Socially Retarded

I've known for quite a while that I'm pretty retarded when it comes to social situations/behaviors. I don't know how to interact with other people - I don't know common social etiquette.

I like most people and I prefer to generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But I think that I come off as a jerk a lot when I'm just not sure how I'm supposed to act or what to say - so I don't do or say anything and I avoid looking directly at people.

Sometimes I'm in a good mood - my self-confidence is up or something and I'm able to interact somewhat normally with people (strangers, etc) in social situations. But I'll still get paranoid about doing or saying the wrong thing.

This doesn't happen so much with relatives and friends I've known for a long time, but I often act rather distant even with these people.

I've been in Wyoming for a few weeks now and I don't get any reception with my cell phone. I knew that people were likely trying to call me, but I didn't check my messages until today and it seems that a few people are a bit concerned about me. I still haven't called them back. I'm not trying to avoid them, I'm just not good at keeping in touch with people I guess.

It's normal for me to go for months without speaking to members of my immediate family - not because we are at odds or anything, just because none of us are very good at keeping in touch.

I guess my advice to these people is to email me - I check my email pretty much every day and I find it easier to communicate through email than over the phone.

The Nature of Software revisited

This is what I'm talking about. It's a1988 paper by Edsger Dijkstra - kind of a revolutionary in the field of software design. This paper was so revolutionary that it has mostly been ignored by universities and businesses involved in software development. But it says part of what I was trying to say in the earlier post.

Yes - I did read the entire thing. No - I did not read it before writing the earlier post.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the paper

"Water Lilies" by Phil Marley

I think that this is the best picture I've ever taken - I'll have to get some prints of it.

The Nature of Software

The nature of computer software is quite unique. It is not directly analogous to anything in the realm of human understanding. People try to equate it with physical objects - "software is like the engine of a car", or with other forms of information - "software is like literature".

It's quite dissimilar to a car's engine - the computer processor would more closely fit that analogy.

Software is not a physical object - it can very easily and very cheaply be copied, stored, and exchanged - it is essentially pure information.

But it is unlike other forms of information in its purpose and use. It is not like literature because its primary purpose is not to be read by people it is not purely linear like a book - it's not read from beginning to end. In this way it also differs from music and video. Although in this category of information it is quite similar to sheet music which is a set of instructions for a musician or group of musicians to produce a piece of music - but is still linear.

Software is its own animal altogether and in order to understand it properly, we need to see it as such rather than simplifying it with improper analogies.

16 penny nail in the brain

We're using pneumatic nail guns to frame this house that I'm helping to build (I got a job building a couple of houses). And it got me thinking about what would happen if I took a nail in the head - it's really easy for a nail to become a projectile when the gun double shoots, hitting the edge of a board or glances off a knot. My boss did this (the double shot on the edge one) while he was showing me how he wanted a wall put together and the trajectory of the nail ran very near to his truck. I made a joke about checking his tires and we kept working - but I try to stay out of the ballistic path of all nail guns. I did have my hand punctured by a 16 penny framing nail in this manner (the glanced off a knot one). That was about 6 years ago, but you never forget a thing like that.

So throughout the last few days I've been contemplating the possibility of taking a 16 penny nail to the head. It's unlikely that it would kill you, but it would most likely cause some brain damage. So I've been thinking about the possiblility of living with brain damage. And I realized that it probably wouldn't be that bad - maybe some memory loss, the loss of some motor skill, or the loss of some verbal skill - I'd manage. Initially there'd be some pain involved, but this would heal. I have no lasting effects from the nail in my hand and it didn't hurt very much. I didn't even use any of the pain killers that the doctor prescribed. At first I didn't feel it at all - I was looking around to see where the nail had gone because I could see that it wasn't in the board. I saw it in my hand before I felt it. I imagine that getting one in the head wouldn't be any worse than getting hit in the head with an airsoft gun or something.

What would be really bad would be cutting myself with a circular saw - taking a thumb off or something.

Military time.

I have a cheap casio digital watch that looks like it's from the 80's or something. I have a laptop computer running the Gentoo distro of the GNU/Linux operating system.

Skip the indented parts

I set the watch by the time on my cell phone and it doesn't drift much - so I trust that it is pretty accurate. The time on the laptop was off by about 20 minutes - I'm not sure why, but I think that it might have something to do with thermal overload and the processor's method of handling this (throttling back to reduce power usage and heat output) which the OS might not be configured to handle correctly. Linux doesn't use the hardware clock while it is running - it reads from it at boot and then keeps track of the time on its own - then it (optionally) resets the hardware clock at shutdown. If the processor clockrate changes and linux isn't fully aware of this then the time could potentially get messed up. I think this might be what happened.

Or I might have simply set the clock to the wrong time when I reset it to MST because I was guessing.

So I had to fix the time. The linux date command, which sets the time and date, takes the time in military time format.

I glanced at my watch to see what time it is - it's 7:10. Now to convert this to military time... hmm add 12... it's 19:10 - I had to do this all in my head and, being a bit distracted and stressed from work and all, it took me a second.

date 0914191006

that's the command I then issued the format is MMDDhhmmYY (month day hour minute year)

Two minutes later, I glanced at my watch - it had been set to military time! I had subconsciously converted from military time to normal time only to have to convert back for the date command.

My watch has a button on the side closer to my hand that switches from military time to normal time - I'm always hitting this button accidentally, so I've developed the ability to convert to normal time subconsciously. I guess I haven't developed the ability to perform the referse conversion subconsciously

My brain is fried

I was working in the sun all day today and didn't have enough water. My brain is totally fried.

I'm using two computers with one mouse/keyboard (by way of synergy) - and I keep getting confused over which computer is performing a particular task (chatting, forum reading/posting, playing music, etc). I keep moving to the wrong screen for a thing.

I'm also trying to switch firefox tabs on the window manager's task bar

- I need to get some water, food, and sleep.

Frightened by the **AA

Here's a blog for just about anybody who uses his/her computer to view/listen to any sort of digital media or is connected to the internet in any way. Those bastards might come after you - they don't care if you've actually illegally obtained any digital media - they just want to scare you into paying them off.

nerd test

Sorry - I didn't try to max it out - really. I only cheated a little.