A Cute Girl, Part 2

I'm going to skip around here a bit.

In the following March (2001), I suddenly realized that I was looking her in the eye. For some people that may not seem like much, but for me that was huge. I still, to this day, find it difficult to look people in the eye. So to find out that I was looking her in the eye, without forcing myself to do so, was quite surprising. That also helped me to realize that she liked me, because she was looking me in the eye as well.


As a side note, I recently found an email address for her. I doubt I will ever use it, because I fear that by doing so I might be headed toward becoming a stalker. I would rather not ever be in contact with her, than for her to see me as anything other than the nice guy, I'm sure I am.

A Cute Girl, Part 1

I've decided to start writing more personal things here.

So I'm going to write about the girl that I almost asked out for a date.

By the way, I don't realize she likes me until at least march 2001.

At the very beginning of my senior year of high school (2000), I sat down at a table for my first class. Not having anything better to do, I sat there and watched as people entered the room. There was this one girl that walked in that I thought was kinda cute. What surprised me was that she sat down at the same table I was. Later one of her friends sat down next to her, they were the only other people at the table.

Well a couple of weeks into the year, and I find out that the friend wants to sit at another table. Well reluctantly the girl of my dreams follows her to another table, leaving me to be alone at the table. Which as I look back on it, she must have had an interest in me on day one. Because A: she sat down near me, when she had friends at other tables, and B: she was reluctant to leave the table.

The Truth About Tibet

This article The Truth About Tibet reminds me of a PBS documentary. It was trying to track down the heritage of Chinese people that may have had European ancestry, but the Chinese were so threatened by this that all of the skeletons, that presumably were of these people, were decapitated.

Why must the regime of china be so oppressive?

I think that most peaceful people of the world would want the Tibetans to at least have autonomy if they have thought of the issue at all.

Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions

After reading Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions I actually feel a little sorry for GWB, I mean after all he really does seem to be controlled by his own feelings.

Excerpts:

President George W. Bush prides himself on "making tough decisions." But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even psychologically unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker. They are right.


A psychoanalyst would note that he is revealing here that he has been worrying about being his father's son quite a lot.

Preparing for the worst

I just read an IEEE Spectrum article Preparing for the worst about a book "The Next Catastrophe: Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters".

excerpt:

He argues that the problem is being aggravated by the concentration of ­economic and political power, which tends to create targets and increase the magnitude of the disasters should something go wrong. Perrow cites as an example the world’s standardization on Microsoft Windows, which he compares to the dependence on a single crop, a blight on which could threaten the livelihoods of millions of people.

After reading the article I really want to read the book.

Caucus Night

I have been thinking of who I will caucus for tonight. I know it won't be Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton, because I don't think we've come far enough as a country, to elect a colored person or woman, to the presidency.

Bill Richardson seems to be a born leader.
I caucused for John Edwards last time, and I am seriously considering doing it again.
I have liked Joe Biden since I first saw him talk on a news show, and I think he would be an excellent president.

The others seem to me to be 'me too' candidates.


Update I chose to go with John Edwards.

Keyboard Fix

Yesterday I fixed one of my keyboards using window defogger repair compound.

If you ever try this yourself you will want to use masking tape, not scotch tape like I did, it tends to melt.

High Speed Internet

Last Thursday I got our high speed modem up and running.

Depression

For the past few months I have been on an antidepressant for Depression and Social Anxiety Disorder. I am glad to say that I am feeling much more confident, than I have been. I still have problems going out into social situations, but it is getting much better.

Operation Noble Email

Yesterday I went and worked on computers that are destined to be used by family members of those who are on active duty.

I found that what they were spending the most time doing was repetitive, and that could easily be automate with AutoIt3. Today I've been programming with AutoIt3. Trying to get it so that you just put in a CD, and the installation happens automatically. One of the biggest obstacles was getting it so that if the installation program requires a reboot, that the installation can continue once the computer is rebooted.

I did this by having an ini file placed inside of c:\windows which keeps track of what has been done so far. One of the major benefits of this paradigm is that I can have the disk automatically ejected. I also have it so that if someone puts the disk back in, it doesn't try and reinstall any thing, it just ejects the disk.

Operation Noble Email

Games powered from the TV

Today I modified my sisters TV so that she could plug her video games into the TV without needing to keep putting in new batteries.

It consists of a cheap power supply from Radio Shack, and a size M coaxial panel mount connecter, on the Tv side. On the game side there is a cord that is the same length as the RCA connecter cable. On the Tv end of the cable is a size M connecter that goes into the connecter on the Tv. The other end of the cable goes into the game, near where the RCA cable goes into the game.

One of my future projects will have to be modifing it so that it will turn off when the tv is off. I think this will be an easy thing to do, there is an LED that is on only when the tv is on. I have a solid state relay that uses 1.2 volts for the control voltage, which happens to be in the range of voltages for LEDs.

What I don't like about C\C++

I think that most programming errors stem from the computer language that is used. I mean one of the commonest errors is buffer overrun, which is easy to accidently create with C\C++, but can be done in other languages when you use pointers. Also this has caused something I don't like about Operating Systems, that when you give a system subroutine a string there must be a terminating null. When more modern languages store the length of the string with the pointer, which means you can call a function with a section of a string without creating a new string.

Another thing I don't like about the C\C++ language(s) is the necessary usage of macros to work around an inefective language.

The thing that I really don't like about C\C++ is that it is basically the only choice for low level operations.

D + Perl6 = DP6

I am thinking about designing a computer language that has many of the core design decisions of D and Perl6. To come up with a language that would be more statically typed than Perl6, but be able to do some of the dynamically typed tricks of Perl6.

The reason I have thought about this is I have been programming in Perl5 for a while now, and I like the freedom it gives me as a programmer, but nobody would likely use it to create a kernel. I als have been programming in D, which would be great to create a kernel, but I wouldn't want to it to be the language I program on a daily basis.