How MSWord bugs taught me separation of concerns. A webdev retrofuturism.

I remember the first time I typed a paper (school assignment) using a word processor. Word 95 on Windows 95a in this case. The feeling you get when it crashes on you after a dozen of carefully laid-out, themed pages. You start to be hypersensitive to fragile features like tables, or WordArt. Anything that triggers a crash, you delay it. Soon you start to reorder the process. Instead of going all-in, depth first, you think of layers of risks. The first layer, the simplest and obviously mandatory one (and yet the most * consuming) is feeding all the characters into the computer, and save it. When done you start to apply structure, then styles. Years later I learned about the html/css separation and was greatly amused.

I could also say that was my first handbased version control system, since every 5 minutes or so I'd save a file with a new name according to what steps were done. I could always fork a previous version and try a new way to achieve, or at least attempt, something. Tables are so capricious you know.

Getting things done, neighborhood scale

People must learn to build. Learn to understand a situation, and imagine a change, otherwise they will live in habits and reactionary behaviors.

"racist" complaints often include mundane statements like 'there are no more bakeries', 'I can't eat Italian anymore'. Pardon me but this is so shallow.

Questions:

• Have they all left ? Or only those you used to know ?
• Why have they left ? No more customers ? You are one. All plaintives are.
• Can't they sustain their business then ? It seems so.
• Do you want it ? It seems so.

What are you waiting for ? Organize, find a place, find a baker|cook|foo, and be happy.

You might think that is not your job. I think that is exactly what a community should be, people organizing themselves to suit their needs.

brain antipatterns ii : multiplexing

Very early I found that multiplexing between tasks has advantages. Exams rarely are sequential, questions can be linearly related thus reading these globally will improve your knowledge of the problem, or non-sequential therefore you can and should average time allocation for them. Nowadays I don't do well with multitasking, right now I'm listening to a talk about emotions effects on cells, while browsing 12 tabs. I think this is related to a difficulty of focusing and deep concentration leading you to switch to other tasks as soon as you feel stuck. Just like an exam. There's a limit above which multiplexing fails, it's well known in computers, too much multitasking means no work done, all energy is spent in context switching.
Now I just recalled something I did in high school, whenever I was new in class and had nobody to waste attention with , yet bored with most of the details of the course, I filled the 'interest' lacking by rewriting the course in my own term with some sort of organized presentation. Indentation, color schemes, columns, commentaries. It was the same content but twisted so the main information I cared about was the center, and expressed by words and structure. This kept me deeply interested in the subject by trying to find a clear and concise way to put out my mind model, while testing it at the same time for some holes.

brain antipatterns

Since I keep hitting walls whenever I try to learn something, there might be a pattern in my brain response to new stimulus.

2 cases :
- I manage to follow the first lesson, my confidence builds up to the point of shutting down my brain. The second lesson I can't barely understand anything. The end.

- I don't see the point of the subject, my confidence builds down to the point of shutting down my brain. There's no lesson two.

Gotta re-educate this cramped muscle of mine called cortex.

society economy organization energy costs

energy is related to our understanding of cosmos (as in order of everything)
we labelled it with the notion of cost which is derived from that understanding
nowadays nanotech opens the road for constant absorption of energy (heat , electricity)
we can pick and transfer small amounts at every moments
we also built more efficient devices that would require amounts in this range

human work ~ energy, also depends on our understandings of things.
crowdsource is kinda this nanotech idea
we can leverage human activities as energy
we just have to provide a sufficiently conductive medium/infrastructure for their little amount of work to be gathered, transfered, aggregated, cross-corelated.
now things would appear almost free, and people would enjoy life while contributing at the same time
we have a lot of wasted time, and lots of desire to build and make changes but the 'job' barrier is too high and unjustifiedly so.

Learning music and stoicism

I attempted to do music, mostly by myself, mostly because with internet you can find legal or illegal sources of information. Since I started this I took as many wrong turns as I could, heading all-in until I hit the wall. Turning back to do the same error in another direction. Every one of these mistakes didn't make me a better player, it did force me to taste anger and frustration, helplessness, impatience .. many kind of 'negative' emotions. Every time I realized I was just betting far too much, far too long on the wrong horse, so I stopped doing so.
Years of dead-ends teaches you to appreciate real progress, as tiny as it can be. It also removes the self. You don't try to be right, you just poke the universe, and listen carefully for the answer. Ahh too much unnecessary details. The thing is, I cared too much about my suppositions and not about the object, that's what causes anger. Later, I randomly stumbled upon the Wikipedia page about Stoicis, which says:

The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.

This resonates with my experience in failures, and a personal appeal towards Aikido, fluidity, circles, Qi Gong, some ideas discussed in system building, like "fail early, fail often", iteration time.Somehow you have to 'have faith', love those potential judgement errors; but not so much you forget to correct them when they start to show up. Those are you internal map, perception, of the world, and learning would be akin to adjust this map closer to reality, if I may say so. Adding bits of resolution to increase sensitivity towards things you couldn't perceive before.

I'm not sure I'm finished with this topic.

Patchwork English

I tend to think and speak in English quite easily since a few years. Around early 2Ks I spent an awful amount of time watching instructional material like musical instrument master classes, software tutorials, my first non-dubbed movies too. Few years back I went virtually abroad using Omegle, I was constantly in sync with America's Time Zone; this was the new epic TV show era (lost, prison break, whatever), I even watched Jay Leno twice. Live chat with north american was alright, some thought I wasn't European, some just said my English was really great. But.. writing is a whole different game. I'm amazed by my lack of grammar knowledge, my failed metaphors, abuse of almost common Latin-rooted nouns,  abuse of these boringly-long-adjective-driven-verb-free sentences, lucky-guess spelling and an overall limited vocabulary that ends up really repetitive.
As an excuse I can almost say the same for my native languages .. I never learned properly, my brain is good at grabbing pompous idioms that impress people. I come across a lot of great writers/bloggers I hope I'd incorporate some of their skills. In the meantime I visit etymonline.com 5 times a day on average which helps too.

Ciao

onlisp - part 0

My last workplace wasn't a treehugger heaven, so I slipped few printing jobs between the colorful waste they call 'work'. One of them was a full print of the famous 'On Lisp' book by Paul Graham. B&W, 4 pages per sheet, laser printed, decent paper and ~300 pages long.

(defun read(book)

    (read (cadr book))