The Mad Peeps

Firstly, this is Ken jumping his Subaru Impreza WRX STi rally car 171 feet.

 

Next up is Ken getting some gymkhana practice in.

And lastly, some relaxing times in the snow.

Who would have known owning DC Shoes would be so much... fun.

I was writing some code today and I wanted to prompt the user to check if they wanted to delete a row of data only if there was some data they might not want deleted. Typically to do this I would loop through all the input fields and if any of them weren’t blank I would run the check. I figured that there must be a better way with callbacks or selectors, and after a little thinking I wrote this jQuery snippet :

row.find('input[value!=""]').length > 0

This basically says count the number of inputs with a non-blank value you find, inside the given row.

Just like my last post, it’s nothing amazing but it sure is a better way of doing things. If you look into the andSelf() method then you could also easily chain selects and other input types.

I’m also interested if someone has a better way to approach this problem?

After using jQuery for quite a while I’ve become quite attached to using the power of callbacks when dealing with sets of data. I’ve seen equally and perhaps better abilities in Ruby but of course had been let down in the past by PHP’s lack of abilities as a dynamic language.

Today I faced an issue due to the size of my objects. The problem essentially came down to the fact that for the largest objects such as Contact objects the amount of data passed back to the client when doing AJAX calls was pretty sizeable. I wanted to write a function that given a set of property names all the returning objects would be stripped of all but those properties.

I didn’t want to write a function for each set of properties I’d return, so I wrote a generic function that given an array of property names that was all that would be returned from that object and it was surprisingly easy and I think in the end highly dynamic and useful.

It uses the PHP array_walk() function which I’ve never used before. It’s a lot like the Array.each() methods that many other languages have.

	private function GetContacts() {
		$filter = RequestQuerystring('filter');
		$properties = RequestAll('properties');

		if (isset($properties)) {
			$properties = explode(',', $properties);
		}

		if (isset($filter)) {
			$contacts = [large_objects]
		}

		if (isset($contacts) && is_array($properties)) {
			array_walk($contacts, 'mod_ajax::FilterObjects', $properties);
		}

		echo json_encode($contacts);

	}

	private static function FilterObjects(&$object, $key, $properties) {
		foreach (get_object_vars($object) as $k => $v) {
			if (!in_array($k, $properties)) {
				unset($object->$k);
			}
		}
	}

Basically for this array of large objects on each one we call FilterObjects. That has to be a function or static method which I learned as I went. The object is passed in by reference so that any change made to it is reflected in the original array, and it just goes through the variables (properties) of the object and kills anything that isn’t in the allowable parameter list.

This allows me to trim large objects dynamically for any of my client side calls for data and I think is definitely going to save me time in the future. I remember when I first started using PHP I wrote a function for each object to spit out XML, then I progressed to JSON, now I’ve got a nice filter method.

I still feel like there must be a better way to do things, but quite possibly that would exist in another language.

I could think of worse action heroes.

Which Action Hero Are You?

You are Daniel Craig. Bond, James Bond. Keep up your suave style but don't forget to remain a bad ass. Money and romance is more your style, so don't get your hands too dirty. Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

I just took Bosca for a walk up to the shops and at the side of the shop car park is a daycare center. There's a fenced area where the kids were playing and a group of around five or so were jammed up into the corner, arms clutching the bars and all intently looking out. I though it kind of funny as it looked like they really wanted to be out of there.

As Bosca and I walked past we heard one kid yelling "turn it...turn up.. turn it on.. turn it!!". I thought that's pretty weird.

As we were right next to them at this point I could see out of the corner of my eye a guy chuckle and start up his ute. A hotted up red ute with big chromey wheels no less. They got excited and this almost made sense to me as we do live in Coolbellup.

Half a second later and I heard "boom boom boOoOoom" as the utes sound system started blaring. This sent the kids wild. They were waving their arms and bouncing like the wiggles in fast forward.

Who knew? mini raver kiddies.

Sometimes my brain won’t function, which is a problem when I’m at work in a job that requires thinking. It sits in my skull and sulks like a child shoutiing “No! I’m not doing it!” whenever I ask it to think about something for a minute. Coffee will usually get it moving in the right direction, but not always.

Today is one of those days where it doesn’t even bother shouting back at me because it’s not listening. Caffeine sloshed around my bloodstream and got filtered out before it did any good up in my head.

So, this afternoon I spent a couple of hours trying to solve a coding problem. I won’t bore you with the details. At the two hour mark I asked Aaron if he had any suggestions; his response was simple and elegant, so much so that 10 minutes later I’d finished that task and moved on to the next one. I’ve hit Refresh a few times to make sure I’m not imagining things that the site works as it should.

I’m sitting here wondering why I didn’t think of the solution myself. It was bloody obvious in hindsight and I’m probably giving Aaron too much credit for something he thought was bloody obvious before I finished explaining the problem. Am I the only one whose brain is becoming calcified while they’re still young?

If the current trend of irreversible brain impairment continues, my 30th birthday present will be surprise senility instead of my very-much-hoped-for plan of renting a Porsche and revisiting some rarely used roads that I like.

I’ve been following this series with interest. Dave Tate, whom you may have heard me talk about before, is a power lifter from the US of Aiight that has been taking an active role in the raising of his kids. This is awesome and it’s great to see another side of the grunting, swearing, death metal power lifting crew.

He started a series called 32 Things I Learned in Kindergarten and it’s good to see that not only is he active in raising his kids but he seems to reflect on things in much the same way the people I generally respect do.

Check it out. Otherwise he’ll punch you.

XMind have made their mind mapping software open source which means a production quality product for free.

I just had a quick look at it and love that I can generate a mind map with a few arrow key strokes and tab as a means of creating sub nodes. Rather quick and easy.

Next point of interest was the ability to convert the standard mind map into trees, charts and other view types which is helpful translating the general mind map view into something that might be more management relative.

Final point of note is that it's cross platform. With tools like this I may have to plan things more.

Someone in the Curtin PR department got wind of Mel’s award win and wrote a news article about it. The quote is not entirely hers - the writer used some creative licence.

Serious imagination and artistic skill:



He's also done the anatomy of a balloon animal and a gummi bear.
Jason Freeny

I couldn't find all of them on his blog site so here's a blog post with a quick look at the others Jason Freeny via designboom.com

I always hated IRC. It always seemed to be where the absolutely nerdiest people hung out. I think some people saw it as the place where they could anonymously stretch their puny muscles.

Sometimes though it was hilarious, people, probably due to the anonymity would say the most completely retarded things. This one came through on Digg today:

<hypnosis> 1. The human cell contains 75 MB of genetic information
<hypnosis> 2. A sperm 37.5 MB.
<hypnosis> 3. In a milliliter, we have 100 million sperms.
<hypnosis> On average, one ejaculation releases 2.25 ml in 5 seconds.
<hypnosis> Using basic math we can compute the bandwidth of the human male penis as:
<hypnosis> (37.5MB x 100M x 2.25)/5 = (37,500,000 bytes/sperm x 100,000,000 sperm/ml x 2.25 ml) / 5 seconds = 1,687,500,000,000,000 bytes/sec = 1,687.5 TerraBytes/sec
<Jck_true> Sweet
<Jck_true> DoS attack!!!
<hypnosis> a bukkake would probably be a DDoS then
<hypnosis> 11 men would give 17 petabytes/sec

So a few weekends back Tony and I bought some seedling trays, seed raising mix, and most importantly seeds! I've not grown anything from seed in my whole life, and have prior to this point imagined it to be some very difficult elaborate task.

So I have now successfully sprouted sunflowers, watermelon, butternut pumpkin, yellow beetroot, radishes, carrot, purple king beans and zucchini. I've planted the sunflower seedlings along the fence that my veggie patch is on. I've put the zucchini near the compost bin hoping that any nutrient run off from the bin will help the zucchinis grow big and strong. The purple runner beans are along the other fence, and I am hoping the grow nice and big, and cover that ugly fence! The flowers of this bean are supposed to very pretty so here's hoping to that too.

The topic of compost can be so amazingly complex you have no idea! I have now read a few books and multiple web sites on the subject to try and give myself a rounded idea of how it all works. Most of my compost is made from weeds we have pulled from the garden. Some purists will say never to add weeds as the seeds can then grow when you use the compost. However if you can mange to to achieve hot composting you should be able to kill off the seeds. Anyway,my point to all this ramble was going to be that I used some of my compost today. So it wasn't from my traditional compost heap in the corner where I've tried to do it all 'by the book', but it was from just a great big pile of weeds that I add and add to as I pull the bastards out. So I turned it, and at the bottom was quiet usable compost. I was expecting that the whole process would take a lot longer to be usable. The top layer is mostly dried and and still whole plants, but the bottom was teaming with slaters, millipedes and all kinds of friendly little garden bugs helping to chew up and break down the organic matter.

So I'm just so excited to keep adding and adding to my garden. Slowly it just keeps evolving, getting bigger, better and more interesting. Also today I planted an artichoke, which from what I saw at the APACE garden in North Fremantle grows to be a beautiful noble plant. Lastly I planted asparagus, which is such a fascinating plant. It will need to stay untouched for about 3 years before we can start harvesting tasty spears from it, and each Autumn/Winter you cut all the plant away down to the soil and basically let it hibernate. This amazing little plant lives and keeps giving you it's yummy spears for about 30+ years. I have read tales of old farm house gardens being tidied only to find ancient asparagus plants still growing as well as ever.

Today I had my first ristretto. According to Epic Espresso:

A single extraction of coffee containing all the essential oils in a short volume. The connoisseur's choice. Restretto is Italian for 'restricted.' 

It's the first time that I've had "black" coffee and I actually liked it. I think I'll stick to lattes though as I like a bit more longevity from my coffee experiences.

Who else has had a ristretto before, and what did you think?

Like most programmers, I don’t like to repeat manual tasks, well, manually. We use Ubuntu Server almost exclusively on our servers and whilst package management is very simple (login, aptitude update, aptitude dist-upgrade, all done) when you have to look after many (fourteen and expanding) servers it can get repetitive.

I use Terminal (or is it called Terminal.app?) on Mac OS X as my terminal emulator, and I’ve messed around with using Applescript to open multiple tabs before, so I figured this was a problem worthy of a Sunday-morning.

What I envisaged was iterating over a list of servers and having Applescript manage a Terminal instance, opening new tabs where appropriate, and executing the upgrade command in each tab for each server. Sounds simple enough.

And it was. I used Martin Ström’s excellent article as a base for my script, and ended up with the following:

set tab_count to 0
set servers to {"astrotrain", "bumblebee", "grimlock", "ironhide", ¬
	"jazz", "laserbeak", "mirage", "prime", ¬
	"prowl", "ratchet", "ravage", "rumble", ¬
	"soundwave", "wheeljack"}
-- Update the package list, dist-upgrade and remove the downloaded
-- packages so they're not included in the backups
set dist_upgrade to ¬
	" 'sudo aptitude update &&
	  sudo aptitude dist-upgrade &&
	  sudo aptitude clean'"

-- Make our settings globally available
global tab_count, servers, dist_upgrade

-- Mainline
on main()
	tell application "Terminal"
		activate
		repeat with server in servers
			set cmd to "ssh -t " & server & dist_upgrade & " && exit"
			my open_tab(cmd)
		end repeat
	end tell
end main

on open_tab(cmd)
	tell application "Terminal" to activate
	my create_new_window_or_tab()
	tell application "Terminal" to ¬
		do script with command (cmd) in last tab of window 1
end open_tab

on create_new_window_or_tab()
	if tab_count ≤ 0 then
		tell application "Terminal" to do script ""
		set tab_count to tab_count + 1
	else
		tell application "System Events" to ¬
			tell process "Terminal" to ¬
				keystroke "t" using command down
	end if
end create_new_window_or_tab

-- Run the mainline
main()

Apologies for the highlighting - the plugin doesn’t understand Applescript.

I have seen this huge Russian dude do a few pretty special lifts. He has deadlifted 370kg (x2) without straps, benched 220kg and snatched 160kg, all pretty freaking amazing lifts.

The funny thing is though, that he is always joking and laughing and smiling. Generally these guys are grunting and roaring and swearing and all that jazz.

Today I watched a video of him snatch 160kg like it was almost nothing and then another where he plays the accordian. Very funny dude. In the snatch video he is holding 160kg like it was picking up a crate of milk.

I found this great channel on Youtube called Household Hacker where if you watch a couple of their more interesting videos you might think, wow these guys are amazing! However you would be an idiot.

Just think about it for half a second.

One such project is a high def speaker made out of a paper plate, aluminium foil and a shiny penny. The penny has to be very shiny though, otherwise they say, it just won’t work as well. Now for the person with an average knowledge of electronics they’ll dismiss this as ludicrous. If you are a layperson in this field though don’t you think to yourself that you’d see such plate speakers everywhere? Especially as in the video the sound is bloody good and the narrator stresses that the only reason it doesn’t sound that great is that it’s one speaker. If you built a 7.1 setup using such plate speakers it would sound much better!

Hah! At this point I thought that they are trying to play with peoples’ heads.

If you read the channel description you’ll see their primary aim is to make people think for themselves, secondly to get your hands dirty. So basically to me it seems they’re trying to say, don’t take stupid premises at face value. Question, think for youself, use your brain.

I like it a lot.

I sometimes get the sense that the movie the Matrix wasn't too far off, or what the writers of 'the secret' were banging on about is actually real.

I have an incredibly lucky life, and some days it feels like it's almost to good to be true. I sit here and ponder my life, what I have (and by that I don't mean material possessions), how I got to where I am, and the future lined up for me.

For a long time, through my teenage years and early twenties I let life live me, I was a victim to the world around me. I felt like nothing was in my control, I didn't have choices, I just had chores, obligations; and society had certain expectations of me, which I would bend my will to for fear of being 'weird' or disliked.

I don't know when it changed, but sitting here now, I have sense that I can make ANYTHING in my life that I want, happen. Granted not everything happens as quickly as I would like, but ultimately all of my dreams and wishes are coming true. Oddly though, a few things I have thought that I always wanted, now that I can make it happen, seem less important, or off the radar all together.

If I think about the current run down, I like my job, in fact I like it a lot now it has changed, and I am comfortable in my work place. Tony is the best thing to happen to me EVER. I love my house and my little garden, I think I could be content forever amongst my tomatoes and beetroots. I have more friends than I care to count, and not just acquaintances, but really great genuine friends. My family are amazing, I live in a wonderful country, I have the most loving little doggie, and well the world in my oyster.

All this does however lead me to think if everything is so great all the time, will the lack of contrast, lead to unhappiness? By that I mean you can't enjoy the ups without the down to compare them to. I like to think not, and if life gets me down, I'll just go do something about it.

Here are some of the things that spin me out:
*This time last year there was no way we could afford to buy a house, I thought we'd be 5+ years away
*When we got the house I thought we'd be sooo poor, but with two very generous interest rate cuts we're saving a bomb, and living comfortably
* I didn't think we could afford to get married any time soon, but now we're making it happen
* I didn't think I'd be very good at gardening, but my garden looks amazing, I even inspired Steve to grow some veg!
*I thought I'd be about 40 by the time we could do the kids thing, now we're talking about trying as soon as we're married
*I thought my job wouldn't get better and I'd leave after a year, but a new job was offered to me out of the blue

Life just astounds me, and I've never been so content and so lacking the need to want.

Yesterday’s session was the last one before I go to monthly sessions just to see where things are headed and how I’m progressing. Also for me there will probably be questions I would like to clear up or have direction to what areas I should be looking at. Simple things as well like when she picked up that I’m skipping the body scan at the beginning of meditation and how that’s likely because I have lots of issues related to my body are useful to know and I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that.

The start of the session was talking about the weekend where I had spent the majority of it with my family and particularly my Dad. I came out of the whole thing pretty well unscathed and while there were definitely times where I left the situation in my head for the most part I tried to deal with it. We talked a little bit about what had changed in this area and I pinned it mosty on the fact that it seems like my Dad is more willing to listen. On reflection though I think it’s probably that I’m in a better space right now and more able to deflect stuff I don’t like. I think my expectations of the situation and what I should get from my family and how much I should put into it are much more realistic for my situation too. I was comparing my situation to some pretty special circumstances rather than my own circumstances. People can change slowly, but your expectations can change far more quickly and that in turn can make it seem like people have changed when they haven’t.

In the next part we talked about how I was going with the stress innoculation exercises. The idea being you come up with about 20 situations that cause you various levels of anxiety and you rate them using a system called Subjective Units of Distress Scale and then visualise yourself doing them. You work from the bottom of the ones with the lowest distress and then eventually work your way up to the top ones. They say that it can take about four days to get towards the top of the list, working through four or so a day. The aim is to lower your anxiety in various situations by visualising yourself doing them and managing the anxiety at that time.

The theory is then once you’ve managed to reduced your anxiety by about 40% usings the SUDS system for your list then you can start doing some of these items. Using some of the same techniques to reduce anxiety or to at least manage it while you’re doing the activity you should ideally be able to work up the list again.

I hadn’t done my homework because I was still finding it difficult to seperate out items at the lower levels of anxiety. It was almost like I had an on and off switch for anxiety, like my bandwidth was very low so the difference between full and empty wasn’t a lot. She suggested a situation that I would never have done before and it was a low anxiety situation, that sort of opened the box to a raft of new ideas. Basically I was having problems because I was thinking of things I typically come across and cause me anxiety, but she said the point is visualisation so even created situations just for the purpose of visualisation would help.

The other piece of ‘homework’ was to be open about talking to people and I felt like I had been doing that. It’s possibly a byproduct of not being depressed any longer but I feel like I want to be around people and talk a lot more. Checkout chicks, people on the train, strangers in the shop, sales people, baristas and other people have all been targets or I’ve been targetted by. Some were good, some were bad, but it’s been different.

My old way of dealing with people was quite judgemental. Is this person smart, are they kind, are they this and that, will they be friend material. I wasn’t interested in ‘chit-chat’ with a random person I’d never see again. However the psychologist put it a different way and explained that there are definite positives to having a conversation with a person you’ll likely never see again. Not to mention that you may actually want to see them again and that’s not impossible to achieve. I hadn’t really thought about it like that.

I’ve invested myself into what seems like quite a introverted group of friends. By that I mean that I spend most of my time with a small group of people and they in turn spend most of their time with mostly the same small group of people and so on. My friendships are very close of course but it feels like I am repeating the pattern of my family again. They were very insular too and I’m not sure that I am such a person.

In any case I want to develop my skills with random people, and I think that’s an anxiety issue, a confidence issue (in my presentation, public skills etc) and just not having any practice at it. So far this seems to be working well, but like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time, you’re bound to have an accident here and there.

We also spent a decent part of the session talking about how I was trying to replace self esteem, or value based judgements with living a more valued life and setting more valuable goals. I can sit there and say that I’ve put on weight and that I’m fat, but that doesn’t help, it just makes you feel bad. Instead I can just do the things to make myself happier, the things I value. Things like weights, like eating well, like BJJ they all help me feel better about myself, healthier, get along better with others, perform better at work and so on. Thinking I am fat doesn’t do that. It also helps with others, I find that the more I am able to remove self judgements the less judgemental I am of others.

When I said to her a couple of sessions ago that I was stuck on the Self Esteem section of the book she sort of laughed and said if I got it then to explain it to her. I think it was just a comment on how difficult it would be to understand and implement, I’m sure she understands it quite well. In any case I feel like after about six weeks of trying to implement this massive overhaul in my life I am just starting to get what it means and how you do implement it in practice.

At first I saw it as such a massive change that it was very difficult to do but after reading the book further and the ACT Yahoo Group a bit I’ve come to realise it’s probably about two things in which you do things in very small steps. In one stream you have removing judgements of yourself and I found this was best achieved through defusing (not diffusing) which essentially means not fusing with a thought. The second stream seems to be about doing things that give you value that get you further towards your goals and not doing things that are against your values.

Early on I remember thinking that the idea that a thought is just a thought and seperate from you as a person, that you could actually choose to ‘talk’ to this thinking part of your brain was so amazing. For someone that had for their entire life talked to themselves internally to have that challenged and told that you aren’t your thoughts, you are something else entirely was so foreign. However now I feel like I’ve completely grasped that concept and so I’ve applied it to judgements of myself. A thought of “you look shit” can either be fused with or not. In the end it can either be, you haven’t showered, shaved and taken the basic effort to look decent, and that would be a reasonable thought and showering, shaving and so on is in line with your values of being presentable, so you do it. In the other case it could be your mind putting you down and protecting you from life in which case you find out what action you can take that would deliver value to you. In both cases you didn’t fuse with the though you just noticed it, chose to ignore it and did something you valued.

For me the “You Look Shit” story can either be dealt with by thanking my mind “There’s that you look shit story. Thanks mind.” which works most of the time, or I do something I value preferably in that area. I’ve exercised for the day, eaten well, I’m doing everything I can.

Back to the subject though. We talked about self esteem and that I felt like I was having quite a bit of success with it, though still working on some areas. I’ve been successful at defusing from judgements and I feel like I have a better grasp of what I value and what my goals are. I feel like I’m working toward them, or at least now that I have a better idea of what they are I can do more activities that I value. Essentially I’m making my time deliver more value to my life.

It’s hard to see what changes are because I am not depressed and which are causing me not to be depressed. It’s probably a pretty close circuit feedback loop with a strong multiplier. Hey nerds, hey how are you ?

In any case she asked me at the session what I thought would be a more suitable period between visits and I suggested four weeks as a lot of what we’re working on now takes a bit of time to get feedback on. I can’t sit down for two hours and bang out “meet new people with an open and accepting attitude”. Also it gives me a chance to start to see patterns in my attitude and behaviour in these situations and take that back to her.

It was nice to hear that she was going to miss our sessions, she said to make sure I set early appointments so she has something to look forward to in the morning. Also she said that it would be good to have someone like me in psychology, she said that it would add to the profession. That was nice to hear.

So the next four weeks are about stress innoculation and pushing boundaries both within myself and towards new people. I’m on track with exercises and my diet now too which helps a lot. It’s been a bit difficult to get out of bed in the morning but once I’m up I am looking forward to getting into the weights room.

If you’re interested in reading the book I’ve got I’d lend it to you but I tend to flick back and forward through it re-reading sections at a time. It’s called The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris and is available from Archive Book Merchants on Stirling Hwy for about $25.

Being a good listener implies passiveness, so I like to try and be an active listener, it implies that you’re taking part but still listening and communicating equally. Truth be told it wasn’t something I was aware of as a term until my psychologist explained it to me and said that she thought I was a good active listener.

When she went through the points of what it is to be an active listener and I thought about how I generally talk to people it seemed to really fit. To me listening is about not just taking in information that the person is telling you, but challenging them, and making sure you understand what they’re saying, or what they’re feeling. To be delivered information and not question what you’re being told I think undermines both parties’ potential to get something from an exchange.

Today an article came across my email-desk about how to be a better active listener. After reading it I felt like I picked up some good points and it feels like even if I’m doing some of the things well already, that it will shore up those skills. Before they were intangible, but now that someone has packaged them into a framework I feel like the skills are more real and something I can actively improve on.

I find that change in approach interesting in itself. They’re the same skills, but now I have a name for them I feel like I can better utilise them.

In any case the article is here, it’s worth a read. Handy in business, in teams, in relationships. Don’t just be a good listener be an active listener.

My favourite is Big Daddy Hill. I love his big white teeth. He doesn't let Dick run over him.

(YouTube link)

I came from a Microsoft background, when I was there I complained about some aspects of it, but in hindsight one thing I miss a lot is a good IDE for SQL and database related development. SQL server didn’t have anything amazing, but it did the job and was stable.

I’m a big believer in visualisation and easy visualisation when working with data. It’s there to be used and if you can’t visualise it simply, if you can muck around with it and fiddle and massage it into various shapes and sizes easily then it’s more likely to be left alone. Data that’s left to rot is like leaving gold to rust. If gold rusted.

In short data is valuable, but only if it’s used.

In my quest for tools I’ve tried a few and found none that I would actually pay for, except the one I’ve been using now for a couple of months without a problem. DBVisualiser Free edition, I’d pay for that. It’s lucky too because they make a paid version with a bunch of extra features.

I’m always on the lookout for better applications to improve my performance and more importantly my enjoyment at work. So far this has been the closest application I’ve found to make MySQL a joy to use on the Mac. The free version does 99% of what I want to do, the pro version just seems to add features to make life even easier.

I’d urge people working with a database on the Mac to give DBVisualiser a try.

It struck me today that one of the things I enjoy about talking with my psych is that she’s a smart person and she’s very good at communication. Her job sort of requires it, even very abstract and obscure ideas have to be explained in such a way that anyone can understand them. She also has to communicate in a way that works for me, even if that may be a foreign way for her.

The session usually starts somewhere and then ends somewhere very different, the discussion is fairly two way obviously she’s there to listen, but she’s also there to advise and relate and that means not just sitting there writing. What we talk about is generally psych or neurology related but those things interest me and I guess she doesn’t have to talk down to me for most things.

Today we talked about meditation as she was reading a book where they had gotten some prisoners in the US that were in for life to meditate for 10 days. It’s a special kind of meditation where they concentrate on breathing for about three days then spend the rest of the time very intensely scanning the body for sensations. She was saying that it was interesting to read the guys’ descriptions of what they did and what they felt during it. Moreso, and this was pertinent for me, she said that they found that when doing body focussed meditation a lot of trauma and emotions were disturbed and rose to the surface. While doing the meditation on breath this wasn’t an issue.

This lead to us talking about maybe it is similar to a smell taking you back to memory. Your body is something that many people are constantly aware of, constantly wanting to change, we’re bombarded with images of what’s right and what’s wrong all of our life. Maybe there are far stronger emotions linked to bodily sensations than a lot of people realise.

Personally I had skipped the body scanning part of meditation as I didn’t find that it helped me settle, I move straight through to the breath focussing part of the style I’d learned. She thought about this and a couple of minutes later said that it’s interesting that I have body issues and skip the body scan when meditating. I thought it was interesting (how the mind plays tricks…) that I hadn’t seen that link before. We talked about me changing it to meditating on breath and then moving on to the body.

We talked a little bit about what it would be like to be psychologist. She has said many times throughout that I would make a great psychologist. To be honest it’s something that has interested me a fair chunk of my life, I’d considered medicine, and particularly psychiatry, haemotology or pediatrics but at the time wasn’t confident enough to go for it. In any case we talked a bit about the disconnection I thought it required, but she countered you just have to keep in mind that you’re helping but it’s not your fault. You aren’t pushing people against their will just a gentle nudge here and there.

We went about 20 minutes over time, and it’s not the first time. I enjoy our discussion, and I wonder if we’d have met outside of this environment would I have given her the time of day. I doubt it very much.

Which leads to thoughts about what we talked about in the last couple of sessions. I’ll leave that for later.

In the end I think it’s just the ability to talk without judgement, without worry of what gets back to who, or any other ramifications to someone that is really intelligent. How often do you set aside a chunk of time and just talk about yourselves and what’s bugging you and try to help one another ? How often do you set aside a chunk of time just to talk to a friend ?

There is a lot to think about and this can go on to discussion of lazy forms of communication replacing much higher quality forms (quantity vs quality) and so on. Our feeling of business in life lends itself to laziness with regards to our relationships. Does this extend to divorce rates, or other areas of society ? It’s something that interests me a lot.

In any case I’m now on to monthly visits and I think I’m going to miss having them closer together.

Before I left for Melbourne, I had set up an experiment to test how well the bacteria I was working on fixed nitrogen. This test ran for 7 days. After this point, I terminated the experiment and took some readings including cell numbers and iron oxidation. By looking at the cultures under the microscope, I determined that the bacteria were dead. I saw no movement or budding (bacterial division). Now because I was lazy I left the flasks containing the dead bacteria on my bench, instead of autoclaving and discarding them. I have had to give a few presentations and attend meetings since returning from Melbourne and as such, I haven’t been at my bench. Today I walked past the flasks and saw that the media had changed colour.

This was interesting because the bacteria should have been dead and therefore no iron oxidation possible, and no alteration of the media. There is always some abiotic oxidation (chemical processes) where ferrous converts to ferric without a biological catalyst (think rust on your car), but not to this extent. I re-examined the cultures under the microscope and to my shock they were alive. They are physically identical to the bacteria that I inoculated the flasks with, indicative of it not being a contaminant. So either they weren’t dead when I analysed them previously, which is entirely possible as they can hide on iron crystals, or something strange has happened. The conditions in which they were grown during the test were optimal in regards to temperature and movement, while on the bench there have been fluctuating temperatures and no agitation. In essence these conditions shouldn’t support growth.

I now have to set up this experiment again, and monitor any changes early on prior to cell death. Hiding zombie bacteria isn’t an explanation that I can publish.

Are freakin' hilarious!!!!

Last week Gregg Pollack from the Rails Envy Podcast put out the call on Twitter for reviews of their latest product, the Ruby on Rails 2.2 Envycast. I was happy to oblige and had been looking forward to checking out their unique take on screen casting for a while. Here’s what I thought.

Is it really a screen cast?

Firstly, I don’t even know if it’s correct to call it a screen cast. The viewer is not presented with a computer screen once during the 44 minute presentation. Most screen casts record the presenter’s computer desktop and have an audio commentary to accompany the video. Gregg and Jason have instead gone the “weather-man” approach and are using a green-screen as their canvas. This has some immediate benefits, but also has some downsides.

It develops the duo as the “face” of Envycasts. I first learnt of them through their audio podcast but they’ve done video before. I think this is important as it presents a teacher-student situation, and I’d expect there’s a bunch of psychology proving why face-to-face teaching succeeds. I think it works well for them, but would expect that other tech-screen casters might not be as comfortable in front of the camera.

The green-screen also allows them to manipulate the background as they see fit. For the viewer of this episode that means you’ll be treated to a world tour as they “travel” to various capital cities around the globe. It allows them to use their unique style of humour with ease too. I actually laughed out loud at a few moments, and enjoyed thembeing chased by the large ball of yarn in particular.

More importantly though, the green-screen also means that transition effects and attention-grabbing techniques (like exploding or rotating text) can direct your attention to the exact part of the code they’re discussing.

By not filming a mouse-cursor style screencast they’ve chosen to give up the opportunity to pass on subtle information outside of the scope of the specific topic that viewers might find useful. What do I mean? I’ve picked up on keyboard shortcuts or other techniques people use in their day-to-day programming by watching traditional screencasts. The best example I’ve found of this is Ryan Bates’ excellent Railscasts. I liken it to looking over the shoulder of a seasoned developer - you’ll pick up on nuances which are sometimes just as interesting.

Both Gregg and Jason speak clearly and are presenters that I enjoyed viewing. As an Australian, I didn’t find their accents overpowering in anyway.

It’s all about the content

The actual content is conveniently split into chapters (I viewed the 260MB MOV) which makes navigating between topics easy. I viewed the video on both a MacBook Pro laptop and 42″ plasma. I found the colours sometimes a little dark on the laptop but didn’t have the same issues on the plasma display. I suspect that my colourblindness was to blame :)

I would have appreciated a wide-screen format for the plasma, though I presume that the majority of viewers are watching on a computer screen.

The content is broken into the following seven sections:

• ActiveRecord
• ActiveSupport
• ActionPack
• ActionController
• Railties
• Internationalization
• Performance

The 38 minutes (85%) are spent focussing on the code-heavy components which make up the changes to Rails 2.2. The examples given are very clear and consistent across the sections and I found the afore-mentioned transition effects helpful at tracking the exact part of the code the presenter was discussing. Your eyes are drawn to the moving parts of the code. Because you’re looking at Ruby code there’s nothing that will hurt your brain, or eyes.

The last few minutes in the presentation are spent discussing the other things that have changed with Rails 2.2 in details beyond just code examples. I enjoyed Jason explaining why gems are preferred over plugins, and Gregg’s explanation of etags and how they’ve changed in Rails 2.2 was fantastic.

Wrapping up

I was skeptical that this format would would for a such a technical topic but I’m glad to say they boys pulled it off. Their lame jokes are sometimes actually funny, though I think I’ve heard enough about Rails not scaling to last me a lifetime :)

My final thought: above all else they jammed a stack of detail into an easily-digestible format that was entertaining and informative. If you’re working with Rails then you really should be checking this out.

You can buy this Envycast along with the accompanying PDF online for just US$16, which even when you consider the current global economic situation is still a steal.

Disclaimer: The Frontier Group was provided with a free copy of this Envycast for review.

I can understand why gardeining is such a popular hobby, why people dedicate their lives to the persuit of a beautiful landscape, and why Bunning's must be making an absolute killing.

Today I worked hard, I sweated, I shoveled, I lifted and I raked. Now we have what almost resembles a garden that is loved. Tony pulled out a big ugly plant near the vegie patch, and replaced it with some roll on lawn. Not much lawn mind you as Bunnings only had 3 rolls left, but we though we'd start with that and see where that takes us. It's just enough lawn to have a picnic for two.

I whiper snipered the weeds, so it almost kind looks like a rough lawn. Also I planted some seeds for the first time ever. I've always though seeds were probably more trouble that they are worth, but after spending about $3 a punnet on carrot seedings only to get 4 carrots, seeds seemed a bit more sensible, and a real way of saving money on vegies.

So now I'm about to have dinner, and enjoy what will feel like a deserved hearty meal.

This took me a few minutes today to work out and find an answer on Google so I thought I’d share it.

I had a string that I was posted from a form and while Firebug on the client said that the string was valid, on the server side PHP’s json_decode() function was returning me a NULL indicating invalid JSON. I spit out the string using good old var_dump() and I could see straight away that I would need to strip some slashes from it, but I couldn’t figure out why.

I don’t like to simply know how to fix something, I like to know why it was broken in the first place! A bit of Googling gave me the answer, it turned out to be because of the magic_quotes setting in PHP.

Instead of just wrapping everything in a stripslashes() call I decided to write a wrapper function that will take into account whether magic_quotes is on or off. It will also allow me to do whatever I want later one if I wanted to parse a particular type of data or something.

Here is the code. As you can see it’s nothing fancy, but it works and hopefully it saves people some time.

function _json_decode($string) {
	if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
		$string = stripslashes($string);
	}

	return json_decode($string);
}

We have deployed a new Zimbra server to gradually replace our existing mail server. We’ve moved all of The Frontier Group’s mail over to use the new system, which gives us a good chance to run it through its paces before moving clients over.

I have been signed up to a mailing list of a Perth-based mining company, and with complete (and illegal) disregard for the Spam Act of 2003, their removal process doesn’t work. They should really use Raven Communicator.

I have rules in my mail client on my Mac that filter out this nonsense when it’s open. However, I’m also using my iPhone to retrieve mail, and the mail filtering rules you set up in Mail on your Mac don’t translate to the handheld.

All of these combine into a situation where I needed to have mail filtering applied before it hits any of my clients; iPhone, Mac Mail or the Zimbra web interface.

Thankfully this is trivial to set up in Zimbra. You login, select the Options > Mail Filters tab and create filters as necessary. The interface is very self explanatory, and any filtering rules are applied before you see your mail.

I can rest assured knowing that this mail is being marked as read and funneled into my trash.

Sometimes you’re working on a server remotely and the ssh connection gets interrupted. Usually when that happens, ssh will stall until the socket times out and you’re stuck with an unresponsive terminal. To get back to the terminal from your stalled ssh session, use this key sequence:

<enter>
<enter>
<enter>
<shift-tilde>
<period>

A handy set of cheat sheets for any web developer. The full listing can be found here over at WebAppers.

jQuery

Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet

Prototype Cheat Sheet

Scriptaculous Cheat Sheet

Javascript Cheat Sheet

HTML Cheat Sheet

CSS Cheat Sheet

Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet

Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet

PHP Cheat Sheet

MySQL Cheat Sheet

In most languages there is a means of building strings and printing out messages. Many will find the printf command all too familiar. In the JavaScript space however things have been a little slow to develop.

We have our strings and to build them up we merely start adding them together but as our code gets more elaborate this gets harder and harder. The biggest problem is usually trying to figure out how to escape quotes and inverted commas as we swap back and forth between plain strings and JavaScript variables.

I’ve often thought there must be a better way and working with the Dojo toolkit there is. It can be found in the method “dojo.string.substitute”. This mirrors the idea used in other languages of passing the method a template string and an object of values to substitute in. Whilst Dojo allows for numerous ways of passing the data such as arrays and functions the one that interests me the most is a standard JavaScript object which is effectively a hash map of name and value pairs.

Here’s a simplified version of the Dojo function that only uses objects for the value map.

var tfg = {
  string:{
    substitute: function(/*String*/ template, /*Object*/ valueMap){
      return template.replace(/\$\{([^\s\:\}]+)(?:\:([^\s\:\}]+))?\}/g, function(match, key){
            return (valueMap[key])?valueMap[key]:"";
        });
    }
  }
}

The old way of doing things might look like this:

var data = {name:"bob", occupation: "builder"};
var string = "His name is "+data.name+" and is occupation is "+data.occupation+".";

Here we merely add the different parts of the string and string values together. Simple enough in a string this size but as it grows and we start working with HTML syntax things get more complicated.

Using the substitute way:

var data = {name:"bob", occupation: "builder"};
var template = "His name is ${name} and is occupation is ${occupation}.";
var str = tfg.string.substitute(template, data);

Here anything surrounded by the format “${something}” is replaced with the value found in “data.something”.

A major advantage of this approach is when we start looking at fetching JSON data sets from a remote server via Ajax. We almost always have to process the return values into something to display and if it is looping through a list of objects we can now define the template once and repeatedly create a string with our substitute method. Here’s a simple idea using JQuery for the loop.

var result = [{name:"a",company:"1"},{name:"b",company:"2"}];
var template = "<tr><td>${name}</td><td>${company}</td></tr>";
var rows = $.map(result, function(index, item){
  return tfg.string.substitute(template, item);
})
var tableBodyString = rows.join("\n");

Here we looped through the items substituting each new set of values and pushing the result into an array. At the end we merge the array into a single string with “join” and have the body of a HTML table ready to be used in the page.

This approach is fast, easier to read and much cleaner to implement when looping through data.

It's been awesome that each night this week to prepare for dinner, one stage of prep has been going out the back with a tub and some scissors. We have snow peas that suddenly appeared, lettuce that handles the regular onslaught of salad and the promise of masses of tomatoes and cucumbers soon to come.

It's quiet inspiring to eat your own veggies and brings the benefits of being healthy and cheap. Melinda has done a great job growing them and I'm doing my best to keep eating them.

Today I found out my uncle died on Monday. We weren't close as he was a solitary guy living with my Aunt out on a farm they had.

I remember struggling to understand him as a kid as he had an extremely thick Polish accent and difficulty finding the words. But he always ended sentences with a big laugh and you could tell by his eyes what he said was funny.

He was very generous to us and I remember jokes about all the young ladies he sweet talked at the various shop's he'd go to, my aunt joking along with a raised eyebrow and cynical grin, as if to say "he thinks he's all that".

He was an interesting man who lived through some difficult times.

Four years ago George W. Bush was voted into the White House for the second time. American citizens that voted for Kerry, the Democratic nominee in 2004, flocked to the internet to post pictures of themselves holding "sorry" signs.

Four long years later I'm glad to be able to return the sentiment.

Thanks etsy

People that don’t question things kind of annoy me. It’s like they don’t want to use their own brain so they are happy using other peoples’. The thing is it seems that more often than not because their brain lies dormant for so long they become unable to detect when other peoples’ brains aren’t working either!

One statement that gets bandied around is that we shouldn’t drink cows milk because it’s for baby cows (calves for heavens sake, this person just managed to sound even dumber!). This statement is just ludicrous. There are so many things that we eat, that we evolved to eat, that are meant for other things in the food chain.

We eat honey, we eat seeds, we eat grains and meat. We fly through the air in planes we make, we protect ourselves with medicine and amazing machines. I’m pretty sure all of these things are not what nature intended, or it’s not what God gave us, or whatever thing you believe in.

I’m not talking about ethical questions here, you can’t really argue that with someone, the decision over what you eat or do as it bears on your ethics is a personal decision. I’m talking about people that say milk is bad for us as a point in fact.

I don’t think that because something is meant for a calf, or a lamb, or a bee, or other plants doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be eating or drinking it. That doesn’t sound like logic to me.

A reason not to drink milk may be that you are lactose intolerant or you have an allergy to something in cows milk. That’s a reason. It’s interesting to note that the percentage of lactose intollerant people of European descent is much much lower than that of people that are Asian or African. It’s a matter of evolution, cows milk has been around a lot longer for use whiteys. We have the bacteria to process lactose (it’s a sugar).

Now just to balance things out, there are studies that link the drinking of cows milk to an increased risk of cancer. However there are links to just about everything else and cancer these days.

Did you know that most recently they’ve started to say quite a few cancers are caused by NOT ENOUGH SUN! White people need about 15 minutes a day of real, proper sun. Put your sunscreen on after 15 minutes. Darker skinned people will naturally need longer as they have more melatonin to protect them. People with newly balded heads will need less

So people that want to rant and rave about cows milk being bad, please think for yourself, and actually consider what you are saying. We know it’s cows milk, we know it’s for calves, that’s not a reason to not drink it for our health. Yes it has saturated fats, we need saturated fats. You can get low fat milk, yes they add sugar, but not a stack and it’s still a good source of protein.

Just think for yourselves. Please.

I bought a pre-owned copy of Bioshock from EB Games in Hay Street yesterday. When I got it home, I discovered a big gouge in the disc, which caused the game to freeze while loading the first level. Today I took it back to the shop with the receipt and got a replacement (still pre-owned) copy of the game without any hassles. I was in and out of the shop in under a minute.

It was a very pleasing experience that made me want to shop there again. I even left some feedback on their website about it.

To set the scene, the guy is having problems getting it up and goes to a psycho-sexual therapist. He says to her he’s written a song to explain the problem. She looked like she was about 7 months pregnant.

It went a little like this …

I want to fuck every woman in the world,

But I can’t seem to fuck even one.

Needless to say the psych cut him to shreds. He then proceeded to go see an S&M woman .. so far it’s okay.

Oh wait, now she’s asked him what he’s done before and he hadn’t done anything. So she says, we’ll start with a school girl fantasy, some whipping, some mild ball kicking and we’ll go from there

I love titties. It is real..

I got an advertisement from Curtin via email today. They send out a lot of garbage email. This one was about John Cleese coming to Perth.

Curtin University and its Graduate School of Business is delighted to offer you the opportunity to be one of the first to register to attend UpClose with John Cleese. As a Curtin alumni, you receive the exclusive member rate of $995.00 for Individual bookings and $7160 for a Corporate Table booking of 8.

A grand per person to see a half-day seminar featuring John Cleese not being funny? I think Curtin is the one being funny.

Lately I’ve been looking into how much time I spend in front of Mail (Apple’s email client). I feel like it’s always a struggle to get away from email for two reasons. If I close Mail I am afraid to open it again as I know it will be a chore to get to the bottom of the pile , but if I leave it open all day I find it hard to complete my day’s work without constant interruption.

Time for a personal assistant you say? 

Maybe, but there might be a better way in the interim. Like trying to find the ultimate way of organising tasks, keeping on top of email can be just as daunting (read: useless). I poked around the 43folders web site and may just have found it.

Merlin Mann is the creator of 43folders and his website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Delving in to some of the posts, I managed to get a basis of how I might go about keeping on top of emails (codename Inbox Zero).

• Better practices for staying (near) zero
• Quick tips on processing your inbox
• 5 fast email productivity tips

After having a read of this site and venturing off into Google, I finally had a plan. Create some folders in Mail (abandoning my previous structure) and action emails in the appropriate way. I’m not creating anything new and revolutionary here, but so far using these ideas is working for me (and making a massive difference to the time spent in front of email).

For anyone possibly interested in the way I am doing things, let me know in the comments. I might just find the time to follow this up.

In a previous job I dealt with the IT tasks related to a multi level marketing business. We stored everything in a database of course and due to the nature of multi level marketing most of the operations performed had to take into account the tree like structure of the people involved.

An example would be, given a party that was run there would be rewards based on future bookings made, how much the party sold and so on. The largest direct benefitor of these rewards was of course the person that ran the party. However this person had a manager, who in turn may have a manager who in turn may have a manager and so on up the tree. At each level the manager got a cut based on a number of factors such as how many people she was managing, what her position was an so on.

At the time the way I dealt with trees was via adjacency lists, mostly because that’s what was most logical to me and how it seemed everyone else did it. I thought I’d have a look around and see if anything had changed in the last couple of years and found this article on using nested sets to deal with hierarchical data.

It seems to me that this method trades insertion performance for selection performance which for most situations is fantastic! It seems to be exactly what I need given I’ll be performing far more selects than inserts and it also has given me another tool in my toolbox.

It’s long been understood that to keep someone in IT happy one of the most important things is change and new stuff. I think this constitutes new stuff for me.

I’m not stupid, let me just start by saying that. I don’t think I’m stupid anyway, and so far the evidence is stacked in favour of me not being stupid. For the most part I know how my brain works, why I think certain things and why I act the way I do in most situations. Not all, but mostly I know these things.

To me depression isn’t something I feel, it’s something that happens to me. That sounds quite fatalistic, which is not how I mean it at all.

What I mean is that depression to me isn’t a word to be used next to the word ‘feel’ or ‘feeling’ in any sentence. You don’t feel depressed, you feel sad and for the most part that can be a component of being depressed. For me I feel lonely, hopeless, sad, out of control, ugly, useless, pointless and many other things quite regularly, but this concoction isn’t depression to me.

I explained to my psych this week that my previous experience has been to experience depression in the mind, and extreme sadness or melancholy that makes me withdraw from life. However this time it was like something was sucking the life out of me and the harder I tried, the harder it sucked. I was trying to move forward, to do the right things but none of it was working. Eventually I gave up and that’s when I hit rock bottom.

Thinking back to that point it was actually mainly physical, but that was because I was keen to portray a scene in which everything was awesome. To me depression this time was like a disease that was inside me, not something I could think my way through or just ‘be happy’ and get on with life. Thinking back again I can’t even remember the loudness of the voice in my head back then telling me how everything was shit. It was pretty terrible, I didn’t tell anyone, and I think it’s best left that way.

I got a taste of it this week for some reason. Probably because I started to feel like things were back on track. I actually started to think things were looking up for me again, and then wham! I don’t want to get out of bed in the mornings again and I’m scared of going backwards. I was though I mean, this morning was scary as hell.

Right now I’m feeling a lot better and I think it’s because I got to practice some of the things I’d been learning and see that they helped. Most notably I’m judging myself so much less. I know I’m overweight, I know I want to lose 10kg by the end of the year, I know that I’m eating badly and not exercising. Those are all truths or facts, but there isn’t any point in letting that shade my character or create a judgement on me. That’s not helpful.

I was looking at some old photos from May and June of this year. I was probably almost the leanest I’ve been, which would have been in July. They were just photos of my face and I was shocked at the fact that I looked at myself and didn’t think I looked awful. At the time I could pick out all these things that were wrong with me, but when I saw the photo I actually though I looked good. I find it hard to say that, I feel arrogant and self loathing but it’s how I felt. To me it reinforced the idea that your mind is always telling me things that aren’t true, or at least are far worse than things are.

In any case I’m not sure how things will be in the future. I’d like to say they are going to just get better and better, but that would imply I am super human and will always be able to fight it. I can’t. However I think this has been a really good test today and shown that things work if I’m willing to believe in them and try it.

The psych and I have been concentrating on me being okay with being alone. Not forever I mean, just making it okay for me to feel lonely. I don’t think it’s something a lot of my friends can actually identify with, especially as, with most feelings, they tend to get far less extreme to you once the feeling has gone away. I have had this feeling for most of the last three years.

My primary coping mechanism is to eat. Well, that’s not true, my primary coping mechanism is numbness, avoidance and protection, the tool of this is eating. When I’m eating I can forget everything else and let the food chemicals make me feel happy. Afterwards I can be in control by vomiting and so that feels good too.

It’s fairly easy to say, hey just don’t do it, but what else should I do then? I don’t know how it started, at what point I thought it was okay to start throwing up, but at some point I justified it to myself and have rationalised it and so to me it’s not wrong. To me the only thing wrong about it is that it then allows me to eat shit food and even though you’re throwing up you aren’t getting it all out and so I put on weight.

It sounds crazy, but there it is. I guess on some level I know I shouldn’t but that’s a societally enforced thing.

I guess I should probably just say that it hasn’t been an issue in a month or so, but still I remember how it feels.

My coping mechanism is still avoidance, it’s just not got vomiting as a symptom anymore, I still eat which just sounds like being a lazy overweight person but that’s not very often these days.

It’s actually hard to experience an emotion you don’t like, well that makes sense actually, but what doesn’t make sense is to purposefully let yourself feel that way. That’s essentially what I am trying to do though, basically to feel it and understand it when I’m in a good situation mentally so that, hopefully, when I’m weaker I’ll be better able to cope. This seems to be working.

However this lead to a long train of thought for me about loneliness. We’re humans after all and 99% of us want to be around other people at least some of the time; we are a social species. I am either someone that acutely requires other people in my life to be happy, or simply I’ve not had it for so long that I’m desperate for it. Either way it feels like I’m developing skills to go against my nature. I then think that would all of this go away for the most part if I weren’t alone. I don’t know, I’ve put too many eggs in too many baskets too many times.

I went into this saying that I wanted to feel complete by myself. The problem is I’ve never believed that is possible.

This has rambled quite a bit but it covers two or three mintues of thought this morning on the way to work. I don’t know what the answers are to a lot of questions posed here, but I do know I’m trying and even though today was a bump in the road it still feels like I’m on the same track.

It may be the engineer inside me, but I find optimizing systems to be highly challenging and rewarding. I enjoyed the time spent analysing and refactoring SQL code and more recently have thoroughly enjoyed refactoring some of our existing applications to run more quickly.

The great thing about optimizing computer code is that you genuinely know if you’ve succeeded or not. You have metrics from before and after your code changes to prove they were effective. It also makes you think about how things are working in the application at a much lower level. It feels pretty good that by you spending a couple of hours on a problem you could be potentially saving days, weeks or months of run time when applied to a number of users.

In this article the author details how he went about improving the speed of a facial recognition implementation by 25 times. That’s a massive improvement and I found the process to be pretty nicely indicative of how a real programmer thinks sometimes. If you consider that this process perhaps took him a day of work, and returned some software that potentially requires 25 time less equipment to run, it just goes to show how much difference one person really can make!

Maybe this should be titled 'Unfit parents feeding lemons to their babies'. Either way, it's funny :) I like how so many of them go back for another taste!

Sometimes the music does need to be that loud.

I tend to reflect on the period between sessions the night before the session to see what sticks out. I think what this experience has taught me is that what is at the forefront of your mind and what seems important is important. Even if it’s just to work out if it’s important or not. If something is at the forefront of your mind it’s best to deal with it rather than avoid it, obviously some times are better than others, but I feel like whatever is the first thought to come up, that is what needs to be dealt with.

I’ve seen this in the sessions themselves where quite often she’ll ask what my first memory is of a certain feeling, or a situation where something happened. That first thought and the feelings that are linked to it are there I think because it comes from emotion, from the part of your brain directly linked with a situation and with how you feel. We apply logic and reasoning to these feelings all the time but it’s that initial emotion that’s important to realise and to use to dislodge a negative behaviour at it’s root. That’s the metaphor I’ll utilise and I think working from your most recent memory of a feeling is like trying to dig up a tree by pulling off leaves.

With all that in mind the last few weeks (it’s been two since the last session) have been about integration. I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of months and been through a massive and drastic chane in life in the last three to four months and so it will take some time to interate new positive tools and approaches with old positive tools and approaches, while trying to remove the old things that don’t work. I’ve noticed this most obviously with meeting new people.

When I meet a new person I don’t know I tend to feel like I’m very cold towards them, my initial judgement isn’t positive it’s just whether this person will be a friend or not. Most people get put in the no bin and I stop being good communicator with them. However if you think further on this without talking to people you don’t know you don’t have friends. I have the old tool of avoidance and protection from when I was suicidal and disconnecting from the world and I’m applying it in a situation where I want to connect with the world. It doesn’t work.

There are a lot of parts of my life where this is the case, and so often I find myself thinking about something and realising all the inconsistencies between how I live my life, and how I’d like to live my life. It’s not like I’m those lazy people “Oh I want to lose weight”, or “I want to read more” and just not doing it, it’s the way I think that is flawed. I want to get a girlfriend, but I don’t want to interact with new people. It seems stupid to say it out loud, but those things existed in my head right next to each other.

Have you read 1984 ? You’ll know what I’m talking about.

It’s always interesting to me that topics I think that will get a lot of attention don’t tend to unless I really force the situation but they do lead to smaller items that initiate change. It’s not that my initial thought is wrong, it’s just that in some ways I’m missing the trees due to the forrest. I don’t think living a rewarding life is about the bigger picture it’s about lots of little pictures. Doing something now that you find rewarding because what you truly value doesn’t change drastically in short periods of time. Working toward a big goal, or a life time of achievement is made of little achievements and goals along the way after all.

I want to write, “But I digress”, but I tried to ‘dumb it down’ which is another issue we talked about today.

Today I ended up talking about being suicidal and about hurting myself. I thought when I mentioned it that this would be a big topic of discussion but it more lead to talking about behaviours that helped me then that actually hurt me now. Disconnnection, avoidance, protectionism, these are all behaviours that allowed me to disconnect from people and my family and would have lead me toward the ability to kill myself. I had an issue with the pain it would cause other people, but that had diminished over time and it allowed me to feel less and less of my own pain as I started to protect myself and disconnnect from myself. I’d never really thought about it in such an open manner, I’d always been scared to make other people feel bad, it’s not a topic that makes people comfortable. It tends to get sympathy also which I don’t enjoy as it compounds my feelings of weakness.

In any case I’ve taken all of these behaviours and continue to develop and use them now. Essentially protecting myself from happiness and contentment and a bunch of other things. It seems to me that on one end of the spectrum you have ‘closed feelings’ which allowed me to exist in sadness, and I haven’t been able to develop the feelings that are useful on the other end of the spectrum which are open feelings to accept happiness and contentment. I think this is demonstrated in my thought process that if I do feel a moment of happiness I’m instantly thinking about the inevitable sadness coming and preparing myself for it. I did experience this a couple of weeks ago and I’m trying to more just take things as they come.

We talked today about problems I have in talking to people in that constantly in my head I’m rewording what I’m thinking so as to not come off ‘too smart’. That sounds arrogant as hell, but I’m always afraid of sounding like a snob or something. I don’t know where that comes from, and most of the people I talk to are highly intelligent anyway. I think it’s protection again, if I blend in then there is nothing to attack. If I’m different then it’s me that I’m putting out there, which begs the question why am I always waiting to be attacked. Or why do I think if I show someone I’m good at something will that end up being bad for me.

Which is the other side of things, in that I generally try to reign in my ability for things I’m good at, if I’m showing someone something I tend to not do all that I can in showing them what I know it’s just a general thing.

She asked why I thought this was and I couldn’t think of a reason and she proposed that it could be because of my interest in computers, and generally in things that most people find unusual or aren’t knowledgeable about. Then my interactions are consistently about making things possible for others to understand (computers for instance) and so I think apply this thinking broadly to all areas of my life. It kind of makes sense.

Also thinking about it one of the constant things my Dad would always do to me was to make me feel extremely self conscious if a story went too long. From when I was very young things had to get to the point very quickly or he would either start to ignore you or start his own story. If you were excited about something or passionate about it and therefore talked a lot about it, that was not a good thing. There you go. Now I dumb it down and keep my passions inside me for everyone, not just the people that are rude.

We talked about the self esteem again and negative judgements of myself. I felt like this is an area that needs a lot of work, but that I have been working on, I also think this is an area of my life that is still here from three years ago and I need to integrate new ideas that better work with how I want to move forward. There is a lot of work to do though and I constantly find negative beliefs of myself that aren’t consistent with who I am now.

I also said to her that the meditation classes were interesting, and that while the meditation was good I was more interested in the different way of approaching life. I likened it to opening up a new toy box, some of the old toys I keep as they’re good no matter what toys are in front of me but some of the new toys are good too so I’ll make my own box with toys from both. Tools is probably a better example, but whatever. I don’t see meditation as being the most important tool, but rather the different way of thinking being a catalyst for other different ways of thinking.

My homework for this week was to try and create more situations in which to talk to new people, people I probably won’t see again and to engage in the conversation not just do it as an exercise. Also I need to make a list of things that are highly stressful to me, then I need to visualise myself doing these things each day to try and reduce my anxiety related to them. I don’t have much trouble with highly anxious activities but low anxiety issues are not that forthcoming, probably because the choice is so wide.

So that was the session this week. It was the first time I’d talked to her about suicidal thought and cutting and it actually wasn’t that much of a deal. I also thought she’d comment on the head but she was more interested in the t-shirt (threadless). It’s surprising what importance they associate to what things.

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