Java Programming, Turkey Sex, Perceptions from Martians

Now that my office environment has been de-cluttered and re-arranged, I feel supercharged to establish a new world order for myself. I feel a lot more capable now of studying and executing some stuff that is very abstract, and demands an extra heightened and sharpened degree of focus.

I just completed the first learning module from a Java programming manual today. My ultimate ambition is to get some sort certification for it, and pad up my resume a bit. It was the cheapest hobby/interest, skill building exercise that I could think of doing to keep me out of trouble from now until the end of winter. I do reasonably well at translating languages, solving decryption and logic puzzles, so I thought the natural and practical thing to build on from these talents is programming. Right now, I thought that the creative side of this writing exercise would help me wind down and decompress after this lesson of processing nebulous terminology, and blowing out the cobwebs, and knocking the rust off of some long unused mental faculties. I'm hoping that nothing in there seized up too much. I blame too much over-interfacing, and having to constantly dig into the heads of people who are so illogical, void of common sense, who regularly obfuscate information, and just are lacking in normal language skills, for any weakness I'm having in being any more proficient at this new project. Dealing so directly and purely with matters of logic and the accuracy involved in programming is a welcome change, but it's also almost a shock to the system as I sit down and get fully engaged in it, compared to what I regularly deal with. It is, however, just the kind of exercise that I need to do to achieve some sort of balance.

In part of the first exercise there was some examples about how the programming language could be used for guiding a exploration probe on Mars, or something, using OOP (Object Oriented Programming) through creating instance and class attributes and methods within a single inheritance hierarchy. Sounds like Martian, doesn't it? If you have no programming experience, it surely would. This mode of empirical experimentation I'm in, thoughts of Martians, and the coming of Thanksgiving (October 8th here in Canada), and the consequently discounted turkeys in grocery stores, all coalesce to remind me of a story about pornography that still makes me laugh.

I forget the name and date of the documentary that was aired about this subject, but the scenario was this. The blurb I saw on it was about the mating habits of turkeys, and how easily tom turkeys could be brought to sexual arousal with the simplest of stimuli.* Scientists were testing turkeys in a lab with cardboard cutout pictures of hen turkeys. The subject male turkey would fluff out his chest and tail feathers, gobbling up a storm, strutting and circling the photo, and then he would actually try to mount it! Apparently, it's not even necessary to have  the whole picture of the female turkey to get the tom turkeys excited. The experiments showed that even when just a picture of the hen turkey's head was pasted on a stick, is enough for the males to still willingly resume trying to court the thing and screw it silly. Oh sure, we could sit here and laugh about how friggin' stupid a creature like a turkey is for doing this. However, the researcher chimed in with a bizarre, yet insightful observation. He stated it as something like: suppose the Martians landed somewhere at night, and then went around peeking through windows to get a first hand account about the behaviours of humans, and chanced upon watching some guy getting freaky with his junk while staring at some pictures in a glossy magazine, or at pixelated lights on a screen. People in this case, aren't that much bloody brighter than turkeys. I would assume that the same kind of conclusion could be arrived at by the Martians if they caught sight of some guys using a laser pointer to tease their cat into chasing a dot of light around the house, laughing like crazy at this simple-minded reaction of this animal, and then sitting down on a couch afterward . . . to play video games**. Not a real difference between the two cases. Therefore, we are far from being a species that should be ridiculing or judging the entertainment behaviours of other animals, especially when it comes to sex. All higher animals use some means of artificial sensory stimulation. It's called play.


Then again, if the abduction stories are true, the Martians shouldn't get a too sanctimonious either if they are still continuing with all that alleged anal probing business.

*- Why they were conducting this research is beyond me, since for the most part, commercially raised turkeys today are the result of artificial insemination. The damn things are being selectively bred to be so big that they seriously risk injuring or crushing a hen turkey if they mounted her, hence this option. There is actually a job out there, as I discovered on Dirty Jobs, on the Discovery Channel. If you ever thought that your job sucked (snicker), just think of these poor bastards.
** - Sorry, but using a controller to chase or shoot at what amounts to points of light on a screen amounts to something not much different than a cat chasing a red laser dot around. We just have a more sophisticated means of doing it. Relax gamesters, I do this too, but I fail to see the appeal of using a whole day of doing it like people do.

Approaching Equinox, English Speaker Peeves

Autumnal equinox is arriving today: when number of daylight hours will balance out with the number of night time hours. As always, it seems to be a natural time of the year for me to pensively re-evaluate what sorts of progressions throughout the course of it are working out, and which ones are not, with equal attention. My big personal, bringing-things-to-balance, project for this weekend is re-organizing my home office. The task is so daunting that I decided to procrastinate a little by writing a blog entry instead.

I reviewed the goal list I made for myself from back in July. I accomplished most of those things, with the exception of achieving a full marathon distance run. I'm reminded of this because the Rush concert is in town next Friday. It was the reward I promised myself if I achieved this goal. The injury messed up my training schedule so badly.

My running activity is becoming more and more infrequent and abbreviated, mostly due to the fact that the city has turned off all the fountains along the trails since the month began, so my range is limited to going as far as the amount of water I can carry with me will allow me to. I feel about 90% healed now; it still hurts to touch my toes. My training sessions ordinarily are done in the morning, but I'll be switching over to using my free afternoons, or early evenings instead. My count is 451 runs that are registered with Nike Plus since I began recording them. I made it a goal to complete 500 before the end of the year. I'm curious as to how far toward the end of the year it will be until I'd find it intolerable to wear running shorts outside. Biking season will be winding down within the next one to two months as well, unless we are lucky enough to have a freakishly late-coming winter like we did last year. I'm not a winter cyclist. It's risky enough that I bike home from work in pitch dark, never mind adding icy streets to skid on in the middle of traffic into the mix. This new bike is great: my best purchase of the year so far, and it pleases me even more knowing that it has been paid off already within five months of riding it with the savings from my gasoline bill.

I've been doing more crazy experiments in self-sufficiency, and had another successful and delicious exercise in frugality for this week: Watermelon Rind Pickles. I purchased one of the last well-ripened watermelons at my local store for $1.98, and made six pint jars of worth of sweet and savory pickles out of the rinds, which would have ordinarily been destined for the garbage. Adding another dollar and a half worth of vinegar, sugar, spices, and sealing lids, reusing the jars I already have, and I made them for about 58 cents a pint. I couldn't make cucumber pickles that cheaply, even if I grew them from seed: if I ever somehow found enough growing space for them on my deck.

Recently, I applied to a casual ESL teaching position at one of the community centres. I was reminiscing about my last English teaching experience, and factoring in who my students would be if I'm hired, and thinking about how I'd do things differently this time around. I'm reasonably forgiving and patient with people who are just learning the language, but I'm also easily sickened when it comes listening to some people who allegedly have spoken this language all their lives, and who still speak it very poorly. Here are some (unfortunately all too common) ways that "English speakers" abuse the language that make me want to cast some biting ridicule at them for being so linguistically stupid:

1. Using the first person object pronoun in the nominative case: I really hate it when people say "Me and <blank> {verb} {predicate}.". Our built-in moron detectors would quickly signal alert status red when we hear fellow anglophones around us say things like, "Us will go to the store.", "Her went to the bathroom.",or "Them have tickets to the movies." So, why is it so bloody hard for some people to understand that "Me and Joe Blow are eating cookies" is just as totally stupid and wrong? Use 'Joe Blow and I', or simply 'We', instead. Hearing some adults constantly speaking this way makes me suspect that they flunked grade six grammar, perhaps more than just once.
2. Failing to notice the difference of usage between 'there', 'their', and 'they're' in their written forms: when people dare argue with me in writing, stating that, "Their is nothing wrong with my message because the spell checker on my computer says that they're are no mistakes. So their!" I'm very certain that I won't be hiring this person for anything very detail oriented. Similar peeves bug me too which relate to the incorrect usage of 'your' and 'you're', 'it's' and 'its', and 'to', 'two', and 'too'.
3. Improper verbal conjugations: English verbs only have two variations of present tense conjugations (the exception is three for the verb "to be": am, are, is), a simple addition of a single form of modal verb to the infinitive to make conditional or future tenses, a single past tense form (two for the verb "to be": was, were), a single participle form, and a single gerund form. It's so much simpler to learn verbs in English than it is to learn the verbs from most other languages*, and yet people are still so stupid to say things like, "I gots really good grammar", or "My child write like Shakespeare". Such things strike me as straddling the line between being grossly comical, and horrifically ignorant and tragic.
4. The word "like", or excessive profanity, splattered liberally and repeatedly throughout the body of a single sentence, stated as mindlessly and casually as if one were chewing gum: e.g. "I was like, going to the mall to like buy these cute shoes, and they were like a hundred dollars, but I only had like forty, so like I phoned my mom and said like, "I really like these shoes mom". . . Jesus Christ kid, SHUT UP! Six likes and only one was valid. On the same token, the substitution of the word "like" with the more foul word "fucking", or any other profanity, used as a filler with the same degree of frequency and thoughtlessness, is even more bothersome to me. Psychologically, people who do this constantly just to throw in this extra shock value, do so because they are they are insecure and yet childishly attention seeking (as with teenagers), and they lack the maturity and/or confidence to dare themselves to think that they might have or develop some other amiable intellectual aspect or personality dimension for themselves that can be used to maintain rapport with another person. If you are 'like' this still as a full grown adult, do the rest of us a favour, and actively learn to broaden your vocabulary, read about some topical interests, and tame your attitude with some civil and mannerly speech, or else just shut up. I'd rather listen to a troop of jabbering monkeys than to people such as these.

I fully realize that my own writing is festered with errors, and in need of frequent proofreading and editing. I also acknowledge that speech wise I've found myself doing the aforementioned peeves and mistakes before, but mostly because people aren't tuning into what I'm trying to say in my normal manner of speaking, and as much as it makes me cringe to do it, sometimes I have to compromise and lower myself to using their parlance to snap some sense into them. I like the statement, "Language is the means through which our thoughts are served to others." Sadly, I believe more and more people are becoming estranged from this idea. If the spoken and written thoughts I serve were food, I'd like it to be a banquet of things that have a simple and whimsical; yet elegant presentation, that are easy to digest; yet stun the senses in a good way, with familiar flavours made exotic with unique signature twists, even when the morsel tested is slightly sour or bitter. I would hope it would draw the diner (listener) into a realm that they've never before experienced. I'd rather not be caught verbally exposing and delivering my thought process in the same manner as doling out the gustatory equivalent of the slop that they serve in a prison chow line.

* - Count yourself lucky if English is your mother tongue, and you're using verbs. Languages like French, Russian, and Spanish have as many as six, present tense conjugation forms. Due to it's gender subdivided singular and plural person forms, Arabic has even more than that. This is why I shake my head in shame at people, whose first language is 'English', who can't even figure out which one of two given forms to use correctly.

Bachelor Home Economics 101

Yesterday, I finally followed up with the action related to some of my rantings I posted in my last entry: I relinquished my modems for my LAN phone and digital cable. I thought I would be feeling a tinge of regret, but I honestly didn't. It was actually empowering. It helped that I used most of that morning to be productive with so many other initiatives that jazzed me up with the knowledge of how much I was saving (in terms of time, energy, money), and techniques I was enhancing through committing myself to those tasks. I believe I reached new personal bests for optimal quantity, quality, and efficiency in managing my resources at home. I owe it to ridding myself of the extra distraction of television.That, plus also noting the ridiculous examples I've been witnessing lately of the insane pissing away and squandering some guys are doing with their recent windfalls of money has made me think more shrewdly. It really makes me so sick to watch it all happen. I suppose it sparked some kind of rebellious proactivity in myself to be a counter-example, and make certain that I'd never ever lower myself into becoming that ignorant, delusional, and stupid. I'm always eager and interested to find out ways to save a buck or two (or more) around my home, along with improving the productive use of my personal time, and to still acquire the things I like, but this time I thought I'd slap down some calculations and figures in this entry to keep me riding along on a cycle of motivation.
 

My biggest conquest of the day was making ten days worth of meals for about $15.00 worth of ingredients*. Cooking from scratch still rules! I figured I trimmed an extra $25.00 off of what I would normally be paying for groceries for that duration, about the cost of a dozen of Alexander Keith's IPA beer at the SLBS (the brand that I was craving). As much as I was tempted to reward myself with a couple of beers after the busy day, I became much more curious as to how far I could graft that money into perpetuating more savings. So, I compromised with my reward instead. I invested $17.29 in a discount beer kit (India Pale Ale style), since the vendor of it was en route to my modem disposal destination. One beer kit yields 23 litres of beer, or roughly 66 standard, 341 ml Canadian bottles. If I had bought that much of the brand I quoted, at retail price, it would be $137.50. Thus, I saved $120.21 this way, or spent $3.14/dozen** for my homemade beer, or about one fifteenth of the price per bottle of one I may have ordered from a pub/lounge/beer parlour, it's an enormous savings whichever way you choose to look at it.
 

So, I’ll have $7.71 left of those savings after the beer kit purchase. I wondered about sticking it into a wine fund. If I repeat this process for a few more months, and if the loonie stays well over par with the American dollar up like it is now, imported grape juice from California will be cheaper. By next September, when the next juice season arrives I would use that total savings make 23 litres of wine. My conservative estimate is that I would be making it at a cost of $2.75 per 750 ml bottle. If the average price of wine is around $12.00 for the retail brands I prefer, that same 23 litre quantity of wine would cost me $367.92: about a 280 dollar difference.
 

Thinking of exchange rates in the last paragraph leads me to note that I'm taking a break from the FOREX market for a while to rethink and re-model my methods and strategies. I haven't been losing out at the rate I did when I tried out this stuff a couple years ago. I did rake in some small profits today; however in the previous couple sessions of trading though, what looked to be promising profit making movements suddenly went volatile, and turned south when I wasn't around to close the orders on time. The indicators of the pairs I bought into dropped like shit from a tall cow, and closed at a bad net loss. It sobered me up to research more precautionary measures for the future. For now, saving coin is a lot easier for me to do than trying to profit on currency orders.
 

This is the outlook of how whittling down just this one bi-weekly food expense to $15.00; plus using six hours (including food prep and brewing time) of work has potential to help me save up to $540.00 for the same quantity of prepared food and booze bought from retailers.*** I'm frugal, not cheap; there is a difference. Being frugal is living richly, in a life enhancing way while spending very little, maximizing the bang for your buck; being cheap is not daring to spend anything at all out of greed, lack of confidence, and other motives related to fear of loss and deprivation.

*-That value is in proportion to the cost of the actual ingredient quantity I used. My grocery bill was slightly higher ($39.27); I portioned and froze the extra meat for future use, and stocked my pantry with the remaining extra bulk and canned goods. The results of my three hour kitchen frenzy for that afternoon were: one roast chicken, six litres of chicken stock, three litres (6 large servings) of Caribbean Black Bean Soup, 500 ml of chicken salad, 700 ml taboulleh salad, 400 ml of egg salad, one large black olive and oregano focaccia bread, three servings  of pasta arrabiata, three servings of walnut pesto sauce, two servings of Chicken Achiote, four servings of Spanish rice, and six servings of cole slaw. My conservative estimate of what all this would have cost if I bought all this as pre-made, delicatessen goodies, or convenience food ranges between $120.00 and $140.00. To add, this stuff I made is a hell of cheaper and healthier than 10 days worth of McHappy meals. If I had more time, and used some of the garden goodies that were gifted to me by my folks, I probably could have covered beyond a full two weeks.

**-I love that figure! How often is it that one could say that one spent pi dollars for a dozen bottles of beer? I will procure the more accurate savings figures for making my own wine in another entry when I actually get around to doing it.

***-This posting also serves as a special "Go Screw Yourself!" message to all the people from my past, especially to those macho shithead jocks out there, who ever bullied, ridiculed, badgered me, and thought me a sissy or effeminate because I knew my way around kitchen. They are the same kind of stupid assholes who would go broke feeding themselves because they are too retarded to know how to cook for themselves if their wives/girlfriends ever left them (and for some of them, they damn well deserve that sort of karma).

Birthday 2012

It started as a cloudy day. I could never remember a time when my birthday was ever so cloudy, or showing any aspect of possible rain. There were cooler days, yes, but I’ve never noted it starting out with such a gloomy, somber looking sky until now. Thankfully, it ended up getting warmer and brighter for the afternoon.

I woke up this morning feeling like I’ve finally shaken off the last vestiges of the insomnia and spells of mental malaise/fogginess, and headaches that I get after doing a night shift. I feel reasonably re-energized; the problem is though that I don’t know where to direct such energy. I have a couple days off. As uneventful and unceremonious as my birthday has usually been, I try to make a point to not work through it. Conveniently for me, it usually falls on the week of the Labour Day holiday, and I use the stat time in lieu of a work day, or else the following day after. It has never been a big deal for anyone else to note while I was growing up, as the day falls in a time when folks usually are too involved with other business that occurs at this part of the year. It always coincided with the full swing of harvest season when I lived rurally, and during the beginning of the back to school season when the return to regular affairs becomes more of a priority.

With my energy renewed; I had no desire to spend the day cooped up indoors, despite the dullness outside. So, I packed up my laptop and went mobile. Since there was no coffee left in my kitchen, I scurried over to the Broadway Roastery where there’s Wi-Fi, to at least plot out something meaningful to do, if not to just simply reflect on things. The only gifts I’ve received so far through the day were a few pennies I found on the ground*, and some lotto tickets that were sent to me by mail, which were unfortunately losers. However, I did tie into a book that a friend of mine gifted to me much earlier in the year during the process of her move. It’s called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. It’s a book that I wish was available to me years ago. Even through a cursory perusal of it, I scribbled out and generated at least fifty questions afterward that I thought were relevant to me for which I thought I needed to have answered. It’s a massive project in itself to take time to find these answers. It was a significant book for me to read for today because of its heavy emphasis on a sense of mission and vision.

To turn another year older without any sense to become a better sort of person than what one currently is, in my mind, is absolutely foolish. I’ve already started taking some steps to accord with a personal advancement yesterday. I decided to do away entirely with services that I just find to be too wasteful, like my LAN line and cable TV. My LAN line number gets more telemarketer calls (despite being registered with the GOC do-not-call list) than personal ones. Why then should I pay for this hassle? As for my digital cable TV, I never find time to watch it, and when I do, even with an extra two hundred channels, I never find anything worthwhile to watch, or follow, in terms of a series. I have better things to do for myself than to squander away my time this way, even with the coming of winter. I did not miss it at all throughout the summer months, and I’m confident that I could do without it through this winter as well. I can select and catch up on news and programming on the web, and filter through the video of stories that may be of interest to me better, at a time of my convenience.

In general, I find myself to be over-inundated with media. I’m tired and sickened of all the bad news I hear. When that happens, we aren’t allowed to think for ourselves, nor do we become more genuine, authentic personalities when we are only given news stories that strike fear and loathing in us. The worst culprit is television, because it involves all your basic audio-visual senses: I can easily skip over the commercial advertizing in a newspaper, but I can’t with TV, not without having to peck at buttons on a PVR. I figured if I took the more of the visual stimuli away, more of my attention would be freed to focus on other tasks.

I’m on the search for meaningful interests, and things to set into skills and habits to use to substitute for that wasted time. I toured the SPL (Saskatoon Public Library) to do such a thing. I dragged home a huge pile of these primitive things called magazines**, some audiobooks to listen to at bedtime, and other non-fiction books of related to subjects of my curiosity. I can putter around home doing more validating work, or to craft other things, while listening to educational and informative podcasts as well.

So far, my work schedule still confines me to doing more solitary, introverted activities (God willing, that will soon change too). Along with continuing to heal myself, and finding more efficient ways to maintain a runner’s conditioning over winter without slipping and wiping out on ice (weight-training and treadmill running), the things I’d like to devote more attention to learning and improving on throughout the course of fall and winter are: programming, writing, woodcrafts, DIY home improvements, culinary skills, investment/fiscal management, advanced mathematics, language acquisition, playing guitar, and perhaps do some formal course work with SIAST.

The greatest gift I’m giving to myself for this birthday is the courage to gain some clarity of mind to attain my own standard of personal rectitude.

*- Gifts from God I suppose. I always pick up coins, even pennies, I find on the street. Not out of superstition, certainly not because I believe the few cents I find this way will make me wealthy, nor is it done out of desperation, but to keep me mindful that abundance is potentially everywhere, and to keep me hopeful that opportunities will appear someday to help serve me better.

**- Ebooks, web sites, and epub files are almost bringing proper paper magazine publications to the brink of extinction. My choices are health, science, and tech mags (Wired, PC World, Men’s Health, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science