Saturday, February 24, 2018

How to Compound a Rainy Day

Watch the solar output when it’s super dark and rainy; it’s like watching your investments tank on a bad market day, but with even less ability to control it. Yeah, but it certainly compounds a sunny day, or even better: mitigates having to stay inside during an incredible day. Okay, barely.


This week I dove into the world of not Numpy with Java, ND4J. I didn’t even get into the ‘N’ of ND4J just keeping to a one dimensional array. Let’s just say that it has many really nice options for dealing with arrays. I will not mention the fact that you cannot easily get an array back to an otherwise usable list in Java without some machinations.


I think that is what I miss most about python in general. Even if a library didn’t have something very specific for a certain community it’s likely the community had someone willing to dive in and make a module that can do it and then posted it. Java certainly has its libraries and all the people using it, but somehow it’s a different community.


When someone asks how to do something there are ten different answers and they must all be encapsulated with a class. Sure if I want to do this again I will move it to a function. If it becomes widespread and is more like an object then I might think about making it a class, but seriously. And then spring… I just want to curl up with some nice classy class based views in Django and leave the mess of Spring behind.

In other news, I ran twice this week. Tuesday and Wednesday were up in the 60s and this morning wasn’t too chilly at 40. If New York only has 2 months of real winter, and it was cold, I guess it’s better for my running. Cloudy, but keeping at around 60% of electricity used produced by solar, ran, and now off to clean something and write my class paper proposal. Content.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The Only Odd One is Me

Not to stir up any fears, but here we go. That in-the-moment feeling of everyone watching, while everyone else says they are not. Can we be real for a second? If you are not staring at a screen in a crowded place, how observant are you? Do you notice when someone does something, at least innocuous such as tripping on flat ground and then looks around to see if anyone saw? Yeah, sorry, I saw that one. Shall we just share a smile and keep going forward?


The problem is that there are so many non-innocuous situations that anything from dumb to malevolent. Going to this World Life Expectancy site can be a bit eye opening, plenty of malevolence, but plenty of stuff that I could classify as dumb, but really it is just sad. Not sad as in “those people should have seen it coming,” rather maybe it could have been prevented by better/earlier treatment or just better friends. Maybe in my age group the traffic accidents could be helped by smarter cars


Anyway, there is a point to this: Whatever I am suffering that is not acute AND terminal, there are possibly a few thousand people suffering of the same thing. That is true of post-graduate online masters degrees. Of artfully procrastinating by practicing writing. Of making bad lists with weird sentences. Though that last might be just me at the moment. But there are people suffering, or...  Oh, how odd am I?


I am odd, there are so many things that I am bringing to the front of my mind through biases where I haven’t really met many people that do, or have done, a permutation of different things that I have. This is the deal with permutations, even if someone else has done everything I have, but flipped the order of two events, then by definition we are not the same, because we experienced those two events with different views. Twins can be a prime example.


You are odd as well. I have found out, somewhat too recently, that I have no idea what is going on inside your skull and trying to understand every nuance is impossible and/or maddening. I spend so much time with my wife, yet it is better to have a model than to be “sure” of what she is thinking.


What frustrates me more is how odd I feel in trying to make people understand my thoughts. I think my thoughts are pretty good, the problem lies where your thoughts conflict with mine. Either I am too dismissive because I am too absorbed by my thoughts, or I have already considered it thoroughly and have a ready answer. Though that seems dismissive too because I cannot explain it well enough.


Four years of theater should have made me a better actor, if not in hiding what I think, at least in having the poise to articulate it better. Well no, I get cut-off when I need a moment to speak, but then ramble when someone should just cut me off. Can I have it both ways? Thinking, listening, and responding. How might I even practice that? How can I even find the place to practice that?


I would love to tell stories too, but I would for now settle with schooling on conversation. I have to say that I write better than I did back in this post, the first, from twelve years ago. Even so, I can improve my writing. Better to practice than to pine about not having practiced. Only a recent addition, that, maybe it will stick.

No one is odd in that everyone is odd. Maybe I will find some more odd people that we can be mostly mutually accepting of one another.

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