the stove as well, but they need to cook well before I’ll get into any. It’s been a long rant about work and hackery, so I’ll serve you with something different now. I just came to realize I’m an audiophile. Nobody else seriously walks around with headphones on all the time. I only lose to Soku on last.fm scrobbles because he listens to Testament at his place all the time I play games and listen to podcasts and internet streams as well, which don’t get scrobbled. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then it’s time you navigate to http://www.last.fm/ and join the online sensation before I murder you and cannibalize your body :P) At any rate, listening to music holds a special meaning for me as a tool to survive work, university, long distance travel, boredom, asshats, cancer… I mean… Well, anyway most of the crap I listen to isn’t exactly some of the greatest contributions to human culture and art, but I like it. I’m getting good at pointless ranting

Anyway, things are rather okay for me and I actually have some choices from which I can pick the ones I like the most instead of just picking the lesser of two prime evils. Tomorrow, I get to be the opponent to a certain girl’s Bachelor’s Thesis Proposal. I guarantee that if she won’t deliver fantabulously, I am going to saw her bollocks off in my trademark sarcastic/psychotic manner. Yours truly out.

Check it out for yourself :)  

Everybody has their favorite place and way to work. I spent a couple of hours (out of boredom, no less) thinking about what is my favorite place and way to work. I came to a simple conclusion: Despite my tendency to look for quiet, lonely places to work in, I like it best to be at home in a familiar environment. The list of requirements also dictates that someone else is already at home. I don’t really need them right next to me, but I do like it if I know I’m not here alone. Weird shit as such…My favorite way of working would be to work when it’s really dark or really bright outside. I also must have a cup of coffee next to me. A jazz band in the background also helps (Jamie Cullum’s good right now).These simple things constitute the perfect working environment for me.

Remember? Fun?

Let me elaborate on that. MMO-games (Massively Multiplayer Online) are based on the repetitive, usually bland and unsurprising questing that people refer to as the “grind”. The grind is an important aspect of these games as that’s what usually keeps people playing them. What occurred to me is that the microwave-generation always wants everything now, instantly. Before anyone goes about sending me emails debunking World of Warcraft as entertainment, let me qualify my statement by saying that I would not be playing in the first place if it weren’t fun. I’m grateful to the fine people I play with, as the society and teamwork are what make the game worth playing. I don’t mind someone using “l33tsp33k” as much as someone who’s out there to ruin the experience for others - me in particular. With this in mind, I had fun most of the time while actually working to get my character to become someone. When I didn’t, it was usually due to my own incompetence to add 100% to the team. What I did realize is that you don’t need to own the perfect equipment, or to have the perfect skills to be useful. You just need to work with others, have fun as a team, socialize and subordinate when necessary, taking command of things when the world’s proverbially falling apart With all of this in mind, in the end I don’t mind having put so much time into the game (11 days, 2 hours and 14 minutes the last time I checked). Again, I emphasize that this is not an excuse why you should like World of Warcraft. It’s just a statement from me why I like it. It’s madness when it comes to it, but like last night’s raid into Maraudon, I really feel like having a new experience under my belt. A solid team, coordinated teamwork, incredible locations and epic fights are what entice me. Then again, having to put all that time to get here might be appalling for some. I’ve been playing since June 2007 and if you divide 266 hours by the number of days my account’s been active, you don’t get much playtime per day. The stipulation here is that nobody tells you to sabotage your own life by playing

I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t play. Personally, I find it more enjoyable to think that I’m a famous warrior, fighting with a death-wish in the evening than listen to the bitching and moaning of the various people who should go and do something with their time instead of complaining how nothing ever happens.

To conclude, I thought it’d be worth it to write an alternative perspective into the ah-so-controversial MMO that seems to enjoy a unilaterally bad reputation.

Addendum:
I still intend to finish my game in the inevitable final clash with the gigantic dragon, Onyxia. I’ll either earn the title of the dragonslayer, or die gloriously like any decent warrior should  

I’m taking this moment to write today on the topic of the freedom and “openness” of the net. Why is it that no matter where I go, the governing trend is some form of identity toolkit, framework, bell or a whistle? Whatever happened to anonymity and freedom? I’m actually very curious as to why someone would need to know my email, name, birthday, sexual orientation, bank-account number and the listing on PINs at my disposal to let me leech a file from an FTP. I am not saying there shouldn’t be logins. They’re perfectly acceptable for maintenance and moderating reasons, say, on forums. What I don’t understand is the related information phishing. I guess I’ve become somewhat paranoid, but I’m really worried about the amount of information about myself that is afloat in the intarweb cloud. I use Google Mail like so many others, and if you look at the contents, one could easily see what I’ve been up to for the past two years. All this in the hands of a company that markets information? Tssk tssk… my bad I guess.

I just figured out why my paragraphs were missing when I typed in blog articles with my Mac. It seems Safari does a sublime job in fucking up the formatting somehow, and the articles end up mangled. Not that there weren’t other absurd bugs, such as text overflowing the editor to the far right etc.

Didn’t I report this crap to you WordPress guys like a year ago?

… unless you’re prepared for an exercise in annoyance and failure. Despite getting feedback countless times that I start things without finishing them, I still keep dispersing my attention over too many things, just because I take people’s word for them. I’m sure a whole lot of peeps would have a lot to say on this: I believe one should be as selfish as possible when it comes to something you like doing. No, really. The inability to focus on the things I want done - as described above - has become grave, really grave. Going back to what I was originally doing doesn’t feel good at all either. The logical choices here are to cut down to one or two interests, or get some people to work with on a daily basis I think I’ll go with the people-thing, mostly because I don’t want to get stuck on any one thing for the better part of the forthcoming two decades.

I’m too tired to make any further profound statements about technologies, ideologies or programming languages. I just want to finish my inhuman universe simulator, some programs for the professor, a nostalgia-game-project-thing, and a PHP project-thing… doohickey, uh.. Ok, non-verbose descriptions I know, but that’s just to recap. Note to self: Cease thinking stuff aloud.

Or maybe all of this is pointless; just building sand-castles on the side of the big road of life.

Well, I finally got my desktop from repair and got about tweaking a functional GNU/Linux to my main computer (which is an AMD-64 3500+ box, perfectly complementing my overpowered MacBook Pro). Since other of the LVM’d hard disks bite the dust, I had to re-root the box. Ever since I tried Gentoo, I’ve been most comfortable with only that, despite the highly motivational statements that float around the web surrounding the Gentoo cult. I don’t need to make excuses as to why one, or I for that matter, would use it. Suffice to say that the nostalgia of setting up a basic system and a kernel was alone worth it. “But that’s just a pointless time-sink for console-junkies. Why the **** are you doing that shit? Use distro XYZ instead.” Look, I hope you’re not going to start telling me that with a straight face At any rate, Gentoo perfectly satisfies my needs when it comes to being able to choose how my software is built up and runs. Like said, it also brings back a lot of nostalgia into mind, and helps me nurture a hope that there’s still hope that I’ll get to see the world some day like some of my more fortunate friends are (you know who you are ).

It just occurred to me today when reading about libICU that I’d really want to try my wings some day with the Nintendo DS. I own a Lite-model of that particular handheld myself, and have been craving to try to program a little something for the baby the moment I got it. So, I noticed that devkitPro is still in the upswing, and seemed to work pretty well. The problem I bumped to was that I am running Mac OS X 10.5, and it didn’t have a decent emulator before. After five minutes of creative googling, I noticed that DeSmuME supported OS X. That is, supposedly. Download, start app bundle, exercise in annoyance and failure. Why is it that every time I need something done, I’ve got to do it myself? I guess I’ll have to tweak the Cocoa-based user-interface myself during this week. The emulator code itself looked really good on that note, and until I can get some memory-card doohickey from the intarweb, I’ll stick with DeSmuME. Great job guys I for one appreciate your efforts, despite the criticism towards the GUI above.