So I was thinking, for the longest of times I’ve been wanting to do a whole bunch of things …

… and I never quite get around to doing them.

Fuck. This. Shit.

This year, I make a list and I fucking clear it by the time I’m 30. There is no sense in living if you aren’t having way over the top fun with it.

Also making a list, publicly posting it and putting a deadline on it is a sure fire way to have a really really really really crappy 30th birthday when you inevitably realise that you’ve done way too few of these things and have just run out of soup.

1. Bungee jump
2. Canyoning
3. Solo sky dive from plane
4. BASE jump the fjords
5. Flying suit BASE jump the fjords
6. Jump off a few other things with a flying suit
7. Climb Triglav
8. Climb Everest
9. Drive at least one official european rally race
10. Drive and finish the desert oldsmobile rally (I keep forgetting the name)
11. Ride the trans-siberian railway
12. Learn to do a no handed endo
13. Perform a double tailwhip with a mountain bike
14. Come to a board meeting with a parachute through the window

Noticed a pattern?

Well I’ve got 8 (although I like to pretend it’s 9) years to do all of this. Will happily take suggestions for things I haven’t thought of.

EDIT:

Oh and 15: Learn to ride a unicycle

I can only wish that it were mine

To the entire Black race living in America, we, the Adamic, pink complexioned race (better known to you as the White race) that came to these shores from Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland, apologize for freeing you from slavery by fighting a horrible war among ourselves that cost the lives of almost two million of our own race. We apologize for continuing to fight among ourselves over that very issue, even though you’ve never told us you appreciate our freeing you.
We apologize for splitting to pieces our entire race the world over to take sides with you to help you survive and become a freer race. We apologize for forcing the rest of the world to outlaw the slavery which your ancestors had practiced for thousands of years, even though many nations on your home continent still practice it today.
We apologize for thinking we could civilize you when you have proven that it is indeed an impossible feat, a feat beyond anything we could have ever imagined.
We apologize for teaching you to add and subtract (what little you can), thereby enabling you to run a household and pay your bills (what few you will) and count your children other than on your fingers and sometimes toes when you have so many you run out of fingers.
We apologize for providing you with medical care instead of leaving you under the witch doctors you used before we arrived, as a result of which you have been able to survive all sorts of diseases to multiply in massive numbers beyond what you could have without these aides.
We apologize for building schools for you which we have had to repair over and over after you vandalized them beyond use. We apologize for inventing computers and the Internet, neither of which you use very much, but when you do use them it’s mostly to bash our race.
We apologize for building factories and businesses that employ you, if you so desire to work. We apologize for creating millions of bureaucratic jobs within our government system simply to give you employment, instead of leaving you to find work on your own.
We apologize for promoting and buying your music, although you refuse to buy ours. We apologize for talking and acting as you do, although you refuse to talk and act as we do.
We apologize for placing you in our movies and TV shows and elevating you to a fictional, heroic level that you have never reached in real life. We apologize for creating this false image of yourselves in your minds, for we realize after 400 years of trying to help you that you cannot solve problems and provide leadership and create original thoughts; and the image we’ve placed in your minds causes you to live in a delusional world. For that we truly apologize.
We apologize for creating quota systems and forced employment programs to make sure you have the best jobs, if you so desire to work. We apologize for thinking we could educate you so that you could learn to build and help others, when you obviously have only the ability to tear down and take from others.
We apologize for giving you welfare and food stamps, with the result that for four generations over half of your race has not had to work, except in makesift type of jobs in our governments and bureaucracies.
We apologize for promoting your children in school as if they could understand basic arithmetic and grammar, such as multiplication and past participles, when we should have made sure they were accustomed to manual labor so that we would not have had to make up jobs for them in our governments dusting seats with their butts.
We apologize for developing farms in our own lands which you have never been able to do, and that to this day feed most of your race still living in Africa. We apologize for coming to Africa and building farms, from which you have now run us off of and have devastated beyond use, forcing us to continue feeding you.
We apologize for creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and U.S. Government Foreign Aid Programs and hundreds of charities that funnel billions of our tax dollars and charitable donations to nations around the world run by your race, all because your race cannot take care of itself by itself anywhere you live.
We apologize for giving you the right to vote so you could take over all our major cities and turn them into high-taxed, crime-ridden cess pools that no civilized human being can live in.
We apologize for creating the term “reverend,” which your leaders use to give themselves credentials and which their actions have denigrated beyond repair, with the result that no decent person would call himself “reverend,” much less a Christian
We apologize for trying to come up with an AIDS vaccine to stop the epidemic spread of AIDS in Africa, AIDS being a disease that you created and passed on to us after having sexual intercourse with monkeys and then with one of our idiotic race-mixers who then passed it on to the rest of the world.
We apologize for providing you with warm, custom-made garments instead of the animal skins and leaves that you wore before we arrived. We apologize for providing you with shoes instead of leaving you barefooted as you were before we arrived in Africa.
We apologize for teaching you how to clean yourselves and your homes, and how to sanitize the water you drink to keep you from getting even more dreadful diseases than the rest of your race gets that still lives in Africa. We apologize for teaching you to cook your foods, which keeps you from getting the hundreds of parasitic diseases that your race gets that still lives on your home continent of Africa.
We apologize for providing you with solidly built, heated, and cooled homes with grass yards instead of the straw huts and dirt yards you were living in before we arrived, and in which most of your race is still living in in Africa.
We apologize for inventing sports so that you can make millions of dollars and live like kings, then kill and rape people with impunity, as O.J. Heisman-Trophy-Winner Simpson and Mike Heavy-Weight-Champion-of-the-World Tyson have done, as well as many others among your race.
We apologize for producing such beautiful people for you to race-mix with, and if they won’t voluntarily mix, you often casually rape them as if you were eating a piece of fried chicken.
We apologize for building thousands of prisons around the nation to house dangerous criminals, of which your race makes up over sixty percent even though you’re only thirteen percent of the U.S. population, and this at an expense of billions of dollars and manpower every year.
We apologize for taking precious metals from the earth on your home continent of Africa, metals which you neither knew were there nor how to use them if you had known they were there, but which you love to puncture and cover your bodies with in the most tawdry way imaginable.
We apologize for those among us who have established charitable organizations, donated billions of dollars and hours of time, and have devoted their entire lives to make life easier and better for your race, although most often to no positive result.
We apologize for all the stupid White ministers whom your race has martyred in Africa where they were trying to evangelize you to a faith that you can’t understand nor do you want to; yet when you claim to join it soon pervert it with the Voodooistic concepts you have inherited from your forefathers.
We apologize for building highways and railroads and for inventing flying machines that you could never have invented but which you use everyday to move about, yet without thinking or appreciating their origins in the least.
We apologize for paying the majority of both federal and state taxes, to maintain the governments which protect and promote you but fight against our own people at every turn.
We apologize for some members of our race who worship the monstrosities your genes have created, such as Jacko the Wacko and Little Fruity Richard and Dennis Nutman Rodman and Don Electrified King and Daryl Coke-Head Strawberry and Whitney Whacked-Out-Screaming Houston and Cassius If-Only-I-Be-White-But-I’m-Really-Black Clay and Tiger Adamic-Hater Woods and Whoopi Thinks-She’s-White Goldberg and Oprah Interview-a-Nut New-Age-Goof Winfrey and Ru Triple-Freak Paul and Morgan Act-White-But-Hate-White Freeman and Sammy Convert-To-The-Christ-haters-Religion Davis and Colin Have-A-Black-Pet-In-The-White-House Powell, to name only a few.
We apologize for defeating the major part of the communist threat which cost us several trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, but whose doctrines you still wish to have implemented on the backs of our race to further torture us and tear us down.
We apologize for spending over $2 trillion dollars on welfare and food stamps in the last thirty-five years, funds which your race received the majority of, although you are a small minority among us.
We apologize for introducing you to the rule of law under a republican form of government, a government that has gone abroad to keep your own warring nations from slaughtering other members of your race by the hundreds of thousands as they did year in and year out before we arrived, and still do every time we leave them alone and do not intervene.
We apologize for teaching you to read a language that contains more than a few words and a couple of hand signs, which has allowed you to take part in our philosophies, our culture, our art, our industry, our collegial nature, and our freedom, even though as soon as you get around them you pervert them.
For surely, if you could not read, how could you have learned the teachings of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Sung, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Lenin, Howard Zinn, the Damocrat Party, the Neo-cons in the Republicoward Party, and others who hate our race, and have brainwashed you into believing our race is evil and that you are severely oppressed?
We apologize for placing you under the form of government that our own forefathers died to create, and for which you are helping to destroy, instead of leaving you under the anarchy you lived under before we arrived.
For all these wrongs we’ve carried out against you, we apologize deeply and unreservedly, and if you will please accept our apology, we shall happily and immediately take back all of the above mentioned evils we have cast upon you and return you to your home continent, if you so desire.
We would with the greatest of glee and cheer even provide you with a nice, little stipend for traveling money, if you’d go and take your race-traitor wives and husbands and Mulatto children with you.
We have enjoyed having you here, but because you claim we’ve been, and are still being, so mean to you, we’d like to atone by helping you get back to where you came from.
You could live in peace without our persecuting you anymore, and we could save ourselves trillions of dollars over the next few years by shrinking our governments and emptying our prisons. We could take hundreds of thousands of security guards and police officers around the country off their jobs and put them to more productive use, and we could celebrate our own culture without offending you anymore.
Moreover, we could take the three-point shot and the forty-five second shot clock out of basketball which would return it to a game of plays and strategies, instead of the run and gun show our enemies have tailored especially for you. We could place the “palming penalty” and the “walking penalty” and the “charging penalty” back in to slow the game down to the point that defense and brains matter.
We could place the “bump and run” rule back in football and have referees start calling “offensive pass interference” again, to change the game to one where something more than straight-ahead speed is what matters. The “taunting rule” and the “roughing the quarterback rule” that we had to implement because of you, we could do away with completely, because civility would automatically come back into the game.
The race traitors of our race who hate their own culture and heritage could go with you, and we won’t offend them anymore either. For after a few generations of mixing with your race they would disappear into the dark tar-mix which your dominant design-genes make up.
What say? Do you accept our apology? Do we have a deal? Please let us know, soon!

That is correct, the exam season is upon us once again.

It’s going to be a hellish few weeks and I’m already dreading climbing out of bed each and every day respectfully. Horrible horrible times are afoot.

This week I’m facing two midterms, one somewhat long paper and having to defend my homework before scrutiny. Next week it’s three rather not very easy exams. Yikes!

And then nobody knows! I fully expect the one exam that’s scheduled and the three oral exams partaining to the exams that are next week. Hoorah!

Oh well, the exam season will behave like the drunk daddy in a particular song methinks.

Strah in groza v Las Vegasu Ljubljani.

Približno tako je danes zgledalo, oz. vsaj zvenelo na twitterju.

Kaotično. Zmedeno. Prijetno brez cilja in vsake logike.

Imeli smo študentske demonstracije proti opresiji nadgroznega državnega aparata!

A demonstrirali so pijani dijaki.

Imeli smo študentske demonstracije za pravo študentsko stvar!

A skup niso spravili niti sence kakega manifesta.

Imeli smo bitko in sekla bridka so se jekla proti zlobnim policistom!

A vsi so se poskrili že po dobri uri.

Imeli smo razbijanje in divjanje po ulicah, da se nas vidi! Da povemo svoje!

A par ur zatem so posledice le na 10 metrih pred parlamentom, drugje niti smeti več ni.

Imeli smo zavzemanje nadsuper študentskih organizacij za študentsko stvar!

A študentje se že jezno zbirajo in zahtevajo ukinitev ŠOS in ŠOU.

…

Jah, takle mamo, študentsko gibanje je le še senca tega kar smo imeli v 70ih. Sicer nisem bil zraven, ampak Zasedba Filozofske Fakultete je bilo tako epska, da še zdaj stari Ljubljančani govorijo o tem. Takrat … to je bilo tisto pravo, tako se te stvari delajo.

Ne pa zdaj, neka na pol mafijska organizacija, ki parazitira ljudi katere naj bi ščitila organizira proteste samo in izključno takrat kadar nekdo stopi na prste njenega denarja. Pa čeprav se vsi študentje strinjajo ali pa jim celo dol visi. Potem je pa treba pijano drhal dijaško nahujskat in jo spravit na ceste, da ne bi slučajno bilo preveč očitno za koga dejansko so demonstracije. Ja tako je, po pričevanjih očividcev so bili edini študentje na demonstracijah organizatorji in nekaj lolekov s FDV-ja.

Takrat ko so nam pa bone dražili in so jokali in pizdili res vsi študentje kar jih poznam, takrat pa nič. O ne, to pa ne bomo protestirali, še malo bomo probali skrit vso zadevo.

Ampak priznam, malo sem pa vseeno ponosen na današnje dogajanje. Cel dopoldan sem se spraševal kaj bi bilo potrebno da sprožimo nekaj pravega, nekaj kar bo vsaj na daleč zgledalo, kot da imamo kaj povedat:

Najprej je zgledalo zelo klavrno. Mislim, jao, demonstracije proti državi so se začele popoldan, zato ker za dopoldan niso dobili dovoljenja od države. Wtf? No saj, potem ko se je pa zares začelo dogajat je pa organizator namesto, da bi podprl svoje lutke, stisnil rep med noge in se “distanciral od nasilja”.

Pa vseeno, dobili smo tole:

Nahujskani dijački, ki sami zase ne vejo zakaj so tam. “kdor ne skače ni slovenc” … čaki kaj? Zakaj že demonstrirate in se tepete s prašiči? Al ste morebiti na fuzbal tekmi?

No saj, resnost izgredov se vidi že v tem kako dolgo so trajali in kako daleč so se razširili. Bojim se da Kresalka vseeno ne bo mogla upravičit nakupa tiste vodne pištolce …

Kakorkoli, ponosen sem na študentsko organizacijo in predvsem na svoje kolege študente -

Dobili smo iskro potrebno za upor proti ŠOU/ŠOS, izkoristimo jo do konca!

Because this is a local topic the post is in slovene, apologies to both my international readers.

Zadnje dni ŠOU že kar malo precej najeda z vso propagando okoli malega dela in kako je to oh in sploh konec sveta, pa da sploh ne omenimo ubogih študentekov kako, da ga bomo nasrkali in ne bomo niti za kavico več imeli.

Pa pustimo, da študent sploh ne rabi kavice ampak se na faksu kaj naučit pa zraven en malo štipendije za knjige in kak sendvič.

Ok priznam, odkar sem na faksu še ni minil mesec, ko ne bi več časa zapravil za “službo” kot za študijske zadeve – izvzemši seveda izpitna obdobja potem ko sem se pred kakim letom malce spametoval.

A vseeno podpiram in pozdravljam malo delo, čeprav sem direktor malega startupa sestavljenega izključno iz študentarije. Malo delo bo super.

Zakaj?

Ja ker se nič ne bo spremenilo, samo malo se bo povečal obseg kdo vraga lahko dela in tisti ki delajo bodo imeli kako pravico več. Kurba je ko si dva tedna bolan in zato konec mesca ne morš plačat telefona, ali pa greš na malo dopusteka in magično zmanjka vsega denarja.

Zveni zelo viktorijansko mar ne? Mogoče celo ameriško.

Pfuj in pfej. Amerika in viktorijanstvo sta kul samo za nadbogate, študentarija in reveži se v nobenem primeru nimajo kaj preveč fino. Pri nas pa? Jah študent je car …

… in tako naj ostane.

Če znaš dobro delat, kar seveda znaš mar ne, sej te močno srbijo omejitve urnih postavk, to valjda pomeni da zdaj zaslužiš bajno več mar ne? Boš po preračunih z malim delom še vedno lahko zaslužil 6000 eurov na leto. In ja, to ravno pade v tisti minimum, da še ne plačaš davkov.

Osebno sem tista leta ko sem zaslužil več kot 6k gagal ko majmun cele dneve in naredil prekleto malo izpitov.

Kar se pa tiče demonstracij …

Jaz in ŠOU sva opravila. Današnja automagična prijava na nekakšen SMS klub in to da me zdaj kar nekaj spamajo sta bila pika na i. Ne grem se več.

Sem hotel it na demonstracije čist samo tako, za špas, mogoče bi bili pa izgredi in po mojem nisi zares živel dokler nisi bil vsaj enkrat v resnih izgredih – po možnosti v študentskih letih, kasneje ni več fore. Ampak izgredov ne bo, smo preveliki papki.

Ah kje so cajti, ki jih opisujejo stari ljubljančani, ko je študentarija zavojevala fakse in ohromila Ljubljano, da so povedali svoje. Zdaj so demonstracije samo še show in komerciala. Pa kak alkohol več se proda na ta račun.

Disclaimer: I am writing this on my phone while walking to work

Reading a funny comic  on philosophy vs. engineering and a short discourse on twitter has got me to thinking.

Just why is there such a huge divide between engineers and philosophers?

Because philosophers are annoying brats.

Most of it comes from their general inability to actually think, that is to say, consider all the variables.

For example, a philosopher will natter on and on about how a copy of a copy is an original and completely indistinguishable from the original and arguing that it is now magically impossible to tell which came first.

All the while programmers have been copying variables left and right to good use and distinguishing them quite well for over 60 years.

The philosophers still don’t quite know whether a copy is an original or a copy.

Now while I do think philosophy has made some marvelous contributions to our society – like inventing mathematics, most of the time it’s just about being a colossal brat and regurgitating memorised thousands of years of actual thinking to look smart.

Then again, like a guitar, a good way to impress chicks.

Seriously why aren’t there more teachers in the world? What a bunch of charlatans.

But I’m getting ahead of myself in this story.

Last week I was doing a lot of freelancing as a teacher and instructor in the dark arts of programming. There was this kid who desperately wanted to get a passing grade on a test this Wednesday. And there was this guy with a hat who has never in his life done any teaching and has spent all his life adamantly convinced he’s got no patience of such things. But he could do with some money in his pockets.

So the story begins. We had a three hour session almost every day and an even better reward than the easiest lump of money I ever made, was the fact that kid suggested, and seriously meant it, that I should think about becoming a teacher when I “grow up”. It was truly quite marvelous.

And all I did was explain some basic things to him and make him think.

Which brings us to the next question. Why was it that this poor bastard who has spent almost a year at the hands of professional teachers even needed someone to explain to him how a for loop works? How to distill an algorithm out of a problem description? How to … stuff?

I mean, seriously. What the hell!?

They trouble these young dudes with details like variable types, function prototypes and the fact that this thing called Dev-C needs a System(“PAUSE”) at the end.

All the while they don’t even understand that a variable will just keep its value and that this (and loops) is the basic principle behind everything a computer does and that you can change the way a computer does something by tweaking values in variables.

Pretty pathetic if you ask me.

When I was a little dude in that kid’s shoes I hated flowcharts and I hated everything to do with real programming. All I wanted to do was pump out functioning code. But the thing is, far before that there was somebody to instill The Way a Programmer Thinks in my head. I already knew most of the basic stuff.

But for those who don’t understand thinking like a programmer. Who can’t empathise with a computer. They need a different learning method and schools and universities (at least around here) are horrible when it comes to that. All they ever do at school is try teaching you languages before you even learn how to talk.

Ever tried speaking a foreign language right out of the dictionary?

That’s how people try to teach you programming these days.

It sucks and it’s got to change.

Personally I think pupils should be taught to do nothing but programming for at least a year when they start. Then, maybe, they could start getting into coding.

Today I finally figured out how to get sportypal working. Tomorrow I’m testing the hypotesis to make sure it wasn’t a one-time fluke.

The trick is to start it up when you’re home. Then after the warmup walk kill it and open it again. This time GPS connect is instant.

But the true lesson for today is that tracking runs is FUN. I even got a map and everything Sure it looks a bit weird where it decided I was running zigzag through houses and trees and cars and garages and pretty much everything at a sooper speed of 30! kilometers per hour.

But hey, it’s a blackberry not an iPhone (or Android), so I shan’t complain. I’m just glad I can finally use this crap.

Hmmm … for some reason wordpress won’t let me embed the map, so here’s a screenshot.

For the past <all of my life> years I’ve been forced to go hiking now and anon by my nature nutter mum.

Then last year I started contracting the bug and sort of wanted to go a few times.

This year I totally want to go for a good hike at least once a month.

Weird right? Does this mean I’m getting old? Or just that I spend too much time inside?

Whatever it is, yesterday the girlfriend and I went for a lovely hike. The first of the season. The destination was this observation tower thing upon some hill above Vrhnika.

I foursquared when we were there of course

The hike was quite lovely through some woods and such, many birds were chirping and there were no mammals in sight except for some cyclist a dog or two and a few children. There were also some humans.

An hour of walking each way … it hurt a lot more than I thought it would. No soreness today, but it was surprisingly hard yesterday and I felt strangely sleepy as early as midnight. Maybe I’m just not at all in shape yet?

Anyhow, here are two photos of the purdiful view we got from the top of the tower.