Total Waste's Total Waste

i wasn't thinking

2012-02-01T01:35:00.000+02:00

"too many people buy things they don't need with money they don't have trying to impress people they don't even like"
i had an argument with someone today who agreed with the sentiment but tried to explain to me that running after status symbols is "human nature" and not societal and didn't think much of my argument that there is no such thing as "human nature" (except, of course, for the need to connect events with causes, often quite incorrectly).

i said something during that argument that i didn't regret until he said, in much nicer language: "you're being an asshole". and then i realized that i was being an asshole.

rule no. 1: don't be an asshole.

it doesn't matter that my apology was accepted, the damage was done and i think i lost more respect for myself than he did.

---
that wasn't the first time today that i managed to offend someone - it's funny how our hard-of-hearing french teacher misses all the communication directed at her, but the one time i make a snide remark ("see how gracefully she ignores us") under my breath she stops the class to ask "what was that?"

well. so i told her what i thought about the "model exam" she gave us that was stupidly hard and time-consuming, and when she responded with "none of my previous students ever accused me of being unfair" i rolled my eyes. to which she really got offended. pg tells me that she's always taking offense, but damn, this stupid woman has been behaving remarkably unprofessionally and now i'm supposed to worry that she might... i don't know what. but it's not a nice atmosphere to add to an already tense "i hate these classes" situation.

it doesn't help that the whole thing started when the girl next to me raised an issue that we all have, and she was told to stop wasting everybody's time. unlike our class-"mates", i wasn't going to let her take it alone. another student approached me after class to thank me for standing up for myself. wasn't i standing up for all of us? where's the "us"?

after lunch with pg and registering for next semester's classes with our secretariat, i made my way to work. i wasn't feeling too good, but i had things to do that needed to be done there. scr taught me about programming for the cloud (the azure system's actually quite well designed, and simple to get the hang of), and i was charged with writing a testing system that should, i suggested, have taken a handful of minutes.

i'm going to have to learn to predict coding time better, because i walked out of there about four and a half hours later :(

ah! good news. my boss re-arranged my payment schedule on the fly last night while we were on the phone discussing the system emergency, and i now get paid either at the end of a project or the end of the month, whichever comes first. THAT makes sense, considering that most of the last couple of weeks were spent performing tasks that weren't on the project schedule...

strange - without any actual planning, i've been working almost exactly the amount of hours i said i would :P

too much of a good thing

2012-01-30T21:10:00.000+02:00

i'm tired to the point of hallucinating and i'm certain i'll pass out if i don't get to bed soon, but it's about 9pm and i'm expecting a call anytime soon to tell me that i can upload my work... a problem with the system earlier has made us think it's unreliable so i can't put code into production from home without someone in the office just in case :S

---
i handled the reveal really, really badly. my advisor will happily advise and he doesn't not believe me, but i wasn't academic about it and i served as an example of "how not to" for the rest of the class :/

my mother called me up because she was concerned that my recent posts, coupled with my being ordained, are an indication of an unsound mind.

in my defense, she's not familiar with the sonnets but now knows as much as she can without actually reading them, and she understands why i'm so excited. and is disappointed with me for revealing my discovery at all! but, fair's fair, shakespeare told me to.

i'll write up a real article that doesn't just make wild-sounding statements, and as soon as it's out there academically i'll expound all here too. that shouldn't take as long as any other planned work of mine, because this is going to be my seminar paper this year and we have a very definite deadline.

---
i met with the plumber at my apartment, who quickly made me unhappy by informing me that the prep work for the roof replacement is big work and quite costly. *sigh*

i thought i'd nap a bit then go to work, but upon getting up off the couch i was convinced that leaving the apartment in my present state would be a bad idea.

right - department website / work / video editing (don't ask) then bed. i don't give a damn about the french class in the morning, even though the test's on sunday and i don't have a good feeling about it.

touch of a ghost

2012-01-30T03:05:00.001+02:00

i thought i was going to get some rest, but i still couldn't sleep. that was two hours ago, and since then i have... i can't say what i've gone through without, umm, ruining the surprise. but this has been without a doubt the most magical moment of my existence. perhaps every thing that has gone before was mere forerunner to this: i have communed with the dead. and i can share this experience.

manic buzz

2012-01-29T21:15:00.001+02:00

i'm physically abuzz with adrenaline; it's a long-running ecstasy and i haven't yet had an opportunity to meet with my advisor (he wasn't on campus today)... i'm about to introduce him to the man he's been studying for quite a while now.

i keep thinking that it's absurd that nobody's stumbled upon this until now, and if i didn't know that the idea of studying contemporary culture only really began in the early 1900s, i'd think i was going insane. but cognitive contamination is a powerful thing, and all it takes is one presumptuous idiot to make a mistake early on for everyone else to pick up on and carry.

i retract yesterday's comment about his bravery. not that it didn't require bravery of a sort, but he really was compelled to publish his sonnets. and talk of him about town demanded that he dedicate it the way he did.

shit. i'm communing with the dead, here. this is - i feel like i'm living in a movie, as the israeli expression goes.

it was way after 5am that i finally managed to shut down, having spent the intervening time (after my last post) pouring through the first third of the sonnets again just to double, triple, quadruple-check that i hadn't made some phenomenal mistake. but each pass has only reinforced my sense of certainty.

---
after two hours in bed, i snoozed my alarm for about half an hour, zombie'd myself out of bed and was almost overtaken by time as i hurried (in slow motion, apparently) to leave the apartment on time. french simple future tense: not so bad. are we ready for an exam? not a damn.

i sped through to see if my advisor was in, and walked off campus with my heart pounding (thank you, fifth floor up the stairs) and my brain reeling. then i magically arrived at work, had time breeze past me there, too (although more productively), and returned to campus for our last lesson on postmodernism.

it was a great class, and began with our professor thanking me for presenting her with in praise of doubt and advising everyone else to read it too. we spent the class munching farewell cookies and summarizing everything we've learned and then it was over.

i really enjoyed that course.

i went past my old office, but it was locked and the alarm was going off so i decided not to get involved. i waited a long while at the bus stop, had a physical brush with a really rude girl (she was in enough of a hurry to storm past me, violently, onto an empty bus. i didn't back down, then felt bad because i'm bigger than her even if she is a total asshole) that annoyed me for most of the ride, then arrived home in time for spicy chinese take-out and...

... i dunno. i need to get some work done, and i'm pretty certain i should get to bed soon.

too much over the moon

2012-01-29T04:04:00.002+02:00

i can't sleep. not a wit. i feel like an archeologist who's dug up some famous, sought-after treasure and is about to become rich beyond his wildest dreams. i feel like the first (as far as i know, of course) to actually have an inkling of who this great man was, and through his works still is.

i'm more in awe of the fact that he had the stones to publish the sonnets. i wonder if they were appreciated properly at the time?

hopefully my professor will be able to meet with me today. this sensation is far too overwhelming to keep it locked up.

the selfish meme

2012-01-29T02:55:00.000+02:00

i stupidly opened my mouth in front of our whole class last week regarding the idea that is now the kernel of the book i'm writing, and i regretted it the second i realized how marketable it is.

i'm usually pretty free with my ideas.

now, in light of that experience, i'm concerned about approaching my professor with this new one in case he does me out of it. that's just silly, and i'm going to tell him everything, but dammit! this sensation of "mine-ness" exists!

the more i've thought about it (included a review of something i wasn't sure of in the beginning), the more certain i am - i know who W.H. is. and i understand clearly sonnets that up until now have seemed really complex.

william shakespeare - you really are too smart for your own damn good.

---
so - still completely over the moon about this. i've also solved an annoying problem with work, and am ready to report my hours and go to bed.

poor bill

2012-01-28T22:15:00.000+02:00

i am feeling wired and inspired, because i just discovered something absolutely incredible while preparing for my final assignment in our sonnets course. i'm not going to go into detail, because there might be fame and fortune in keeping it on the down-low (that's the second time in a week - awesome!), but i can say with certainty that shakespeare was not gay.

i'm not saying that being gay is a bad thing, only that poor old shakespeare's sonnets have been completely misunderstood for a very long time and i aim to show that they are far less ambiguous and mysterious, and far more intimate, than we've suspected.

---
i've just returned from a meeting with our student rep - there were three of us altogether, out of five departments, and i was the only one who'd done my homework and had a list of issues that need dealing with.

it looks like all of the issues i raised are shared throughout our side of the faculty, so we're about to start pushing :)

yesterday:

i slept almost until noon [does that seem excessive?] and around 2pm sorter and my co-worker arrived for a really good meeting! i'm quite amped, because we now have an idea that really is special and could change the way we watch videos online ^_^

after dinner i was exhausted, but we watched the original a nightmare on elm street. some of it was kinda scary, but what ruined it was the early 80s lack of understanding vis-a-vis the function of dreams.

i slept like a baby.

saturday:

i spent a lot of time staring at the mock french exam and thinking that we have not been prepared for something so complex. i'm not happy with it at all :(

i'm on a total high from these sonnets. at least i know i definitely have something to write for the final paper that's due in a week =D

executive discount order form

2012-01-27T23:01:00.000+02:00

harvard business review, your special offers are unappreciated.

i was about to send an email to about ten of the kind-of-could-be-the-right-one email addresses i managed to find on the hbr.org website that looked as follows:

Hi there

I'm contacting you in utter vexation and desperation. Your company website has made it impossible to figure out who precisely I should be addressing this to, and there is no "unsubscribe me" functionality available anywhere online.

I am unable to discover a way to stop receiving offers from Harvard Business Review in my (physical) mailbox.

I do not want to pay more postage to send you back another physical form with a tick in the checkbox to unsubscribe me because apparently it isn't enough to stop bits of dead trees finding their way back to me.

Could you please assist me in this matter? In addition to annoying me with spam, I feel like you're destroying forests in the names of your already paying customers. If this continues, I will not be renewing and I will attempt to find resolution in a less polite manner. Somehow. Your company has me at wits' end.

Thank you, please show mercy,

<total waste>
Tel Aviv, Israel

PS. The return envelope is addressed to the Netherlands, but I couldn't find any Netherlands contacts on the site.

On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 1:52 PM, <total waste> wrote:
Hi

I keep receiving "special offers" from Harvard Business Review for other subscriptions, and I'm really not interested. Please stop spamming me. If there are any details you need in order to stop these offers from arriving on my doorstep, I will be only to happy to provide them.

Thank you,

<total waste>
Tel Aviv, Israel

and then, like a massive, shiny, outstretched arm breaking through the storm clouds, i found a chat link tucked away on their login page.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you...
All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.
An agent will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.
You have been connected to <helpful support person>.
<helpful support person>: Thank you for contacting Harvard Business Publishing. How may I help you?
<total waste>: hi there
i'm absolutely at my wits' end, vexed and desperate.
i cannot find a way to unsubscribe online from the special offers that keep arriving in my mailbox
There's a form for reply, and I'm supposed to tick the checkbox and mission off to the post office and pay postage so that your company will stop spamming me?!
I'm so sorry for the trouble. I can contact our marketing department and make sure they get everything removed.
That's a little unfair, and very frustrating. This is not the first time I've tried to contact HBR, but apparently emails are disregarded over there.
Thank you
Are you getting both emails and physical mail? Or is just postal mail that is coming?
And please - pretty please - if you could ask them to make it easier to get in touch online
It's just postal mail - but I don't want email offers either. I have a subscription and I'm happy with it
I'll definitely do that -- I've been working on a lot of requests to opt-out this week and it's become clear that we could use an easier process!
It seems absolutely ridiculous that there's no "unsubscribe me" from the HBR or the Wired sites.
Thank you - you have all my details in front of you, I assume?
I have your email address and phone -- if you can bear with me one moment, let me see if I can pull up your subscription and address information.
Did you happen to have any of the mailings with you right now?
I ask because there's a code that can help our marketers confirm which mailing list you're on, so they can more easily remove you.
Thank you - you're doing a good job of rescuing me from website hell. Yes,the offer is in front of me
I'm glad I could help! Let me find an example of the code we're looking for.
Do you see a code that looks something like this?
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX
If so, we would be interested in that last five digit code.
I have a Wired subscription, so for me it should end in XXXXX?
That sounds like the right one -- does that appear after the other two codes? If so, I'll send that along with your details.
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX
That's perfect, thank you. I will send that along to our marketing team and let them know you wish to be removed from special offers.
I know they plan their mailings about two weeks in advance, so I would say by mid-February you will stop seeing mailings.
If it's okay with you, I will share this conversation with them so they have it as a reference. If you have any future questions or continue to see any special offers, you can refer to this conversation if you chat with us again.
Fantastic! And please pass along my suggestion that they add the "unsubscribe" checkbox from the physical form to the virtual one at www.success.hbr.org
I'm more than happy for you to share it - I was tearing hair out for about fifteen minutes before finding this chat
I'm so sorry for the trouble. I will definitely pass on your suggestion.
Is there anything further that I can help you with?
No, that's about it. Thank you so much!

so you see: i CAN uses capitals when i need to.

pre-fried neuron steak

2012-01-27T14:01:00.001+02:00

if you don't know what you're doing, frying a steak in a pan can be daunting. it's made even worse when there are two steaks at the same time... that shit's expensive.

what made it even worse is that i got so caught up in the "simple" instructions that i found online, that i ended up with a messy kitchen counter and two weird-looking, mostly raw flesh.

and i felt really, really bad about the whole experience.

i took one bite, and spat rather than swallowed. it was that bad. and i saw myself throwing out these two previously good-looking pieces into the trash, and the idea did not appeal to me in the slightest.

i had nothing to lose, so i reheated the frying pan, added more margerine, and proceeded to do everything the internet had told me not to do. i left them longer and i flattened them shamelessly with my spatula. i'd seasoned them since removing them the first time, and was now cooking against the explicit instructions of the butcher.

and the smell... improved. and they began to look good. and after two to two-and-a-half minutes, instead of one-to-one-and-a-half, i put them on a plate and i didn't leave them to "keep cooking".

the one i consumed tasted great and it was done to almost-perfection (i like my steaks rare, and this was just past medium-rare). the other one is now cooling down in preparation for refridgeration, so i know that tomorrow's breakfast will be a good one.

on the whole, the story turned from a tragedy to a comedy; pg can deride my efforts as much as she likes (and she's right, i really did make some remarkably stupid decisions and i was an idiot for not asking her for help), but the end results are just fine AND i think i've actually learned something about cooking.

almost examing

2012-01-27T05:02:00.002+02:00

t'was a beautiful, springy day! in spite of some distractions, the actual classes were interesting. the orientation course was fun, if a little less productive than usual.

the anime session was great, except for the bit where two of the (now much larger) group didn't take to hunter x hunter at all. i had less of a problem with that than i did with the fact that while trying to explain the series the odd kid (the one who wanted to know what religion i subscribe to after i explained god; also the guy who accompanied me to the bus the other day) kept talking over me, and he's *LOUD* by default :S

chasing samurai champloo with a lecture on the differences between gone with the wind's original text and the movie (and their accuracies, inaccuracies and bi-directional influences) was really interesting, but relatively relaxing after having seen another episode of bobobo-bo bo-bobo :P

pg was not particularly impressed by my being ordained this morning. it did, however, lead us into interesting territory regarding common-law-spouseness.

... much later ...

i've just spent over two and a half hours going crazy because no matter how much i tested every element of the system, it all worked perfectly; but as a whole, nothing happened when it was running. and no errors were being reported, either. there's nothing worse than an exception NOT being thrown when it should be - the joys of working with windows services.

i'm totally stumped and stymied, because my error is in telling the compiler exactly what it needs to do with an unknown object. when did programming become not being specific?!

twice, i came close to firing off emails giving up and being at a complete loss; it was nothing less than shame that brought me to give it one more try each time.

*sigh*

sod this night. morning. whatever.

mysterious!

2012-01-26T09:23:00.004+02:00

i have just been ordained!

you know, it suddenly occurred to me that if we got organized in this country, we could sort out the civil marriages issue fairly quickly. all we need is enough registered pastafarians to be taken seriously, and the current system will crumble under the weight of its own stupidity.

i'll happily marry believers of the invisible pink unicorn, too. or atheists, even.

first lines

2012-01-26T00:30:00.000+02:00

i don't know how i manage to get up so soon after going to bed, but i do. i barely left the apartment on time, and arrived in class a few minutes late. i'm not sure if it was the coffee, the early morning exhaustion, or the class topic into and out of which i floated at random - perhaps it was a combination of it all - but i churned out a solid starting outline for this book that i now feel welling up inside of me, churning and vibrating in its excitement to get out.

i have something to say, i can back it up academically, i know how to express it in an interesting way, and i already have the support of a professor i admire. i spoke to her about it at the end of the day, thanking her for the mixed blessing; it's really important, but what about all the other stuff i'm doing?!

once first class was over i headed to work, with sorter catching me just in time to turn around and head back home. i dropped off my sweater (it was nice and warm today) and met up with sorter and the roofer to go over the options - i'm totally satisfied (so far as impressions go *knocks wood*) and he should be getting the job done within the next two weeks.

hooray!

sorter gave me a ride to work, and i crammed in as much as i could but i had to run out unfinished :(

my presentation was supposed to take ten minutes, and i ended up with twenty and the feeling that i'd gotten it right. i'd picked up on the interesting stuff the professor wanted to discuss and actually enjoyed class participation, which is fairly unusual :D

i came home, worked, ate, worked some more, and now i'm beyond tired and ready to crash.

...

i'm usually exhausted, but every now and then i have these manic periods that lead me to wonder: perhaps i do have a problem, but my refusal to turn it down a notch when i feel shitty is the equivalent of self-medication?

---
thought for the day brought to you by tim minchin: storm, the animated movie. this is an absolutely superb piece. as a cross between a hippie literature student and a pastafarian science fan, i wholly endorse this video and humbly request that you pass it along.

argu-mental

2012-01-25T01:35:00.000+02:00

french class: not so bad.

lunch: a bit too political, and the liver was so bad that we had to wait in the queue all over again to change it.

to the bus: accompanied by a first year, so unable to put on headphones to block out the world. then the sun came out. the extra layers quickly became a difficult burden, but the glimpse of sunshine and natural warmth made it lighter :)

work: finally, the inevitable reorganization took place. unfortunately, my project management got hit too (coincidence, as a matter of fact), but we seem to be getting sorted out. what hasn't been sorted out yet, however, is my payment... it's supposed to have been processed by the freelancer company, and i'm not even sure if it's left my employer yet :S

other work: over. as in, we couldn't do anything more if we wanted to, not even documentation. so i tidied up my account and was getting ready to format when i discovered that there's a good chance i'll be able to take my fancy-schmancy equipment home with me! that would be really neat, i could use the upgrade :P

i had a chat with sorter over his project, and by the time we were done brainstorming we were both excited - we're having a meeting on friday, and i think we've figured out what will make this thing great ^_^

hurrying home, hurriedly eating dinner, hurrying to the cinema...

what kind of asshole comes to the cinema when they're sick and coughing uncontrollably??? to make it worse, one of the three that we had to suffer was sitting right behind me, and his mother never taught him to cover his mouth. i so wanted to put a foot in it! if i get sick, i'll know exactly who to blame and it won't help me in the slightest :(

that notwithstanding, i thoroughly enjoyed the new sherlock holmes. hah! over the top, spectacular, intriguing, and not quite as i'd envision him, but it totally doesn't matter.

it was warm coming home - weird. the ice cream was a good idea, arguing politics wasn't.

and now... work. and presentation prep. perhaps a little sleep, even...

shit, it's late. the so-manyeth time.

2012-01-24T02:23:00.000+02:00

another very late night. just over four hours of sleep, then about four hours of class, about five of work, and then i scrambled home to discover that today was monday, not tuesday. instead of going rollerblading, i watched another episode of fry's planet word* and sorted out my presentation notes for wednesday's class.

* he doesn't really give any of the locals a chance to teach him anything. and where does he find these people? it's interesting nonetheless, but there's definitely room for improvement.

---
thought for the day (addressed to my mother, with specifics and personal bits cut out):

south africa is a wonderful country and all, but it's already too crazy and it doesn't have a very rosy future. physical distance is not the only distance that matters. i know this is a difficult, traumatic, cognitive dissonance inducing thing to ask. i know it's going to irritate you that i keep harping on about it, because that's what unpleasant reminders do. please don't force me to keep bringing it up - you really need to accept that our home and baseline really isn't a home and baseline any more. it's time to pack up our family history and heritage and get the hell out before south africa does for the whites what nazi germany did for the jews.

digitize. box. whatever. they're just memories. beautiful, meaningful memories, but just memories. they'll go with you wherever you end up.

i know that to anywhere will be a difficult move, but not moving is just as much of a struggle only without any potential benefits. and that's just plain silly.

i will always be a capetonian, i will always feel rooted at the tip of africa. the place and the people have shaped me, have given me as much hope as despair, and it will always feel good to go back and always be tough to leave. but it's not home anymore. it stopped being home the second people like nelson mandela became irrelevant and vengeance and tribal mentality took over.

back from a momentary lapse

2012-01-23T01:46:00.001+02:00

the storm was so bad today that the canvas from our gazebo was ripped off. in retrospect, we really should have taken it down for the winter. what a waste!

my previous post pretty much summed up the day - it turned into an evening of shopping, dinner and reading twelfth night, which i'm fully aware that i read completely differently compared to my innocent, pre-course-in-shakespeare's-comedies self. i'm super-attuned to shakespeare's recycled materials, and super-attuned to obscure little phrases dropped every now and then that shift the nature of the play dramatically.

i still don't find myself laughing out loud, though. perhaps my sense of humour's broken.

i closed my giant volume of shakespeare's work and lay my head down on the couch where i was, with pg reading next to me and the air-conditioner finally warming me, and was just woken up a few minutes ago, dragged from the most oblivious, peaceful sleep back to reality, still half in a dream-trance and feeling more relaxed and rested than i have in a very long time.

ho hi. ho hi. go we work to off it's.

ready for the next step

2012-01-22T20:17:00.002+02:00

the self-satisfaction, whether or not it lasts, was entirely worth hours of wet socks, a broken umbrella (which in grand total lasted almost half a day!), and most of the two hours between classes spent in competition with the elements and public transport.

i walked in, turned on my pc, built a new service and solved the problems with the old one, set them all running, locked my station, said goodbye and walked out with pride: all within twenty minutes and while simultaneously brushing people off as politely as i could.

---
that satisfaction was rounded off when we finally got to my turn (about three hours into the class) to discuss my paper proposal for the term.

"can we turn our referat into a seminar paper?" yes.
"and we can turn out seminar into a thesis?" yes.
then i proposed my idea, and i was told that it was such a good idea, and such a broad topic, that there's no way that either a referat or a seminar, or even a master's thesis, would be enough for such an endeavour. i have been advised to turn it into a non-fiction book, and been told that it would solve a problem that nobody else has an answer to yet.

same class, same sentiment. well, colour me pleased, i think i know what i'm going to do when i'm finished with academia ^_^

my beard's looking a bit grey

2012-01-22T08:55:00.004+02:00

it's a frustrated night's sleep, fraught with stolen blankets and elbows, with a stiff neck and back on waking up and knowing that the week in all of its insanity has begun.
it's breakfast and a cup of tea before hitting the bed again, curling into foetal position to escape from the icy cold that's seeped inside.

it's the three alarm clocks that dragged me out of my quiet, blanket-smothered oblivion, and the hot chocolated coffee that threatens to cool while the sun shining outside shows me the leaves swinging in the freezing breeze that i'm going to have to face soon enough.

for the one class that i don't like, and must take regardless.

what did i?

2012-01-21T22:47:00.001+02:00

what a disappointing weekend. i slept kinda late, tried to be productive (and mostly failed), went off in the cold to wait half an hour with wordsworth outside a miserable door only to be let in to argue bad poetry in an unconvincing manner without so much as a cup of coffee or a chair.

i think i'm out of the group.

i came home to eat in front of the end of the first season of buffy the vampire slayer, i've read a couple of pages for tomorrow's class and i'm beat so i'm going to bed.

tv snow. sans tv.

2012-01-21T05:07:00.002+02:00

5am? oh. i don't feel tired, but i think i'm beginning to suffer visual hallucinations.

after performing my socialist student duties* we went to a delicious dinner with pg's family. i ate too much, and had a deep and meaningful discussion with her brother about religion and culture. it all started with why i don't want to work for the big aeronautics companies in israel, and ended with me discovering just how much i've learned since i resumed studying.

* scanning fifty pages of a book (fair use!). i've discovered that camscanner+'s ocr is absolutely useless. the scans themselves are fantastic, though, especially considering the low quality camera, and the only other issue encountered was that the file size is excessive (20mb for a pdf? sheesh.)

i've spent most of the past six hours working, finally getting the new service up and running in spite of being unable to resolve a logging issue. a few minutes ago i checked the logs of the working version just out of curiosity, only to discover that the service is functioning superbly but the target - an external, paid-for service - is down. figures :P

now that i've discovered something interesting enough to present about metropole, i believe i can go to bed.

head down

2012-01-20T17:39:00.003+02:00

wow - i just put glow-in-the-dark yellow (english and hebrew) and pink (arabic) stickers on my keyboard to cover the faded ones, and it's totally defamiliarized. i've gotten so used to touch typing, but every now and again i recenter myself and BAM it hits me square between the... you know what i mean.

i got to bed late, and woke up early, and skeedaddled to dizengoff center to relinquish the router that hot so graciously loaned me. that was after i discovered that they'd been charging me for service since december, even though i'd called them to freeze the account and they'd (allegedly) acquiesced.

after almost a year of fighting with them about letting me cancel my subscription, i'm finally free* of their tyranny and abuse and i will never, ever be using their services again. the same goes for netvision - although i have yet to escape their clutches :(

* thanks to pg and her father. i don't know how they pulled it off, but i'm really grateful!

the rest of the day, up until now, i spent in bed dreaming really strange dreams** and feeling awful. i had a lot to do today. i still do. oddly enough, while i'm not quite back to feeling good (which i was this morning) i am feeling particularly bouncy with protoculture's dead or alive remix in the background.

** i found myself in the middle of the war, alone in the silence at the end of the bridge, in the middle of the straits and unsure of whether i was supposed to be building it up or tearing it down. blue skies and blue waters all around, the concrete reassuring underfoot and the heavy sense of the steel girders striking up into the heavens were overpoweringly real. i climbed over the edge and found the worker's entrance into the dark, dusty, hazardous tunnels below, clambering and climbing across and down in circles until reaching the broader, oddly habitable half-finished rest area between tunnels.
i don't know what the cooldrinks had to do with it all, only i'm certain that k-twang showing up had something to do with my decision last night to apply for jobs as far away from montreal as vancouver.

yawn

2012-01-20T02:56:00.000+02:00

i'm too tired. i'm too tired to do the work i'm supposed to do, too. it's been a long, fascinating day.

i learned about wearing scarves (pg's is warm AND stylish), realized that my sister's getting married in a couple of weeks (and i won't be there), and i got a lead on a job overseas that looks interesting.

oh, and community does look like fun. and tiger and bunny was fun, as was... umm... the other anime that we watched.

gods - the five hours of work this evening wiped me out.

depression as an indicator

2012-01-19T10:55:00.003+02:00

something is broken in a man who cannot function in a healthy society

something is broken in a society within which a healthy man cannot function

am i on to something?

2012-01-19T08:08:00.002+02:00

okay, most of us are convinced that our modern day legal systems are broken. in spite of the fact that i've become a bit of an anarchist of late, i'm going to be cautious and suggest that you're all correct: we need laws in order to govern ourselves.

in order for those laws to be useful governing tools, as opposed to a form of oppression*, they need to be dynamic. there's a process for putting something into law, and it's a problematic process because there's no real trial period. a law, once passed, is a bitch to get repealed.

now, i'm all for a regulated society but surely it's better to regulate our society by our current standards, and not those of yesteryear? like that law in tennesse?

i think laws should have an expiry date. when that date occurs, if it's a good law it can be voted right back in. if not... well, then it doesn't have to bite us in the ass.

human beings make mistakes. that's what we do. lawyers and politicians make more than most of us. this will help them as much as us: what have we got to lose?

* by the lawmakers, or by the past, it doesn't matter.

bug (eye) am in the morning

2012-01-19T01:12:00.004+02:00

i definitely have to crash. hours of debugging to discover stupidly simple things*, and now i'm stuck on more complicated stuff :(

* so, umm, i shouldn't have done what scr told me to do... services should use System.Timers.Timer. and services need explicit write permissions to write logs. and stones are... stony.

good service

2012-01-18T23:18:00.000+02:00

it's been almost a week since i used vinegar, and about 2/3 of a month without shampoo or conditioner. oil production appears to be more or less regulated (if i run my hands through my hair they feel weird afterwards), my hair doesn't smell funny, and i've only pulled out two plastic bristles from my hairbrush so far.

dreads will definitely be less effort than all this brushing :P

---
four and a half hours' sleep before the early wednesday psycho-babble class? nice. amusingly enough, i'm the only person in the class familiar with a rebus (i'd link to wikipedia if they weren't closed*), albeit in the form of cartoon strips called "funetics" that used to be published in capetonian newspapers and magazines.

* SOPA and PIPA are threats to the very foundations of the internet... not only because the internet is so overwhelmingly american, but because if they're stupid enough to pass laws like that then other governments will happily follow suit.
here's what wired have to say, and the oatmeal is on form as usual, and this guy is made of win.
of course, some of the big boys are in too.

i sat an hour or so with scr and we learned how to configure installers for services and perform basic debugging. i'm actually testing it right now, but it's not quite right yet :/
at least all the tricky stuff has been stored legibly in the new office wiki, so we won't have to rediscover it again.

i made it back to campus just in time for second. i enjoyed most of the class (eugenics and cyborgs), not including the five or ten minutes wherein i couldn't focus or keep my eyes open: that kinda sucked. i'm not entirely sure what was being discussed during that time, but i suspect it was interesting.

aside from some good news from the other office (my code passed the initial tests quite well), and some good news regarding sorter's project, and some planning towards the rather complicated things that need to be done to my apartment's roof, it's primarily been an evening of procrastination. and it doesn't help that this stuff HAS to work by tomorrow morning... :S

gut-wrenching instead

2012-01-18T01:45:00.001+02:00

as opposed to the heart-wrenching mentioned yesterday. a couple of days ago i mentioned the girl with the dragon tattoo's opening sequence. and i said "oh. shit."

well, we've just braved the cold, wet night air (and splashy, turd-covered sidewalk) to go and see it. not only was i not disappointed, but rather spent most of the movie totally immersed and most of that time thinking "oh. shit." - i'm not entirely sure i want to compare it to the previous version, but i guess i will at some stage. it's a 2.5 hour rush, and it's not an action movie.

...

french class - an amusing aside, even if it was in the most inappropriate time: a couple of us complained that hebrew wasn't our native tongue, and the teacher was shocked. by me, in particular - apparently she'd seen me talking to the english teacher (the one who was harping on about critical thinking) and put two and two together to get sixteen. then the moron who thinks out loud got involved: "but aren't you...? aren't you...?"

i mimicked his hand gesture, palm up and bobbing up and down. "aren't i... what? aren't i what?"

stupid bugger.

...

after eating lunch meditatively while hiding from the rain, the rest of the day was spent in the office in front of the monitor. it was okay, i guess. i wrote my first windows service, but unfortunately couldn't get past the successful install to the "start/stop" phase :P

headached

2012-01-16T22:27:00.002+02:00

the morning was fine, although i was a bit of a zombie during first class. second picked up and was a lot of fun, then i headed off to work.

the integration was a slooooow process, but i got it done smoothly. after an argument - no, a fight - with one of the marketing guys about specifications (we don't communicate well at all) i said goodnight and headed off home, having had more than enough of the day and needing a stiff drink.

i passed my apartment on the way to pick up some stuff and discover that the last fix made the leak worse, and was about to arrive at home when my boss called to inform me that "it's all broken!" and don't i know how critical the data is that we're losing?

i took about five minutes to realize that we weren't losing any data, but that a change that i'd made earlier had muddled the reporting. it took about two minutes to fix that...

... and then hours (i think) to sort out the disconnected stuff without touching anything else. it's just... it's just...

i'm not even billing for these hours. aside from it being my mistake, i cost them the QA's time as well. i'd cry, i feel like crying only i don't have tears. apparently my tears are reserved exclusively for heart-wrenching movies.

...

at least the letter i got from the army is an indication of a positive situation.

sort of turing

2012-01-16T03:10:00.000+02:00

another 3am special - but this is the first positive one in ages! i've gotten my system running so well that at first i thought it was broken, before i discovered that my tests were flawed and that what i've built is, in this case, just a little bit smarter than me.

*happier sigh*

now i can go to bed.

on wearing silly hats

2012-01-15T23:33:00.001+02:00

on wearing silly hats

---
the sunday morning special: the "regular" french class: less course load, more people in dire need of having "imbecile" tattooed on their foreheads.

work: pleasant - and i'd been worried the whole morning. i convinced the boss that my solution was better than his, and now it's all about racing to implement it in full.

second class: amazing. between zizek, lyotard and leary, hillman, plato and saussure, my concept of the universe (inside and out) feels fleshed out and whole. i wonder if one day i'll be able to communicate it.

the old office: also pleasant. i performed a code review, made a couple of fixes and was left with nothing but completing documentation for our numbered days. we've received notice that we've been fired, but i suspect that the payout won't be particularly high :P

i brought my space quest 1 poster back home.

dinner, french homework, and now work. *sigh*

---
this image is beautifully depressing.

i feel siiiiiiick

2012-01-15T03:13:00.001+02:00

on the plus side, though, needing to pee every 10 - 15 minutes has been a great excuse to take a break from the monitor.

i really didn't get as much done as i'd hoped, though :(
and my upper back's hurting :(
and i have a headache :(

*sigh*

living and loving

2012-01-14T22:27:00.000+02:00

i wasn't feeling too well today... that was before lunch. i ate, i felt really bad, and eventually moved from the air-conditioner and blanket to the bed and duvet, which heat-wise turned out to be a much better option. i was still woozy when i woke up, had a chat with my mother about Very Serious Stuff, and then...

---
angels in america is absolutely wonderful, in every sense. one thing about the weird relationships in the movie: they most certainly make me appreciate what i have.
i mean, i've spent years kind of assuming that i'd just end up alone - and here i am, actually happy with someone and constantly (and most pleasantly) surprised by it. people are fascinating. people are amazing. but not all fascinatings and amazings work well together.

okay - maybe not all people :P

---
right. time to get serious and responsible. and to try to shake the dumb ecstasy of pg's nutella-filled chocolate muffins. WOW.

needing hugs

2012-01-14T12:20:00.000+02:00

monday:

two good classes, one on the grass
sonnet scanning
the formal "good job" speeches:
realization dawns

the new office: too much QA. hours and hours just to find the simple bug :(

---
from an argument that took place after i commented on a new awareness campaign addressing aggressive driving habits:

it intrigues me that you guys are so defensive about something that we all acknowledge is a serious problem in this country, and with a lot of israelis that go abroad - it may not be an israeli-only problem, this macho-aggressive פרייר-paranoia shit [the fear of being a sucker], but it is an israeli problem that our people take all over the world with them.

and we, of all the people in the middle east, should be above that kind of thing.

don't generalize! that's so racist! but the truth is, generalizations are the way that the human mind functions. and [an american friend] just happens to be on our side - do you think that people who aren't jewish and haven't lived here are as fair-minded as you'd like them to be?

this country is a cultural absurdity and it's destroying itself from the inside. whether the fighting is on the road or in the marketplace, it's israelis doing it and israelis who are suffering it, and you don't have to be a racist or an elitist or arrogant to figure that out. you can call [an american friend] anything you want, he lives in a place where, currently, people treat each other with a lot more respect. it doesn't matter whether it's fake or not.

and we're talking about LA. that's kind of a harsh indictment. maybe not every israeli behaves that badly, but more than enough do that it makes the rest of our lives unpleasant and uncomfortable.

criticism is fine - god knows i do it all the time, but labeling people as aggressive assholes just because of their place of birth is bigoted and arrogant.

no, we're labelling people as aggressive assholes because that's what they are. you've obviously missed the point of what i was trying to say in [an american friend]'s defense - [an american friend] generalizing is not the problem. there are two real problems:

1. EVERYONE generalizes, and most people see us the way [an american friend] described even if it's not true 100% of the time

2. we have a problem here. a real problem with aggressive behaviour. and i, for one, am not just criticizing but doing my best to get as far away from here because i don't want my kids to grow up in such a hateful environment.

no, not everyone sucks. but enough do to make it unpleasant. there are wonderful people here. and that is irrelevant.

...
from a later discussion with the same person:
i think the biggest issue here is a crisis of democracy - democracy in its current form essentially means that whoever has the most progeny dictates the order of the country. the second we treat the vote as something to be earned through active participation for the good of the nation - military / national service, community service, taxes etc. and stop rewarding outmoded and dangerous behaviour (hello, overpopulated world with limited resources) we'll be able to consider things like letting non-jews become legitimate members of our society.

on the other note, a fundamental element of judaism is criticism and analytical thinking; not to mention hillel's take on loving one's brothers - senseless hatred, in my opinion, is the primary mode of the ultra-orthodox: i'd rather be a good jew by being a good person than by being identified with a bunch of hate-mongering primitives. i can only justify that last sentence by the fact that my irreligious behaviour disqualifies me from my nation in the eyes of those i'm complaining about.

i'm not entirely shocked by the utter absurdity of the law in the case of illegal immigrants - who can now be imprisoned without trial for up to three years - because we know which side of the table called for it. it bothers me that if such a call had been made by the other side, it would have been for the loss of a jewish state. it's a lose-lose system.

---
beers with ze germans to say farewell to the british one had many pleasant moments, but was rife with politics and a mutual sense of dissatisfaction.

---
tuesday:

our stupid french teacher surprised us by informing us that our friday morning make-up sessions would include a test :(

after class i went home with pg, picked up my rollerblades and went back to the store for a long string of disappointing news. nope, no solutions available. they were nice about it, at least. i tried on a bunch of inners and each one had its advantages and disadvantages.

i bussed straight to work for a bug hunt and what i felt was a disappointment to the boss. swak feeling. i returned home for a great dinner, wrapped up my ankles and wore two layers of thick socks, and braved the cold for what turned into a great skate! aside from ankle hair removal when i removed the bandages, the ride was mostly comfortable as long as i held my foot correctly. so not ideal, but doable. perhaps, i pray, a sign that i won't need to invest in another pair.

---
wednesday:

i worked another 3.30am special, then spent 3.5 hours fighting unconsciously over blankets, woke up tipping over a full cup of water and used the wrong towels to dry it up - happy wednesday! that was followed by long, cold-faced bussing and walking, and i only discovered once i arrived on campus that i'd made the right choice of bus lines.

we had a great class! i made a joke about "sigma freud" and was shocked to discover that our professor had made the same joke a few years back and had been slammed for it :P
also, for the first time, she covered the board with signs and symbols and i actually found it readable. i must have been hallucinating :P

to work - more of a cold face and wishing i'd remembered the scarf that pg made for me.

i left work early with a good feeling (but no brolly for the rain), finally having gotten things functional. i'd left an hour earlier than i'd had to (i'd confused the hour), so i met with pg for a decent lunch, a miserable cup of coffee and then a few minutes on the comfiest chairs on campus - it was raining outside, we were warm, and i sunk in for a deep sleep that i was most forlorne to be dragged out of. but the class i got up for was fantastic, and i've come to the conclusion that china mieville - iron council is awesome, and i will buy it at some stage. (or steal it, if i can't buy it).

my hair was super greasy - was it baking soda and lemon juice time? one more day.

i couldn't rest, so we went shopping; arrival back home had me upset. no hot water and having to go down to turn on the generator in the rain (like in jurassic park) + the motorcycle nuisance making that difficult + getting my ski-jacket zipper properly stuck + failure to open dinner's zip-loc bag = aggravation.

at least work was fun, i got to do some real problem solving again ^_^

---
thursday:

two great classes, and a super-strange moment when co-conspirator took offense to our lecturer's sense of humour and refused to speak to him (???). the orientation class was fun and interesting, and was followed by screenings of samurai jack, hellsing and afro samurai. all brilliant!

the experience was marred by my lunch - i won't be buying a sandwich from the webb cafeteria again. a glove on her left hand, and while i was making up my mind she scratched her hair with her right. i figured that as long as she didn't use that one it wouldn't be a problem, but then she did. ugh. and i was too embarrassed to point it out. while my mind was reeling, she then reached her hand into her shirt for another scratch. compounded embarrassment, and i resolved to think india and hope not to get sick. lice sandwich? *knocks wood* i think it was okay. it was delicious :P

note-to-self: i don't get to complain about a lack of weekends because my thursdays are so much fun :D

the paid-for lecture in the evening was painful to watch. i was unimpressed by the lack of sophistication of the subject matter and its presentation. thought highlights:
connor mead in ghosts of girlfriends past is a wona-miser. the movie, much like dickens' a christmas carol, is very spectre-torial.
aside from captain obvious' conclusions that the movie is similar in a number of respects to the dickens novel, i was offended by the director / script writers' insinuations that not appreciating the institution of marriage equates to excessive materialism. being a misogynist is a sad / bad thing, but hollywood values aren't any better.

i did not study hard for the french test. but i did use baking soda and vinegar on my scalp. i think the baking soda was a pointless exercise, but the vinegar? that shit works fast! and well! and i blabbed about it.

---
friday:

horrid, early, rainy morning
forgetting the basics on the test
a shitty lesson, a cool cat sitting on class laps
a decent breakfast
some rest
dinner, drinks - and a lost voice over politics

---
samsung makes future: the smart window.
jeet kei leung: it takes him quite a while to get interesting (and i don't like his style in general), but when he gets to the point he makes it really well! global culture through festivals

---
will humans become extinct?
depends on your definition of "human", and how lucky we are. the odds of us becoming extinct soon (on earth) are fairly good, considering our dwindling resources, overpopulation, warmongering and weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the ease with which some new type of disease could spread through our global village.

if we evolve, either genetically, technologically, or both, we may well see ourselves escaping an unfortunate destruction and heading out to populate space. if that happens, we will have an opportunity to evolve far beyond our present concepts of humanity, and in that sense we not only might become extinct, but probably should.

having said that, what separates us from other beasts is our language and our ability to produce social narrative. as this feature might well survive whatever other transformations we may experience as a species, by this definition of humanity it is anyone's guess if it will survive as part of our descendants' genetic / social make-up or if some inherent communication / thought improvement will crop up

going feral?

2012-01-13T17:45:00.000+02:00

i've just gone two weeks washing my hair with only water, and just now used vinegar as conditioner - it's awesomely effective. chemical shampoos and conditioners aren't good for you.

although i'm sure the first few weeks of getting off them are more comfortable if you have less hair :/

i can attest to the fact that there are no interesting smells, it feels good and it's less effort / wasted water / money. i'm just putting it out there in case anyone's interested; it's not the biggest deal.

in response to a comment about "nourishing the hair via the scalp": seriously? hair is made up of dead cells. it doesn't get nourished from anywhere.

in any event i think that fixating on hair is silly, just like i think that following fashion trends is silly and owning status symbols like cars is silly. if hair is a "thing" for you, then it makes sense to take care of it in a certain way. but if it's just hair, then as long as it's clean and doesn't smell then it's just fine.

of *course* it's comfortable to use shampoo. that's the whole point. once you're using shampoo your body produces the oils in excess and you *have* to use shampoo and conditioner to get rid of them. when you wean yourself off, then you don't need it any more.

just sayin'.

---
obviously going public with a story like this can leave one open to all sorts of attacks, and someone insinuated that i might not be using deodorant.

the truth is that i haven't really been using deodorants or perfumes for a heck of a long time now, not because of any conscious decision but because quite frankly i don't notice much difference. i'm now convinced that as long as you take care of your personal hygiene you won't smell funny, and that it's not the use of deodorant but rather the food you eat, how much exercise you get, how often you shower... that sort of thing that matters.

i'd link to an interesting article (in i could find it) that i read a while back (i think it was in wired) about the fact that human beings use their natural smells to detect genetic compatibility, and that masking those smells is a mistake relationship-wise.

also, beware of perfumes specifically - as opposed to deodorants, which as far as i'm aware don't have this problem - because the manufacturers put all sorts of crazy things in there including animal faeces (for the "musky" quality).

---
something that keeps popping into mind whenever i smell something offensive is that dogs use smell intensity in identification, whereas we use it as a way to know if we should avoid something. i find that amusing, yet knowing it doesn't help me when i have to stand next to someone smelly in a line. be clean, people!

stupid muscles.

2012-01-09T02:38:00.001+02:00

have i mentioned not having patience for stupid people? our french teacher may or may not be partially deaf, but she's definitely, 100%, not a smart person. and she's not a particularly good teacher, either. it's definitely better to learn online.

what a way to begin the week: an hour and a half of wanting to do violence to her painful lack of intelligence. it's either slapping sense into, or slapping the stupid out. to paraphrase louis ck - "i had to stop just so i could hate her with all of my body".

...

i got to work feeling like shit, and the office equipment seemed to be conspiring to make me pass out. chairs missing, a computer that needed moving... the network was down, though, so aside from being harrassed by a guy who wants to see *SPOILER ALERT* battlestar galactica *SPOILER ALERT*, has gone so far as to read all manner of reviews and ask everyone he knows if it's good, but cannot bring himself to actually watch it, i had a short while to rest a bit and by the time we had internet access i was doing a bit better.

i can't tell if it's my back, or my neck, or something else... and my knees were aggravated this evening. i'm definitely over the hill :P

the evening class was kind of alright, but i found more interest in becoming a sudoku champ. possibly because i only read a few pages of china mieville - iron council so i didn't really have any legs to stand on.

dinner, metropole, rest. then work.

distractions: hairbrush cleaning combined with dr. seuss @ burning man and pg and i arguing over an offer to stay in l.a. served to slow down my work efforts. at least it's all good now.

i've had greasy heart popping to mind a lot since i stopped using shampoo / conditioner... this had better be worth it! (i suspect it will be)

so much serious

2012-01-08T02:38:00.001+02:00

i did a bit of work today... and a little reading... but mostly it was more of the same. heck, we even watched the first part of angels in america - quite an impressive film.

still here

2012-01-05T03:28:00.002+02:00

wednesday:

i learned that a muscial conductor in hebrew is menatze'ach (מנצח), which directly translated back to english is "winner" or "beater". so the opera conductor "beats" the opera, as it were.

---
the news for the week was painful: i was informed that the old office is closing. a while back, after another unfortunate encounter with the law, i told my boss that i was interested in moving to the US office. he told me then that they weren't looking. on wednesday, when presented with an opportunity to discuss this with the CTO, i was informed that if i *had* gone over my boss' head they would have known in time and would happily have sorted me out with a visa, but now it's too late and i'll have to wait until april to apply for one which will only be useful come october.

dammit army! dammit mom! you guys taught me to go through the right channels, and this is how i'm repaid?!

at least his enthusiasm and appreciation made me feel good.

---
i returned to campus for a meeting with the student union; apparently i'm involved with the elections this year - i'm supposed to be the representative's representative. and here i thought i was registered to be the former. (o_O)

dinner with all our parents: not unpleasant at all. discussion of our future kids over dinner was a bit strange, though.

i wasted time until 3.30am looking for solutions that don't exist, AND i couldn't get to work until sunday, so i was a bit stressed about an issue that had arisen during the day.

lihi sagi's album was playing in the background, and it got stuck in my head. it's really good.

---
thursday:

a short but great sleep, a happy wakeup. thursday was a beautiful day, the classes were fun. there was a bit of work stress but scr managed to sort it out with only one phone call so we were all good. i'm becoming a sudoku master (the orientation class was a bit bland).

i left campus "anime braindead": detective conan is cute, but bobobo-bo bo-bobo is completely bizarre and great fun that will ruin your neurons a la the magic roundabout.

i got home to rum, my massage pillow and webcomics. my mum, pg and i went to goocha, and i noticed raindrops just in time for us to find ourselves dry and inside when the hail came pelting down. the meal was well timed and absolutely delicious.

i rewrote my resume when we got home, and sent it off to the cto. i then fell into the deepest sleep on the couch: getting up to go to the airport took a while and was really difficult.

the airport experience was filled with miscommunications and bold planning.

pg and i returned home in the rain for a good night.

---
yesterday:

i finally performed sorter's project review. i'm pleased to report that for once my co-worker has made me proud! the code is commented, it makes sense, and he didn't do anything ridiculous ^_^

t'was a wasted day, as today has mostly been. healthy spiritually, not so much financially or academically.

we watched the original fright night last night. it was shocking to realize that the first time i saw it was over 25 years ago! and the first time i watched it and laughed was about 12 years ago...

i passed out until 4am this morning, then passed out again until about noon. most of my up-time has been reading unproductive things, watching videos and i *think* it's time to get serious. it's been an amazing weekend so far; i haven't had one of these in forever!

...

greasy hair is uncomfortable. it also makes it frighteningly obvious how bad shampoos and conditioners are for one's scalp. i wonder how it'll feel when it balances out...

---
the title sequence for the remake of the girl with the dragon tattoo: oh. shit. for the music as much as the visuals.

---
i've been thinking this since discussing it with my mother on wednesday: one day we're gonna look back on private car ownership and laugh. how pathetic that so many of us have been trapped by the idea that a private car provides freedom, when it usually does precisely the opposite! for the exceptions, when public transport isn't helpful, alternatives such as rental or shared cars make a lot of sense.

two thousand and hate

2012-01-02T22:06:00.000+02:00

an attempt to keep my promise to myself not to write everything down:

why have the last few days been so ridiculously cold? and so filled with politics?

the first communication of yesterday was two thousand and hate mail: it's not wrong. what scares me about islam is not that it demands all of our submission, but that it threatens to delete* all incompatible history, knowledge and culture and that's more important to us as a species than any imagined freedom or rights.

*don't deny it, i'll cite the taliban and those so stupid that they'd find french philosophers offensive. and george carlin.

religion - disconnecting people: this is my new favourite image. i'm none too sure about its context, though.

...

i love this country

the super-heated and packed bus home from work made me feel faint and sickly. i initially wrote that the other way around but it sounded like i'd actually fainted. i had to push past others getting off, and found myself standing outside the bus with someone seated next to the exit dangling my ipod just in reach. that could've been unfortunate.

others' hot troubles reminded me of mine. i hate israeli companys even more than i hate most israelis.

the other office: it was a successful evening, but *boy* was i wrong in estimation.

dj anders - morning expressions made a good background playlist for the evening >v<

work: logic nuts deep into the night. i like actually having interesting problems to solve.

heading off at 3am to get some sleep... pg's parents were still unpacking when i walked in.

---
you can spot your own bloodvessels. it is an interesting exercise.

unstable french teacher, gifts from switzerland, too much lunch.

it took a long time to get to work, and i was there a much longer time than i'd planned.

harvard makes a good call! now why didn't they mention b12? and why is nutritionfacts so depressing of late?

inside, i'm a fat person trying to get out. i just stopped myself from demolishing a large bag of crisps, and not because i'm hungry. there's me advising people who want to quit smoking *not* to replace the cigarettes with food, and eating non-stop...

it's the hair

2012-01-01T22:36:00.000+02:00

it's not using shampoo and conditioner and hoping that the next month will be alright; it's brushing the hair loads and in both directions with bouncy goa trance in the background while standing wrapped in nothing but the steam from the hot shower after coming home soaked through and freezing cold from a debate with my manager in which we agreed that mafia and gangs are a preferable alternative to thugs in uniform and with diplomatic immunity.

it's sitting in front of my pc with biltong, chai tea and the airconditioner's warmth about to get to work after an evening spent arguing the value of statistics* and the nature of reality and then tying up loose ends on a complex fix at the old office.

* statistics is a necessary tool, but has absolutely no bearing on predicting the outcome of an event outside of the controlled for variables and original context and as such cannot be used as evidence.

---
confucius jokes are only funny in english. i find their direct translation to hebrew funny because of how severely they aren't.

that's a very dangerous gun

2012-01-01T00:59:00.000+02:00

i didn't go up north to experience reefer decree like i wanted, but the ushering in of the new year was good nonetheless. rum and sushi, my girlfriend and my mum and the fifth element, coincidentally timed so that the world was saved pretty much as 2012 became a consensus reality.

may 2012 bring us less politicians, less marketers, less organized religion, free drugs, higher IQs, and magical unicorns blessing us by farting rainbows all across the skies.

---
friday:
a trip to the skate shop for nothing, because my leg was still hurting from the day before. i get the feeling they're not going to be able to help me, and that my 1.5k is a painful sunk cost. and i couldn't even leave the blades there because they couldn't guarantee being able to retrieve them for me when i return.

it was a long drive up north, this time pg wasn't feeling great either. i managed the trip there in spite of being extremely self-conscious and uncomfortable. i'm sure it's my slipped disc, but it could just as easily be a lack of fresh air or trouble with my blood pressure. or maybe i'm a bit ill?

lunch got a little burnt, but with great cakes, chatter and rest for the remainder of the afternoon i didn't really feel compelled to complain.

a sudden synapse misfire outside herzeliya had pg back in the driver's seat - not cool. i pulled out my massage pillow and sat on it in front of half of the first episode of fry's planet word. i think it helped a bit.

i then ran off for a political beer next door with botchman: is it worth getting involved in politics when they're so broken? i joined pg and my mum at etnachta and had lentil soup for dinner, followed by a long night's sleep.

---
the last of 2011:

i woke up late, pg wasn't feeling good and the dog was desperate so i took her for a walk. this made her more affectionate than usual, and i couldn't really focus on metropole while drinking my coffee because she kept trying to get a response from me.

we were late for a big family lunch in herzeliya, loads of delicious food and all sorts of interesting chatter. the ride back was alright, but i still wasn't feeling good - have i been sick?

an email from one of my professors made me wonder about alternative methods of studying french - so i signed up for the duolingo beta

---
i was shocked this morning by the now well-known story of paul christoforo.
here's the bottom line.

holy shit. i suspect that his next year is going to be less fun than the last... and he deserves it.

rule no. 1: don't be an asshole. thank you, penny arcade.

here's more detail, and even more detail.

wow. and thank you. you know, if this man was up for the "douchebag of the year" award 2011 - he'd totally be winning it.

to quote a friend: "it's like he compiled six months' worth of crazy just so he could qualify by dec 31."

what kind of day was it?

2011-12-30T01:27:00.000+02:00

i woke up feeling like i'd slept enough. hooray!

i left my cds for the anime afternoon behind. bummer.

my rollerblades are utter shite, i made it two blocks before it was too painful to continue. F***-BUGGER.

of the three buses that end in 71, i picked the one that goes the wrong way. F***!

late for class. swak.

it was an awesome class wherein we learned about the origins of the minotaur and their relation to a midsummer night's dream. sweet!

not a bad lunch, and time to space out a bit. neat!

having a fellow student point out the lack of hygiene as i finished my meal... *sigh*.

more sonnets, less sanity. nice.

finding the student union's portable speaker available. excellent!

getting serious weight-lifting exercise carrying it around. cool.

an orientation class on mythology, interesting points made in a monotone. meh.

good, crazy anime for an hour and a half. sogoi!

skipping the evening lecture to go to work instead of joining the others for a pre-new year's bash. hooray :/

tons of work and not enough time. *grumble*

mother freaking out because the television interface is in hebrew and she thought she'd buggered something up. aaaargh!

forgetting that pg is staying in a different city tonight. whoops...

long arguments online about fundamentalism and extremism and whether or not it's okay. timesuck. (it's not, but it's understandable)

good dinner and rum and liquorice and chocolate in front of the original fantasia. pleasant.

getting ready for bed by sitting in front of the pc. what the hell am i doing?!

thank you, ben franklin

2011-12-29T01:36:00.000+02:00

late to bed and early to rise, makes a man slightly psychotic and a bit irritable. first class was tough, but ended with a great telling of a story about the creation of memory. i was on my way from that to the old office, in good spirits, when i got a phone call from the new office.

the upgrade i performed hadn't been functioning at all. i had to go back.

fortunately it wasn't too tough to sort out, but i wasn't feeling particularly positive about having caused them a day's loss of data. the cto shrugged, i shrugged, and i was on my way out when the ceo made my day: i suspect he reads good management articles. he took me quietly aside and informed me that they're incredibly pleased with me and my work.

you know what? that made my day.

i had a great breakfast for lunch next door with pg and my mum, and then we went together to campus. aside from a bit of touring before class, i sat down to get some of the reading done and was interrupted by pg's brother and his girlfriend for a pleasant chat until i had to run. the class was sometimes interesting, but mostly i just played sudoku between points of "oh, cool".

the event that wordsworth and co-conspirator organized was surprisingly good. most of the participants were interesting, all the items were short, and it was all done with a sense of humour and i think that it was remarkably successful overall.

my mum and i headed back home to pick up pg and then meet with some cousins for a very pleasant dinner nearby; pg has made cookies and i've now given up on the readings (perhaps i'll manage some more before class).

yellzors

2011-12-28T01:54:00.000+02:00

whoa. another 4am special - and it still wasn't working right. when i took it to scr, *boy* was i surprised to discover that what wasn't working was something i'd written in my first couple of days on the project, and that it shouldn't have been working at all.

eh??

another early morning, this time punctuated by an interesting chat with pg's brother and her sister before french class. the class was a bit long. i had a pleasant lunch with pg and a pointless meeting with a professor about a non-existent web page before running off to work.

it took me about four hours to get it all working, by which stage i was completely exhausted and beyond ready to go home and get some rest before rollerblading. i was most unimpressed to discover that there was a report the upgraded system needed to produce - and urgently - and having the client sit behind me sounding pushy did not make me a happy camper.

i urgently dragged myself out of there an hour and a half later after an unpleasant battle with microsoft's excel package. it was all working but i wasn't at all satisfied.

a drink at home made it better, as did a great meal with pg and my mum, and we decided to skip the exercise in lieu of a movie and munchies. the movie was eyes wide open, which was a bit more artsy than it needed to be but it definitely fueled thought. unfortunately, the argument i had afterwards with pg regarding the bible belt overheated.

---
i have a problem - i don't realize that i'm raising my voice unless someone tells me: "you're shouting". by which stage, damage is usually done regardless of my best intentions to the contrary. if i was normal, i probably would have known to give it up but if i was on the receiving end of that response i would be offended that i didn't care enough to... well, shit. the only expression i can think of it "to close the corners" because it's the hebrew version of what i want to say... i would be offended that i didn't care enough to tie up the important loose ends. the back and forth, some tense and unpleasant, some calm and amusing, eventually ended in a reasonable and reasonably desirable atmosphere.

i wish my mother hadn't had to suffer through the stages from the side...

---
vogonizing is mine. i render it unto you.

success? failure? character reports? that's inspired. i think it's an awesome idea, even with the potential pitfalls.

just another regular day

2011-12-27T00:02:00.000+02:00

getting to bed after 4am... waking up around 9am... two classes, a quick sandwich and then arriving at work for integration...

[the integration went smoothly, i'm well pleased. also, the boss intimated that i can disregard the vicious email from yesterday]

... bussing to dinner, delicious and extremely busy post-wedding get-together, then bussing back with pg and my mum... now about to resume working...

not the best of plans

2011-12-26T03:39:00.000+02:00

i don't think there's a way for me to post this quickly; i have to get to bed because i have to be up soon and i've only just managed to get the barest minimum of functionality out of my code.

and i just got back from her wedding, having had a fair amount to drink.

---
saturday:

i *did* go back for a nap, and woke up in the evening *just* in time for us to all have to scramble to get to modi'in to celebrate my cousin's kid's engagement. it was dark, rainy, and *boy* were we glad that pg came with us (she doesn't like surprises) because i began to feel faint on the highway.

joke of the evening: there's no pre-nup when one becomes a common law spouse :P

the evening was pleasant, although it took us more than 40 minutes to say goodbye and i was still feeling woozy. then pg pinched me when i responded to something in a way that might drag the goodbye out even more, which led to some embarrassment.

the storm: not even a KRAA-AAACK before the BOOM, and the BOOM was right nearby. we jumped out of our skins, my mother told us later she'd done the same, and the poor dog was terrified as usual - only the dog can't be allowed to jump up on the bed (bad leg), so i had to lock her in her cage and we felt really bad for her. oh, well. it'll be even tougher with kids one day...

the 7am parking trauma will not be discussed.

i slept well, and i slept late. it was tough to get up, but i knew i had to get the work done. a few hours later i was faced with a virtual wall - thank you, transact sql, for sending error codes that aren't listed anywhere. the worst bit was that the code seemed to be working, but was sending an error code in addition to the correct output. i spent hours trying to figure it out, and had to let go in order to get to the wedding.

it was only now, a handful of minutes ago, that i figured out the issue. debugging sql is a right bitch, and i've now wasted far too much time on getting to a point only halfway towards where i needed to be by today. the pressure was only increased when the client team sent an email to all of the bosses complaining that the application i've written is utterly useless.

brilliant. i haven't even been paid yet :(

at least the wedding was great. it was actually very emotional, it was beautiful and tasteful and there was too much food. i had a great evening, and in a few hours i'm going to sorely regret having neglected my studies this weekend...

too much, or not enough

2011-12-24T16:44:00.002+02:00

5am waking to wait for an hour with busy children of disinterested parents and arsim; the closest one can stand is a long way from the gate, enough to blur my eyesight and cause potential embarrassments.

shopping and decaf coffee, then bed: the first call was from a friend of mother's, which i can understand. the second, from a cousin, which i can understand. the asshole repeatedly honking outside the window? that i couldn't understand, and i was so infuriated by its waking me up that i couldn't get back to bed.

bits of work, then goocha for brunch. awesome spicy crab and tasty tentacly goodness.

bits of work, then a perfect half hour sleep followed by a perfectly evil requirement to get up from it.

both my mother and my girlfriend had a go at me about my not owning enough formal clothing. with my attitude towards materialism and social niceties... why the heck should i?!

dinner was at מקום בלב (makom balev) in ra'anana. that place deserves the 5/5 food rating it received on google maps. there were nice speeches, there was a great vibe, and aside from an awful incident where i forgot two of my cousins' names, it was as usual great to spend time with everyone.

i feel greatly advantaged, comparing all of my interestingly (both psychologically and professionally) successful cousins on my mother's side of the family to all those on the other side, who are either unsuccessful or only financially so. also to all my "friends" (the use of quotation marks implies that i'm beginning to view them as "not so much", like ze germans), who are all considerably less psychologically developed and are wasting their lives on the pursuit of money.

too much good food, or not enough?

there was much discussion regarding big weddings and end-of-the-road bravery: the groom's father has just had his leg amputated and is at the end of his road, yet was nothing less than charming and joyful - and in some cases, amusingly and cheerfully cynical.

the fifth element's OST played us home - eric serra is an absolute genius. this is not the first time i've said it, and it certainly won't be the last.

finally! to bed! and, of course, the complete inability to sleep. pizza dreams? it was too hot, or too cold, my sore legs and feet causing my body to curl and spasm and knock pg about... it was only around 6am that i was finally "rested" enough (define irony) to get out of bed and stretch out, and the short sleep that i got after that was, well, too short.

hooray for early mornings! :/
after doing a bit of cool shopping (buying classical comics off book depository - kick ass!) i got my mother and myself through to the synagogue in time for me to be called up to hold up the torah (no sweat! except that i *was* a bit nervous)... the ~~whiskey~~ breakfast afterwards was nice, and the coffee next door, and the coffee after that, and then it was time to hunt down fuel stations in tel aviv before searching for parking.

we found the parking fairly easily - nice!

i feel like a need a good, long sleep. gonna go do that now, before returning for a night's hard labour...

---
on an entirely unrelated note, an amusing (and somewhat accurate) breakdown of the lsd experience caught my attention on cracked.com, so i thought i'd share it.

not just another weekend

2011-12-23T00:26:00.002+02:00

sleep did help a bit, but i didn't really leave myself much time for more reading.
first class - great.
second class - made my head spin.
orientation class - way more people, i made myself useful and co-conspirator drove me nuts with her stupidity.
anime afternoon one - two episodes of ergo proxy and gundam 00. awesome.
work (old job) - productive. almost interesting.
work (new job, at home) - productive. but i gotta run across to pg's mom's place (temp home) now because i need sleep before waking up in 4.5 hours to go pick up my mother from the airport.

real art

2011-12-22T02:39:00.000+02:00

i can't concentrate of astrophil and stella; the words aren't sinking in, and it's deep stuff.

it doesn't help that i got caught up ogling the best of street art utopia 2011. it's all amazing - but this one in particular blows me away.

maybe if i sleep a few hours the poetry won't seem so alien.

unplanned pre-vac

2011-12-22T01:44:00.000+02:00

the early morning was painful as usual, and i was buggered. it was an interesting lecture, although i must admit to having spent some portions of the last few classes (various classes, not this course specifically) playing minesweeper or sudoku... i don't know why...

i mean, i'm still paying attention and taking notes. i suspect that there's an element of tiredness influencing the lack of participation.

i needed to write a paper for the next class, so i figured i'd do that at home instead of in or outside the office. also, pg managed to score a massive splinter and needed help removing it, so i gallantly returned home to make it worse. i've warned her to take it to a doctor if it doesn't heal quickly, partially out of guilt :(

i was really tired, so after lunch i thought i'd set my alarm for half an hour and have a nap, only switching to my alarm application isn't the same as setting it and i only got up about two and a half hours later. panic! i kind of enjoyed writing the paper anyway, but it totally blew my plans for getting some work done before going to class.

another inspirational class! followed by the old office, doing new job work. i thought it would be quick and then i'd start logging hours once i got onto old job work, but instead of half an hour or so it took me well over two, and i had barely enough time to make myself useful before i had to leave :S

although at least i did make myself useful.

i came home in time to help out with dinner (mini burgers - the first failed and turned into tasty "meaty bits" that were spread in the salad, the second came out in the right shape and texture but not as tasty), perform serious duties as webmaster, and... and now i have poetry to read for tomorrow morning.

wisps of mytheme

2011-12-21T08:16:00.000+02:00

as it was, i only had 4.5 hours to sleep this morning; i spent most of them half-awake, conscious of my body and my surroundings but stuck in an attempt to solve a problem. i barely remember fragments of the problem, but it involved four or five characters and i believe that if i had been able to recall all of their details at any given stage i would have been able to combine them neatly to form a sensible picture, but as i was limited i was unable to find satisfaction and i was distinctly aware that what i was searching for was a myth to make sense of the contradictions.

and then my alarm was going off, and even an extra fifteen minutes couldn't help me. although i'm feeling far better about this morning than any other wednesday this semester.

picked-me-up

2011-12-21T01:56:00.000+02:00

i love bizarro, and the post i read this morning in particular. as much as i appreciate the first one, it's the second one that made me laugh out loud, and i felt compelled to share :)

---
what a difference catching up a bit of sleep makes! and spending the first few hours of the day working from home, figuring out interesting things and then heading off to work with nothing but a kindle** for an hour's meeting and some administrative tasks before heading out for the other office kept the rest of the items short and sweet.

* implementing json objects in c# isn't that difficult once you've seen it done... but you have to have seen it done first :P

** i usually have my heavy schoolbag

the other office has better coffee, and there were doughnuts. my co-worker and i had an argument on the whiteboard until i realized what he was talking about, and it was pretty much what i'd told him to do in the first place only phrased differently. after that, i had about ten or twenty minutes to hurriedly find something (i found it!) before rushing home to leave in time for the rollerblading route.

it was a great route! my blades were a bit easier to secure, although the left side bit into my ankle the whole route and the right side scraped the inside of my sole... hopefully it'll get better.

pg and i had a long an amusing debate about marriage and emigration, and while i'm not going to share the details here, suffice it to say that i can definitely see a familial future for us whether or not an actual wedding is involved.

---
someone asked me earlier how i'm doing, and it suddenly struck me that in the midst of all the craziness, i'm doing fantastically well. studies are stressed but fun and satisfying, working as a freelancer is an absolute pleasure (so far, at least) and not only is the home situation comfortable but my mum's arriving this weekend and christmas / new year's might actually feel like christmas / new year's ^_^

bzzzt

2011-12-20T00:54:00.000+02:00

i was a zombie this morning. i could barely stay focused during my classes and it appears that when i shut up, everyone shuts up... not so pleasant.

work this afternoon didn't go very well; i spent another hour sinking research time down a well, took ages to figure out a shortcut for web communications in c# console applications (WebClient - it made translating php and cURL to c# really simple), and...

... today, i billed hours for the first time in my life. it was incredibly liberating. i feel like... a grown-up.

i arrived home quite late, and was just as shocked as pg when i kissed her "hello" and it was literally electrifying (one of us had been building up static, apparently). after dinner, i celebrated the continuing university strikes (the non-tenured are revolting) by doing my french homework (je serais boire rhum parce que je suis pirate). now to get to bed, i can sleep in and still get up early enough to make programmatical strides.

i realize the time.

2011-12-19T02:37:00.000+02:00

it's late. i've done what needed doing, and i'm happy with it. also, i've discovered absolutely incredible artwork (joe fenton) and read something profoundly worrying about consequences.

swayed

2011-12-18T22:41:00.000+02:00

that icky feeling's still going strong - it's been one of those days. pg and i left early to join the strike that didn't really happen, i handed in my midterm assignment and then failed to do any useful work from the campus computers.

the first hour of the lecture on consciousness was a bit of a disappointment because david chalmers (who is one froody dude) dumbed his talk down. i can't talk about the rest of it because i then had to head to class.

after class i went to work, and managed to make a breakthrough in spite of how crap i was feeling. i returned home just in time for dinner, and i'm now trying to be productive but... i don't really want to be.

---
the life 2011 pictures of the year are amazing as usual. i might not have seen them all if at any stage i'd realized that there were over a hundred of them :P

floored

2011-12-18T10:20:00.003+02:00

i woke up in the middle of the night to pee, and ended up on the floor after a fainting spell or two. it all feels... icky. and as a result, i slept too much and my day was going to be stressed anyway :/

my work here is done.

2011-12-18T00:15:00.000+02:00

i totally forgot to mention one of the highlights of the day! it was one of the highlights of my return to academia, actually. my favourite professor, who i was certain i'd offended, appears not to be as offended as i'd thought. not only that, but my response paper that i sent in last week came back with an enthusiastic review, a grade of 100, and rather more flattery than i'd expect from a paper beginning "i found the unit on utopia fairly tough to wrap my head around, and i’m not certain that this response is going to contain anything more than ruminations on themes already discussed in class".

i'm a little bit pleased with myself, yeah.

misplaced

2011-12-17T23:55:00.001+02:00

nothing like spending more than a day and an inordinate amount of research time coming up with the first half of a paper, and then discovering that i'd inadvertently saved it in the wrong place and in so doing made it publicly available, in all its stages, to my classmates.

i *really* hope nobody read it. partially because it's far from polished; mostly because i'm terrified that some idiot will steal my ideas. and i'm fairly sure nobody else was going the route i am: i've spent just over a page explaining why the question we're answering is ridiculous in order to make a claim that's rather nasty to substantiate.

---
i'm so glad that pg's mum came over to check out the kindle! i was busy telling her that the one drawback is the inability to flip through books, and happened to discover how it's done. my kindle just became even MORE awesome (^_^) - either that or i just turned out to be a complete moron (>_<).celebratory brunch (pg's mum's birthday) this morning was pleasant, and an enjoyable distraction from the paper. so was watching the last two episodes of the first season of misfits. i really enjoyed it!

---
i've done no actual work today. fortunately, tomorrow morning there's a strike on campus, so at least the french homework can wait a couple of days :P

i can't believe my mum will be here in less than a week!

long friday

2011-12-17T03:57:00.001+02:00

waking up early for the make-up french class was a bummer. the test was alright. the class was annoying, and i speak for pg too.

we had a pleasant breakfast at the new place next door - much better now that the opening excitement has died down - and then sped off to the skate shop so that i could pick up a pair of rollerblades.

on the one hand, i should have spent some time doing research. on the other, i can't be without rollerblades. so i went with nrks. so far, i haven't figured out how to tighten the tops and i've gone from less than thirty seconds to put on my blades to more than two minutes...

and something doesn't feel right on the left side, which is an all-of-a-sudden that began a few minutes before i got home now from cm's :(

the rest of the afternoon was spent in front of the computer, trying to make progress with my midterm assignment. i did - i know what i want to write about - but that's about it. i could use another week :/

in spite of that, i took off a few hours to go over to cm's and play arkham horror again. we not only finished the game, but we had a lot of fun playing it - if you play with the attitude that you're not supposed to win, then you can focus on the characters' perspectives and it can get pretty terrifying.

speaking of terrifying:

1. my blades and i aren't stable and my wheels are new, so when botchman took me up to 50kph on the back of his bike i had to call it a good try

2. the tall, well-built bald man dancing in the middle of the deserted street and trying to get me to approach him "to show me something" at around 3am? i would have called the police if i wasn't worried that they'd have given me shit...

3. i wish that somebody would tell me that this is a twisted, chain-letter style practical joke... but the petition has reached over 5500 people and the protest has been mentioned in the news: the usual idiots are now trying to turn the national electric company into a religiously run institution.

because it's not bad enough that they take most of our taxes and resources and hate us in return, provide nothing either culturally or economically, and would like to see us all head back into the dark ages.

back to sleep

2011-12-16T02:17:00.001+02:00

so i missed a wednesday, and essentially a thursday too?

thursday: a strange day, i actually managed to sleep enough, sort of didn't really get started on my midterm assignment, had my rollerblades break on me (after six years of good usage, so i suppose it's fair) on my way to campus, enjoyed a wonderful orientation course lecture, was at work just long enough*, then returned for a great lecture on orson welles' othello. then i came home to eat soup, watch misfits, and study for the french test in the morning.

* there's a tax issue with my fees, and i was stressing about whether or not to broach the subject at all. i was given an opportunity to mention it without making it seem like i was asking :)

wednesday: i was completely buggered. practically dysfunctional. first class was tough, although now that i'm on top of things it's much easier to keep track. i returned to the neighbourhood and ate breakfast while waiting for the plumber to arrive; he only called me when he was done, which meant that i had to get him (thursday morning) to come back and show me that he really had sorted it all out before paying him.

i think i understand the source of the confusion now - he and the other guy have the same name, and both of them have partners. freaky.

i went to work for another meeting - seriously, i wasn't expecting so much administration but at least i can bill for it - then returned for an excellent evening class** before going to the old office for an hour before returning to tel aviv for a pub arrangement with a guy i used to serve with.

** that girl has actually been quite pleasant since we had our little talk.

oh. shit.

2011-12-14T03:17:00.001+02:00

it was 2.30am, and on my way home i discovered just how much impact wind-chill has on rollerbladers... i was wearing a ski-jacket, but without gloves under my wristpads my fingers were freezing...

... also on my way home, running into someone i study with and getting into a heated debate about veganism. it was interesting - although i suspect i cut him off a bit too harshly quite a few times - until some apparently drunk guy who'd been peeing in the bushes behind us planted himself two feet away and stared at me. he asked my classmate if he could understand a word i was saying, and when he responded in the affirmative he told him to tell me that he understood perfectly too.

now, i don't have an issue with being excessively social, or anti-social, but do you *have* to be aggressive about it? everything about this jerk suggested violence, and the first words out of his mouth were to tell one stranger to "pull one over" another. damned primitives :@

---
now that i've gotten it through my head that i'm actually freelancing, my appreciation for my time is completely flipped around and everything's gravy. i'm a team of one, and i'm the team leader fully responsible for management. i don't have an issue with putting together charts and graphs and spreadsheets when i know that i'm being paid to do so.

---
it was evening already when i received an emergency phone call from my tenant: sewerage seeping out a pipe that goes through the bedroom. NOT acceptable, less by me than him if i gauge the difference in our attitudes correctly.

the plumbers i usually call are two partners, one of whom lives close by and both of whom do decent work fairly cheaply. the thing is, these two are always bouncing phone calls back and forth and i've never been able to keep track of their phone numbers - not only bouncing, but they each have a couple of numbers so my contact list is a bit of a mess.

i can't say who i called and didn't call, and as usual there was bouncing and back and forths, but eventually we agreed that we'd meet within the hour at the apartment and i bailed on a meeting to rush home and attend. when i was five minutes away i called to make sure that everyone would be arriving with me, and by the time i arrived the guy was there and had already discovered the problem.

our tanks overfloweth - and as my apartment is on the first floor, of course it's the first to make the discovery. after a strange and frustrating non-argument with the caretaker, we agreed that tomorrow morning we'll meet (after my class) and the plumber will arrive and sort it all out. for a very fair price.

a minute after he left, the plumber called to say he would be arriving in five minutes and that he'd been delayed because he couldn't find parking.
eh?? i told him his partner had already left, surprised that they hadn't talked to one another, and was about to go back inside to pick up my bag when he called back to inform me that his partner hadn't been to see the apartment.

-- cue twilight zone music --
i haven't the slightest notion who it is that came over and is contracted to fix the problem, even though i definitely know him and he's definitely worked in my apartment before. no matter how much of the other guy's time i wasted, and no matter how much he was willing to beat the other's price, i wasn't about to cancel on someone who'd not only made it on site quicker and with whom i already had an agreement, but who i cannot even phone to inform him because i don't have a clue who he is or what his number is.

that's a bit screwy.

---
rollerblading was great tonight; i needed the exercise. although i could just as easily have slept those hours - yesterday morning's wake-up was tough, this morning's is probably going to be tougher. and i discovered, an hour before leaving the apartment, that i have an assignment due tomorrow and a whole bunch of reading i'd forgotten about...

what i've gotten myself into

2011-12-12T23:52:00.001+02:00

well. i discovered today that i don't just have to calculate project times and costs, but i have to be able to justify them, too. also - although i've been told that they can try and speed things up for me for my first month - the norm will be that once i've billed them i'll have to wait thirty days from the end of the month in which i've billed them for payment.

it's not the end of the world, but it most certainly changes the way i plan things. also, i've realized that i need to include the amount of time i spend researching new things and making those plans. it's not the end of the world, but it's new and kinda of annoying.

---
1. my favourite professor doesn't appear to have been offended. hooray!

2. too much reading this week. it's nuts.

3. pg missed her french class yesterday morning so we met on campus and i caught her up. it was an experience; tough, but ultimately satisfying. i wish she wasn't so impatient, though. and i don't have patience for impatience, which creates tension :S

4. it was *really* cold this morning. for some reason i kept thinking of the forecast temperature and put aside the bit about it being less than that in the wee hours of the morning: i'd gotten up an hour and a half earlier than my alarm :(

5. the locker on campus is seriously paying off. i bladed to campus yesterday, used the buses to get to work and back, and after the evening class bladed to the old office and then home. i have to say, it was noticeably difficult: after a weekend of eating unhealthily and not exercising...

gearing down

2011-12-11T00:18:00.001+02:00

between yesterday and today, i got a hell of a lot less done that i'd planned. not that i didn't get anything done, but i most certainly wasn't in gear.

i suppose i did kind'a need a weekend.

pg and i pulled out thunderstone this evening - it took a few minutes to get it all set up and it took a few rounds to get into the groove, but i have to say i'm well pleased with my investment. it's such a great game!

final score - i won... 62 / 61. that's pretty darn close, and she had the thunderstone :)

the shape of things to have come

2011-12-10T18:36:00.001+02:00

i'm busy reading h.g. wells - the shape of things to come, and a specific sentence caught my imagination:

the alternative to disaster, they saw even then, was not just a bleak and terrified security. that was the last thing possible. there was no alternative to disorder and wretchedness, but "such an abundance, such a prosperity and richness of opportunity", as man had never known before.

if we, as a collective, could escape the culture of fear that we have allowed to control us, and which has allowed those willing to manipulate us free reign, we could enjoy the fruits of our labours and struggles. in a capitalist age where the difference between the rich and the poor is vast enough to be disquieting, this same distance allows us to dream and lets us forget, in a strange way, that even our poor are better off than they would be amongst peers in another system.

wells is right, i believe, in suggesting that the problem with any system is its inflexibility... trial and error, and balance, are crucial devices in managing great numbers of half-crazed supermonkeys*. but in order to get to such a point, those supermonkeys need to relinquish their fears and turn an optimistic face to the possibilities of new paradigms.

* that's us

socialism isn't good, capitalism isn't good, but varying combinations of the two could work well.

i wonder if it's possible to maintain a civilization wherein anything is allowed as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others, and in which any violent acts (and only violent acts) are responded to with the utmost violence as a means of disincentive. would it be possible to protect such a civilization from the subversion of manipulative genius, from becoming a dictatorship or a police state?

2011-12-09T23:53:00.001+02:00

while logging in to post this, i discovered two pending comments that have apparently been waiting for my approval since july... way to go, blogger!

---
it wasn't an easy day; i spent it in front of the pc, not counting two episodes of bill and ted's excellent adventures* while kipping on the couch, a quick shopping spree and super**. otherwise, it was all about not reading plato's symposium*** by performing some of my webmaster duties****, going through emails, and sending off long emails to my co-worker regarding both jobs*****.

* seriously - they arrive in china hundreds of years in the past, and everyone speaks english? outstanding!

** it's actually pretty funny, and surprisingly sweet! also - what an amazing cast! thank you, ~~captain hammer~~ holy avenger!

*** the first half, at least, is a serious drag

**** joomla can be fun!

***** sorter's project, too. dropbox has turned out to be the best cheap svn for single-developer projects

---
linkage for the day: nokia's mapping is amazing. but with all these wonderful, incredible, life-enhancing systems being built and deployed, i'm left with one question: what happens when the internet goes down?

good parenting advice: compromise is important. not quite "if you can't beat them, join them" but an even wiser position.

this is amazing and frightening. and not because of his connection to family guy:
lapd arrests the wrong guy over protests in los angeles.

psy-onna-stick

2011-12-08T23:46:00.001+02:00

it was a most pleasant day. last day of the week? einstein's general theory + my last couple of weeks seem to indicate that the more one works, the less one moves in space and the faster the days go by. the first two classes were entertaining; the last class was our orientation.

wordsworth brought in a couple of texts and we demonstrated the kind of analysis that's expected of them for their papers... i think by the end they started getting it... then i had half an hour to teach them the basics of psychology.

either i'm a great teacher, or they're really smart, or they're good liars - apparently everything i said was clear. i covered everything they'll need to get through a goodly chunk of their degrees and i even took it one step further - to the point where we are right now with our wednesday classes.

that made me feel good. then i went to work and actually got quite a bit done, which also felt good. the end of the evening in the office was a bit of a rush job (a few TODO comments in the code) because pg was cooking and i didn't want to miss dinner :P

pg and i just watched confessions, and i can see why our lecturer found it distracting. it's really good.
now, i believe, *is* a good time to go to bed.

---
the last weekend was killer, and i was concerned that i'd be burned out by the end of it. strangely enough, while i'm still exhausted i'm REALLY excited about real programming again and i'm loving both jobs. i don't even mind having to drag my co-worker by the ear because he's a fantastic exercise in coaching, and i'm convinced that the day will come when i teach him to do things the easy way :)

where? am i?

2011-12-08T00:10:00.001+02:00

it's just turned thursday, and i have the following to report. in no particular order.

rollerblading slowly through quiet, dark streets while dressed in clothes i only wear around the house felt... nice...
i fear i may have offended my favourite professor by sending a mail slightly impolitely deconstructing monday evening's lesson of stupid
i'm very, very tired.
this morning's lesson on lacan and levi-strauss actually made sense, and was interesting. it gave me a totally new perspective on science (reinforcing my previously held views, but putting them in a much more interesting context), and brought me across the line from the side on which i'd been imagining that co-conspirator isn't a complete idiot. when she doesn't *get* something, she forces a subject change.
i would wonder how people like co-conspirator and the girl from monday's lesson got their degrees, only our master's forum this evening explained it all. in simple terms, undergrad is now the pay-as-you-go say-you've-been-to-college certificate, and master's studies are what undergrad used to be once upon a time, when people actually wanted to learn stuff.

in addition, it has been made perfectly clear that the thesis track is a complete waste of time for anyone not planning on continuing on to a phd, and i realize that if i want to contribute something to the academic world i'm as well off, if not better off, doing whatever i like in my own time and publishing (or not) personally. i'd rather make use of my little "vacation" by doing as many courses as i can about things i know nothing about.
my co-worker: *sigh*. he's not bad, but i don't know how much drilling i need to do before he gets what i'm on about. SIMPLE code. SIMPLE solutions. THOROUGHNESS. when committing and when testing. COMMENTS AND DOCUMENTATION. useful things. in friendly format.
last night i got to bed early (around midnight) for the first time in a week - and we were woken up with a jolt around half an hour later by a phone call from the states...
i didn't answer, and i got back to sleep almost immediately, but physical shock was memorable :(
a long chat yesterday with one of the guys i used to serve with; it sounds like we might get together to make some music - i hope.
the project! it's OVER! there were a few interface issues, but on the whole it's now a neat and functional application and it does the job. and a whole bunch of other jobs in the future, which means that i designed it well ^_^
it was really satisfying to see the results of field operation. one row of data made my whole day :)
i didn't have the energy to go rollerblading last night. it sucked to bail, but it was the smarter choice.
working on contract is beginning to sound much, much better than for a salary. i can take days off between projects and nobody will give a shit where i am. i can incorporate studies and personal events into my time estimate, and nobody will panic.
now i'm just waiting for the guys from freelancer to get back to me so that i can bill my first job.

it's not over yet

2011-12-06T02:13:00.001+02:00

i've just now, finally, i pray, completed the sql logic. i can't believe that in my haste i made such silly mistakes. now all that's left is to integrate it with the front-end, and then i'll be ready for bed. soon after which time i'll be getting up for class again...

... i only got to sleep around 3am yesterday (too, it seems), then got up early to do the reading and didn't have nearly enough time. i managed to arrive late for the first class because i'd gotten the rooms backwards and sat waiting for a while until i registered that i didn't know *anyone* around me...

the second class was interesting, but i was buggered, unfocused, and it took me right until the very end of class to come up with something interesting. i decided not to go to the third that i've been auditing because it really is a waste of time if i'm not doing the readings. and i was really tired as well.

i had lunch with wordsworth, who gave me a ride to the bus - on the way another netvision representative called to offer me some new deal; it's happening more and more frequently, and i've taken to screaming at them in an attempt to get myself on a "do not call" list. it's very upsetting, especially considering the fact that they've still got me by the balls with the internet services that i don't want :S

work: horrid. everything went pear shaped, and it all being down to configuration issues doesn't make me feel any better. i don't know if my chat with the boss at the end was productive; it took me a while to explain last week's misunderstanding to him; there were a lot of assumptions made about company knowledge that i've just learned the hard way, such as who to listen to and under what conditions to agree to a project. next time i'll be smarter, at least :)

slightly more positive news - my mum's coming to visit soon ^_^

it's funny, i don't listen to music when i'm super-stressed. after getting home, snacking, skipping over to pg's parents' to print and photocopy stuff so that i can sign up for a freelancing company (what a great idea!!! they take a cut and i don't have to get intimate with the revenue service), and doing my french homework, i was feeling much more relaxed.

just a little bit longer...

not. my. day.

2011-12-05T01:36:00.001+02:00

i got to work all excited after french class, only to discover a couple of minor bugs that kept me busy until i had to run to class again. it was in the middle of class that i got a phone call informing me that things weren't working...

... it's the class that's usually my favourite. the girl who upset me on thursday? [i didn't even mention it, apparently. she kept cutting off the professor, and punctuated the rest of her sentences with "uh, huh?"s and "mmms" and "rights" - a little distracting]
i had a talk with her, which i'd been dreading both having and not having - i was certain the confrontation would be unpleasant, but the alternative was more of her behaviour. surprisingly, it seems to have gone alright. but the universe couldn't let it go at that, so it had her "teaching" us the whole lesson instead.

this is a girl who doesn't *get* what the class is about. we spent two hours pouring over uninteresting things that any idiot could find online, and in this case did. the highlight? she cited "the onion" as a source, not realizing that it's a parody site.

seriously.

...

straight back to work, there until 10pm. i got things basically functional, but the boss asked me to make some critical changes and holy crap, i've just spent two hours renaming fields in the database only to discover that i'd forgotten to incorporate a couple of changes made in the other office, potentially wasting hours of work when i don't *have* hours to spare. it's closing in on 1.40am and i haven't done the readings for the morning.

FUCK. and my outcry at my discovery woke pg :(
at least it seems that the bosses are happy with me. i'll tell you how much that's worth if i survive the day.

parkinson's law isn't always right

2011-12-04T02:51:00.001+02:00

i'm WAY overdue for this project, judging by the amount of sleep i've lost and the fact that i haven't been out of the apartment since thursday. heck, i can count the number of breaks i've had on my fingers (although friday's few hours were good).

there's just a *tiny* bit left to do and i really can't do it without jeopardizing my day. dammit.

both wired and tired

2011-12-03T19:05:00.001+02:00

i have just now completed the Big Deal - the only thing that sucks is that while there's a big deal of code behind it, it doesn't actually look that impressive from the user's end. i can only hope that it's as "to spec" as i think it is. at least it's a major item scratched off the list; two more major ones to go.

i'm taking a break to do some of the readings for tomorrow; the only other break i've had was for french homework. i've just decided that i won't be joining the protest tonight... i really don't have the time.

on another note - the leftovers from pg's baking are unfortunately delicious.

ticking tocks

2011-12-03T03:06:00.001+02:00

i worked until late, then slept, then got up early and carried on working. aside from a chat with my mum mid-way through the day, i continued to work through to the evening, at the end of which i discovered that the biggest part of the project (or most complex, at least) is still ahead of me. so tomorrow's going to be hard work again. and i have readings to do.

dinner at pg's parents' was great, and we came home just before the guys began to arrive for super-weird anime, a nasty game of citadels (i was either killed or disabled for most of the game, and - mostly - it wasn't even intentional), and attack the block. that's a fun, intriguing film but it's not quite as good as i was expecting (after the so-far cornetto series and paul, which kind of set the bar), although something tells me that there's a lot more to the movie hidden beneath the surface and that it might warrant a more observant review at some later stage.

as pg said - it's alright that we didn't see it in the cinema.

---
in terms of discourse and registers and what-have-you, it's dawning on me that pg's and my relationship has, for a while, been a lot less girlfriend / boyfriend and a lot more husband / wife. i find it a bit startling every time that we discuss future plans (serious ones, like leaving the country and raising children) that these things don't worry me; they're not overwhelming or scary, they're just the way things are and the way things should be. and that feels... rather good, really.

break-ed

2011-12-01T22:57:00.001+02:00

i spent a couple more hours working, then went to bed. then woke up and dragged myself back to campus. the day was great; excellent even. we got good feedback on our orientation course, too.

i scrambled home, buying olive oil on the way and wondering, once again, why the express queue is always the slowest. i mean, i know *why* - they just have to herd troublemakers over to another aisle - but i don't understand why it's not taken care of.

i did a bit of work, then joined sorter at my apartment to spend an hour or two terrified by the fact that we were working with asbestos (not directly, but the dust was everywhere and i'm not sure that our masks were really enough. it was dirty, disgusting work (i didn't do much aside from share my opinions and try to avoid the dust - not that the troublesome particles are visible) and i *really* hope we've sorted the leak out this time.

whether we have or haven't, though, we now know what the situation under the roof is and i'm going to need to set up something a little more solid.

we came back to my place for a beer, after which i showered and ate (and joined pg in watching an episode or so of invader zim, and now i'm working / playing...

oh, crap. and YAY!

2011-12-01T01:08:00.001+02:00

i'm a bit blown. it's 1am and i've barely begun the stuff that needs to be finished this week, because every - single - time i try to do something i learn a new limitation or something else goes pear-shaped. no pressure... i'm reduced to simulating the functions that are working but somehow inaccessible by copying and pasting their live results into the code i'm writing.

this is shameful.

---
the other crazy news:
i made a serious faux pas yesterday with both my bosses, and i got the feeling that at that moment i'd blown the whole thing and had lost the job. it ate away at me all the way home, by which time i'd settled on a course of action that involved sending a long email to explain exactly what was going through my mind when i said what i did.

apparently they're both surprised and satisfied by the email, but we'll only know when it comes time to make the hiring decision...

mongoose called me up yesterday, and spoke to me in a way that i find... disappointing. i'm actually quite irritated with him, and i suspect that we're not friends anymore, nor have we been for a while.

this morning began way too early with way too much freud and lacan. i'm not entirely sure what was going on - i tried to take notes but the words blew away like wisps of smoke in a breeze. something about navels and signifiers and not knowing anything. that was all after witnessing an absolutely horrifying incident with some violent kids (and i mean, 8-12 year olds) continuing to be disgracefully rude to an elderly lady in spite of three of us (on a packed bus) stepping in; one was adamant that he was both polite and a grown man, and i'm fairly certain that his parents should be culled.

---
the good stuff:

on my way off campus last week my left ankle developed shooting pains at every step, and i suspect a bit of a sprain. it only got worse whatever i did, and then i figured out that if i forced my leg out and to the left it didn't hurt so much... it's kinda like i'm retraining my leg, only without the use of orthotics. the odd bit is that when i went for a run on sunday (forcing it outwards consciously) it was okay... anyway, it felt much better today.

rollerblading last night was excellent. today, so many birthday wishes *did* make me smile in spite of my cynicism. it made it tough to get things done! the best part of the day: cooking liver for dinner and then being treated to pg's excessively decadent personal pavlovas. small for a pavlova, giant for a meringue ^_^
every time i leave the study i'm surrounded by balloons and wishes; and pg knitted me a really funky scarf! (i didn't realize she'd made it herself, i was certain it was store-bought :P)

almost 2am?

2011-11-29T02:01:00.001+02:00

rubbish! i won't have it!

i've finally learned how to use linq. why it's so complicated to find out how simple everything is is beyond me. add new item, linq to sql classes, drag and drop, save, et voilà. sheesh. so now i have http referral, wcf, linq, and manual sql server database manipulation under control, all i have to do is produce a hefty frikkin' service-based interface for the users in two / three days.

holy crap.

...

mondays are long days, and in the third class i discovered that i hadn't even bothered to look at the materials for the second course i'm only auditing. thank the gods that i'm auditing, i was lost for half the lesson (although the other half was interesting).
the earlier classes were great.

half the time i was at work was spent engaged in conversation with my co-workers - i *really* like the new office. i really hope i can impress the bosses enough to take me on.

i came straight home, ate dinner, and aside from five minutes of sitting with pg while she's going through invader zim (it was my favourite episode, hobo 13) i've been here, in front of the screen.

must... sleep...

stressed out weekend

2011-11-28T00:07:00.001+02:00

i don't feel like i had much of a weekend... i spent all of yesterday stressing because i couldn't get a basic wcf restful application running. i had sample code and too much documentation to pour over, and while i thought i understood everything i just couldn't get things functional.

i took a break midway through the day to watch i, claudius, expecting it to be a comedy. it's about as funny as stepping barefoot on a sharp knife when lost and hungry in a dark forest. it's kind of like watching rome (the series), only with less psychedelics, less sex, and less amusing lines.

at night we walked to mike's place for a joint birthday party (mine and one other), and the evening was quite awkward (mostly seating issues, but some social ones too). mindless echoes was supposed to play at 10pm, which was then moved to 11pm, which meant that they only really got on stage around 11.45pm and we had to be out of there by midnight... at least the second song was awesome.

i have to admit that i ate far too much. when i got home, i looked in the mirror and was horrified to see my gut hanging out at me - no way. in response, i didn't have an appetite nor anything to eat today*, minus an energy bar around 4pm and a bowl of cereal two to three hours before returning home to go for a run.

* yes, i know it's counter-productive.

today began at the tax bureau, where i offended the first guy into a state of intentional, petty uselessness, and walked around in circles** until eventually somebody took pity on me. i'm still not sure what happened after that, only it involved filling out a form. i'd written "less than one month," and the woman read it and looked up at me: "i don't understand, you need to mention time-frame. like, a month? a year? something."

** literally, they've placed all the offices in a circle and have useless signs, for maximum confusion.

french class wasn't bad, and then i was stressing again on my way to work. stressing because i have four days left to make good on this contract and i haven't made any progress with actual code in days... then i got into the office (minus a short visit to the old office to say hi and discuss monies) to have scr laugh at me: all of the documentation i'd found for wcf was for versions 3 or 3.5, and the example he'd given me is for version 4. within one minute we'd sorted it all out and damn they made that shit easier!

back to campus, for an amusing and deeply satisfying class on the russian revolution. really. i made a connection between conway's game of life and the post-revolution riots that, combined with the trauma classes, have me pretty certain that i know what my seminar paper's going to be about. i had to refrain from arguing with our professor about zombies because i don't want to let the cat out of the bag regarding my plans for my thesis, and most certainly not in front of other students :P

a couple of hours in the old office, with sorter and i agreeing that with my schedule conflicts (the past couple of months have not gone according to plan) it's a good idea to bring someone in, and it just so happens that my co-worker, for all his faults, is the ideal candidate. so we had a chat and i've just now sent him the outline with the first stuff he needs to get done.

i came home to change clothes - not warm enough, unfortunately - and go for a run. i feel better already, have eaten a delicious and almost carb-free dinner***, done a couple of things that needed doing (hopefully i've done them correctly) and am ready to get to bed.

*** yes, i know complex carbs are okay nutritionally, but they're not very helpful when trying to lose weight!

summary fire too

2011-11-26T02:34:00.001+02:00

it was really tough focusing on things today. the amusing bit is that i only realized two important things at the end of it that would have made me waste a lot less time earlier:

1. i *did* have the details i needed to get started on transferring our department's website. when i did remember, i got started and it's such a pleasure to work with joomla!

2. visual studio's c# express has more than enough power to create and manipulate an sql database (even though it's not designed for this, and requires ignoring a lot of "this is all wrong" alerts).

the kak bit of the day - a rehashed argument (and not an enlightening one) with an annoying girl in our department forum on facebook. the excellent bit - going to the tmuna with shakespeare (with him carrying a book of shakespeare, that doesn't happen as often) to hear some didgeridoo artists, groovy funk music and then excellent trance.

summary fire

2011-11-25T13:55:00.001+02:00

the scientologists didn't have authorization to enter campus, which reflects better on both the student union and the contractors who organize the bazaar. the day was long and entertaining, i got a nasty surprise at work (although i suspect that it's my own fault that i misunderstood the requirement, and otherwise everything's great), then i came home to shop and didn't have energy to do anything more than watch big fish and go to bed.

picked up my copy of ferenc karinthy - metropole this morning, bought stickers (so it's now going to cost me less than a shekel per sheet, instead of twelve), and i've now given up on my webmaster duties for the weekend in favour of getting real work / studying done.

---
update: oh, shit! i completely forgot two awesome items:

1. our lecturer reading eric idle - who wrote shakespeare? at the beginning of class. inspirational!

2. until yesterday i hadn't been exposed to kant's formulations:

a. "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
b. "act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
c. "therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends."

good to know. i can't disagree with kant... only with those who misinterpret him.

i don't like wasting words

2011-11-25T12:00:00.001+02:00

so i repost them here.

the paper makes one incredibly large assumption at the very beginning - that people are rational. the problem is that the very notion of "rational" depends on culture and world-view.

the universe as you know it is entirely constructed of partial sensory data that you put together in causal sequence to create narrative. that's not to say that you don't get anything right, but that is to say that you "tune out" or "smooth over" contradictions in order to contain them. considering the simple fact that your experience of the world is not identical to the world itself* is a giant contradiction that you have to make peace with, and that effects most of your rational decision-making processes.

the bottom line is that the scientific method is the one method ideally suited for discovering facts outside of the human experience, but it's incomplete (i'm being exceedingly generous here) when applied to human consciousness because psychologizing is a process that does not take place in isolation and cannot (at least at this stage in our technological / philosophical development) be measured in any meaningful way. understanding human behaviour demands a lot more than understanding "desire", because there are deeper desires that determine whether those shallower desires will be acted upon and it is uncannily complicated to communicate them - meaning that it is fantastically difficult to assume that you can figure out what drives someone else. or even yourself.

* for instance, there's no such thing as colour, only differing wavelengths reflected from light hitting a surface, but you identify them as colour and most of us can all talk about the colour blue** regardless of how we see it.

** assuming, of course, that it's a culturally significant colour. this is why the russians differentiate between a lot more reds than the rest of us.

---
clarification
---
> "your paper makes one incredibly large assumption at the very beginning - that people are rational. the problem is that the very notion of "rational" depends on culture and world-view."

Where does the paper make that assumption? The paper is fully about how to consider irrational acts. Looking at statements in the preamble before examples of irrationality are introduced simply doesn't do the paper justice.

i'm sorry, i went through the paper and it appeared to be trying to make sense of human behaviour. Everything talked of utility, and the idea of utility implies being able to determine what that utility is. The underlying assumption that people want money doesn't fly for a surprising number of people.

> "considering the simple fact that your experience of the world is not identical to the world itself* is a giant contradiction that you have to make peace with, and that effects most of your rational decision-making processes."

First off, calling it a contradiction is erroneous. I am happy to concede the DUALIST approach. Yet I am a functional materialist in so far as the experience of evidence -fits- with other evidence.

it's not a matter of evidence fitting or not fitting, it's the notion that your reality IS reality instead of just a MAP onto reality. which is not the same thing.

> "the bottom line is that the scientific method is the one method ideally suited for discovering facts outside of the human experience, but it's incomplete (i'm being excessively generous here) when applied to human consciousness because psychologizing is a process that does not take place in isolation and cannot (at least at this stage in our technological / philosophical development) be measured in any meaningful way."

Firstly that is not my experience of the human mind and people in general. The atom may not be deterministic due to Quantum theory, but my experience of people suggests determinism on a grand scale. Even what people consider to be 'irrational'.

The thing is that you seem to think it's possible to simplify; one's internal universe (the mapping) is vast and complex, and neurologically riddled with feedback loops and filters. the fact that you see determinism on a grand scale is a perfect example of how your mind creates a coherent narrative on top of events in order to link them with causality. this is something YOU do, not something that exists outside of your experience.

Further, even if the scientific method is in error, it would be even more erroneous to suggest that emotional argument or beliefs is the superior form.

i'm not sure how to express this succinctly: the scientific method is not in error, we are incapable of using it on ourselves. it becomes irrelevant to discussions of human behaviour because we are unable to isolate the variables.

>" understanding human behaviour demands a lot more than understanding "desire", because there are deeper desires that determine whether those shallower desires will be acted upon and it is uncannily complicated to communicate them - meaning that it is fantastically difficult to assume that you can figure out what drives someone else. or even yourself. "

This is probably your own work. I suggest nothing more than there are separate human desires that are often in conflict, even in the individual, and belief systems are the means of picking and choosing between the conflict, whether cognitively or not.

100%. but you don't have access to the processes, so to make assumptions about them is ridiculous.

>"* for instance, there's no such thing as colour, only differing wavelengths reflected from light hitting a surface, but you identify them as colour and most of us can all talk about the colour blue** regardless of how we see it."

Here, you are wrong. Colour is simply the ASSOCIATION between distinguishable wavelength and various experiences. Assuming that an association is 'not a real thing', is a fundamental flaw on your part.

here we have a terminological quandary. instead of "real", i use the terms "true" to indicate a subjective reality and "fact" to indicate an objective one. if you believe something, it's true and real for you. if that belief can be verified using the scientific method (and here we have to be reasonable, because even though scientific consensus isn't always right, it is always "as right as can be until we get new information") then it's "fact" and real for everyone.

"colour" is the interpretation of a wavelength, which means that it's very real for every human being, but not real in an external sense. colour is truth, not fact.

>"** assuming, of course, that it's a culturally significant colour. this is why the russians differentiate between a lot more reds than the rest of us"

<personal details deleted here>

our brain performs two functions: filtering and pattern-matching. you're right - it's incentivized, meaning that if we don't need certain information then we drop it. just like the japanese, unable to differentiate between "r" and "l". there is no "conflict", as such; it's a personal mapping that either has a value for a specified wavelength or doesn't.

in the enemy's camp

2011-11-24T00:04:00.001+02:00

i couldn't keep my eyes open during first class. it was painful and uncomfortable and filled with lacan and freud and bad parenting.

i had to write a paper about trauma today, and i learned so much while writing it that i'm fairly astounded by my own insight.

the evening class was entertaining as usual, work (old office) was a bit productive, the bus there (with the girl who scrapper met through me, somehow) was initially awkward, then kinda interesting, and interrupted by a girl sitting in the row in front of us who started asking me questions out of the blue. i was completely thrown by this; when she got to asking how i feel about israel, my immediate response was "it's a shit-hole."

"why?" she asked, sounding a bit hurt.
"it's the lack of culture. it kills me."

and she left me alone. then i felt bad for being so vague and not being specific: it's because everyone's completely absorbed by their own needs and desires and the notion of being considerate is completely out the window, to the point where israelis make themselves miserable by behaving so badly.

this evening it felt like pg and i were celebrating without specific cause - dinner out followed by ice-cream. and the real gift? she's been watching invader zim since she got home around noon.

*sigh*

---
the one thing that's pissed me right off, though, is seeing a scientology stand on campus. they profile you to see if you're normal, then teach you to do what essentially amounts to lobotomizing yourself before hitting you with the whopper. i realize that that sounds suspiciously like other religions. it's an anti-academic anti-science foundation that violently suppresses dissidence. that means that if you're stupid enough to fall for their shit, you're screwed. shit. that's still like a few other religions.

there are two types of scientologists: assholes, and morons. and they're both dangerous. the original judeo-christian texts in general and jewish philosophy in particular are full of profundity, but "the fans", as someone so eloquently said, are the problem. scientology, however, is a practical joke by a well-known science fiction author that went too far.

scientology is not like the others. scientology was designed to be a giant con; at least the other religions have *some* positive side-effects, scientology is net-mega-negative.

launching...

2011-11-23T01:21:00.001+02:00

i walked home fast from work last night, partly because there were lurkers at the beginning of the road and i didn't want them to see that i was... distrustful... i had a quick shower and went straight to bed.

i'm very lucky - as is pg - that after she got up at 6.30am and was getting ready to go to class, i began to stir and somehow registered that i hadn't informed her of the strike. we hadn't been sent any details, so she decided to take a chance and went back to bed. two hours later i got up for my class (with the same teacher), and i arrived on campus to discover that the lessons were indeed cancelled and that pg had gotten it right.

---
so i went to work. they set me up in an office with two other guys (who seem nice enough, but then again i've only seen this company as having a good dynamic), and after a weird struggle with security settings i managed to get started. aside from two short breaks for phone calls and coffee, i worked straight through from 11-5 and *enjoyed* myself. not least of which was caused by my getting the basic underlying requirement functional.

i'm kinda proud of myself. and grateful to microsoft for their visual studio line. it has evolved into a set of exquisitely solid products and aside from a few nuances (almost nothing that a good forum hunt can't handle) they really do allow one to focus on the programmatical problems instead of the environmental.

---
the bus back to tel aviv smelled bad. at certain hours of the day, the back of the bus is packed with less hygiene-orientated people and it's hard to concentrate on reading shakespeare (we're on taming of the shrew, and it turns out i don't remember any of it) in that sort of environment...

i met up at the lincoln with my second (army) team leader, and we spent a good hour and a half catching up, arguing politics and getting into the games; i think the last time i saw him we were taking the judges examination together in order to be promoted to captains, and now we're both civilians (he's been out two weeks) we can discuss this stuff freely :)

late for a meeting with nystire - and slightly tipsy, and with my mind still racing from the debating - i rushed to azrieli to meet him and his wife for coffee and rather interesting conversation. then i rushed home to strap on blades for a really fun couple of hours around tel aviv.

now i'm about to hit the hay: i'm still really excited about the day in general. the only thing that mars it somewhat is hearing about the south african secrecy bill. well done, assholes.

---
i wonder why stephen hawking thinks we can't manage? and who was that weirdo who used to say the same thing? oh, yes... timothy leary... you don't wanna listen to someone like that... </massive irony>

long day

2011-11-22T00:06:00.001+02:00

it was a long day, whether in the classroom, or the office. those are the only places i've been. and i think i'm nursing a throat infection.

the day began with a horrible incident with the slow girl who annoyed me the whole of last semester. she called me over, then stood with arms open expectantly until i couldn't not hug her without making a scene. i didn't want to hug her. then she spoke inanities at me that i had no response to. when someone i knew came past, i jumped at the opportunity to run away, feeling mortified at needing a pretext and disgusted at myself for butting into what could well have been a private conversation. no amount of apologizing could make me feel better about what i'd done.

it was a long day - my last professor had seen me arrive in the morning - a long day of supremely intriguing ideas. then i came straight to work, and have surprised myself by doing almost nothing but work since i arrived. and that was about six hours ago.

sheesh.

---
memorable facebook argument for today: on academic strikes and whether or not they're justified.
you're not a customer, you're a student. and those people who are on strike are also students, who have no job security and it's their only way to pay for their studies.

the responsibilities in academia for actually learning anything fall on the student, not on the teacher - this isn't high school. the classes that are cancelled have to be made up... they probably will.

...

one of the problems with the university is that it's a giant bureaucratic organism and there're always "rationality gaps". the question is, if you were only taking two courses this year and were paying an amount accordingly, would you be less upset?

i don't think the money's the issue. most of us are paying a lot. but then, most of us aren't planning professional academic careers and it doesn't matter to us if the (non-tenured career academics) get fucked. but that's their career, and it matters to them. and if they don't get better conditions, in the long run the chances are there'd be far less people willing to choose academia as a career path. far less people to teach you stuff.

and then actual universities would be even closer to shutting their doors than they've become. you'll be able to choose whatever college you want to learn a trade, education can get stuffed and welcome to a Much Better World filled with Only Practical Things.

...

dick moves are all they have. the problem with any strike / boycott / protest is that if you don't mess things up then nobody will care. it's a sign of desperation that they're resorting to this :(

---
and speaking of protesting: this just blows my mind - people put up with this shit?
good on this guy for slicing through. we're talking about non-violent and apparently non-disruptive protest. if it's a private school and the students are making a nuisance of themselves, they're more than welcome to have them removed in a reasonable fashion. the methods employed were not reasonable. and as far as i can tell we're talking about a public institution.

enthusiasm

2011-11-21T01:57:00.001+02:00

but undone prep for tomorrow's classes. it's about 2am and i've spent the past few hours playing with visual studio... and actually getting somewhere. i love working with things that, umm, work.

...

french class was alright. "that guy" in our french class got me thinking: "if you ejaculate each thought as it occurs, you limit the speed of your thoughts to that of your flapping gums". i didn't say it out loud.

a few hours in the office, getting advice from my scr (who's pretty much my team leader now) and discussing terms with the bosses - i *like* these terms - and then i returned to campus to get some reading done before the second class. which was another mind-meltingly interesting one.

i stopped by the old office on the way home to perform a code review and chew out my co-worker (as usual), then returned home to Get Stuff Done. only, Stuff ended up in the singular, which wasn't the plan...

the new media

2011-11-20T22:40:00.001+02:00

after being hit by an inspiration particle after trying to come up with something clever on the theme of "poetry in unexpected places", and having sounded the idea off people i'm close to, i have come up with an idea that may very well change the way we interact with our world; an idea to breach the fictitious gap between cyberspace and meatspace.

PART 1 - GRAFFITI
the first part is cheap to do and astoundingly simple. instead of spraying "killroy was here", or even something fantastically artistic but physical, it is now possible to cheaply and easily print and place a QR code that represents whatever message or links to whatever static / dynamic artwork one wishes to display.

this becomes interesting when the text or linked item in question is strongly connected with the location of the QR code. for instance, imagine walking through a park and spotting a QR code on a bench. when you pass your scanner over the code, an apparition appears on the bench (viewed from the perspective of the camera facing the sticker) and adds a ghostly narrative to your experience of the park.
or, upon pointing your camera at a code on a street corner, you're treated to a band playing a song on that very same corner.

PART 2 - AUGMENTED REALITY
this takes the previous idea one level further, and requires cellphone applications that superimpose data from a QR code over the camera display. this could be anything from seeing objects that aren't there - similar to the idea in part 1 only viewable from any angle - to reconstructing the objects that are.

for example, if i'm wearing a QR code on the back of my t-shirt and it links to a skin of an alien monster, the application could display the skin instead of me and match its movements to mine.

BOTH ARE LIMITLESS
the interactivity made possible in either phase is bounded only by the imagination of the artist. a QR code can link to a puzzle that must be solved in order to find the next QR code. or it can be used to correspond with the previous / next viewers of the QR code. the target site of the code can be updated to reflect changes in the time, the weather, the political situation, the number of people who have already viewed the content, and so on...

---
imagine a world where you can take in a good play, or catch up with your favourite "television" show just by following codes through the cityscape. i just did, and it sounds really, really good to me!

the studio

2011-11-19T19:49:00.001+02:00

it's been a long, long couple of days. some of the visual studio stuff was so simple that i'm still not entirely sure how it works or that i did the right things. some of the stuff - the stuff that *should* have been simple, like setting up a database in sql server - has taken a lot of my time and gotten me nowhere.

what bothers me is that aside from a couple of breaks (dinner last night, lunch this afternoon and in about half an hour we're hosting gaming / anime night as usual) i've spent all of my time focused on work and none on studies :/

at least most of the weekend has been fun. and pg made cookies! we have too many cookies. the marshmallow ones are a disaster in the diet department.

reined in

2011-11-18T16:42:00.001+02:00

*phew*

by the time the last class came around yesterday, i was totally bombed and had the strange sensation that it was monday and that the week was only beginning.

i'd learned a little during the night, but those hours are all a bit hazy. i think i managed to put my head down for ten minutes at some stage. sorter gave me a ride home, and i arrived around 5am and went straight to bed. at 8.30 i somehow dragged my carcass through the freezing cold between the warm blankets and a hot shower, then headed back to campus.

i was *tired*. the classes were interesting, but it was hard to keep the yawns in and the eyelids up.

after the orientation class i went to the new office - right next door to the old new office - to present my design and time estimate. we sat talking about it all for a couple of hours, and then i was sent home. by sunday i'll have a computer to work on and a contract to sign, and they don't care if i'm in the office or at home, as long as the work gets done.

so: visual studio express is free? i like it!

i napped a bit on the bus, waking up just before we hit my stop. i began the visual studio download before hitting the sack; i woke up a couple of hours later to eat and go to cinema city for the half-past-midnight show with pg and her father. i was horrified to discover that one of the three tickets i'd booked had magically been switched to the previous night, but they were kind enough to find us a seat (the house was packed, so i'm even more grateful) and we went in to watch immortals.

holy shit.

that was, aesthetically speaking, one of the greatest movies i've ever seen. everything else was made of win. even the fact that we were surrounded by arsim, and that the guy next to me had a perpetual nostril-whistle thing going on, could not detract from the magnificent experience. it's very visceral. it's not a family film at all.

---
i slept like a baby, and until late. i got up, played around with visual studio, and was about to go out and cross a few items off my list when i realized that the rain was bucketing down. i went back to bed instead. we got up a couple of hours later, ate a hearty breakfast and did our french homework, and i'm now installing more visual studio stuff so that i can continue.

i'm feeling *so* much better now :)

broken head

2011-11-16T21:20:00.001+02:00

it's the sense of perpetual bewilderment that's dragging me down... and yesterday's disappointment is making it worse.

my error wasn't in the code i wrote, but in the lack of precision that i felt compelled to work with. i *should* have done more research. i *should* have emailed them with a request for clarification instead of making as much sense from the nonsensical as i could.

---
this idea i've been vaguely referring to has also been consuming an inordinate quantity of my mind-space, but it's import is so massive that i cannot ignore it...

life can be really tough sometimes. as usual, though, it's all because i don't say no to my desires. everything has a price attached.

---
waking up at 6.30am every wednesday morning is tough; not as tough as doing it this week, when i'm still feeling under the weather. the first class was interesting in spite of that... but as the day has progressed "word soup" has begun to set in. haven't suffered that since india...

i went to a meeting with the other company i interviewed for, and aside from getting caught up in a massive thunderstorm that pummeled me with rain* i spent a couple of hours having my first project explained.

* i cannot thank pg enough - i saw her on campus for two seconds and discovered she'd brought me a brolly. win!

back to campus for four hours of interesting stuff, some formal, some informal, and then here to the office. now i'm working until 4.30am (and waking up at 8.30am, not including an hour to get home and get ready for bed), and i need to spending some of those hours learning all sorts of things for the project...

i've been told i look like i need to get some rest. from a distance.

better when moved

2011-11-16T01:42:00.001+02:00

i feel much better now that i've had some exercise. the rest of the day went well, from laughs with the head of the department to a very serious code review and demonstrating the basics of QA to my co-worker; to gathering players for this idea of mine. i'm now comfortable and ready for bed.

and in health?

2011-11-15T14:25:00.001+02:00

i feel sick. i think i've been sick since the weekend, now that i'm conscious of the possibility. i'm feeling tired (yesterday was terrible, today's a little better), disconnected, distracted.

it doesn't help that i already got a response regarding the assignment i fretted over until this morning: "we regret to inform you that youre application does not meet our expectations". i *do* wish i'd had some indication as to what they were looking for. i can't say i'm not disappointed; on the other hand, i was unable to do better with the information that i had and i'm still pleased with my work.

*sigh*.

and the french teacher zoomed into a whole other level this morning. in both classes, pg was also taken by surprise - we're going to be practicing this week.

karnivool songs have been stuck in my head for days now.

restless mailing

2011-11-15T06:01:00.001+02:00

stress or excitement? i was incoherent by the time i went to bed, but i couldn't sleep easily with this assignment looming. i eventually (about half an hour ago) got up, composed a lengthy email explaining the functional versus incomplete and more correct versions i've sent (of course i've sent both); i decided that it's better to hand it in on time when a guideline has been set and stated something to that effect.

i hope i've done the right thing. it's a good sample, though - i'm proud of it whether they like it or not, and i learned cool stuff, and it was fun. i really do wish they like it!

now to try and sleep a bit more :P

alternative mode of work

2011-11-15T01:41:00.001+02:00

i've been doing this "two hour" interview assignment for about four hours; some of that time was wasted because i didn't fully understand what i was supposed to be doing (unclear instructions) and when the penny dropped i had to rewrite a bunch of things. most of it because i'm totally over-engineering this thing.

and i was dead tired all day. i couldn't even enjoy the rain...

worst 13th

2011-11-13T23:50:00.001+02:00

we've been having issues since friday, so celebrating this evening was a bit of a downer. although i think we're okay now; "celebrating" was a good excuse to talk things out. not a small part of the issues is the idea that i want to get out of israel - it's most certainly a lot to think about.

---
the french lesson this morning was alright - although i suspect that i should have taken the "quick" course and it's too late to switch. oh, well.

the interview was fascinating, and i'm definitely interested in working there. also, the test they've sent me in the mail is interesting! i have a day or two to do it, so i'm going to focus on tomorrow's reading instead...

i returned to the office for a quick sort-out and meeting, then bussed back to campus. i had time to read before class, but it was squandered arguing with my classmates about the greatness of terry pratchett and neil gaiman. tough times. the lesson itself was edifying as usual.

---
i skipped back to work to be horrified when the QA team leader waltzed in to show us how it's done - my co-worker had invited her because he wanted help, instead of asking me first. i'm not sure that he really understands what i was trying to tell him (after i dismissed her) - they don't have any "easy" methods to do QA, and having done my own for years i'm not only in a perfect position to teach him how (which i've already tried to teach him, but he's too damned lazy and unmethodical to actually listen) but doing it without intervention means plausible deniability when the boss asks why we're not filling out QA forms.

frikkin' kit-bag questions. they don't pay me enough to participate in bureaucratic revelries.

---
after getting a bit of work done i came home; botchman cancelled on me, so pg and i "celebrated" earlier rather than later at one of the better sushi / ramen bars. it worked out for the best. now for the class prep.

a couple of days ago...

2011-11-13T02:11:00.001+02:00

... i had the idea of a lifetime. i shared it this evening, and the idea was received with much enthusiasm. i hope we can pull it off...

bar's out

2011-11-11T18:14:00.001+02:00

well - i had to wait six years to put my tongue bar back in; it's a year and a half later and i've finally decided that it's not worth the limitations. goodbye, vestige of a childhood.

---
thursday:

bladed to university, left my shoes in my locker. i hope i don't get stopped at the entrance, because then i'd have to tread barefoot all the way to my shoes.

first class: tons of exercise carrying the giant speaker from the student union to the classroom. only to discover that the cable we'd been provided with was absolutely useless.

rushing between classes (and returning the speaker) to grab a bowl of noodles, and eating while walking was kinda weird.

---
sonnets. between wyatt, spenser and shakespeare we had ourselves a field day - only one example from each, but it was nothing short of inspirational. unfortunately, i ruined shakespeare's first sonnet for everyone - the lecturer didn't want to continue - by suggesting arnold schwarzenegger's role in junior as an example of increase being brought about in a male subject...

i tend to say a lot during most of my classes, and i'm always worried about being "that guy", the one vocal idiot who's always ruining it for everyone else. i'm always careful (or, i try to be) to give others a chance to speak and sometimes i open my mouth and feel bad for doing so. that's usually the end of it, except that when this class was over co-conspirator made a remark about the quantity that i share and the lecturer pounced: "are you trying to shut him up?". when i put forth that i *had* felt like i'd gone too far, i was taken completely by surprise by an aggressive outburst from another student: "NO! please! don't stop! i also hate it when people talk too much, but everything YOU say is intelligent and interesting!"
she went on a little more than that, and i was overwhelmed and a bit flustered... very pleased, though. i hope i appeared to be as flattered and grateful for the compliment as i am.

anyway, the sonnet masters blow my mind (all the italians included), and analysing their works is intense.

---
it was then time for the orientation course - we have a schedule problem, and we're definitely going to have to sort this out. my part of the lecture didn't go nearly as well as i'd planned...

i bladed home to pick something up that needed to go to work, and occupied myself there for a few hours before returning to watch an episode and a bit of the wire (i passed out after the "bit"). i went to bed early, and slept well.

---
friday:

i spent the morning deciding whether to continue working with flex and upgrading my sdk. then i met up with sorter and we went to play on the roof of my apartment's patio. it took a couple of hours and it doesn't look like much, but it's cheap and i suspect it might just do the trick! and if it doesn't, then we were all wrong about the source of the problem and i didn't spend thousands of shekels on something unrelated.

i spent the afternoon coding and blogging, and fighting with pg over rubbish (i think we both feel bad about that), then went to her parents for dinner. i ate too much and have been doing so a lot lately. i suspect it's related to the sleep deprivation. after dinner we played with magnet balls, and it turns out i have a knack for them :)

---
today:

waking up early, getting picked up by cousins to make a video for her wedding. it was a really fun morning filled with hilarity, which was followed by a huge lunch at her parents' which was absolutely delicious but demanded siesta. i woke up and had a loooooong talk with my mother (we eventually understood each other, we're apparently in interesting times) and am waiting for botchman to get in touch with me because i've had a magnificent artistic idea and i need to put together a group to execute it }:D

now for a movie, or something.

---
anti-vaccination crisis - they were going too far from the beginning, but this?!

on relative importance

2011-11-11T11:15:00.001+02:00

western black rhino declared extinct

how does one go about making idiots who use rhino horns extinct?

the past of the future of the past

2011-11-10T03:01:00.000+02:00

early morning discourse - two classes so far, and we've only gotten as far as examining the title of the first text. which is all of three words, translated from slightly more complex french. and today's class was interesting. during the break i stuffed my bag into my locker and worked on my response paper, taking a break to get advice on which courses to drop. satisfied, i continued a long argument with co-conspirator on the way to lunch, after which i was so bombed (and my eyes really hurt) that i crashed in the shade of a tree for half an hour.

i kinda almost felt better after that.

i finished my paper, including a bit on perspective of time inspired by cubism and james joyce, then made an appointment for a job interview on my way to meeting wordsworth and co-conspirator for a planning session. then back to class; futurism fascinates me.

as a pastafarian, i take deepest offense to "down with pasta!" from the futurist cookbook:

"the defenders of pasta are shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers or carry its ruins in their stomach like archeologists"

WE MUST BURN THIS COOKBOOK!

and before anybody claims that i'd burn people, the manifesto is a must-read

from there to work, where we finally closed the door on the current version that's dragged out far too long, before coming home and attempting to study. and re-install pg's computer at the same time. discovering that she's not only a bit clueless, but terrified of (technological) change. it's been a long night, and i'm not yet done with the ovid reading...

in passing

2011-11-09T02:02:00.001+02:00

tahoma woke me up just as my alarm was going to go off, and i met with him for pleasant breakfast at etnachta. he scurried off to work, and i to french class. i feel like i learned something today.

after quick lunch with pg, i made my way to work. i handed over my keys, i updated the documentation, i erased my users, i said goodbye. done.

i stopped by campus on my way to work to sit with her sister for a while over coffee, mostly discussing studies, then headed off to work (there's only one again). from there i returned home, meeting pg for falafel and then strapping on blades. relatively short route, quite nice, very social.

now bombed. an super-early morning looms.

strike out

2011-11-07T22:45:00.001+02:00

well, that was an unpleasant surprise. having planned for a strike, and having gone to bed rather late, i was woken at 7.17am by an sms informing us that the strike would be in the morning only, and at 10am studies would resume as usual. so... umm... no difference then. except for no public transport. so i dragged myself out of bed, dressed warmly (it was quite chilly), put on my rollerblades, and was about five minutes away when i registered that there were buses picking up passengers.

what the hell kind of a strike is that?!

the sun had come up and the air was super-heated by the time i arrived on campus half an hour later; nothing like arriving all sweaty for class. i did learn about campus lockers, though - i now have one for the year. it's big enough for my rollerblades or my full bag, which solves all sorts of issues! a bit expensive, but i'm guessing it'll be worth it.

a pity the air-conditioning wasn't working in our classroom: my winter clothing was, to put it mildly, absurdly inappropriate. the three lessons in a row with nary enough time for breaks was tough. the class on rhetoric in elizabethan england was so incredibly bleak and depressing that the topic of titus andronicus was fun by comparison - i now understand where the devil's advocate *really* stands strong :(

---
quitting.
i received a mail from mmf expressing his appreciation and understanding, his disappointment in my decision and his willingness to make me as comfortable as possible* on my way out. aside from correcting him about a nuance in his response, i called him up to discuss the money owed. even after my email he claimed he didn't understand what money was missing, and when i explained again his response was "but that's what we agreed on!"

no, i did not agree to be paid less the more i worked. that doesn't make any sense.

the good news is that he's acquiesced, and i will receive the cash at the end of the month. he's also been kind enough to offer me a return to the company in the future if i change my mind. nice of him, but i can't really see myself doing that - unless i get *really* desperate. and if, gods-forbid, i do, it will be with a written contract stating the payment terms explicitly as a condition.

*sigh*

at least i wasn't completely taken advantage of. still not nice, though.

* including releasing me immediately
...

the email after mmf's was from scr, and i'll be paying him a visit after i sort things out in the other office. wouldn't it be nice if i began working for them immediately?

---
i bladed straight to work, for an evening of multi-tasking and finally *knocks wood* sorting out the last of the release issues and performing the final testing. i came home to excellent dinner (i really need to go running) and french homework with pg, and now that i've done the internet do's i'm off to bed early.

chest pain

2011-11-07T02:04:00.000+02:00

i went to bed around 2am, and around 4 or 5am i was up and incredibly uncomfortable. pg must have sensed it, because she woke up soon afterwards and both of us lay in bed, miserable, until the alarm went off at 6.30am. except for when i got up to go to the toilet. on my way back i yawned and stretched, and somehow the stretch made the area around my sternum really sore, like i'd pulled a muscle or something :S

early mornings aren't good for us. but my disk-on-key had not only been found by the caretaker, but he'd sifted through its contents and discovered my phone number. i'm surprised and impressed! i arranged sound equipment for the shakespeare lecture i'm auditing, sorted out thursday's room confusion and had coffee while discovering that while my kindle may be cool, it can't handle indexing thousands of books without draining the battery (so i've just deleted everything except for what i need for my studies). what a silly issue!

french class - not bad, although annoying can't-keep-his-trap-shut dude sat right behind me.

i was buggered by the time i got to work:
"have you lost weight?"
"not really"
"oh. well you look like shit."

the guys left for lunch as i arrived, and it was only after they got back that i was told that there was no reason for me to come in. thanks. rabbitcvs / nautilus / whatever was ruined by the previous upgrade and couldn't be reinstalled, but i did manage to get svn workbench running before i left and it's actually quite a neat little package.

back to school: the loud-mouthed canadian girl is away for a couple of weeks, and the class was way more interesting without her crowding it. afterwards, a quick snack, excellent mocha at aroma with wordsworth and co-conspirator, and then the three of us walked to our favourite professor's for a long meeting that had both highly entertaining elements and a bit of group shouting therapy. the hardest part was right at the end, when i informed the professor that i'll be cancelling her class; it's true that it's for financial reasons, but i felt uncomfortable when her line of thought turned to "how can we help you more" (my bursary award is quite sizeable) and it was tough to explain that i'll be in a much better position if i defer the courses and don't overload myself.

at least i think i managed to not offend her. i say hopefully.

wordsworth gave me a ride back home, and i would have done some work if i hadn't been so occupied with my kindle, pg's computer re-install, and a train of thought that stretched from checking my bank account and discovering that i've been underpaid this month, to determining the likelihood that i was underpaid last month, to whether or not i'm familiar enough with the tech to take the job i've been interviewed for, to sending mmf a letter of resignation stating all of the reasons for my general unhappiness and expressing the hope that we can still be friends.

although, as pg pointed out, we might well be past that judging by the way i've been treated.

as i said to my mum: i'm feeling better about it already. and tomorrow's a strike; no studies and no public transport, so i've an excuse to work from home.

seeking the stone

2011-11-06T01:18:00.001+02:00

i barely got anything done this morning, for a number of reasons. and reading freud is, as usual, a hassle and a half (not a hoff, thank the gods). i had an absolutely horrid experience with pg's mother's dog, who suffers from an old leg injury that i never thought to consider when i convinced her to jump onto my lap - she got stuck halfway and was so sore afterwards that petting her was impossible and she could no longer climb stairs. she didn't stop staring at me, looking traumatized, and i still feel horrible about it :(

we took siesta, and woke up half an hour before everyone was supposed to arrive for the games / movie evening. a minute or two before my kibbutz cousin called, she and her sister had arrived in tel aviv and pg and i needed to meet with them. after urgent calls and postponing, the two of us met up with the two of them in an arbitrary place for coffee and wine; it wasn't unpleasant, but it was slightly awkward.

we returned home just as the guys were arriving, and we gave up setting up thunderstone: i suspect it would have been easier if everyone had been paying attention. we switched to citadels, which was fun as always but got dragged out by the number of players and the silliness injected by certain players... fun, but much longer than was comfortable.
after scrapper and a couple of others had left, and we had to choose between a movie or a game, i'm well pleased that we decided to give thunderstone another go. we'd missed a crucial point on setup that we got on the second attempt, it wasn't complicated at all and the game, as i remembered, flows smoothly and is a lot of fun!

now back to prepping for class tomorrow.

saturday morning dreaming

2011-11-05T11:59:00.001+02:00

with blue pilots project - mamouth in the background :)

i began the weekend yesterday with a visit to the student union, where i explained my position on a number of political things and agreed to run for humanities representative for the master's studies. weird communication issues with the head of the union, though.

on the way home i had my photo professionally taken for the united states' diversity visa application. it cost me fifty shekels, which kinda sucked, and when i opened my wallet to pull out my usb-on-key (i didn't want them to waste a disc on a picture) i discovered that it had been left in the computer we used for our class on thursday. DAMMIT. another early morning sunday tomorrow, to see if i can retrieve it :'(

pg and i watched another episode and a half of misfits, and i rushed off to the climbing wall. i'd gotten as far as the bus stop when the heavens opened and poured buckets of rain down upon us; we agreed to meet up at rabin square instead. it was glorious, wonderful rain, and i walked happily back home past crowds trapped under buildings, soaked through but rewarded when the sun came back out just as i entered our street.

i dropped off my phone and wallet, switched to a more sporty shirt, and headed out to the square for about an hour of excellent frisbee, only brought to an end because botchman botched a landing (in his defence, he was doing some awesome aerobatics at the time) and needed to get home to wash off the blood and muck. we celebrated with brilliant home-made BLTs and interesting conversion, and then i returned home (it had gotten quite chilly) to shower, arrange the course material for the next orientation class, play fluxx with pg and then head out to max brenner in ramat hachayal for birthday dinner / drinks for a member of the poetry group. i'm not particularly excited about the place, but the company was pleasant. unfortunately, i was so tired by the end that not even coffee could save me...

... and now i've slept a whole bunch - enough for a whole week! - and i've begun the day with freud - the method of dream interpretation.

liking murphy

2011-11-04T00:08:00.000+02:00

wednesday mornings are nasty. 8.30am class with the professor who makes our heads spin at any time of day. after that, hitting work (the old office) for a busy few hours including a Very Important Meeting in which i discovered that the project we've been working hard on for the past half a year or so has been rendered obsolete by a decision from the head office...

back to class - the woman with no internal monologue is offensively lacking in critical thinking skills. otherwise - great class in spite of my having been forced to skim most of the material. both the communist manifesto and wilde - the soul of man under socialism are enriching, but boy did they miscalculate the human propensity for not doing things properly. and for requiring incentive.

home for a quick nap, missing the alarm and being woken by a call from nemesis to say he was on his way. drinking tea and listening to his version of japan on the avenue. arguing the Big Philosophy Questions as he drove me to work.

a late shift, the trainee's a bit slow on the uptake. only got about half the things i needed to do done. got a ride from sorter, didn't swing by a friend's birthday bash because it was 3am already. spent an hour reading instead - relearning the invaluable lesson that sparknotes might give you all the facts summarized, but when you read the text itself the tone and nuances transform the text completely.

slept about four hours, then woke up for the shakespeare course i'm auditing. awesome class. no time between classes to prep for the orientation course. the sonnets seminar is fun. hurriedly (including a bit of running, when i'd forgotten to print my lecture notes) getting set up for the orientation class (same room as our anime nights used to be, with the same reservation issues), then setting about teaching. could've done it better, didn't matter, the kids were enthusiastic and appreciative and hopefully there'll be more next week.

shakespeare and myself running in the rain with a beer keg trolley; the rain began just after we acquired the trolley and stopped just as we found shelter. the picnic was moved to the bomb shelter on account of the weather. long talks, great cake, beer. running the trolley back to the student union, rushing off to bus home, going straight to pg's mum instead. we all went out to great dinner at segev express to celebrate pg's sister's birthday; i ate lots of dumplings.

been back for a while trying to knock things off my to-do lists. mmmmm...