Sometimes when I’m out and about and not being careful about my clothing my penis slips out.

No wait that’s not right. My linguistic geek slips out.

Yeah, that one! Linguistic geekdom! All over the place! Like a vulgar Andy Warhol rip off painted on a pornstar’s fake boobs.

So last time that happened it was because I stumbled upon something called a Slovianski Jezik, which is apparently something not unlike an Esperanto exclusively for slavic languages.

Of course I went full monty on it and was all like “Omigosh omigosh this is liek SO brilliant yeah!?” in my best cockney accent impersonation.

But the thing is that, all joking aside, us slavs are in dire need of a language such as this. The most painful thing we have to deal with is that already, as it is, in our natural state, it’s almost like we were talking dialects of the same language. Well not really, but still, there are many many similarities.

Like I’ve read once that Slavic languages are the only family of languages in the world where speakers talking to one another feel like the other person should be understandable, but has such a horrible speech impediment that they just can’t quite make them out. Combined with regional differences in vocabulary and you’re in a fucked up situation where you instinctively feel like you should be able to converse normally …

… but just can’t.

For example I went to Prague last week. When there I could almost understand everything I saw in written language and could understand something like 50% of the things I was told. 70% when I tried really hard.

But as soon as I tried to do some proper communication there was a big fail and we were all forced to default back to English, which is just horrible. Come on, a Slovenian and a Czech conversing in a stupid germanic language. EW!

That’s where Slovianski comes in. It is specifically designed to be instantly and intuitively intelligible to anyone who understands slavic languages, more specifically, anyone who is a Slav. You can try this on the Slovianski language front page

Personally I can make out just about everything it says. Even when a word is missing I can very simply understand it from the context.

This is without ever having learnt any other Slavic languages than Slovene and I guess I learned some Serbocroatian by ear simply from … well those who know why know, the rest don’t really have to know.

I think every Slav out there should learn this language, I sure know I want to. It looks easy enough anyway.

Dude seriously, the answer to that is “HaHa oh you” not all of that.

Oh well, kudos for proving that caring about paradoxes is just silly because they either don’t exist or they do exist and you’re a jackass.

Also, did you know that if you assume any paradox to be correct you can mathematically prove/derive anything.

Point of fact:

Just to help you embrace the herculean task this was: My goal was to make the algorithm’s runtime lower than 1.5 seconds for any realistic data sample. It was taking anywhere from 5 to 20 and even 30 seconds at the time.

So I set off. First some profiling and some tidbits here and there, then tweaking and poking and yanking and scraping code for hours upon hours upon hours.

Nothing, no increase in performance. Nothing even remote to sane behaviour at all. Even though the algorithm was working, my debugging/profiling data wasn’t making any sense.

And I said fuck this shit and went to chillax and rest my mind over Men Who Stare at Goats for two hours.

There were some good laughs and some pretty good chillaxing being done. My I-don’t-know-which-exactly-or-what’s-it-called part of the brain was probably busy processing the afore mentioned problem in the background. Or maybe it wasn’t, who knows.

All I know is that when I came back to the problem I noticed something funky.

HEY THAT FUNCTION ARGUMENT SHOULDN’T BE A FUCKING CONSTANT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!

Characters 1 and t look a lot alike …

So anyway, long story short. The meta-heuristic that used to take 1500 epochs to do something now takes only ten to do the same thing, but slightly better.

That’s a pretty fucking good improovement right there!

Now the algorithm is constantly taking about a second to do its thing and I’m happy. Pushed it into production where profiling data will be collected of a more varied sample of data to see if all is well.

Chillaxing! It really does work.

Yesterday another WebCamp took place in Ljubljana and it was the best *camp event I’ve ever been to. Congrats to all involved in making it happen, you guys rawk.

For some strange reason though I seem to have done almost nothing but hang out in the hall and only caught little bits and pieces of the talks here and there.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that I learned is that nobody writes good software anymore. Hell, why would you make your algorithms and page generators run faster … just slap some caching on there! First you make it cache all database calls. Then you start saving straight to cache too and sort of make commits to the actual storage happen a bit later when they don’t bother the user. If that’s not enough you can still just “cache” the whole output of your app in a static html file and serve that. And so on.

HELLO guise!? Bad sign ™ if you need to store the whole output of your software so it runs sufficiently well? O.o What are web developers smoking these days … I want some.

That’s the impression I got anyway from so many talks about optimisation and caching …

Another very cool talk, although I wasn’t in geek-mode enough to listen in on the whole thing, was by @refaktor who showed some funky simplistic server thingies that can perform real-time communication amongst each other. I did see the demo and it was very pretty. Hope he puts the code and talk somewhere public so I can give it a study some time.

I happened to steal two sessions of people’s time. The first was a public release of LazySharer that went alright I guess, some things went wrong but it all turned out well in the end.

And in a spur-of-the-moment kind of inspiration I also made a talk where we did nothing but watch stupid and silly youtube videos. We burned through our 20+10 minutes and ate away at half of next talk. Sorry Jure, hope you had enough time to talk about XMPP.

Seeming as how stupid videos were a marginal enough success for my tastes I got together some people and we set up a booth of sorts in the hall where we then played Monty Python and other silly videos for the rest of the day. Well actually we sort of got bored with it and then other people started playing whatever they wanted to see. It was great fun.

The WebCamp concluded a bit early because there were no more talks people wanted to give and half the public went MIA. So then the real party started because all the boring people had left.

Imagine this scene: 30-ish people, two cases of beer, a lot of pizza, 70 sooper chocolate muffins.

Yeah it was a blast. Apparently spiking those muffins with extra sugar and cocoa was the best idea we ever had at Preona. People went berserk for those things, eating three or more and stealing them for home consumption. Hell, if all this Synaptic Web stuff doesn’t work out for us we’ll open a muffin bakery.

Later on when almost everybody had left the evening evolved into Hekovnik’s first movie night. Inglorious Basterds on a huge LCD and four people on a sofa munching on stuff. Fun times.

Although those people having a brainstorming session on the other side of the room were a bit loud at times

PS: there were three pizzas (out of 40) left over and no muffins (out of 70). I think this is a great achievement.

So let’s start by describing the problem. We have a base user model named pUser (yes stupid naming convention) that is tied to a cookie, which holds an id. These users are then tied to a number of different API accounts. In my case it is Delicious, Twitter and Facebook. The user_id is also used to tie a bunch of meta data in different other models to them.

The problem is that we do not want to trouble users with a special login for our service. But they are using different computers and browsers, so the same physical user can have multiple user id’s.

However through their Delicious et al. credentials we can tie them back together into a single entity. But we do not want to trouble the rest of the code with this detail, it should just work seamlessly because otherwise we’d be forced to introduce checking for this stuff at about 50 different places in the project.

My approach to solving this goes as follows; at the end will be the three tests that indicate that the solution is valid. A hardcore test through the actual UI also confirmed that everything works.

Funky geek stuff follows, you have been warned

First we introduce a model that connects different user id’s to the main user (i.e. the first id said user was given)

class UserNormalisation(models.Model):
	main_id = models.IntegerField()
	sub_id = models.IntegerField()
 
	class Meta:
		unique_together = ("main_id", "sub_id")

Then we give our Delicious model a ModelManager that will perform duplicity checking and tie different users together as needed.

class DeliciousManager(models.Manager):
	def create(self, **kwargs):
		try:
			old = Delicious.objects.get(username=kwargs['username'])
			new = super(DeliciousManager, self).create(**kwargs)
			try:
				UserNormalisation(main_id = old.user.id,
						  sub_id = new.user.id).save()
			except IntegrityError:
				pass
			new.delete()
			return old
		except Delicious.DoesNotExist:
			return super(DeliciousManager, self).create(**kwargs)
 
class Delicious(models.Model):
	user = models.ForeignKey( pUser )
	username = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	password = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	isScrobbled = models.BooleanField( default=False )
 
	objects = DeliciousManager()

Basically when the createfunction is called it checks whether a Delicious model with the same username already exists and if it does, then a row is added to the UserNormalisation table to tie the two user id’s together.

And here’s the real magic, the changes we did to the pUser model.

class pUserManager(models.Manager):
	def get(self, **kwargs):
		user = super(pUserManager, self).get(**kwargs)
		try:
			id = UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=user.id).main_id
			user = super(pUserManager, self).get(id=id)
		except UserNormalisation.DoesNotExist:
			pass
		return user
 
class pUser(models.Model):
	username = models.CharField( max_length=50 )
	password = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	creation = models.DateTimeField( auto_now=True )
 
	objects = pUserManager()
 
	def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
		super(pUser, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
		try:
			id = UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=self.id).main_id
			self.id = id
 
		except UserNormalisation.DoesNotExist:
			pass

The pUserManager should have a few more functions that do essentially the same thing for other operations (filter comes to mind). Essentially whenever a pUser is fetched from the db the manager will return the real user as per the UserNormalisation model.

Another trick that makes this work seamlessly even when used as a connecting model (primary key for instance) in a different table is that __init__ function. What I’ve discovered is that there it’s enough to just change the user’s id in place and everything will work.

Here are the tests that confirm all of this funky stuff actually performs as expected

	def test_normalisation(self):
		user = pUser(username="test", password="test")
		user.save()
 
		user2 = pUser(username="test2", password="test")
		user2.save()
 
		norm = UserNormalisation(main_id=user.id, sub_id=user2.id)
		norm.save()
 
		fixture = pUser.objects.get(id=user2.id)
		self.assertEquals( fixture.id, user.id )
 
	def test_normalisation2(self):
		user = pUser()
		user.save()
		user2 = pUser()
		user2.save()
 
		user.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
		fixture = user2.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
 
		self.assertEquals( fixture.user.id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=user2.id).main_id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( fixture.user, user )
 
	def test_normalisation3(self):
		user = pUser()
		user.save()
		user2 = pUser()
		user2.save()
 
		user.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
		fixture = user2.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
 
		norm = UserNormalisation.objects.all()
 
		Concepts.relate(user=user2, concept1="tag1", concept2="tag2")
		relation = ConceptRelation.objects.filter(user=user2, concept1="tag1")[0]
		self.assertEquals( relation.user.id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( relation.user, user )

Take special note to the latter two examples. In test_normalisation2 you can see that when a delicious_set is created for user2, the two users become the same thing because both we’re using the same delicious username both times. Something similar happens in test_normalisation3, but there we see that creating a ConceptRelation for user2 actually creates it for the first user because they both behave as if they were the original user.

Ah, finally, we can breathe again!

The last couple of weeks … was it two, was it three? Can’t really tell, feels like I’ve left the office just yesterday while at the same time seeming like it’s been years since I last set foot in the office to do any real work.

This my friends, this ejection from the stream of time, this rejection from life, this abortion from the normality of our daily lives, this horrible feeling of floating in time like naught is happening but what you can see on your immediate palm …

… this is what exam season does to you.

For me it is, luckily, already over. Some of my best buddies have another week of wartime ahead of them. Waring with evil warlords, waging battle with delusional teaching assistants. To them I wish good luck! Good luck I say!

To the rest of us I say, Gidday mate! Finally, finally we have come out of that Vietnam that is the few weeks of exams. Those stressful days when your future hangs precariously at a balance and your parents are wagging their eternal finger into your face “you better pass those exams mister lest we reject you from the family unit and make you get a real job”

But alas dear mother! Alas I say! Alas! For I have passed three out of five exams and that means I’ve got a 60% success rate and not even all of those were a weak mere pass! Nay! For I am victorious! Victoriously have I come out of that hell that is pure suffering.

Could’ve done better though. Crap.

PS: said season also fucks with your mind.

Naturally I’ve developed a bit of a love for pretty mathematical objects, so I wanted to share some with you.

1. Our first contestant is the cardioid. She’s a bit chubby on the sides but has a heart of gold.

2. The second contestant is an implicit heart and was contributed by a bloke on Facebook whom I believe has had this saved somewhere because it would be just mindblowing if he even know it from heart, let alone could create it.

3. This little nugget followed from my experimentation with parameters of a curve I don’t know the name of … it’s a flower if you haven’t noticed.

4. The Butterfly Curve is well known in some circles, but I found it by stumbling around wikipedia like a drunken madman

5. There are likely to be other contestants I have yet to discover.

So, which curve do you think is the most beautifulest mathematical construct?

Of course after all this hype the features I expected were:

• the casing is made of solid gold
• it can make me a sandwich
• it brings coffee
• it fits in my pocket
• it is very very useful
• it can wipe my arse after I take a dump
• it can fly me to the moon and back
• it works like The Guide mk.2 (If you don’t know what this means you should be ashamed of yourself)

So let’s see what Apple gave us:

• oversized iPhone that can’t make calls

Errr … what!? Seriously Apple? Seriously? This!? Really!? We’re doing this again!?

Ok look, I love Apple, hell I even want an iPhone. And I really believe the devices they create are marvelous pieces of technology that work very well. But this fucking piece of crap is the biggest technological let-down I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.

I mean seriously, what the fuck was Apple smoking when they designed this thing? They’re supposed to be this sooper innovative company performing feats of magic right before our eyes, but instead, they take all the old technology, add nothing of the new, and call it the next big awesomest thing.

Fuck off Apple. Call me when you start making useful and exciting stuff again.

At least with the Newton it was marvelous technology that was too far ahead of its time, the iPad is just boring, mundane and boring.

Oh and you can tell they know it’s boring and useless because it’s PRICED THE SAME AS THEIR OLD PRODUCT!

Size matters!

But obviously that’s a very lame argument so let’s work it out a bit.

Everybody knows that when it comes to impregnating homo sapienatic females any and all but the weirdest of male homo sapienatic instruments will do. It can be wide, it can be small, it can be whatever. As long as it’s longer than 5 inches you’re good and obviously since you’re here and we have this thing called evolution and inherited traits, chances are your phallic instrument is longer than 5 inches mister.

And 5 inches is quite alright, I wouldn’t want a 5 inch knife in my back …

But homo sapiens are smart cookies and they needed something more out of sex. This thing called an endorphinal high, we like drugs maaan, because after all, if sex would hurt nobody would do it and then we’d all be fucked. Not to mention that’s no fun at all.

So most of the time when a homo sapiens female and a homo sapiens male get together it isn’t to make little hobbits, it’s to make fun and create natural occuring brain drugs. Woo.

This however introduces a problem, the lukewarm hole most females sport is very stretchy and the more fun it’s having the more it stretches. The damn thing does not in the least care about what you’re putting inside, it just wants more and more and more and it gets bigger and bigger. Then the lady stops getting pleasure because she can’t feel anything.

Hell, there’s very little friction left!

What do? Well obviously you put a bigger instrument into the hands of the master male homo sapiens so that he could pleasure the female better. Problem solved!

By the by, many animal species have tricks to make the female more … uhm … willing. Like cats have spikes on their instruments and ducks have a spiral penis! Wow, amazing, shocker!

Ok so no bitching about “Size doesn’t matter, it’s how you use it” Sod off with those, size, in humans, is about 80% of the equation when it comes to pleasurable activities of the sort.

Therein lies the problem. The more the woman wants to have fun, the bigger instrument she needs. But how can you tell who’s got a big instrument when the damn bastards keep it neatly tucked away in their garment?

Confidence!

The more confidence a male sports the bigger their schlong! The mechanism for how big schlong == big confidence is probably self-evident so let’s leave it at this. The reason why bigger schlong equals bigger confidence is that lasses need a heuristic for finding bigger pleasure.

You know how it is said every programmer needs to learn how to do parallelisation and funky stuff on multi-core multi-processor beast of machines? And how such machines aren’t even really beasts these days, they’re our run of the mill desktop and portable computers.

This is the world we live in.

It’s getting worse by the hour!

Very soon the first thing a young programmer will hear out of a lecturer’s mouth will be “Thread-Safe“.

But there’s something we can do about that even today. First of all, we can kiss threading good bye. Sure it’s sweet and yes it sort of works. But ew! It’s like trying to make a marine corps do their job with everyone’s finger in someone else’s arse. That’s the problem with threads you see, they keep picking each other’s arses and noses and then nobody can do any work.

Multi processing to the rescue!

Running an algorithm in several processes is the only thing that makes it run on several processesors in parallel and it gives each process its own memory space and everyone is nicely contained in their own little world. But fuck, now you can’t exactly pick another process’s arse when you need to … like when eating through a common queue of tasks.

And then python’s multiprocessing module, library, thingy, whatever it’s called, comes into play.

It. Just. Makes. Everything. So. Fucking. Easy!

This weekend I was working on a scrobbler for Delicious. Basically this thing is supposed to go through a user’s Delicious history, scrape every website it finds, send the results to three different semantic API’s and build connections between the tags those API’s return and the ones the user used to tag the particular link.

Now obviously there’s a lot of downtime involved here for every iteration. You’re easily looking at 10 solid seconds of waiting per website. This means that scrobbling 838 pages (my stress test) would take about two and a half hours. With multiprocessing it took something like 20 minutes.

The beauty of this approach is that I’ve never ever ever done anything in parallel. And yet I could do funky things like worker pools, queues, semaphoring and a bunch of other stuff I’ve only heard of in fairy tales until now … in an hour.

So there you go, an investment of a few hours for learning from scratch and some tweaking to create a ten-fold increase in speed.

A few weeks ago, or was it days, I forget, I stumbled upon a rather fascinating video about living to be a hundred years old and more. But not just sitting around and waiting to die kind of 100+, the kind where at 100 you’re still happily running around, building fences and doing stupid crap most westerners really wouldn’t expect you to do anymore.

Everything in there is fine and good, but the most important bottom line I picked up on was the importance of having an ikigai. It’s all wonderfully explained in the video so I won’t go into what ikigai is, I’d rather say a little bit about what it feels like to discover one’s ikigai. (it doesn’t matter whether you know what it’s called or not, I didn’t for months)

As late as just last Spring my life revolved around going to a school I hated, having a job that was alright but not quite that and occasionally getting together with my girlfriend. I was doing some nifty stuff in the evenings and late at night, but mostly it was just another burden no matter how much I loved it and felt like I believed in it.

Then something changed, I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but it changed. The symptom of this change was that I quit my job and devoted most of my attention to the side-project, which evolved far far far away from what it was back then.

And suddenly much was different. School suddenly seemed interesting and awesome, I started learning exciting new things every day for the first time since being a kid. Getting up in the morning was … well it’s still fucking hard, I’m just not a morning person … but staying up at night was painless as hell. Meh, I won’t pretend like I can describe this, just try it.

Now watch the video, I’m not here to blab, I’m here to make you watch this

This is the first post in the series of How <x> changed my style where I shall talk about tools and events that had a significant impact on my style of doing things. If you happen to like this idea, I would be very happy if you could help it spread like wildfire, because it’s a form of pay-it-forward where we say Thanks for cool stuff.

Some months ago, fuck has it been two? three? four?,  I attended a series of lectures on Lisp and functional programming and some other useful thingies by Simon Belak. At first it all felt like just another useful tool under my belt. Cool, Lisp, yeah, so what do I do with this? Meh, it’s cool, knowing this can’t do any more harm than a parenthesis thrown at a boomerangual trajectory smashing the windscreen of our hapless programmer.

However it did do damage, dear god it did so much damage! It fucked with my mind man, it fucked with everything. Nothing has been the same since!

No not really, but lately I have started noticing some pretty remarkable changes in the way I write code and more importantly, the way I think about code. Suddenly everything is a function is a function is a function! It’s quite remarkable really, sure I’ll often still code the very obvious object as an object, but I’m no longer forcing object oriented programming where it doesn’t belong.

And then there are even more radical examples of my brain changing, for the better I believe. Let’s take a simple comparison of writing a function that calculates the average of a list of numbers. In the old days I’d write it like so:

avg = 0
for key in self.tags:
	avg += self.tags[key]
avg /= len(self.tags)

These days, and it was fucking surprising when I noticed myself doing this, the same function gets written with a much bigger lisp:

avg = reduce(lambda a,b: a+b, tags.itervalues())/len(tags)

I really couldn’t go so far as to say whether this change in style and thinking is good or bad, but it certainly is interesting to just sit back and watch yourself from a distance as you morph and change before your very eyes.

So what’s changed your style lately?

Not to mention the snow and the occasional drift around a corner! Orgasmic! Oh!

Although winter services could be a little more vigilant, I got thrown all over the place driving through tracks others made. There was snow up to 20 centimeters deep someplaces! On main roads!!

Anyway, had fun, was awesome, got stuck in the snow on the parking lot at home. That was a big lol, but a surprisingly large amount of people I don’t know decided to be helpful and we got the car into a parking space in no time.

OMFG Guys… I seriously always thought that those wincest stories were bullshit, I have two sisters, though one’s a baby and the other is two years older than me. The thought of having sex with her was both simultaneously really creepy and in the realm of ‘would-never-happen-to-me’. My sister’s sort of a flower child, garlands and stuff all around her room. So I’m sound asleep one night, I’m a junior in High School and she’s at community college, she hasn’t moved out yet… and she knocks on my door much louder than she needed to, but she whispers through my door ‘Can I come in?’…

Well of course she can, she’s my sister. Anyway, she comes in in the skimpiest fucking night gown I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know she even had a night gown. She tells me that she thought she heard a gunshot in the woods and she doesn’t want to be alone. She asks if she can sleep with me, and before my mind gets out of the gutter, I recoil… but realizing what she means, I tell her of course and I let her into the bed. As she climbs in, I can smell honey on her breath, it’s mesmerizing. That sweet smell brings me closer to her and I curl up next to her like we were just little kids again.

Her snoring has always been loud, especially deep into the nights, but half-an-hour into trying to get some winks, she’s still not snoring. “What do you think of us?” she says randomly. I stammer because I’m fighting the fact that I’m turned on right now AND what she just asked. I tell her that she’s a wonderful sister and I loved her. She told me “What if I was more than her sister? Something much more?” And I shit bricks… It all became so clear to me now.

All those years of wondering, staring at her door, waiting for her, laying awake at night just thinking, rolling crazy suspicions around in my head, all of it came down to this Wednesday night, this very moment, everything I had wondered about her became very… very clear. It was an epiphany at its purest and most tense, most… terrifying in its own way. I could finally say it with no regret, no fear, only truth.

“You’re a bear, aren’t you?” I say. The honey, the gunshot in the woods… there are NO WOODS around here, the berries strung up all around her room. She lept out of bed and ripped off her mask, roaring and making other bear noises! I jumped out of my window and it gave chase, out into the streets! Moving as fast as my legs will let me, eventually she gives up and moves back into the house. Standing on the street, I know it in my heart… she’d always be my special bear.

If the leader of a dictatorship is a wolf then the leader of a democracy is a wolfpack.

Now and anon I like to fire up a game when I’m feeling a dash unmotivated to do pretty much anything. Most often I simply don’t have time to play, so when I do play I want the game to be something fascinatingly epic but in such a way as can be enjoyed ten minutes here, twenty minutes there, an hour over yonder. NOT something you have to play for three hours straight before you get in the groove.

Two nights ago I discovered Machinarium through a hapless link in a msn chat.

I was instantly hooked, the art is simply amazing, the level of detail beyond all comparison. The gameplay itself. Oh! Don’t get me started, I could *gasm all over at the mere thought of the brilliance therein.

Basically you play a robot that goes through a few adventures and solves many a puzzle in a beautifully designed world to, well I dont’ know what yet, haven’t gotten that far. It would seem though that it’s got something to do with love because whenever his memories are shown they’re about a lady robot.

It is also one of the hardest puzzle games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. Shivers, Monkey Island, Abe’s Oddysee/Exoddus? Don’t get me started, weaksauce in comparison to Machinarium! Downright bloody weaksauce! Often you will encounter a proper logic game, one as can be bought in stores sometimes, you’ve got to solve just to open a door.

Other times you are left solving five puzzles just to get to an item that solves a previous puzzle.

The best thing though? It’s absolutely DRM and any and all copy protection free. Buy the game, get the downloads for all OS’s and a soundtrack! Yay! How could I resist? So I didn’t, I shelved out the few euro it takes and it was possibly one of the best moneys ever spent.

Big game publisher, if you are reading this, yes, yes I do only buy games if they come without DRM. Sometimes I consider buying a big-name game, but usually get disappointed by the process half-way through and bail.

They’re of a very bloody cute small boy goat thing. My grandmother says this is as big as they get and by god the little rascals are awesome. Soon as I came into the barn this guy jumped on me and demanded petting!

PETTING!

A goat!!

Here he is, now let’s make him famous just because he’s so cool.

Perhaps it’s not the best of ideas to talk about one’s recreational drug experiences publicly, but everyone who reads this blog is a junkie anyway so it doesn’t matter. (ie. they’re caffeine drinkers! *gasp*)

So last night I gave my first ever proper try to psychoactive substances – namely shrooms – and kicked off my psychonaut carrier with a boom. Since I don’t know how much I actually took, I’ll just describe some of the experiences that stuck in my mind and perhaps someone can tell me what happened.

Before you get too excited, there were no religious revelations, no openings of the mind and I most certainly didn’t start climbing down any rabbit holes. But by god was it fucking amazingly awesome fun!

1. A lot of the experience felt like it wasn’t happening in real time, but more like I was remembering it from a distant future – this happens to me almost every time I’m intoxicated though, the shrooms perhaps just intensified the whole experience.
2. Time stopped. This might have been just because somebody put a large stopped clock in the middle of the room, but nevertheless it was exactly like we were all stuck in a time bubble and it would be 10:37 for all eternity.
3. Perceived paralysis – don’t know what exactly caused this, but most of the time I couldn’t feel my extremities and felt quite odd from the waist down. This might be my deep phobia of paralysis popping up – but I didn’t perceive it as frightening, just as bloody exciting.
4. Perspective distortion – this was quite … odd … everything was in a strange perspective and just plain wrong. It didn’t make sense and as a result I felt very strong vertigo whenever I tried to do anything.
5. We are world – perhaps the most emotional sensation from the whole trip. Simply put I felt like I was always in a world of my own, or sometimes “our” own. When I went to get a drink, the faucet pulled me in and the sink felt like the whole world, like there is nothing else. Basically, whenever my visual surroundings changed it felt like the whole world became those surroundings.
6. Extreme naivety – this was of course closely followed with extreme naivety. When somebody said that we’re in a mountain cabin, I was convinced, downright certain of it, that just on the other side of the door there was at least a meter of snow keeping us inside.
7. A bit of paranoia – I’m often a fairly paranoid individual when I get into a bad train of thought, but this was different because it was backed by some pretty solid fears. Like when people made funny and sarcastic remarks of some sort I felt like bashing their head in and shouting Don’t tell me this things! Not now!
8. But the worst was perceived incontinence – of course this ties into paralysis and paranoia, but I swear perceiving my legs’ warmth as something external and having wet socks from the leak  in the bathroom made me feel like I was constantly pissing all over myself. Luckily in the morning I didn’t find any evidence to back this perception. Phew.



Image by Getty Images via Daylife

9. Synesthesia – this was definitely the most fun. We were watching a movie and after a random comment from someone I discovered, to my surprise, that I wasn’t perceiving room temperature as a physical effect in my body, but rather as the colour hue of the movie. So when I was hot the movie was blazing red and when I was cold it was frozen blue. Quite funky.
10. Complete and utter sensual overload – it sucked a bit to be forced into leaving the party just because I vomited a few times – knowing the very early physical symptoms of imminent vomiting was SO helpful, thank you House MD – but I just couldn’t take it anymore. There was too much everything. Too many sounds, too much music, too much television. Everything was moving in strange directions and being funky … like for example the edges of items buzzing around into a blur. Wtf was that.
11. Pretty fractals – when I got home into a calm, dark and quiet environment and went to sleep all was well. There were many patterns and weird things flying around to keep me company and I could still hear the music.
12. Sleep confusion – now granted I’ve often had this happen without being on drugs, but it’s still fun when it happens because of drugs as well. It’s the strange feeling when you notice your body falling asleep, but your brain does not. The sleep paralysis is a bit scary, but it’s still quite a lovely feeling. You’re both asleep and awake. Mindboggling!

There we are, that’s all of the experiences I can remember to write down. This list is going to be valuable to me in the future to help me kickstart these memories against because I don’t intend on doing psychonautics too often. Expensive and time consuming – two things I can’t afford.

PS: no hangover whatsover. Such, perfect, utter clarity the moment I woke up this morning at 3pm.

PPS: psychonautics are far more fun than sex … and I’m known far and wide as a total perv.

Last night I went to see A Clockwork Orange at the playhouse and it was just a thing of joy. Shit was so cash.

No seriously, everybody who has ever even thought about doing far out things that bend the mind and touch you deeply and truly. I don’t think I’ve ever been this affected by a theatre performance before. It was weird. It was strange. It was fucking brilliant.

Such perfect captivation of the story, so amazingly performed. Half the time I was afraid they might actually start pounding away at the audience and doing all manner of strange things to us. And half the mind I was just left with a giant WTFLOL in my head. And then there were times when it was so mindboggling, so sick, so perverted it was painful to watch.

If you can possibly find the time, if you can spare the few euro it takes, fucking go see this show. You shan’t regret it; hat’s off to Mladinsko Gledalisce.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a deep urge to go fuck somebody up with a stick.

Eventually covering about 15 square meters of whiteboard in squiggly lines and weird characters and all sorts of stuff that I probably shouldn’t explain in too great a detail publicly. Let it suffice to say that I believe to have solved the problem of translating machine vocabulary to personalised user vocabulary.

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Children of Men is a bloody brilliant movie that the above trailer doesn’t quite do justice. It is quite simply the best dystopian/post-apocalyptic story my brain has ever had the pleasure of listening to.

The story revolves around the idea of what would happen if the whole world turned to shit, humanity was doomed and only England of all places, remained standing against the onslaught of shite. The best part is that the whole sequence of events and what exactly is going on is never quite explained. We’re told that the world started going fuckwards because of some sort of flu pandemic in 2008 – note the movie was made in 2006 and we had a bird flu scare in 2008 – and then in 2009 all women went sterile … this luckily hasn’t happend IRL yet.

Well the movie goes on 18 years after humans couldn’t make babies anymore. Inexplicably there is a civil war setting up about the rights of immigrants and the whole British government is being very Orwellian in operation. Interestingly, they’re becoming more and more Orwellian in real life as well.

Children of Men, next to the the awesome story, also features  very good cinematography and a neo-hippie – played by Michael Caine – who smokes a lot of weed and is a bloody awesome chap. But most of all, it is one of the scariest non-horror movies I’ve ever seen simply because it’s so fucking realistic you can almost touch it.

Everything, bloody everything, could become true in the next few decades.

In short … it was fucking awesome! This is the first movie in 15 years that I am willing to pay for again and probably will. Sometime this week. Yep, I’ve always liked watching movies I like several times in rapid succession – this one however I can’t do justice with my rig at home. So the moving pictures it is!

Because I want each and everyone of you to go see this masterpiece I will not tell you anything about the story, but here are some tidbits that I believe make it more than just your usual blockbuster effects pornography.

1. There is a very good story that ties the whole movie together, albeit extremely cliche, it still throws a glove at the face of modern culture and blahblah. No story talk!
2. So. Much. Eye-porn! Love love love! It was like Angelina Jolie, Liz Hurley and Scarlet Johansson having sex with my eyes simultaneously for three hours.
3. Very fucking awesome scenography! You know those incredibly artistic comics you see in Flight and other proper art books? Well this was just like that, except in a movie! A fucking movie! I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was quite beyond words.
4. The details! Oh gawd the details. How often do you see a movie where scenes shot from within a glass canopy of any sort actually show the glass? That’s right, none. Until now.
5. The world made sense. This is very rare in fantasy these days, but the world made very much fucking sense. The animals looked right, even the topography and fauna looked proper and correct. It felt like properly exploring a foreign planet, not like somebody was pulling ideas out of their arse.
6. The blue people had a language. Now maybe I’m just a language geek, but it fills me with great delight to see that an artist went through the pain of creating a proper language instead of just stringing random words together … although it did sound a lot like a derivative of Quenya.

Now, there were a few annoying little tidbits that felt somewhat … off.

Like for example, if every animal on the world has three limbs, why do the humanoid peoples only have four? Doesn’t make sense.

Or … uhm … why did the animals feel so derivative of Earth animals? You have this wonderful opportunity to create something awesome, and you do, but why the fuck do you make my mind go “Well that’s a Rhino equivalent” … “and that’s a dog” … “oh look, a hyenna” and so forth? Don’t do that. Making animals that are awesomely designed, but then almost neglecting their behaviour … tsk tsk.

All in all, the movie is a definite thumbs up. All f0our thumbs!

Lovely.

Bullshit!

The real reason students love this time of year is that finally there are no classes, no tutorials, no whatevers – it’s just free time where you can actually get some work done without everyone getting in your damn way.

Of course there are many who disagree with me and actually do take it easy over the holidays, but most of them don’t strain themselves very much anyway. For them, and those of us who like to work during holidays, here’s a few special comics describing just what the professors think winter break is for.

So what are you doing over the holidays?

There is something specially tragic about sexy people leaving this world. There was a big humbug when James Dean died, there was an outrage Jim Morrison died, there was an uproar when Hendrix passed and there was a whole lot of baawwing all over the interwebs when mr. Heath Ledger died last year and today we’ve lost another downright sexy person – Brittany Murphy.

She isn’t likely to reach such instant extents of fame and notoriety and legendary proportions of personality as the rest of them did … probably because she’s a woman or perhaps just because she wasn’t quite as famous … but she was nontheless incredibly sexy and gorgeous and by god I wish she did some porn.

I must admit I have no idea why we take such big notice when beautiful people die – perhaps it’s just our internal reaction to feeling the sexiness of the world slipping between our fingers. We want the world to be a sexy place and we so rarely contribute anything to the amount of sexy out there that it just strikes us very intimately, very personally, when the sexy is reduced.

They also all seem to go in such dubious circumstances, I’d go in more detail but I couldn’t do it much justice because I’m not a conspiracy theorist at heart … certainly someone else can do a better job. Why do you think they all go so very young and under such strange circumstances?

Upon second time meeting a person their questions about the card suddenly become hey didn’t you have a different card last time? Well yeah, I do change it every day dude …

This quickly becomes, well why the fuck do you keep changing it? How the fuck do you pick? Blahblahblah.

So here’s the answer guys, this is how I choose my card every day and all the considerations that go into the selection.

First and foremost – simplicity uber alles! The simpler and less complex the card is, the more likely it is to end up on my hat. This also means that only hearts and spades get chosen. Diamonds are too pointy and weird, and that other thingy I don’t even know the name of in english, is just too complex and convoluted a symbol. Euch!

Secondly, the colour of the card alternates between days. If the prior day had a spade, next day it will be a heart and so on. I also try my best not to wear the same card twice in a week because that’s just silly.

Thirdly, if the hat hasn’t been worn all day and is being put on just for a party or some other social event – the joker is chosen. It used to be that I had a nudie card stuck between the normal card at all times and then would swap them for social events (it’s ‘bad luck‘ to change cards twice in a day). But I lost that one.

The rest is completely random. So you could say my subconscious mind picks a card according to the weights I’ve put in place. Now, some people say this is a terribly bad answer because it doesn’t tell a story. But it does, it tells a great story.

You’ll notice that most of the world’s religions, belief structures and pretty much everything humans ever do in life, is governed by randomness. We call them acts of god, faith, yada yada, but at their core, they are simply events so damn random human minds can’t wrap around them so they pull a reason out of thin air to feel a bit better about it. We don’t like thinking things are random, we want to feel there is at least some structure … somewhere … somehow.

But I reject that! I embrace randomness! I love randomness! Randomness is king!

And that’s why the card is random. The weights give selections a bit of a pattern, but mostly it’s very random.

Now stop asking me.

Last night I was discussing goth music with a mate and somehow the debate turned into my showing him around what goth music was in the first place. Blahblahblah.

This eventually led to my showing him Velvet Acid Christ, which I still don’t know whether they’re goth or industrial. And then I showed him a certain song. It triggered memories, many memories.

Particularly the whole story of how I discovered Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hunter Thompson in general – two of the biggest influences on my life and my art and pretty much everything I’ve ever done since reading the book, watching the movie and becoming a raging fan.

It all started out when I was a wee lad of 15-ish and listening to an internet radio – its name eludes my memory – that played a certain song a whole lot. It contained clips like Oh god, did you eat all this acid? That’s right, you see! and uhm … This is not a good town for psychadelic drugs, extremely menacing vibrations were all around us.

Back then I was quite a regular and chatted a lot with the DJ’s, yes it was a fucking awesome radio, and eventually this meant I asked what the song was and whether it was any particular mix they themselves created.

This is how I discovered Velvet Acid Christ.

So I listened to their music some more and god knows when, I finally decided to look up these sound clips and figure out where they were from.

This is how I discovered Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the movie.

Watching the movie had an instant effect of making a raging drug lover out of me. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to get my greedy little paws on most of the stuff I’ve wanted to try … have been hunting passively for acid for gawd knows how many years now … but I did try ether that I’ve made myself. The effects truly are just like the movie describes, it’s bloody fun too!

Anyhow, eventually I decided to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the book.

Fucking brilliant stuff! My writing style has never been the same again and it only cemented my dire desire to get into psychadelic drugs as soon as I possibly can … I still haven’t. For shame.

The fucking suck part of wanting to do psychadelic drugs is that we’re not in the 60’s anymore and everybody just wants to get stoned and drunk and dance for a little longer than usual. Bleh. I want to have fun! But this is really another story, which says more about my lack of connections to the drug world than anything else.

Since as far back as my memory goes I’ve been using Apache for my main, primary, and absolutely only webserver. It was the workhorse of everything from dev environments to production machines serving tens of pages.

But throughout this love affair there was one constant – I had to change things.

This isn’t bad. Of course when you first start using mod_rewrite you’re going to have to change things and naturally adding a new website on a new domain means changing a few things. No problem here, all natural.

But still, there was a certain feeling that rose up in me like a mad urge, a feeling of endless power and proportion, a feeling like, hey, I’ve had sex with this woman a few times, and I quite like it, but there’s something missing something isn’t quite right, why can’t I watch a good movie instead of having this sex thing?

That’s right, it was the Sense of Impending Doom. Because you see dearies, whenever you have to make a small change in the apache configs a small part of your soul dies. You know it’s supposed to be a small change, you know it’s supposed to be effortless, but despite having done this countless times, you still waste an hour making everything work.

This Saturday I finally stomped my foot like a little school girl and said ENOUGH! Then I installed nginx.

It was a bit daunting at first and I may still not know how to pronounce the name, but I love it. The damn thing is sooper fast and when I had to add a config for a new site … hah! Took three lines of code, sure it was only for serving static files, but the same thing in apache takes a separate file, then a vhost, then blahlbah. Fuck you!

Here’s an example, come on, would you see anything so sleek and awesome under Apache? Ever?

server {
                listen localhost:80;
                server_name lestat;

                root /var/www;
                index index.html;
        }

Now obviously I don’t know how to do fancy rewrites and stuff yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, I think nginx and Swizec are a match made in heaven for the foreseeable future.

So there you go @robertbasic, @genom, @loudandwicked, @jaspertandy … a blog post about the change.

PS: about versatility and such that @genom mentioned, I haven’t a bloody clue (yet)

PS2: apologies to everyone I mentioned in the post and didn’t link to, Zemanta didn’t suggest the links and I’m too lazy to do them manugally.

Anyhow, my second big love was CAD, which I’ve been reading to this day. Sometime during the whole affair I was quite popular on their forum, then a certain revolt happened, which I magically survived and then I got banned a few months later … oh well. But I loved that forum, learned a lot about painting there.

It would seem that there are even more comics that I used to read, but don’t read anymore, than there are comics I do read. There are such marvels as Pewfell, the Dreamwalker Chronicles and Lackadaisy – in all the bookmarks folder for webcomics holds 58 different links. Out of those I only read twelve today, with a few new ones still in the buffer for me to go through the archives. So in no particular order:

Ctrl-Alt-Del

AppleGeeks

Bardsworth

Bunny

Commissioned

Girl Genius

Not Invented Here

PHD Comics

Sheldon Comic

Wulffmorgenthaler

Johnny Wander

Lackadaisy

Two honourable mentions also go to Copper, which should really start updating again, and Ugly Hill, which ended, but @paulsouthworth awesomely went on to do Not Invented Here.

Sadly, most of the comics I stopped reading lost my attention due to my simply forgetting to click the bookmark for a while. Henceforth this is remedied because I have resolved to continue reading only through RSS. Life is too hectic even if the only really proper way to enjoy a webcomic is by going to the home page.

PS: of course there is also XKCD, but I refuse to even bookmark that one. There’s a special charm in entering the URL by hand every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.