I could say all of this to. Just to get it out.
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Feelings and opinions are about as useful as (insert useless thing).
1) Feelings/ opinions, are not dictated by reality. If they were, everyone would feel the same.
2) Feelings/ opinions do not dictate reality. You can be as angry as you want about something but that won’t change it. And just because you hate it, does not actually prove it is a bad thing. Or more relate-ably, just because you love something does not make it a good thing.
I am either too smart or far too stupid for my own good. For the past three (probably more) years, there has been only one thing I have actually wanted. To go to the beach, any beach. In that time, I have gone exactly once, but only because my travels took me to the east coast and I managed to get the people I was with to drive me the 20 minutes to it. I have not gone on my own in the time since my truck died. While I want to go, I can not rationalize spending my very limited resources and time to get there, only to turn around and come right back. So the question is: Is getting myself all the way to the coast just to briefly satisfy some meaningless feeling, worth the added hardship and burden it will place on my resources. I just can’t say that it is. Yet there is something soul crushing about my life. Nothing brings me any joy, life is just a meaningless, endless choir, doing all the stuff I am supposed to do, going through the paces. It would be nice if there was something, anything as a reward for making it through another day, month, year… Spending 300 bucks and 48 hours is not going to make anything better. I would leave and come back, just to be right here where I started, except 300$ and 48 hours poorer. So whats the point. I just wish I had some reason to keep waking up. What it comes down to is either I am too stupid to prioritize the feelings I have, and make decisions based on them, so I resort to using logic. Or I am too smart to get excited about things I can see are pointless in the big picture. Either way, I am broken and that is why I will never be happy.
So to procrastinate doing my math homework. I did math that is not my homework…
This stems from me being suspicious of all the people getting hit by trains around here. Lets just say, if I need to get rid of a body I will be leaving it on the railroad tracks. Each time a person gets hit A) the body is so mangled they often cant tell race or gender from it, so you certainly could not determine that someone had been beaten to or near death shortly before being left on the tracks, B) after someone gets hit, the papers just say ” a person was hit by the train and died. ” end of investigation, end of story. And when drunk people just happen to pass out on the tracks… Honestly, on a six block walk home from the bars, the odds that you are going to pass out dead center on the track instead of somewhere else on your trek seems unlikely. But since no one investigates people who get hit by the train since it is so obvious that they were killed by a train… It would be easy and low risk to drag drunk people onto the tracks just for fun. People around here just get hit by trains. It’s just a thing that happens.. Freaks me out…
Anyway back to my original point, I ran the numbers to see how far away you would have to notice a train coming to be able to get out of the way. Here are the parameters I used:
Train width= 12′ No idea if that is really how wide trains are, I just guessed..
Persons speed getting out of the way= 4 mph I assumed they are slow or only willing to walk out of the way of the oncoming train.
I left the speed of the train as a variable since the train speeds very based on type of train, area, loaded/unloaded etc.
The plot below is the result. The x axis is the speed of the train in mph. The y axis is the number of feet away that you must detect the train to have time to walk out of the way.
x=mph, y=feet
So if the train is going 50mph you must notice it when it comes to within 74.98 feet of you to be able to walk out of the way.
if the train is going 60mph you must notice it when it is 89.98 feet away.
If the train is going 100 mph (not around here) you need to notice it when it is 149.96 feet away.
I feel like I could hear a train rumbling toward me within ~100 feet. Also I would most likely run and or jump out of the way, not walk. So I am still suspicious of all the people who don’t get out of the way.
Anyway, back to homework doing pointless math for no reason other than to waste paper……………….
I was excited to take discrete math. But now I know it is nothing but finding awkward ways to state obvious things.
We are currently doing “proofs” which are a complete joke. The idea of proving something is ok, but when you do it in this class, the process is almost always based on multiple assumptions and premises. So when you get to the end and say you “proved” something, well no you haven’t..
Example:
Lets prove I have a million dollars.
1) Assume I am a millionaire
2) millionaire implies someone has a million dollars
3) thus it follows that I have a million dollars.
The obvious issue is that while you “proved” I have a million dollars, it was all based on an assumption. The proof does not prove anything if its based on an unproven parameter. But in none of these problems do they prove the assumptions are true, they just assume it.
An example from the text book:
prove that the set (A intersect C) is not empty:
assume x is in set A and x is in set C
then x is in the intersection of A and C
Thus the intersection of A and C is not empty.
That does not fucking prove the intersection isn’t empty!!!! Because there is no evidence that there is any value ‘x’ that is in both sets. Set A could be all the negative numbers and C be all the positive. But hey, you just proved they overlap! way to fucking go! Since the whole thing was based on an assumption, the proof proves nothing. You would have to also prove that there is a value x that is shared by the sets which they don’t. If I can prove things by just making assumptions we may as well be talking about religion and not math. I apparently got the highest grade in the class on our exam. Don’t know how I feel about that, all it shows is that I have learned to re-create a bunch of useless incorrect crap. I hate that I am wasting my time doing this trash when I could be working on my senior project, writing code, or working on math that works in real life.
Was reading and found this insightful/relevant. Step 4 is a tough one.
Abstract
I really didn’t think I could make it this long without drinking. It is in the top five most difficult things I have done. But I am glad I did it. I wish I had done this a long time ago. But I guess things needed to get really out of control before I could be convinced to make a change.
What has changed
Being sober has on its own mitigated three problems, 1) burning through money, 2) Doing things I later regret, 3) Not having time to get things done.
As for all my other issues. Sobriety has not on its own done anything to fix them. But it has given me the clarity and time to work on fixing them myself. When you just disassociate from problems by drinking, nothing gets fixed and ultimately things get worse. After being sober for this long it has become easy to see correlation between things I do and situations I am in. Just being aware of all the subtle cause and effect in life allows me to be in much more control of my life. I can steer my life where I want to go. Before, things just sort of happened. I couldn’t explain how I got myself into a given situation, it “just happened”.
The people I am associating with are better. I am having much much healthier relationships with the people around me. I am doing better in school because I have a lot more free time and more energy to get things done.
Planning my life has gotten better. I feel like I might actually be going somewhere now, where for years, I was just spinning my wheels. Going nowhere. I think a lot of it is just that I can see further into the future and make plans now. When I was drinking I didn’t think beyond that night. I thought about the future of course, but not in the specifics and clarity that I do now.
People who were just drinking buddies have stopped coming around. But I see just as much of my real friends as I used to. That was a big worry for me when I stopped drinking. My entire social life was based on getting drunk. So I had assumed that when I stopped drinking my social life would flat out end. That fortunately has not been the case.
All my dishes are done, my clothes are clean and put away, and my bills are mostly paid on time. None of which was true when I had the option [ do choirs: or go to the bar? ]
In closing
I am very glad I did this, and I suspect things are only going to keep getting better. The reasons this had never worked before (I could only make it about a week) were: 1) I was doing it for the wrong reasons. 2) I was trying to do it alone without any support 3) I would get discouraged that my life was still shit after a week and give up. It takes a while for the benefits to materialize.
I still miss drinking (a lot!) but I have proven time and time again that I do not have boundaries/ limits/ an off switch. Left to my own devices I will take things to the extreme, and not stop until I hit a wall. If I started drinking again, it might start as just binging on Friday nights, but it would quickly go back to every day and I would be right back where I started. Given that life style, well there are only a few ways it can end. So I am just going to steer clear, and find joy in other things.
I really wish I had done this much sooner. I have accumulated so many regrets, and set myself back so far over the years due mostly to drinking. But you have to start sometime and it’s never too late etc, etc, etc..
So Woot! Six Months!
So today, I forgot to go to one of my classes.. To make up for being irresponsible/ disorganized I made a detailed weekly schedule for myself in excel. It came out well, and I figured out how to fit everything I need to get done in addition to some free time. One of the key points of the schedule was a set bedtime, so I would wake up on time each day.. So the plan was great. then this happened:
For a while I have wanted to write a spyware detection program that would not rely on having fingerprints of known spyware to work.
Well, I had an idea of how to implement it, and five hours later it is past midnight, and I have a bad ass spyware detection program. But I basically ignored the schedule I made that was sitting on my desk in front of me while I worked. Tomorrow I will try to stick to my schedule, and wait till Saturday to work on adding functionality to my program. If I could just focus on the stuff I need to do instead of what I want to do…
The program for those of you who are interested works like this:
1) A recursive function builds a table of every file and its corresponding size for each drive.
2) A function takes control of the keyboard and types out a known amount of text into notepad (or anywhere else) This is on the order of kilobytes.
3) the recursive function again builds a table of all files and their sizes, this time comparing them to the old file sizes. It is looking for files whose sizes have increased by 1/3rd of the text size or more. This is to account for a key-logger that might be using compression. This will not only identify files that increased in proportion to the text entered. But will also detect any new files created during the text entry. Obviously it knows what files it edited, thus does not flag itself. Because that would be dumb… A file is generated for the user with flagged files. It is then the users job to investigate the flagged files and determine if they are legitimate or not.
This version assumes two things.
1) The system must be disconnected from the internet, such that a key logger is forced to store the data for later retrieval.Or lose the data.
2) the key logger is not storing its data buffer solely in RAM, or directly addressing a location of the hard drive without using the file system.
I plan to add the ability for the system to monitor network traffic. Such that in addition to looking at the file system, it could look for a proportional increase in network traffic when it is typing out the data. The idea being, if something is logging your data, it has to be either saving it for later retrieval, or sending out a (live) feed/ stream. I would love to include the ability to watch RAM as well, but that may be a bit over my head. And I imagine windows, might not be happy when my code starts looking at ram addresses, memory fault?
And with that I am going to force myself to go to sleep so I can be productive tomorrow.
Time is an infuriating thing. Maybe it is just because I am never happy in the present, but I feel as though all my time is wasted.
I feel like a deep space probe sent off to explore the stars, zooming across cold empty space.
Racing toward a cluster of flickering lights in the distance. Just trying to get there, to the light, the warmth, anything but this cold empty vacuum.
But in the time it took me to get there they have burned out and all I find is ash. Some dust drifting aimlessly, uselessly in space. Just like me.
Everything I try to do takes so much time. Not just engineering where trying to make something happen, involves hours of sifting through datasheets, running calculations and simulations. Then testing, troubleshooting, etc.. and finally some little gadget that works, at the cost of days of my time I can never get back. Then there is homework, which is just a huge time suck with nothing to show afterward. I don’t mind the effort, but I mind the time. My life has been going by so quickly. Just astonishingly fast. And all the time has been spent on nothing. Its like dumping my bank account into the sea. All the money would be gone, and I got nothing for it. Nothing. That’s what has happened to half of my life. It was spent on nothing. Racing climbing struggling, to get nothing… Such an awful deal. It makes my stomach hurt thinking about it. Every birthday, every time I celebrate another month sober. Every time I renew my insurance, lease on my apartment etc. I think back on what have I done in the brief space of time since last time I did this. There is never anything there. When I look back at the past six months, the past year, I can say nothing happened in that year to make it worth while. It would have been just as well if it never happened. I can say that about any year. Any month, any day. Sure there are a few nice things mixed in, but nothing to make all the time and effort worth while. It is awful because I am sure there is something out there that would make it worth while. But I am missing it. Everyone else has it and I don’t. And I am not going to know what it is until it is too late, at which point I am going to look back and realize I could have enjoyed that too. I could have been happy for some of those sixty years. I hope I die before I ever have that realization. I can not imagine anything more heart breaking.
I decided to make a to do list. Aside from the obvious reason, (lists are awesome!) I just needed to prioritize my time. So I set about making a list with one column for tasks I NEED to do, and a column for tasks I WANT to do.
I made two mistakes:
1) I started with the need column. After writing a long list of all the things I actually need to get done and seeing all the deadlines laid out before me. The want column seemed laughable. There was no “free: time left after listing all the needs, and how can I be wasting time writing a list of stuff I want to do when I have a huge list of things I need to do staring back at me.. So that was depressing..
2) I did not set a time window for my to do list. So it was not “things I need to get done tonight” or “things to do by Friday” It was every single thing I need to do out to my temporal horizon and on some items beyond. Overwhelming to say the least.. I have heard generals and other people in high stress jobs who have to prioritize large numbers of objectives will write out a list of all the objectives they have, and then cross off all but the three most pressing. I think there is something to this. Listing everything is not only discouraging, but seems like it would really divide ones attention. That being said, I don’t want to forget to start an assignment on time because I had intentionally left it off my to do list and then just forgotten all about it.
In conclusion, I wish I was a machine. For example I could give my server a task that would take years, and it would immediately start crunching numbers. It would not feel overwhelmed, or wonder if it should be working on something else instead. Or be day dreaming about other projects. Just execute one instruction after the other, racing toward the solution with perfect focus and confidence. I can do that with my personal projects, partly because I am excited/ obsessed with them, and also because I have no fear of a deadline since I am just doing it for myself. But when it comes to Work or School, The drudgery of working on something I am not excited about, combined with the worry about deadlines and grades drastically reduces my performance. Case in point, I am sitting here writing instead of doing homework A,B,C,D,E or studying for exams X,Y, and Z. Or taking care of all my non school responsibilities. If all this work was for my projects no one would see or hear from me until I had completed them, and it would be fun.
I guess I will start trudging my way down this list now…
From what I observe of people, they are self aware in a factual sense. They know they exist. However I don’t think most if any of them comprehend this. In the same way that we know the universe is really freaking big, but we can’t fully comprehend just how big because we have no reference frame. We can not step back and see the whole thing, nor can we take a train across it to get a sense of just how far it is. Yet we say we know how big it is. it may just be me, but the idea that I came into the universe (my mind) and in effectively no time at all, I will cease to exist, is something I can not wrap my head around. I know it. But I have no deep comprehension of it. I just know it. I suspect that if people actually were self aware in a deep sense, and internalized the fact that they are a little dot brought into existence for just a little while, people would behave better. For example if you really understood yourself and what you are, you would understand what the people around you are. People would not text and drive or do other reckless things endangering unique intelligent life, much less themselves. But they are not afraid, or aware because they do not fully grasp themselves or their place in the universe. They think they are the center of the universe because from ones perspective we are each the center of the universe, and our life time is all of time. We know different, but most if not all don’t really get it.
Mr. Stranton 