30 Days Of Geek – Losing is Fun!

Well, it’s been roughly a month and a week since I wrote Focus, and once again I’ve “failed” and “lost” at what I planned to do this month.

Oh well.

The interesting mindset that arrises from the holistic life as a game approach, is that failure is just as valuable and worthy as success; by losing we strengthen and sharpen our skills to handle unexpected situations.

It’s the difference between being frustrated and put under pressure, and having fun while facing an appropriate challenge and level of resistance.

And it does sound a little flip, and that I haven’t “learnt my lesson” – but you don’t learn a lesson out of beating yourself up over things, you learn by trial and error and by properly debreifing.

So, what went wrong? Well, I didn’t pre-write content. I didn’t sit down when I had time, and knock out a bunch of entries and then time them to go up on the right day. I was busy focusing on my answering of the questions, not thinking in the sense that the questions were a reason to interact daily with other people. And, I did it like a newbie in an MMO – playing alone together; and even worse, without using the chat channels between participants. So, not only did I lose the stated goal of the game, I lost the metagame of playing to the fullest.

Ultimately, it’s this reflection that is key to helping win next time. Not that I have to, but because I can.

So, what I’m doing in May is working off a weekly schedule, since that’s a time period I can keep in check.

Next Tuesday I’ll be on “Take It From Us”, a community radio show about recovery from mental health issues on Planet FM. They do podcasting of the show, so I’ll get a link or even a good copy of that (they’ve got a bit of a horrid Flash Interface) when it comes around; otherwise if you want to listen to me live during the middle of the day, you can totally search up the FM frequency and everything yourself.

And then otherwise, I’ll be attending a few entrepreneurial events and being on the prowl for an opportunity I can sink my teeth into; got a few proposals on the boil so to speak, and some interesting potential jobs.

So yes, sorry my fellow geeks that I lost the game (by the way, you just accidentally “the game”)

30 Days of Geek – Geek Fuel

Well, I’m on a low stimulant diet, so I limit my intake of sugar and caffeine. Typically I drink water or some sort of cordial, like blackcurrent, orange or lemon. As far as foods go, I like a lot of small snacks, like Sushi, Bhuja Mix and Tapas.

The other thing that fuels me is getting good sleep, so I’m off to sleep now.

30 Days Of Geek – Quick Nifty Hack

So, my favourite quick nifty hack is a physical one; Our wireless router has to serve quite a big home, and it sometimes struggles to get signal out to the rest of the house when it sits in the middle.

I went out and bought a good antennae for the router, but even that still had troubles.

The antennae had magnetic feet, so I went out to the garage, grabbed an empty metal paint bucket and stuck the router on it. And that, having an empty metal container holding the antennae and attached to it, boosts the signal so much it reaches everywhere.

And that’s probably my favourite little hack, cause it lets me use my computers anywhere around the house.

30 Days Of Geek – Greatest App To Date

Oh man, the greatest “app” I ever coded was in Primary School.

It was a Magic Eight Ball. On an Amstrad CPC. Written in BASIC.

So, other kids would sit down at the computer and ask it stupid questions. And it’d give back stupid answers.

I quickly got told by the teachers it was causing problems, with bullying, when it was no more than coding up what “asking an eraser” with things written on it did.

I mean, it was essentially a toy. It no more enabled bullying than putting kids together in a room full of stuff, but it was easy to blame the tool.

So, I kept hacking on it, and had it hold an array of names; if you typed in someone’s name, it would return only compliments about said person. And it even got a logic kludge so you couldn’t “Not” or “Triple Not” it.

Essentially, I coded a chat bot, in BASIC, by hand, on an Amstrad, in primary school.

Oh, and for #30DaysOfGeek, I got too busy with my day yesterday to talk about my day job; what I’m going to do is do make-ups of any days / questions I miss at the end, cause it’s about finding the time daily to do a little blog post, you know?

30 Days of Geek – Preferred Programming Language

So, obviously a big part of being a geek, as I said yesterday is asking the why and the how, and then eventually morphing into controlling the why and the how. So, there’s a gravity towards computers and programming them.

If I had to pick a preferred programming language at gunpoint, and could only say one, I’d say Clojure. Why? Well, because it’s LISP and it’s in the JVM. It’s like a peanut butter and jam sandwhich, you know, two pretty good tasting things that go great together. The main selling point on Clojure is pretty much a cool factor. You can do so much with the tools it offers.

And that’s what a language is, a set of tools. It’s a way of writing down in a structured way how you want something to work. So, it’s kind of silly to limit yourself to just one language.

Another set of tools I quite enjoy is Ruby. Because there’s just such an ecosystem built up around it, with frameworks like Sinatra and Rails allowing you to quickly sketch up web-based ideas; and hey, it can even be pushed past development into production if you so wish; and Ruby provides good tools in terms of gems and bundler and RVM; together, they handle dependencies and versions quite well.

So, an interesting one that’s come up recently is Mirrah – it’s sort of like Ruby, but it’s natural Java bytecode; there’s a lot of selling point in being inside the JVM in my mind; it allows you to leverage all sorts of neat computational tricks between your code and your VM and between your VM and the metal you’re running it on.

Which brings us to the grand daddy of them all – LLVM. It’s not really a programming language; it’s not really a compiler, either. It’s a, well, it’s a low level virtual machine, just what it says on the tin. I don’t actually know how to express why it’s so exciting, except to jump up and down and squeal like a teenage girl for no apparent reason whatsoever.

I’ve come across the idea recently that all programmers code with an “accent”, regardless of what they are coding in. If I have an accent, I’d say it has to be object-orientated. I love breaking code down into interacting objects and throwing all sorts of relations between them. It’s just, I don’t know, fun, to see code come together from dis-assembled and dis-connected parts.

I feel this is quite a light post, but the thing is, I’ve got quite a light attachment to my languages; I tend to pick up and drop tongues as I wander across the computational sphere.

Why I consider myself a geek.

So, running on from my previous post Focus, I’ve taken up a slightly more focused blogging idea for the month of April, #30DaysOfGeek, a bunch of questions about, well, geeky stuff.

So, here goes. I’m going to try to hit the same word totals I was aiming for last month with an unfocused blogging idea for these ones; well, not so much word totals as being a little bit above bite-sized, and a little below a full five course meal; you know, somewhere in that vague range.

So, why am I a geek? It’s such a ridiculously open-ended question. I think the core of being a geek is that a person is likely to do depth-first searching for an answer. As in, I’m going to, as my default question to anything, not ask “What?” but ask “How?” or “Why?”; and there’s going to be drilling down for many layers until there is a commonality with something I already understand.

Well, that’s a bit pithy; to reduce the entire mindset down to a simple algorithm; but that’s just it. Being a “geek” is on some level being a mechanist, thinking that everything can be partitioned down into smaller subsections that can be understood. Of course, eventually you hit a wall doing that; and that’s where obsession comes into it. Let’s introduce another word for geek – otaku. Now, in western culture this a Japanese loanword means someone who is obsessive about Japanese culture, and is used derogatorily, even by fellow geeks. But I think it cuts to the other core of being a geek, the ying to the yang of trying to understand everything; there’s a level of obsession and dedication that becomes a tunnel vision so sanity can remain while continuing to divine and divide a topic until reaching that state of zen expertise.

So, yeah, being a geek is a mindset. It’s the ability to put on horse blinders and become totally dedicated to some obscure topic, and have strong feelings on them. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the shiny, it’s about understanding why and how of something over and above the who and what.

I know what I’m describing is something akin to being on the Autistic scale, but that’s really it; being a geek is being a functional person who can at a whim drop functionality to expand the ability to understand a desired topic. It’s about tinkering and playing around with something new, because you’ve learnt how to learn by mucking around with stuff. It’s about becoming really excited because you’ve implemented something in some obscure way, or even in a common way, but the excitement is because you did it rather than someone else, therefore you show that you understand it.

So, I consider myself a geek because I think that that is the worldview a “geek” holds. And I know that other people may disagree with me; but they better be ready to answer all the “Whys?” their rebuttal will inevitably generate.

Focus

Be still, my wandering mind. I’ve been reading “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal over the past week – almost exactly the same week I had planned to write 500 to 1,000 word bloglets each day, and completely and utterly failed to do so. But, in the words of Dwarf Fortress – “Losing is fun!” – I came across some serious mojo for other parts of my life in feeling guilty for failing at a self-selected challenge.

So, focus. Yeah, this is going to be one of those manifesto style pieces that takes a piece of language and expands and contracts and warps it into something it isn’t. But the thing is, focus is already something it isn’t. By the act of focusing on something we cut out all distractions that exist around us and look only at a small part of a whole. Which is almost an antithesis to my holistic philosophy – we look at the whole and the summation of small parts. But the dichotomy is required in order to get anything done – to serialise thoughts from a parallel structure, we need to write it down; or speak it, and in those acts we have a point where there is what is already recorded and what is yet to be said; and in recalling the information from their ascribed forms we travel typically sequentially through parsing as we go; yes, you can skim by skipping pieces of textual information out of sentences when you parse them – oh, how I longed to leave something out of that, but then the missing piece would stand out by omission and you would stop your continual parsing to work out “hang on, that sounds weird”, and so it would be an example by throwing off balance rather than a legit expression thereof.

Digressions aside; It is by focusing on a small part of a whole that we can get action done on the whole. By subscribing to the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, we allow ourselves to observe the whole, or even just a part of the whole, and find the pieces of the puzzle that if we move them causes the entire system to collapse into a new form. It’s like unraveling multiple strings that have been tied into some very nasty knots. Yes, you can be Gordian and slice through them all, but far more entertaining and informative is to trace out each string and model how they are connected, and slowly unravel them by untying.

I suppose I’m saying something here, but like I’ve said, I’m a nihilist. I don’t really believe that I’m getting myself across. But that’s okay, I’m a cheerful nihilist, so it doesn’t matter if no one groks what I’m on about; the slightest glimmers of understanding in my future selves when I re read this will be enough to allow me to be joyful in the present.

I think I’ll sign off there and go do something with my newfound perspective of the ability to change and create meaning by moving around small interconnected pieces of nature. Though, I’m still nihilistic, since I’m not entirely sure that my intended meaning will be what is gotten across, but that’s okay, I’m still cheerful.

Enter title here

Well, this doesn’t bode well. It’s all of three days into pretending I can actually write and produce somewhere between 500 to 1,000 words a day, and I’m already getting meta with the title and the content, hence this sentence describing my situation as opposed to actually doing it. It’s like those grumbly comedians who become successful, and then all their comedy becomes about touring; like about planes and airports and being recognized on the street; except here I’m doing it without the success!

I suppose there is of course a place and a time for meta-conversations, about “craft”, and so forth, and I have been lacing what I’ve written so far with the journey of gaining experience; It all gets so self-referential and recursive really, though, and you just want to wonder; why did I feel like writing that, why am I using so many commas and semi-colons and dashes – do I have some sort of grammatical diarrhea I need to get attended to, or is a symptom of style?

Oh dear, I’m talking about style as if I have one – if I do, it can only be described as why. are. you. using. grammar. to. tell. me. when. you. breathe. if. this. was. a. conversation? Ahh, abusing Mr. Period for fun and games. Oh look, the fun of hyperlinking, there we have a jump straight from my discussion to the first appearance of Mr. Period as a character at Penny Arcade. I suppose there is a “craft” and “style” to online writing, and discovering a personal way to use grammar in those contexts in a way that reads well on a screen can be difficult and does warrant exploration. But of course, talking about it is one of those sins; the first rule of Write Club is you do not talk about Write Club. See what I did there? Pretty punny.

But really, we’re getting all meta- here and no one really ever wants to read that, especially not from someone without any authoritative voice. Heh, even I won’t want to read this so why am I writing it?

Actually, that’s a good question. So I’m going to spend the rest of my self-mandated 1,000 words today writing about something vaguely interesting.

Oh I know, let’s talk about talk some more! Let’s discuss the other thing we don’t want to talk about; manifestos.

So, a manifesto in the wrong hands is an excuse to get righteous and ranty. It’s a tag you attach to something you’ve written when you look at the world and go “RAGE! Why doesn’t it look like THIS!” and then you start from a few assumptions and make a complete ass out of yourself going from there to a utopia where everyone gets along just fine if only they follow your simple golden rules of 1) RULES, 2) BEHAVIOURS, 3)  ??????, 4) UTOPIA!

Not to rage against the whole field of manifestii – there have been some very good influential and well thought out ones in the past. I’m not really talking about those – you know, your favorite manifesto, the one you swear by and that improved the lives of so many people and this and that happened – I’m not talking about that one. No, not at all. There’s no sarcasm in my discounting a manifesto of your choice from my scathing of all of them as literary masturbation.

See, the ones that work, are the ones where there is work put in. Words; of and by themselves do absolutely nothing – they can’t even properly convey a point without further communication and clarification and interpretation. There are no divine Logos that by sheer utterance move mountains. And thank the deities for that. Imagine a world in which words by of and themselves did actual work! It would be absolute madness; we’d have to rope off the entire area and commit all who sin with these blasphemies to some sort of dungeon to toil away in where they couldn’t harm all the rest of us.

And for irony’s sake, let’s say I’m talking about computers and programming languages.

So, my favorite language, of course has now become LISP. Because, the more I learn about computer “science”, and especially the applications there-of, the less science and more alchemy I see involved, and if we have to use language in order to get these machines to do something, why not use a language which is, well, pretty much pure theory? I mean, seriously, LISP is almost ontological – you can implement it in itself, you can implement anything else within it, and there’s all sorts of other geekery involved. The thing to avoid with using LISP, is of course, the ability to start spouting manifestii about how you can implement almost anything.

Oh great, how did I get from nowhere? Umm, train of thought – meta > craft > sin > manifestos > magical writing > irony > LISP > manifestos .. so, now I have to talk about sin > craft > meta. Well, I suppose I just did, because “>” isn’t a proper way to delineate a linked list. And that’s craft, cause linked lists is a programming concept, and that’s meta cause I just described it.

I think I should go now, before I spout something really silly.

Tahi, Rua, Toru, Whā

Well, continuing my spate of posts with three different ideas as a title, which I then use as a springboard to say something totally different and only tangentially related to them as a topic, let’s count to four in Maori, complete with a wonderful accent on the a in Whā as provided by unicode characters.

First off, let’s talk about why I’ve been using three ideas in my titles; because it generates a idea-space within which I can triangulate my thoughts. Ahh, the fun of physicalisation of fundamentally ethereal realms such as thought and discourse; and the use of long words to make it sound cooler when I go “Well, I pick three random things because then I can think about what would exist within those three ideas if they were the edges of a triangle”, and make me sound less like a primary school kid and more like a post-graduate philosopher de jour. I don’t even know what “de jour” properly means; but from contexts the French phrase is stolen into in English, I’ll assume it’s got something to do with the present. Which goes full circle into why am I entitling this post in Maori? Well, because in New Zealand we treat Maori as loan words – our Kiwi English includes various bits and pieces of Maori, and we are generally ever so slightly conversant in it – except of course that hardly any of us can carry on a conversation fully in Maori, which is a bit of a shame because as a linguistic exercise it’s actually incredibly interesting. I don’t quite have my thoughts together about Te Reo, so I’ll leave that alone until another day. The point is to bring up that in small ways, we already use words from Maori, especially in place names, and our continual evolution of language as New Zealanders is based not only in English but in Maori.

And of course, the pithy reason is that counting in Maori, one gets to four in much more, lyrical way. Seriously; in English you typically go “One, Two, Three” unless you’re counting out for music, in which case you go “One, Two, Three, Four”, but going to four is actually a burden unless you speak faster. It doesn’t flow off the tongue. In Maori, however, if you leave off the Whā, it sounds too short – “Tahi, Rua, Toru” sounds incomplete, there’s no stop at the end of it. And there’s probably more I could speak of on that point, but my linguistic kung fu is not strong.

Secondly, well, Iet’s speak about Comfort Zones, and the relation they have to expertise and mastery. I’m not actually comfortable with the level of knowledge I have in Te Reo, and would very much like to learn more, as an exercise in actually learning a “foriegn” language. I mean, for all my being a New Zealander, I am primarily culturally identified and hang out with other Pakeha, oh, sorry, I mean “White” people. So, for all my readings and identifying as a multi-cultural liberal, I don’t have much to back it up. Then again, I know the national anthem far better in Maori than I do in English, because the syllables roll off my tongue lyrically to the music, whereas with the English I get tripped up in trying to remember the lyrics as actual words. I’m not sure how that speaks for me culturally though.So, here’s the thing; Maori language and culture actually makes me uncomfortable. The aggression of the haka, the seemingly inclusive/exclusiveness of the marae and concept of whanau; being of the people as opposed to not being of the people. I am not of the Maori people; my lineage is entirely European; but I am of this land. I was born here, I’ve lived here, I know where my river and my mountain are, I know where my people have lived upon this land, and where they came from.

What I’m trying to say, and struggling at because I feel like tip-toeing as if there is a minefield there for me to stand on; is that to learn and grow as a person one has to step outside of their comfort zone, find something that is a little contentious, feels slightly out of place for them; because if you stay insular you’ll only end up with strong convictions borne out of ignorance. I suppose it’s the argument to travel and experience other cultures – well, I feel like I can travel and experience other cultures without leaving my own backyard. Which is where “expertise” and “mastery” come in; if you stay comfortable, you never learn something new; if you never learn something new, you never can gain experience from your mistakes; therefore you don’t grow, and can never become someone who others turn to.

And with that, we get to three; the age in which most children get to that annoying “Why?” stage; well, at least I did. The quest for understanding is a long and involved one, and eventually you have to actually stop asking since you get to a sort of “It’s turtles the whole way down” argument, which may or may not be true, it’s just you’ve reached the exasperation or edge of a particular topic and doing a depth-first search is just driving everyone crazy and leading to no particular good. It’s a weird skill that we pick up in later life to compartmentalise knowledge and learn when it’s neccesary to stop asking “Why” and simply accept assumptions, so we don’t go down a rabbit hole and never come back up to actually get on with what we were supposed to. The problem of this, though, is that we pack ideas into language far more than we should; we skim and place complex concepts into singular words that drive people from other “disciplines” away. It’s a weird problem, and there are entire “branches” of philosophy and other disciplines dedicated to the problem of knowledge and how we group it. I don’t think I’ll be able to get into that here either.

And with those three ideas, I’ve crossed my imaginary threshold of 1,000 words. Why pick that? Well, it’s an arbitrary number, good as any, and it helps me to actually write as opposed to not, by compartmentalising my own ideas and allowing them to be expressed in a form other than frustration at an inability to communicate. Which I suppose, is point four – the mythical point at which what I say has meaning to other people, and I’ve managed to properly convey something. I hope to get there; that is my goal – not “universal truth” or anything as lofty; just to get my point(s) across.

Privacy, Censorship and Employment

So, remember the heady evils of Social Media? That we have to be ultra careful of what we share, and present only our respectable selves to the world, in order to maintain social cohesion and be employable? That our best and most valuable right and duty as a person is our privacy?

Well, fuck that. I’m going to be “selfish” in that I’m going to share what I want, when I want, and with who I want. And, in typical arrogance, if you have a problem with that you can go away. Really; it’s a terrible shame that I have to use aggressive language to defend my right to privacy; because it goes both in non-disclosure and in disclosure. I can actually say what I want, and share it to whoever wants to listen to me.

Hell, there are people who make a living from being total pricks who people love to hate; so why do we pressure ourselves and our children to self-censor? Yes, there is a danger in sharing yourself to strangers; but ultimately you are the one with the choice, with the control.

I can only rail against, say, Facebook over-sharing what I put up there in the sense that I put things up there that I expect to be private. And I don’t. Because I actually read Privacy Policies, and Terms of Service, and remember that all of them come with self-modification clauses and inherent grey areas that are designed to be used in the favor of the collective over the individual.

So, how do we “win” this? Well, social interactions on a mass media scale are a different beast from everyday privacy. But, ultimately, there’s a signal to noise ratio. If someone is reading my blog with a pre-conception, then there’s really nothing I can do about it. I can tip-toe and self-censor, but then I’m presenting something which is not myself. So, why bother? If I add another filter between myself and what I portray, it feels less like me.

And I know that this view is not universal and not for everyone. There are clearly people who feel stigma when they share openly of themselves. I greatly respect those who are anonymous or pseudonymous. If you find that with a mask, you are freer to be yourself, all power to you. I, however, take great pride in that I am me, and that I proclaim my individuality, using my own name and owning what I say. I have had pseudonyms in the past. No, I won’t tell you what they are, but if you were really going to sleuth it out you could probably find out.

I do believe in the right to be forgiven and forgotten, though. I know I’ve deleted plenty of rants and raves from the internet over the years, as I grow and they no longer reflect myself. Life is clearly a journey, and we have to allow people to have false starts and “born again” moments where they show great insight and change. You know, the thing I like currently is googling my name, I am basically all the relevant links on the front page there. And it’s not like I’ve tried. I haven’t actively gone out there to “market” or “brand” myself. I’ve just been me. And in being me, well, in the past there have been other things come up from googling me. I think some years back you’d find a very different picture of myself as a young adult or teenager even.

Well, actually in a way I have been “brand”ified – my name is reasonably unique, which is actually quite funny because they’re both old English names. Like, really, it’s pratically “John Smith” by a different etymology.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that I found something on my hard drive, that I’d written back in 2009. I was a bit of a different person back then, raging against the world and not exactly seeing how I could do good, but in the struggle of getting there. I still am, but I’ve found that if I get angry or righteous about something, it’s because I haven’t handled all the steps to do it properly – like “1, 2, miss a few, RAGE!”

And since I want to maintain a bit of mystique and make you work to read it, since by creating a small barrier I can make sure that well, you really wanted to so you can’t complain to me that I’m ramming some opinionated rant down your throat, you can totally click here and read “The Weight Of The World On Our Shoulders”, a lovely three page piece that starts with “I am from a generation of losers”. It’s upbeat! Well, in a bittersweet way, which is the sort of thing I love.