Splish Splash

Right. Time to say something again.

It's funny to catch a glimpse of yourself now and then. You mull over the concept of your own identity and how you fit in with the scheme of things.

I've had a strange couple of months where my moods have been swinging wildly between contentment and despair. I think I may have reached an odd boundary stage in my life where I feel like things should have fallen into place and started making sense... but they haven't. I don't know what I was expecting. Perhaps a sudden rush of enlightenment entwined with a warm glow of achievement, bound by universal harmony and a realisation of my true purpose on this planet.

But, no. No such luck.

And no surprise, really. I mean, what have I actually done to make anything like that happen? All my life I've just been studying manuals and following their instructions, chasing the dangling carrot with a weary sense of befuddlement, wondering where I'm being led or if I'll even like it when I get there.

These days I'm feeling wildly divorced from everything and everybody. I feel like I should have tried harder with everything. But I'm not sure why. Or what it was I was supposed to achieve. What about what I wanted to achieve? Did I ever really want anything at all? Who the fuck am I? Do I like that jacket? Is this album any good? What's my opinion?

I'm really not sure. And it's driving me spare.

Also, I feel I should say sorry to everyone I know for the general lack of social grace and charm. The truth is that I'm a terribly shy and lonely person. I feel like I must make very bad first impressions. If I've ever given off a vibe of hostility or arrogance to anyone then I'm really sorry. I've never truly disliked anybody in my whole life. I just lack the confidence to contribute properly to social interaction. I really would love to engage everyone I meet with a charming smile and a rivetting conversation. But I meet people and mumble, shuffle my feet and avoid eye contact. My mind goes blank and I pray silently for them to throw forward a nugget of information on which perhaps a meaningful discourse can be established and perpetuated. My goal right now is learning to make that first step in interaction before I become far too old and mentally solidified for the behaviour to ever change.

I'm getting a lot better at it these days but I can see why I feel like I hardly know most of the people I know. People who know me reasonably well are probably aware of some of these things and so know what to expect. I'm perhaps thought of by some as a bit of an oddball but an ultimately harmless person who is very aware of the fact that he's somewhat foolish at the best of times and does his best to combat this with varied success. People who know me less well may form all sorts of opinions about me. People might think I'm very confident and strong or that I know what I want. They might think I dislike them because I failed to have anything to say to them because I met them in a period of crippling shyness.

I think I might actually be depressed. Everything feels like it's so much effort. Just getting out of bed is torture. It might just be the lack of daylight and the onset of SADS as a result. But I still get this horrible feeling at the back of my mind that I'm really not trying hard enough. I wonder if I'll ever figure out what I want and actually get on with it, rather than venting these immensely self-indulgent blog posts.

I feel like the world is in on some big secret. Like everyone else understands the point implicitly and is perfectly happy to get on with their lives with unquestioned confidence. No doubt this is a complete fabrication by my befuddled self but it's still a terrible thing to feel so ultimately lost and hopeless.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I dwell on these things? Why don't I just get on with everything and stop fussing? Why do I feel the urge to tell everyone how I'm feeling? I suppose I just want to feel noticed and connected. Perhaps even loved. I feel like my whole life I've been getting up the courage to jump into the pool but I've spent so long building up expectation that it might not actually ever happen. These invisible boundaries of neurosis coccoon me in suffocating safety. And all I can do is comment on the way I feel, or even on the way I comment on the way I feel.

Just some feeble observer upon the passing of my own life. Waiting for a moment to pass comment. I'm David Attenborough and my life is a meerkat burrow.

Ok. I think I've run out of miserable things to say. I promise my next blog post will focus on things outside of my head and thus be more interesting to people who aren't me. Treat this post as some sort of attempt at self medication. Or use it to draw parallels with your own life. Or feel sorry for me. Or feel anything or nothing. I don't mind.

Perhaps you read this post word for word and were gripped by it. Or maybe you skim read it because you figured you've heard half this shit before anyway. That's cool because you probably have! I skimmed half of it when I proof read it. I think I might have changed my mind about a lot of it. Most of it's just paranoia being set free onto the Internet to be eaten up by hungry web crawlers and cached forever in some dark forgotten corner of Google's server city.

But please do comment if you have something to say about any of it. In fact, it doesn't even need to relate to anything I've said. Just say hello and tell me about your day. Share something with me about what you've been up to or how you've been feeling. Don't be shy :-)

Right. Bed.

P.S. I made this the other day. You might like it. Click the link and find out!

This Haiku summarises my thoughts on KUATB. I'm tired of this condescending acronym being banded about. I don't know what you know. You know I don't know what you know. If I share information, it's because I think it might interest you. If you already knew, never mind. No need to be rude. You'll just put people off being so generous with what they know and the world will darken a little as more gems go unshared.

"Keep up at the back",
You keep getting my back up.
Pipe down in front, please!

That is all!

After spending 5 minutes browsing the computing section in the Waterstones on Oxford Street in Swansea, I was shocked to see 14 different titles on Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system(!), just 4 on Apple's Mac OS and zero titles on Linux.

How do Waterstones choose which computing books to stock? Open source software is having a profound effect on the IT industry and I didn't see a single title covering an open source topic. Every title seemed to be a "How to do X for dummies" or some other basic step-by-step guide.

Where are the broader books covering concepts and fundamental computing principles? The Waterstones on campus is stocked with such titles. Why not the outlet on the high street? Doesn't John Everyman need to know anything about computers beyond how to turn them on?

Of late, I've noticed that the typist in my brain has phased out typos in favor of what I believe is referred to as a thinko. This is where, instead of a simple out-of-place character, you type entirely the wrong word instead of the one you were intending, perhaps even in an amusingly Freudian fashion.

Perhaps it's workload stress or just a side-effect of getting older but, quite recently, my brain has been making thinkos left, right, and centre like some demented Microsoft helper program. Oh, well. If my mind is breaking then I may as well enjoy the ride. At least I haven't put mayonnaise in my coffee yet...

Why is it that SQL INSERT commands have an entirely different syntax to UPDATE commands?

They both do exactly the same thing, only INSERT adds one new record and UPDATE modifies one or more existing records, given a method to identify it. At the end of the day, both commands are changing values in the table. The only major necessary syntactical difference is that UPDATE needs a WHERE clause appended to the end. What harm would come of UPDATE (col1,col2,...,coln) VALUES (val1,val2,...,valn) WHERE cond ?*

If this were the case, I could've copy-and-pasted several dozen lines of SQL and changed INSERT to UPDATE. And saved an hour or two of hassle from the resulting creeping syntax errors.

Sigh.

Oh, yes. My code was working fine yesterday (12/07/2006) and was magically broken today by a lack of endianism. Silly Microsoft.

*If anyone has a good answer to this, please comment!

From: public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

To: talyn256@sucs.org 

Subject: Re: Gary McKinnon

Reference : T21121/6

Thank you for your e-mail enquiry of 10/05/06 13:38:42

A reply is attached.

Attachments: T21121 6.doc

Hmm, how helpful :-) 

"The Vatican says the right to freedom of expression does not imply the right to offend religious beliefs" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4681294.stm

What a complete load of contradictory nonsense.

Freedom of expression allows anyone to say anything. And if people are going to take offense and set fire to things then I think they are the ones displaying offensive behaviour.

It takes two people for offense to occur. The offender and the offendee. But since papers are governed by law which allows free speech then writers and cartoonists should be free to express themselves. The people at fault are the offendees.

(Never mind the fact that Muhammed, according to the historians, very probably was a mass murderer anyway.)

If anyone reading this blog has been offended then I'm glad. I hope it makes you think about the folly that is religion and exremism.

Unbelievable.

3 days before Whyley's "Programming With Objects and Threads" exam and he's finally finished writing our course notes.

I wonder what his reaction would have been if I'd handed both of my courseworks in over a month after the deadline had passed.

Scandalous.

*Breathes* *Calms down* *Has a coffee*

Besides attempting revision (with limited success) I've been reading up a lot on Ruby, and have decided that I may actually love it. Performance issues aside, it makes coding a lot more fun for several reasons.

1) It does all the nasty memory stuff for you, to the extent where you needn't even type your variables.

2) It's a pure OOPL (like Smalltalk)

3) It allows simple, absolute control of variable scope.

4) It uses single inheritance but allows importing of modules and all their methods, effectively allowing behaviour like that of multiple inheritance in C++ without all the associated hassle.

5) Inclusion of regular expression pattern matching as a core feature of the language.

6) A whole lot of other nice, considerate design features.

This is all in preparation for a Ruby-On-Rails project that I'm hopefully undertaking in February.

It's all rather exciting :)