Meandering Melody

There are just two weeks left before winter is over.  Already crocuses bloomed in some sheltered spots and daffodils are just about ready.  Fairly soon more daylight will brighten up the days.  It’s as if the world, at least in the northern hemisphere, is waking from a long slumber.  I think about these things and while working on various projects around the house and in my programming.  Of course my paid job as a programmer keeps me busy.  Explorations of 3D programming are coming along and several times I’ve wondered how to use three-dimesional graphics to present data structures, program structures, inter relationships between components and such.   Until I posses the necessary skills there is little profit in following those thoughts too far, but it certainly does give me direction in what I must study, practice and master if I am to create the kinds of applications and tools that I and others will find useful and worthwhile.

One of my goals is to present information about software packages in a manner that highlights package structure, inheritance and polymorphism relationship in an easily understood manner.  I should be able to show the graphics to my sons and they should immediately grasp the importance of what is presented to them.  I wish for it to be as clear and informative as a map is to a landscape.

It is not always easy to think your own thoughts.  Society, businesses, culture, politicians, academia, religions; basically other people all strive to influence if not downright manipulate others’ thoughts.  Many times they are successful.  Advertising does drive demand, and political campaigns do get politicians elected.  The effect is not always exactly what they might have intended.  At times it is the opposite of what the influencer or manipulator intended.  The very same message that attracts some to a product or a political candidate for example will drive away others.  There are more than enough examples in everyday life if you take the time to be aware of it and observe it without becoming engrossed by it.  Nevertheless it does drive other people’s thoughts by forcing them to react or agree.  Well that is not exactly true.  There is always the option to ignore to not be influenced to not be manipulated.  It sounds easy to say but far more difficult to do.  Perhaps it is the human need for social interaction that makes most of us at the very least notice and in some way react.  In someways it flatters the targeted person’s ego and self-image that someone is paying attention to them, and that is why they react.  Being able to not becoming engrossed allows one to ignore and not be affected by unwanted influence from others.

Why exactly would anyone not want to be influenced?  Well it is only when we are not thinking what others want us to think or reacting to what they want us to think, we are free to think our own thoughts.  Only at that time do we have the opportunity to choose deliberately what we want to think and what we want to think about.  For example think about the last time that advertising, music, or someone else’s conversation derailed your line of thought and set you on a mental wild goose chase. The interval might have been a few seconds or it might have been several hours. Sometimes it happens when you are the least aware of it.  Becoming aware of it allows you to avoid it and think your own thoughts.

Just remember, when compiling source you pull from the net from several intertwined, related but separate projects trace your dependencies very very very carefully.  Of course this means reading any related documentation closely, but that is the easy part if it is well laid out.  Sometimes even documentation does not help when there it is not clear.  At that point experimentation is necessary and may be the only thing that will determine what versions of which projects for which platform work together successfully.  Unfortunately there are no easy rules to follow,  best bet is to only use tagged versions which are noted as stable.  Pay attention to date stamps and commit notes for each of the related projects, sometimes that gives a clue what to do.  At worst, delving deeply into the code to with an editor, debugger, or a decent IDE should let you poke around the source and infer where the compilation or integration problem are.  Learning to read error messages, stack traces, and then interpret them correctly is a far more valuable skill than it appears.

I’ve been away from blogging for almost a whole year.  A lot has happened since, far too much to catalog in one single post.  Suffice it to say that, much like any other year, some things have changed while others have stayed the same.  All the while everyone is a year older.  A few highlight include no longer hosting my wife’s friend’s web site, something I had done for close to four years.  Change of strategy, as far as my plans for an event sharing web site go.  In addition to my explorations in common lisp, I also started exploring Objective C for iOS (iPhone, iPad) development, tinkering with 3D graphics programming in Java, and a bit of playing around with JavaScript with my youngest son.

That just covers programming.  More regular posting will resume.

Well the year is ending. Another cycle of seasons has gone by. We’re all a bit older and with luck a bit wiser.

Felt the need to get out of the house on Sunday afternoon. Tom and I took a walk around the neighborhood and out into some fields on the edge of town.

Misce baked some bread, and the loaves ended up joined together like Siamese Twins

Work has kept me very busy, and I’ve been traveling to a client site repeatedly for the past month. The hours I’ve worked in the past month are easily double what I would have worked during an ordinary month. As you can imagine, this has left me little time for ordinary chores, being with my family, taking care of my garden, let along blogging. During a brief respite during a stay on a client site, I’m posting this. As I write, as song from my late teens plays on my computer. Times like these make me wonder what the purpose of life is. More specifically it makes me wonder what the purpose of my life is and what exactly I want from it. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that what I most dearly want is to love and to be loved. There are times when I do feel that, even if only in fleeting moments. Traveling on business, while a necessary evil right now so that I can support myself and my family, certainly makes me acutely aware how far away I am from those whom I love, and who love me. A summer has gone by that I can’t get back, autumn is coming as the seasons march on. I will change my circumstances so that I will not lose another summer, or any other season, away on business. The price is too high for the time lost is too precious.