Blue Sparks

While outside the other week I noticed a small piece of fluff floating in the wind. It spiraled around in the air currents for a while and eventually landed close to where I was standing. The fluff was actually the seed from a milkweed plant, a pest that I have viciously cut down in my own gardens on many occasions. This time it was different, and I really do not know why. Rather than the usual loathing of a plant that I am unable to kill, a flood of childhood memories came back to me. One in particular sticks out more than the others.

I remember finding a caterpillar on a milkweed plant when I was a child. Being curious I captured the young monarch butterfly larvae with a piece of the plant and placed it in a jar with some holes poked in the top. Over the next few weeks I continued to feed the small caterpillar by finding new milkweed and adding it to the jar. Eventually it hung itself upside down from one of the leaves and created a cocoon. Being quite proud of this “accomplishment” I took the jar in to school to show all my friends.

Now, at some point along the way something bad happened to this poor butterfly I was trying to raise. I can not remember if my mother would not allow the jar in the house, or if I just forgot it outside on the picnic table one night. No matter what the reasoning was, it happened to rain that night and the poor jar was flooded when I found it the next morning. I emptied the water from the jar and dried out the cocoon, but it was too late. I never did get to see the butterfly emerge…

It seems odd, and yet exciting at the same time, how something as simple as a small seed floating on the wind can bring back memories like this. Thank you, milkweed, for helping me remember.

I found a website today that had 200 billion digits of pi calculated. It just so happens I have a website that takes such a file and spits out an image of what those digits would look like if you assigned a colour to every number from 0 – 9. I figured that 200 billion was a little much, but the site I got them from splits them into chunks of 100 million. Previously I only used 4 million digits, this is due to the fact I once calculated them using my computer and then stuck them up on my website for the world..

So what I have done is modified my script to be able to seek through the digits, and show you a picture starting from anywhere in the first 100 million digits. It did not take a lot of extra work, and I think the result is quite pleasing. I am actually considering doing the same for ln, phi, and some other interesting constants.

Yes, this is truly nerdy stuff.

Jackie and I’s 3rd wedding anniversary is coming up shortly. We were wandering around the mall today, attempting to give each other gift ideas. I believe I know what I am getting her, but I do not think I have given her sufficient ideas yet. It is hard though, I do not even know what I want. But I am starting to get on a tangent… already! Afterwards we started talking about how I proposed.

For my 26th birthday Jackie had decided to throw me a surprise party. Unfortunately for her, I managed to figure out what was going on beforehand. My thought was to do a reverse-surprise and propose to her when I walked in the door. Let me tell you that Jackie is quite the snooper, or at least that is what her family always tells me. She has an uncanny ability to be able to shake a wrapped gift and tell you exactly what it is! So with this in mind I was quite nervous about having the ring in the apartment at the time. Especially since Christmas was nearing and presents were beginning to accumulate.

I was not really sure what day the party was, so I carried the ring around in my pocket for about a week. My hand was in there almost constantly making sure I had not lost it. Finally I figured everything out when my friends Don and Matthew got me out of the house, quite conveniently, during a weekend when Jackie was around. I was taken out to Bayshore Hobbies in Hamilton where Don was nice enough to buy me a 100 sided die for my birthday. The whole time we were out I was so nervous I thought I was going to puke!!

When we finally got back home my plan, as stated above, was to drop to one knee as soon as the words surprise were exclaimed in unison. What I had not anticipated was silly string!!!! I was bathed head to toe in the blasted stuff as soon as I opened the door, and lost my concentration entirely. I had to think quickly and regroup. I look back and say to myself “You should have just done it right there anyway,” but that’s hindsight. Instead I started drinking, it was my birthday party!

About an hour later I managed to pull my courage together and told everyone I had an announcement to make. I pulled Jackie into our dining room/living area and dropped to one kneee with everyone watching. The rest is history, although she still claims she never would have said yes if she were more sober at the time!

I have an addictive personality, I will be the first to admit. I have been that way as long as I can remember. When I find something I enjoy I will continue with it for a very long time. For example, I smoke. I have tried to quite on several occasions (and lied to an ex-girlfriend about actually quitting once), and even succeeded once. Sadly I took up the habit again about two years later. I drink coffee, a lot of coffee. I used to drink a lot of cola; I actually broke that habit because my stomach rebelled. Now, these are addictions that a lot of people have these days, I am definitely not alone, but there is one addiction which consumed me entirely: The Massively Multiplayer Online RPG.

The year was 2002; I was in college at the time. I was beginning my second co-op work term during the winter semester. I also had a girlfriend, of almost a year – the longest ever at the time.  (SIDE NOTE:, this is the same GF whom I lied to about smoking.  Not my best years, I must admit.)  Sadly it was not to last as someone else,  ‘something‘ else rather, came into my life shortly after. As you can guess from above, this was a MMO game.

I had beta tested a few years before for a game called Asheron’s Call being created by one Turbine Software. At the time I was not very interested. The beta came and went and I paid no heed to it. I was more into first person shooters and real time strategies at the time. I also had a real Dungeons and Dragons group to get my true geek on with, why bother online?

Flash back to the co-op work term. I was working for the same company I did the first term for, but the load was pretty light this time. I was working from my apartment and corresponding through email and telephone. To make a long story short, I was bored:  I had nothing to do and I had no desire to find anything else to do.

My playstation and my old video games were getting a little tiresome.  I decided to try one of those new MMO games I was hearing about on the Internet. My first attempt was at EverQuest, but it just did not seem right to me. I packed it up and traded it in (yes, you could still do this at the time).  I remembered playing the beta for AC, and looked it up. I could not find it in stores but managed to have a copy shipped to me. It was the begginning of the end for my social life.

I am sure that many people who will actually read this post know what these games are like, but I will explain it anyway. The game was like being on drugs. I was glued to the screen for 18 + hours a day. Yes, 18 hours of every day I was spending on this game. Always trying to make my character better, trying to compete against everyone else. I had to be the best! If that meant I needed a widget or a do-dad which could only be found by killing a super-rare monster a hundred times, I would do it. I could not stop myself.

I soon stopped calling my girlfriend. I could not talk to her and play at the same time. When she called me I would ignore the calls whenever possible and make up excuses later. When we did talk I tried to keep it short, any time that I was not spending on the game was time other people had to get ahead of me! When I went to see her, all I could think about was the game. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up! Not of the woman whom I had told I loved…

Yes, this is exactly how I behaved back then. And as you can guess I was to lose her soon afterwards. There were other reasons, of course — and I will not enumerate them all here — but this is the one I look back upon and feel ashamed of. I let a video game control my life, and I lost something special because of it.

After she left me I went a little crazy.  I was stuck between a rock and a hard place – give up the game, or give up the girl. I told myself I really loved her, but I did not give up the game : I wanted both.  In the end I said some nasty things, none of which I can recall. I do, however, remember the reaction which they got me.  I was an immature 22 year old, but I say that with 8 years of retrospective. I would never have admitted it at the time.

All of that said and done, I quit the game forever 6 months later. I got a real job, since my money had run out. I could not devote the time I needed to it any more. When I quit, I had absolutely nothing to show for it except a still broken heart.

With that said, I am finished my story for today. And if you ask me to play an MMO, you will know the reason why I turn you down without even a second though.

It has been a while since I have actually written anything on here. I could make excuses, as I usually do, but there really is no good reason. Sure I was doing school work and busy with something, although I am not really sure what that may be, it does not make my lack of writing acceptable. Let me correct myself, it does not make my lack of writing acceptable to myself. I am going to attempt to write here more often. We shall see how that promise works out.

I have my first summer off in roughly five years. As many who know me are privileged to hear, almost constantly, I have been taking university courses part time. It has been a constant move from one set of courses to another, but the end is definitely in sight. I cannot wait to be done, but I also ponder the thought of “what will I do?” after I am finished. This question does make me think, but then again I will most likely do what I am doing now during the summer : fill my time with hobbies. I am just not sure if that will be satisfying enough. Two months of fishing, video games, and other things is great, but what comes next? That will be a question for 2010 though… September marks the beginning of the end, my last two courses.

Some history is in order for the rest of this post. I completed college in August of 2003, but was never satisfied with the education I received from Conestoga. I always felt that I was being taught the basics over and over again, only with a different language every semester.  By basics I mean syntax of language, and not the FUNDAMENTALS that I believe that any decent software developer should know. Nobody taught us about data structures – Hash Tables, B-Trees, Lists. We never learned about how an operating system really worked. We were taught about Windows – How to operate it. We were taught VB, Cobol, and C – How to program in them.

Taking university courses in Computer Science has really opened my eyes. I have seen the guts of an OS and how it works with hardware. I know how my databases work behind the scenes, and can make better informed decisions on their design. I know how my computer network is designed and really understand how it works. I have dabbled with the semantic web and can make my documents part of it. I will be learning about Artificial Intelligence and Distributed computing next.

I also brushed up on my mathematics, something which was severely lacking in Conestoga. We learned “Business Math” and “Statistics”, but this is not nearly enough. I have the power of Calculus and Discrete Mathematics under my belt. I even tortured myself with a class on ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations). This is the sort of learning that I longed for when I was in my early twenties!

Unfortunately, looking back a decade or more, my late teens made the trip to university impossible. I had a choice between friends, school, or a compromise between the two. During my first three years of high school I chose school and participated with friends to a lesser degree. After grade eleven, I tried to get into the social scene much more and my studies fell to the wayside. I even went for a sixth year of high school to attempt to bring up some grades and join the university crows a year later, but to no avail.

In one way, I do not have much to show for the bad choice I made above.  The friends I keep company with to this day are those whom I spent time with before I made the choice to let school slack. In other ways, I do not think I could have done anything differently. I have a beautiful wife, whom I would never have met if I changed the way I lived my life, and a life I would not give up for anything. It is hard to imagine how my life would have turned out if I had changed even a single thing in the past.

It is funny, I did not know how this post was going to turn out when I started it. I am quite satisfied with the results, even though there is much more racing. The mind is a beautiful thing, and I must exercise mine more to keep it in shape.

The Princess Bride is one of my all time favourite movies. It’s just a great movie altogether. Imagine my delight when I found the following comic this morning! I laughed my ass off!!!

Westley's a Dick - Click for full size version

I’ve finally broken down and purchased a media server. Just a little guy though… It’s a Shuttle XPC K45. I am putting an Intel Celeron E1400 (2GHz, dual processor) into it, with 2 1TB drives. It should be a fun little box to work with. The pieces should all arrive today… So I’m looking forward to putting it together!

I’ve packaged my 4 million digits of pi script and placed it on the main products page for anyone to download if they so feel like it. I also added a download link for the Pi Picture script that was available for download previously only from the picture page itself.

Note : This was developed for linux! It can most likely be made to work on windows, but it was not written for it!

I’ve written various tools over the years to help me out with tasks that take a long time, or are very boring/repetitive. I have uploaded one of these to my website. It is a small PHP script that I wrote in order to rip album art from ID3 tags (embedded in the MP3) and store the file as a BMP (windows bitmap) that rockbox will be able to read and display. I’m not sure it will be useful to everyone, but it’s there for the world.

The download is located here if you are interested.

And here’s the description from the ‘product’ page on my website:

“When I installed the Rockbox firmware on my iPod I was left with a dilemma. I had spent hours (days even!) downloading album art for my MP3 collection and tagging every file with it. Unfortunately Rockbox only supports album art as a BMP file, and not embedded art. I didn’t want to spend more days pulling art out so I could see it, and what would happen if I changed what I had on there?
Enter this little script that I hacked together one night. It will read ID3 tags for your MP3 collection, and dump BMP files into the album folders on your iPod. Woo!”

And there it is! If you want to check out more stuff, there’s a bunch located on the products portion of the main site (although products is misleading… I don’t actually sell anything but my time).

I’m going to make the switch… from Gnome to KDE. In my Linux Distro of choice this means I will be swapping from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. I gave the live CD a try the other day and I really think it should be a nice change. Hopefully I can figure out all the applications that will be necessary to run things from day to day. Most of the time I’m running a web browser, email, or an Instant Messenger… and those are all included by default. The difficulty will more likely come when I’m trying to fill those niche apps that I’ve found use for with Gnome. I can’t really name anything off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s something I will miss.

That’s life I guess… No pain, no gain!