Madness Dreaming of Normalcy

So I was on Facebook. (I can feel the complete lack of views on this post already.) And I got into words with someone (well.. I wrote the words, they didn't respond back..) about unemployment. The State Governments of a bunch of states have done a lot of things recently to unemployment. Namely, they have mandated that there be restrictions on unemployment based on certain criteria. Some states have reduced the number of weeks that you can receive unemployment. Some have created laws to enforce drug tests on people to receive unemployment. Where I am getting my Info. I... I can't even begin to keep calm about this. Even from a GOP perspective, this is FUBAR. The amount of money that had to be funneled into making these restrictions happen could have been spent trying to make jobs. Or better yet, trying to make peoples lives better on the whole. Instead we get legislation on states trying to diminish the number of people on welfare/unemployment. Hey, I have an idea. If you ...

I am slated to move back to Florida soon. I'm gonna be living with the mom for a little while. (Trying to pay off student loans and such while being in an environment that doesn't require as much money.) So, to this goal I have been cleaning up the apartment. I'm not going to post pictures, because well.. that shit is embarrassing. Like.. Health Hazard embarrassing. Like... a strain of mold grown here might kill Cthulhu embarrassing. (Assuming the dark lord is effected by such things.) But while I was cleaning.. I thought of this humorous tale. Enjoy. [----------------------] The general walked up and down the line of soldiers. Mostly officers stood before him, ground soldiers trying to peak over their heads while staying at attention. They wanted to hear the words of this man who stood so talk and awe inspiring among them, the lowly scrubs who had been on the front lines since this war began. He stopped pacing in front of them suddenly and let lose a smile. "Men...

So in a previous post I know that I talked about not wanting to continue in the calling of being a programmer. And I still think that's 100% true. I don't want to continue being a programmer. But my problem now is being driven by still being a programmer. The truth is I'm bored. I hate the problems that I have to face sometimes as a programmer. No they're not problems of too little wage or the issues of being a wage slave or even some of the work. Some of the work is enjoyable in the same way solving a puzzle or figuring out a riddle is enjoyable. But it's not something I do everyday because it's fun. I do it because I want my paycheck. Something I know should be a driving factor (some would say, the only driving factor) but it's not enough, is it? I do this gig because it pays rather nicely. But I don't enjoy it every day. I don't go out of my way to complete my tasks, working for 12 hours a day doing it. I can sit in front of this computer an...

Maybe it's just me, but I find that when I'm writing whether it be a blog post or a personal project I seem to be unable to articulate my thoughts correct if the music has lyrics to it. So a problem arose in my choices for music: I love things like hip-hop, power metal, and almost all manner of rock, but most of those have lyrics. Then I started listening to Instrumentals. Especially where hip-hop is concerned, instrumentals seem to be a very open form of music. Many hip-hop artists probably started out listening to instrumentals, putting their own rhymes to the music as the beat looped in their head, over and over. I try to harness that creative vibe whenever I listen to an instrumental. Except my goal isn't lyrics. (Well, not always.) My goal is to just flow with the music. My words are produced in rhythm to the beats themselves. This isn't necessarily something that's for everyone. I could understand that. I know people who just can't get into hip-hop f...

WUI. For those who are working from home, happily signing into remote servers or dropping their work everyday into a shared repository, these people get to do what they want when they want. See previous post. But is it unethical for someone under these conditions to work as they please? Put a different way: If I'm drunk at 4pm writing code (or blog posts or writing my current project) I'm not hurting anyone. I'm getting the work done under circumstances that may be completely ideal. I get to bring up my BAC so I can relax, get stuff done, making connects that I might not have made sober. But all in all... is it ethical? moral? is it ok? Whose permission am I seeking? Isn't freedom the ability to make my own calls? to make my own mistakes? And yet here I am wondering about the ethicalness of drinking on the job. I mean, I write drunk. I'm pretty inebriated right now as I write this. But who can really say that I'm not working my best? Is that me? Am I the...

Just before waking up I had two really weird thoughts. One was that I had millions of dollars to do with as I pleased. The other was something about.. pheromones and taking a piss.. but the first one was slightly more enjoyable. I dreamt about not having to clean my apartment, I could just throw money at an army of maids and get them to do it. I dreamt about getting to live where I wanted, whenever I wanted. I could visit friends and family whenever. I could use the money to further my career (as either an author or a software developer.. or both.) and I could have all these things. Then a strange thought popped into my head. There was a point when I had millions, and that's when I was playing diablo 3. I had more money than most of my friends had (lucky drop turned into about 6 million gold and I was on cloud nine for a while) And then.. I ended up spending most of it. I realized that.. in order to get more gold I had to invest in myself. I had to use all my resources to ge...

So, I'm not sure how or why, but I decided that for some reason I stopped making updates. I had a shitty birthday and well, I sort of shut people out for the most part. It perhaps wasn't something that I should have done, but I did it anyway. Moving on from that. I've been having strange dreams lately. Not necessarily Lovecraftian style dreams, (I see enough of that during my day dreams.) I see things more along the lines of: I've been diagnosed with cancer and have six months to live. So, naturally, I freak out a bit. But if I had to measure my life in a manner of six months from this point I wouldn't use that six months playing video games and writing software. I'd sell every possession that wasn't nailed down (sans my computer and my writings). Anything I couldn't or wouldn't I would offer to friends, anything that survived would be given to charity. Then, I'd write. I'd write for hours a day every day until the end. I would write wi...

Today is gonna be a short post. It's a tough one for me so, here goes. Today I honor the memory of a dear friend of mine, Timothy Lee Rackley, who four years ago today, at 6:30 A.M. CST (approximately one hour from when I'm writing this) took his own life with a bullet to the brain. In his suicide note he had said that he could not fit in with society or what it required of him. He ended his own life instead of living one of misery and/or torment, self-inflicted or otherwise. Sometimes I envy him. I haven't been feeling well since I got out of bed, today. I feel like shit, I'm going through the motions of my life, but I feel beaten and defeated. I feel that I am not where I'm suppose to be. I feel like I'm making the best choices I can but those choices aren't making me happy. I can't explain it. I've been trying so hard to find out what it is I want for my life, but every time I try it ends in failure and depression. I feel like I don't be...

So, this kinda might be cheating (I wanted to create a space where I wrote just about my thoughts/opinions/dreams/life etc... but, no on lives in a vacuum), but I'm going to post something that a friend on facebook said. For the purposes of this post, I will edit slightly. To whomever broke into [my significant other's] car and stole my [bag] by smashing in the back window: fuck you! The world would be better off if you got shot in the face. I cancelled all my cards before you could use them. Enjoy the 20 bucks in cash you got. This is why I will never vote democrat. If it was up to me all you shit bag piece of shit non contributors to society would just be killed. Fuck you. Karma will get you. Fuck you. Pardon my language.

So I don't want to give an extensive list of who did this technique first. So I'm just going to gloss over all the people who came before and try to focus on the subtle ironies and humor that comes with writers writing for writers. Let's clarify. It's the kind of story that Kurt Vonnegut might've written if he included himself in his own story. The kind of story where he would interact as a writer with his characters (some of them being surrogate characters for himself, he would even go so far as to make them writers as well) and he would see through them as the author sometimes does and his characters would ask things of him and his God like powers. And all the while, people would have their minds blown and enjoy that feeling. And that's good. English professors would dig deep into the book's text finding every subtle nuance with every single word put under the microscope. And that's pretty good. And then there are his fellow authors, his peers, who...

Ah Apple. The pinnacle of usability, ease of computing, and price. For a very long time I thought that apple was the opposite of the old phrase, "You get what you pay for." To which I mean, I was not convinced that such a high price tag was indeed worth the ease that the computer gave. I sat around dealing with the small tricks and hacks I needed in order to get windows to do what I wanted. I just accepted that having a development environment that was sometimes wonky, didn't have the power and flexibility of command-line prompts (like unix/linux) with a clean UI that just made sense. For a long time I sat around and hated Mac, blindly and ignorantly. Then I got a new job as an iOS developer. Naturally, I would have to purchase a Mac in order to work as an iOS developer. So, took the time to grab a Mac book pro and have been using it for two days now. ... Holy fucking hell. I'm fairly certain that there is no better computer for development on the market. The OS...