The story begins with a young boy who had a pair of shoes he loved very much. They were the bestest and most durablest pair of shoes he ever did own.

And they were pretty too! My god, all the female shoes turned their heads as they walked by. The shoes were sporting a lovely black leather body with a red line or two in strategic places, topped off by a magnificent red Fallen logo. The shoe laces were knotted off at the base and survived most of their time being stunk up and walked upon by dirty socks as was the fashion of the time.

The shoes lived life together with the boy through all sorts of haps and mishaps. They were there when he got drunk, they were there when he decided it might be a good thing to do some sporty things like running and stuff. They bared it all!

Resilient little shoes that they were.

There were times when younger, more sexier shoes, almost took their place in the boy’s life. But it never happened, somehow, through some turn of fortune, they always came back to embrace the boy’s feet and make the nasty experience of walking all lovely and comfortable and just like he was floating about on a cushion of air.

But despite all, they were getting old.

There were giant holes gaping from pretty much everywhere. Their posterior was old and battered and nearly mashed up and eaten through like a pack of rabid wolves got their hands on them. Almost every time they made a step they tore through the boy’s socks in an act of defiance as if to scream “HEY I’M FUCKING OLD! I DON’T LIKE WALKING ANYMORE LEAVE ME ALONE!”

And the boy heeded their call and he did decide to buy a new pair very soon. But his mother heard them even more so one day she up and threw them in the trash. Alas, the boy now had not a shoe to put on his feet.

He decided to go for a run despite all. Do it barefoot so to speak.

Now his soles are kind of tender.

The end.

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Tags: Athletic, barefoot, Footwear, Leather, life, Shoe

Ok so today has probably been one of the crappiest days in a very very long time. Nothing spectacular happened, just a bunch of small very very irritating and annoying things, just enough to ruin your mood for a whole week.

Which is awesome since it’s Monday.

Even better, I’m going to London tomorrow and am expected to be all chirpy and awesome.

Because the day can speak for itself, I’m just going to list everything:

1. I got up quite a bit later than I intended.
2. It was cold and incredibly humid outside.
3. By the time I got to uni to have a grade officially noted down, I was dripping sweat.
4. Went to hackerspace to study, made tea.
5. 10 minutes later realised I’d forgotten my calculator at home, went get it.
6. Dripping sweat when got home.
7. This time get in car and go back to hackerspace.
8. Going for calculator took an hour. Made new tea.
9. Ten minutes later classmates called, let’s go study at a random open classroom.
10. It is now almost noon and I’ve only had a few sips of tea.
11. All vending machines at the faculty are out of energy drinks, everyone’s studying.
12. With the last change I’ve got I grab a coke.
13. At 3pm the exam starts and it’s a fucking assrape. I literally felt the professor’s dick go up my arse when I put my eyes on the problem.
14. Struggle through somewhat solving everything.
15. It took so long I couldn’t pick a time/date to go get my grade. Got one that is on a day when I’m in London.
16. Go back to hackerspace to mostly hang out, do some business stuff.
17. Laptop runs out of disk. Quickly empty trash.
18. Emptying trash takes two hours.
19. While emptying trash the only data file for my time logging app where I log pretty much everything I do so I can have an oversee of what I’m doing with my time … goes missing.
20. Fine I’ll just restore it from backups.
21. Mate beats me in almost every single game of Guitar Hero.
22. Get home, start restoring that file from backups.
23. Find out someone had turned Time Machine off on December 6th 2009.
24. Give up. The day is officially horrible. The only way it could get worse is if I magically break my leg while sleeping.

Tags: Business, Energy drink, Food and Drink, life, London, Opportunities

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.

Tags: Hell, life

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.

Tags: food for thought, life

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.

Tags: Education, food for thought, Language, Learning, life, Teacher

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.

Tags: GPS, life, running

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.

Tags: Hiking, life, Outdoors, Recreation

Today I read a nice post about the 6 myths that stand in your way. And there was one that stood out the most

Myth: There is time

Reality: You have less time now than you have ever had. You have less time now than you had an hour ago. You are nearer to your death than you have ever been. Plan thoroughly, but don’t wait too long before taking action.

And then when you remember that Steve Jobs had a speech devoted almost completely to this notion of memento mori.

Hell, the Romans came up with the whole memento mori crap far far ago … I forget how the tradition went, but they used to punch winning generals in the face or something … or was it that a slave was following them through the whole festivity whispering “memento mori” in their ear. Something like that.

Then there’s that tradition in greek weedings (judging from Big Fat Greek Wedding) where the bride is thrown off her chair – just to remind her she’s mortal too.

And way back when some smart poetry geek came up with the idea of Carpe Diem (later transformed to Carpe Noctem and Carpe Pijem, the slovene version). Again basically the same concept!

Then there’s an interesting story I read on a forum once, it happened to a forumite’s cousin or somesuch:

She was a lass, around 23 years of age. Two lovely children, a loving husband, nice house and so on. One day they have a fight over something extremely mundane and boring. She gets pissed off and storms out of the house … only to be mowed down by a truck.

To death.

So yeah, I know as humans we like to think we’re something special, that each and everyone of us is a special little snowflake unique and wonderful in their own right.

Well you’re not. You too will die, today, tomorrow, in an hour, it doesn’t matter.

And nothing of value will be lost!

Nothing!

Nobody will care, absolutely nobody.

I think people often forget these things and spend their whole lives doing boring shit they don’t care about. Stop that!

For the end, a quote from Anthony de Mello:

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up

But that just brings to mind this:

I dunno, just remember that whatever you do, all your life, you’re on the verge of imminent death. Never forget.

Tags: Carpe Diem, Carpe Noctem, Death, food for thought, life, Steve Jobs

This morning just as I was battling with the question of going for a morning run or not I came across this facebook status

<a status I am currently unable to find>

But anyway, it was of something called @runkeeper and a dude reported he just ran 0.00 kilometers.

So why would this matter?

Because it gave me the idea that hey, if I tracked my runs I could get empirical data on what I’m doing and being the geek that I am this would inspire me to run more, harder and oftener.

Yayz! \o/

Then I went looking for this RunKeeper app … well whaddya know, it only exists for iPhones, who cares about you dirty BlackBerry users. You all suck anyway, you never do cool things! (gee I wonder why)

Well, after minutes upon minutes upon minutes upon dirty minutes of looking for something I finally came across an app that supports blackberries in the seedy underbelly of the internet’s shady alleys where drug dealing pederast’s push their wares.

It is called SportyPal.

Hoorah!

I downloaded it, fired it up and went for my run. After half an hour I come back home, look at the app and … why the flying shit is this? The stupid thing didn’t even manage to start getting GPS data during this time. Yep, 30 minutes of running and it didn’t even begin tracking anything.

Then two minutes later it failed with a “I’m sorry”

Tags: BlackBerry, food for thought, Handhelds, life, RunKeeper, Smartphone, SportyPal