Charmed

(Hopefully)

Awesomeness

There is, strangely enough, many reasons to be very optimistic about everything. How i came about such optimism is to me somewhat odd, but i hope i'll be able to take it in stride. Anyways, the last week or two has been retro enough. Working out at Uggdal Fysikalske is something we haven't done since 2008, but it's interesting to try out the old routine again. Punching and kicking a medicine ball is surprisingly entertaining. The only problem is that we need a proper volleyball. The conversations are interesting as well, which is a good thing. Robie House is coming along nicely, it's fun to stand and work on it, though i think it might beb somewhat problematic to my back in the long term. I will have to figure out another way of doing it to be on the safe side. tonAtom provides a nice background noise, and i'm over halfway through their release-archive! Other than that i've listened to an Endless Ascent release which was beyond awesome (as always), and i've gone through some HeadphoneCommutes. I got a nice batch of recommendations from the latest Gramophone, which i am looking forward to playing with. linuxfromscratch is in chapter 7 now, and everything seems to be progressing nicely. i want to take a short hiatus from it though, because i just borrowed "The German Genius" at the library and i really want to read that as soon as possible. The La Trobe U. lectures on the European Union has been very enlightening, and can be recommended to everybody. I'm also about to finish off the last lecture in the series on "Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform" which i've spent quite some time with. (Just please do not ask me how much i remember. That isn't what it's about (yet)). Codeacademy is fun, and we'll see how that fares over the next few weeks. And i just signed up to two courses on logic and mathematical thinking that start sometime in september. (Because i have so much time to spare you know....!) It shall be a charmed autumn indeed.

legoduino

i should also get me some arduino love soon. Getting to it. Now if somebody gave me a years subscription to safari books then i`d be in heaven. A very distracted person in heaven, but yet...! =)

Hectic.

So, things have been getting hectic around here. That is, -relaxed-, hectic. Which is one of my stated goals. There`s no point in too much of a hectic life. Its also related to what i compare myself to, and i compare myself mostly to myself in order to keep at least a semblance of belief in my own progress and prowess. Anyway, i found codeacademy, and am now enjoying myself through some very basic lectures on the workings of javascript. It is very entertaining, even though memorization is far from my strong suit. But it doesn`t hurt to go back and re-check the correct syntax once in a while. I still have faint shimmers of the, frankly stupid, idea that i should manage to memorize everything in one runthrough. I know from experience that this is not the case for me, and should stop bickering about it, but it keeps nagging me. So, linux from scratch, coedeacademy, tonatom, building the Lego Farnsworth House, drinking coffee, trying to stay hydrated, smoking too much (ugh!), trying to learn the hebrew alphabet, listening to lectures on the history and composition of the european union and some very interesting lectures on the crossroads between literature and science in the 17th to the 21st century in (mainly) europe. Those lectures on literature and science from Freiburg are really interesting, though i must admit to occasionally slipping in my understanding of what is being said. Though it seems i am capable of paying pretty good attention now. The last three months of drs 4 has helped a lot. The hebrew alphabet is interesting. It feels really good to learn different signs for the sounds humans articulate, and writing from right to left is quite intriguing. I have plenty of apps to feed my language-curiosity, and i`ll get started with hebrew and see where it takes me. I have approx. 60/70% recognition on the consonants now, and that is with three days of practice, so it seems plausible that i`ll have them under control in another week or so if i commit myself to a daily practice section. Which i do. It is a bonkers experiment if i ever started one, but i feel a distinct need to learn a variety of scripts used by humanity. Afterwards i think i`ll take korean for a spin, and then cyrillic. In those cases i won`t immediately try to learn the language, just the sounds. I`ll focus on german and hebrew for at least another year or two, and then i`ll see what can be gained from that. (The obvious answer is nothing in particular, but we`ll see..... My aunt will probably ask about what i can gain monetarily from it... Luckily my father won`t! I wouldn`t be so critical of the income-related angle if she also could, after having analyzed that aspect, understood or analyzed what other gainful repercussions such a project could have. Alas. sternenspringer is the good stuff! The wors part is that after i`m done with Farnsworth House i`ll need another Lego-set, these things are wonderful diversions when i`m working on the computer!

code

i hate code, i really do. But nevertheless, i just rediscovered codeacademy and had some time to spare whilst gcc went through its checks on my lfs-install (where everything seems to be working, shockingly enough!) (This just in, monkey can reproduce text from book without error! Amazing, innit!) Anyway, all that is lacking now is getting my Hebrew on and we`re cooking with weirdness. NOt that we weren`t already doing that, but alas. Endless Space was a great game, definitely the best 4x space sim i`ve played thus far. I don`t know exactly how stupid the AI is, but i`m eating it on normal in my second game. Fair enough, even though i can`t say i`ve played these games a lot. (Okay, maybe a little lot...) Other than that i`ve quit smoking, again, and am now jogging twice around kyrkjevatnet. The jellyfish have disappeared, so now i can swim as well. Though i noticed that i hadn`t been swimming for over a month when i did yesterday. Fair enough, i`ll be back in regular shape before summer is over, though my upper arm muscles will still languish due to a lack of apparatus-training. Other than that i`ve discovered that i couldn`t care less about cryptography. Secrecy bores me. Another thing which (unfortunately) bores me as well appears to be Noam Chomsky. This comes as a real surprise to me, but hey, I`ll learn to cope with it.... I`m about to finish the series on Capitalism as well, that is nice. Next stop is EU from La Trobe and literature and science from Freiburg. Which i should get at now if i am to finish a lecture before i fall asleep. (I really, really, really need to get better at poking around in my bookmarks, it is quite retarded not to.)

Formality

Had to actually speak english today. That turned out to be more complicated than i remembered it to be. This is, unfortunate and worrying. That is the problem with not having a chance to practice a language regularly i guess. I am somewhat at a loss as to how i shall counter this development, since i am, after all, quite comfortable not being too social over the internet. i know that the internet is supposed to be a marvellous place of varied expressions where it`s always possible to find somebody sympathetic or respectfully confrontational to one`s own view. The problem is that i`m vampiric in regard to not wanting to engage myself with the workings of other peoples discourse without a proper invitation. I`m too formal it seems. Which, knowing my history as i do is both true and quite funny. So, I`ve finished listening to a course on french history. Now don`t ask me what i remember from it. I remember the depiction of the social conditions and the street protests regarding the fight over whether or not to give arms to Republican Spain.

Random.

So. Another stay at the fantastic schoolhouse comes to an end, though not for a few hours yet. It turned out to be more of a vacation than i had really planned, but then, had i planned anything at all? Right now I`m listening to the second release from yet another netlabel called We Are All Ghosts. I was rawn in by their third release, and decided to listen to the rest of them as well. It`s so much easier when there is not upwards of a hundred releases to choose from. The second release is interesting, and the spoken word element is relaxed yet intense. Definitely worthwhile. In the background glibc is running through its test-suite. after some horrid mishap in chapter five of linux from scratch (which i have yet to locate), i had to redo the entire chapter. Which takes time, and is boring as hell (if hell is boring, i guess it is if you`re bore-able...). So hopefully the test will register less errors this time around. If that is not the case i`ll put lfs on hold for a couple of months and then try again. Next stop will then be The Elements of Computing Systems. Which is much trickier than lfs by far, but i always make it slightly further every time i try, so i`m optimistic. Tomorrow i`m going to do something i haven`t done in years. Two laps around the lake in the vincinity of my mothers house. I used to do that a lot in 2008? and i wonder how my performance will be this time around. I might also go for a swim in Kjevikjo, something i haven`t done since last summer. It should be nice. This time i`ve brought proper swimtrunks and glasses, so i`ll be able to spot things underwater (even with my poor eyesight.) Other than that, what`s there to mention? For some reason this blog has been visited over 160 times by somebody behind a russian anonymizing-service. I have NO idea why, but i`m betting on something automated. It`s amusing to have such usage statistics at my fingertips. Since this is more of a private diary kept with an idea of the continued availability of google for a while i am loath to really think about it having visitors, but hey. We live in public right. The avant-garde of tyrrany indeed! Should i do anything else this summer? I`m triking to Etne at some point. That should be nice. Schoener Gotterfuncken 5 indeed....

Il tempo gigante

So, for the past three days I`ve been locked in front of a computer screen doing a lot of work on Linux From Scratch. It`s been great! I make mistakes over and over again, forget the occasional slash causing me to have to discard a day`s worth of work and other joyous things. All the while I`ve been reading the transcripts of the edge symposium on synthetic biology and talking to my father about whatever comes into our minds at the time. Solid gold! It feels good to work with these things again. It`s funny, i have a tendency to end up on edge.org when i`m here at the schoolhouse. I remember (vaguely) past video lectures of theirs enjoyed in the wee morning a long time ago. I`ve also had a chance to reorganize my book-collection. That has been great. Not only have i had a chance to revisit some of my past forays into the world of fiction and non-fiction, i`ve also had the opportunity to sort all of the scifi i inherited from my ex-uncle into readable and non-readable categories. So i`ve read probably over one hundred scifi-synopsises over the course of the past few days. A great time! Funnily enough Victoria showed up less than an hour after i listened to Marissa Nadler again for the first time in six to eight months... Intriguing! Tired now. Very tired. I`ve been running on three beers and nicotine for the last four hours. Far from ideal, i know, but quite entertaining!

Sequence and structure

Just had to remember that.