Home
FiveSpot [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
Raalnan Five

[ website | RoanokeDirect ]
[ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ]
[ archive | journal archive ]

Hape://Bertha.de [Jan. 9th, 2008|12:23 am]
[Tags|, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ]
[Current Location |Elizabeth]
[mood | bouncy]
[music |PodFunk]

·      Hape://Bertha.de

o    BirthDay Funk

§      http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PodOfFunk/~5/209000705/funkpod_30.mp3

§      I have some BirthDay funk, but it’s not like a down feeling. Actually, it’s like a great excitement. Tomorrow, I will be 34 years old. Because my birthday is so close to the New Year, I generally spend the nine days in between thinking of “resolution candidates”. When the deadline rolls around, I usually settle for what I think of as “recent improvements” in my behavior, as I have never been the type to improve my own behavior intentionally.

§      So what’s news?

·      Lots of news, a lot of it is great, and much of it is not for consumption by the general public. Nothing extra special, just not very interesting. For example:

o    Every year, I come up with a new budget and a plan to be debt free by the end of the year. It is usually not very realistic. This year, I actually make enough income to make it a remote possibility.

o    I am fully geeked out. I have two different bar code scanners. One is a light pen, and the other is the light gun type.

o    I just got a degree, and I am going back to school. It is an online college. The future looks bright, but the web sessions that pass for classes are not so exciting. The courses are easy, but the assignments are like an Easter egg hunt. The professors don’t put the assignments with due dates in the syllabus. You have to go looking around for them.

§      What would you want to be asked if you were being interviewed?

·      That is not a rhetorical question. I am actually writing this for my blog and to send to myself on http://FutureMe.org. I like to talk to people, but I can’t stand superficial conversation. When I say this, I mean, I can’t stand conversations about celebrities, or complaints about “the system” or “society”. Needless to say, I often find myself wishing I had better questions to get people to expand on what they think about life the universe, and everything. Thinking more on it, I should probably develop some questions. What would the future me want to be asked about? While I can’t think of anything good, I can put down what comes to mind. Actually, these come from the book “All about me” by Phillip Keel.

o    If you had no commitments to others, what would you do?

§      I would maximize my education and work experience. I would make my dwelling where ever I found the highest paying job. I think the online education thing is good for the lifestyle I live. It is also good for the lifestyle I would live in such circumstances. I would always keep putting in resumes with different firms. When I get a new job, I would stay for a year. This would be long enough to satisfy the apartment lease. When the lease is up, I would start the job hunt again. I would continue to take classes in the field as opposed to classed for a new degree. I would do this because the industry is always changing, and the moves would be costly to perform, no matter how paltry the new dwelling. I would live meagerly. I would not take huge apartments even if I could afford them. I would also not take anything without a washer and dryer. I would invest all I could in traditional investments, and in my own business, which would have a forwarding post office box, if necessary. For my “own business”, I would do application programming, which I have a lot of great ideas for, as opposed to service programming, with which I have a lot of experience.

o    What is a dream you have had more than once?

§      This is a bad question for me to ask, because I don’t have a real answer.

·      I dream often of climbing on something big and moving, like in “Shadow of the Colossus”.

·      I dream a lot about chasing something very small that moves very quickly. The recurrence is the fact that I always move very slowly, if at all.

·      I dream of being lost in a big place, with a series of closed off areas. There always seems to be a choice of which area to go to next, and each area seems more inappropriate than the last. It is not always the same setting. Sometimes, it is like a Wal*Mart, other times, it is like a hospital, other times, it is like a cave. In every instance, there is never any going back, and there are always multiple choices, and there is always someone calling me by name from an unknown direction.

o    List 5 things you would like to accomplish within the next year. This is my own question.

§      Debt Freedom

·      Credit cards are a real pain in the ass, especially when it is so easy to keep using them and paying them off than it is to simply cut them and pay them off. My mother recently told me about prepaid cards, which are not the same as the secured cards. A prepaid card can actually accept money from direct deposit. They look and work just like other credit cards, except for the fact that they appear to have no connection to your credit, and they extend you no credit. They are simply a spending mechanism, nothing more. I thought of this idea years ago. It is good to see that the rest of the world has caught up.

§      A good schedule

·      Many people try to avoid the 9 to 5 lifestyle. I aspire to it. I would like nothing more than to set a schedule, and follow it for two weeks in a row. I would be ecstatic if I could do the same for two months. Time and money are separate commodities, but time, like money is a highly valuable commodity. If you don’t know where it is going, it is easy to waste a lot of it. If you can not account for it, you can count on the fact that you are wasting it.

§      One (1) or zero (0) packs of cigarettes every month.

·      Currently, I smoke One (1) pack of cigarettes every week. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is so hard to not smoke any that I have been considering hypnosis as a method of elimination. If any readers have tried it, please feel free to offer your opinion on the matter.

§      Successful completion of all classes I am taking.

·      This is less of a hope and more of an expectation, as long as I don’t get the rigorous travel schedule I had last year at this time.

§      An initial release of one of my applications.

·      I have a lot of good ideas; some of them might even be considered good ideas. All of my applications are 75% complete, as far as a release is concerned. I write these applications for myself, and that 75% represents what I need them to be to be functional to myself. That last 25% would represent my confidence in the fact that others would find them useful, if I were to move them to completion.

linkpost comment

Daily Review [Mar. 23rd, 2006|10:52 pm]
[Tags|, , , ]
[mood | chipper]
[music |Fats Waller]

We went to the mall tonight. I went to Barnes & Noble, while Debbie & Aaron hit TJMaxx… I sat and checked out some of the new books on EJB and AJAX. There is so much to learn, I feel like I need to take a speed reading course or something. I literally feel like the more I learn, the less I know. It's like being a kid. Actually, it is not like being a kid, kids are generally bored, unless they are fed entertainment by others. I seek out this [adventure], so I am less like a child, and more like an investigator, or a geek.
linkpost comment

032206_Derridas [Mar. 22nd, 2006|12:11 am]
[Tags|, , , , , , , ]
[mood | accomplished]
[music |Variable Speed Fan in MyrtleSan's LapTop]

Tonight, I had to refactor the application. I don't like Refactoring, it represents wasted effort. In some cases, refactoring isn't so bad, like when it represents reorganization due to some newly gained knowledge. In some ways, that is the case here. I needed to get ahold of the wild Array issue. Arrays in DotNet seem to want to be a central part of their functions, rather than simple variables to be passed around at will. For example, it you can't simply pass a variable from one function to the next and grab an index, like you would in Java. You have to massage the Array, taking it for a walk, and asking it about each of its indexes. I could be wrong. I hope I am. The current model is simple, one function accepts the text, frames it, parses it, and steps through the array. with the exception of the first and last item in the array (the start and end), each word is added (with validation) to the vocabulary table. All items (including [Start] and [End]) are added as context links in the database. Now that I think of it, this could probably be done in JavaDotNet with no loss of credability on my part. time for another ReFactoring... Damn. EveryThing I do is an expiriment in something else. I just pinched into my nose and pulled out the biggest, thickest, blackest nose hair I have ever seen. If I had this typr of hair on my head... I mean it, this hair was thicker than anything on my body, it was like a cats wisker... I also remember where I was when I first realized that people were paying attention to me, without my trying to be noticed. I thought about putting the nose hair into page 47 of my DotNet book, but as I was turning it in my fingers, it literally JUMPED out of my hand, and landed squarely in between the 'N' and 'M' keys on Myrtle's laptop. I am about to start looking for something to pry off the keys.
link1 comment|post comment

03.21.06 [Mar. 21st, 2006|09:39 am]
[Tags|, ]
[music |PodCast]

How do I determine a value's type in ASP.net? I have a situation where I need to accept an array as a  value. If the value is not an array, I want to split it into an array. I need to be able to determine the values type to do so.
linkpost comment

navigation
[ viewing | most recent entries ]