In fact, the seeming existence/presence of ego - an instant of conviction of being a nexus of separate individuality - is literally the-missing-of-it.
While I was doing my MSc in Chemistry in 2012, I started listening to QOTSA. I remember that I was at a point where I was looking for new bands and my own friend there at University suggested the band to me. QOTSA are one of the best rock bands out there. When I listen to a band I give a lot of credit to unique song structures, recording sound/techniques and the general vibe of the band. As time progresses it becomes ever the more difficult to innovate in music. So many combinations of melodies, drum beats etc have already been recorded and used, it's hard not to fall into a trap when writing new music. However, QOTSA almost always delivers something new and fresh. Their music writing style is definitely "Avant-Garde", they generally use differnt song structures and melodies. The weirder, the better. On top of that, their recording always sound amazing, and is part of their aesthetic.
I had a half-baked plan this morning to do some early-morning sunrise photography. Sunrise is now 4:38am and getting earlier each day, so I thought this might be my last practical opportunity. It sounded kind of boring to go back to my other photography spots, but I couldn't figure out from a map what might be another good spot, in view of the terrian and treelines in this area. I had one idea to try to head downtown and see if I might get some good shots against a skyline. One the way, I found a parking lot near the "Boatel" with a good view across the river.
Is it something I've become bad at through lack of practice (failing to build a habit of reading)? Something I've become bad at through practicing the wrong thing (building a habit of failing to read)? Something intrinsic to my brain? Am I just trying to read the wrong things?
I don't know whether it's a problem or not. I feel very ignorant on a huge number of topics and I feel like perhaps if I read more then I could be less ignorant. On the other hand, there will always be vastly more things I'm ignorant about than things I'm knowledgeable about, so perhaps it's a silly thing to worry about.
At the end of December, I purchased a Nokia G21 TA-1418 to replace my Samsung Galaxy Note8.
The Samsung ran well for the most part and performed the tasks I needed, but my current job requires me to install certain MFA tools on my smartphone, and the Note8 was reaching end of support for some of those tools. Of course, the screen also had major burn-in and the battery barely lasted a day on standby, but those were relatively minor concerns for me. I chose the G21 as a replacement phone since it still offered SD-based expandable storage and a 3.5 mm TRS jack: increasingly rare features among US smartphones.
While Tears of the Kingdom is actually out for me right now, I wanted to wrap up my previous Zelda experience. In the run-up to the TotK release, I watched someone else play BotW with a couple mods enabled. This got me in the mood to play the game myself a little bit again, and I also wondered if I could get the soundtrack. Way back when, when I first got the game, I looked into getting the soundtrack, and decided against. When I looked at the entry on Amazon a bit (maybe years) later, only scraps were available at ridiculous (three-digit) prices. However, when I checked the final time, they were down to normal levels…but they were all imports, and all the printing was in Japanese. I still have access to at least one computer with a CD-ROM drive, so I bought the thing.
Eclipse, well, there's a funny story there, some intern started up Eclipse, which promptly made 50 database connections in the test environment, which killed that environment, and I got blamed for it because the DBAs on the other side of the wall thought it was 'jmates' who had caused the problem, not the intern 'jmate'. Why the heck would a unix sysadmin be running Eclipse? I get annoyed when vim has a 30 millisecond startup time. Java? A bloat browser? Fuggedaboutit!
Joel Spolsky informs us in 2001 that bloat does not exist.
Unix is my IDE. OpenBSD in particular, using a somewhat customized version of the base vi, plus various other tools that I know pretty well and can mostly debug (the man(1) crash was a beyond my skills). That's an environment. It's got problems; however, the developers accept my patches (not sure what ever happened to the strptime(3) bug I sent Apple) and make continual improvements to a complex system on a predictable cycle with little in the way of resources. How much do the Googles and Microsofts pull in for profits? Why is their code so often featured in the CVE charts?
Let's review some alternative environments.
In Card Story (link at the end), the users can do things like "edit a line of text", or "create a link from a branch in one card to another card". Like most user interfaces, some things the users do involve multi-step flows. One of the questions when developing user interface code is how to logically represent this kind of multi-step flow.
Holy moly: managed to sleep until 8:35am, which is way later than I usually arise. Three cheers for the power of some well-placed THC.
Unfortunately that puts a real crimp in my internet attention budget for today.
Much interesting and playful thoughtfulness down these paths...
I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but vim has long been the only IDE I've ever needed.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
