Tonight won't be fun. Not sure if I'll even go to work tomorrow. Maybe I'll go late after a decent bit of rest. I told them today that I wasn't sure if I'd be coming in tomorrow. We'll see how this goes.
When I was young (about 5-6) I had such a fear of getting old and dying. I would cry and come up with theories on how to beat death. I thought you didn't die until you hit the floor. I remember thinking that if I held on to something I wouldn't fall, thus not dying.
I'd rather not think about death and it's inevitability. I'd rather think about life and its inconceivable complexity.
5 comments:
I have tried to leave a comment three times, and I have lost all patience and stamina now. I will never buy an EVGA motherboard again. This is terrible--this will be my third RMA for this motherboard. Both times I was typing this beforehand the computer shut off (with a memory controller failure code on the mainboard). All I was going to say is: I had never experienced any tragedy in my life up until Sept 2006. My own mortality was something that seemed unreal, something of fiction. In Sept 2006, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack, and three months later my grandmother, with whom I was close, passed away as well. It is just my mom and I left for any kind of extended family. Ever since then, the future has not seemed like this unknown part of my life way off in the horizon--it is something that is now. My perspective has changed so much since then. Unfortunately, with this paradigm shift came the other, less-inspirational consequence-- life is short...incredibly short. That's why I like Joe's vlog/blog so much, his youthfulness and exuberence makes me feel hopeful that there are good people, having fun, and experiencing life. It inspires me to have more fun--I feel like Joe (at least the joe we get to see) experiences a lot of life. I don't know if thats reality or not--regardless, it makes me feel better. I go out to clubs once every few weeks, and even just hanging out with a few friends and observing everyone else dancing their asses off--it makes me feel more connected to the world- more alive. I don't know if any of this makes any sense, and its probably more sad than anything else... but your post has been the focus of my thoughts for the last two years, and I have a tendency to word vomit whenever I get on the topic.
On an unrelated note, I am a server side guy. I live eat and breath back end systems, super scalable, robust, distributed systems... and I have little/no ability to create interactive/intuitive UIs. That being that case, I am working on a school project in which I need to visualize an onotlogy and provide an interactive UI. Its a bit complicated, but basically it will be nodes and lines connecting them, and it needs to be animated, etc. I suppose flash is the industry standard for doing this type of thing-- I would prefer sticking to non-flash, only because I eventually want to integrate this project into our codebase at work, which is JEE based. I see you mentioned actionscript3. I did some minor work in action script 2 when it came out. Do you have any comparable experience outside of flash (silverlight, scriptaculous, etc.) or other rich UI tools that you can make a comparison? Is flash the best/most productive or is it the ad-hoc standard by virtue of its market share? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Let's go in order of topics covered:
I just bought an EVGA nforce 680i and I love it. The EIDE header could've been a little higher up on the board to make it easier to connect to multiple peripherals since it only has one header. I had to connect my DL-DVD burner and a PATA HDD (I wanted to dualboot OSX Leopard and it didn't recognize my SATA drive) and needed to fiddle with the drive positions until I could reach both drives with one cable from that header. No issues aside from that, and even that is strictly a preference thing...i mean the thing has 6 SATA headers for crying out loud.
Sorry to hear about your loss. I'm still in the dark as to what's going on. My mom gets back tomorrow. I was never close with my grandmother though so it's a completely different situation. Sounds like it was a life-altering year for you. I agree with your Joe comments. As far as the face he shows on youtube, he's got the right attitude. Whether that's the person he is outside of youtube, we can only guess (and hope). He's a very smart boy and very insightful. I just hope it doesn't result in robbing him of his childhood by over-analyzing everything instead of simply enjoying it.
I'm a jack of all trades, really. If it's code, I like it. I started with HTML and then PHP. I worked towards mySQL and recently discovered the MVC structure (a bit daunting). I then began to play with JavaScript and now ActionScript and both are very similar since they're based on ECMAScript standards. Hands down, if you want fluid animation I'd say go with Flash. The caveat is that AS2 and AS3 are rendered differently because AS3 was meant (as I understand it) to be a lightweight language that borrows a lot from the browser to achieve this. This means now Flash movies are open to interpretation by the browser instead of being the same cross-browser. You'll run into the same problems if it was written in JavaScript (e.g. scriptaculous). That's not to say that you can't make something nice and fluid in JavaScript. I was doing some research and ran into the Gucci site and it looks like flash but it's entirely JavaScript, scriptaculous (possibly effects as well) in particular. Now, I've never dealt with any such JavaScript libraries but I do know of some that could be of use to you. Mootools is a great, lightweight JS framework that allows for animation and drag-and-drop functionality.
The way it breaks down is if you have the time to reinvent the wheel, write it in JS. You can do just about anything in JS that you can do in AS just that JS isn't meant to be graphical so it lacks the functions to do half of what you want so you'll have to write them yourself. If you don't have the time, AS will do nicely but you'll need to adjust to coding in AS because it's a whole different mindset. Luckily once you get used to that, anything you want to do has probably already been done and somebody made a class for it or at the very least a forum post on how to accomplish it.
In order:
Yes- mine is EVGA 680i nforce, model 122-CK-NF68-T1. I bought it because of the great features (as you mentioned 6 SATA ports!), and of course the 680i chipset was the best (at the time). I don't play a single computer game, so getting this with a 8800GTX was a bit of a waste...but I have a 6 on the vista user experience scale. If you just bought yours I am sure you are fine. I bought it right after it came out (the *T1 was the first production run I believe). They replaced it with another, and quickly moved to another revision of the board (the *TX, maybe?). So yours may be fine, and I am hoping they give me a newer revision. That is the only computer I have outside of prying roomates eyes >:-)
I wish you the best of luck. I had one grandmother that I was not close with, and for me at least, her death was not a big impact to my life--I was sad for my dad when it happened, however. My other grandmother (who passed in '06) lived close and taught me to play piano since I was a child. It was bad, but at least it wasn't sudden. Regardless of how close, certainly these times are hard on families. I was very anti-family before my dad died...I think it was because I wanted to distance myself from them in case they found out I was gay (or bi, or whatever I call it this week).. it was a defense mechanism I guess. I regret that now of course, and really do value family... Sorry to keep rambling about this.
I will check out the libraries you mentioned for javascript- scriptaculous, dojo, and prototype are the only ones I have ever used before, and none to any great extent--so I thank you for the tips! I don't have time to reinvent the wheel, and I didn't know until now that Flex was open source. This is good news to me, because I remember when Flex 1.0 came out- it was $10000 per processor for the server software (which I guess is gone now... compiles to swf, right?), but it always looked like cool technology.
Yea MVC (and a good number of the canonical design patters (gamma, et al)) can be daunting. I work for a company writing bank software, which is an incredibly frustrating/challenging domain (but I guess most are). Mostly we just move massive amounts of data, so I am very sheltered for better, for worse from cool UI stuff. Most of my expertise is java, .net, and database technology (at least mssql, oracle, and mysql...if I ever have to touch DB/2 again Ill kill myself.).
Take care, and I hope all goes well with your family.
Flex Builder has a 30 day trial and, yes, flex does compile into swf. You write the apps in MXML and AS3 (MXML actually translates to AS3 and you can throw in AS3 wherever you want because of this). Flex is fairly robust and because of this it may take longer to load than just writing it in Flash so you'll just have to weigh that with the use of this project. If it's just to show on occasion, go for it. If it's actually going to be used on the web then I'd suggest writing it in Flash rather than Flex.
I played with Java but I hated it. As it turns out, it may have been due to a shitty compiler. A friend of mine has none of the problems I had where apps would sometimes compile and sometimes they wouldn't. That reminds me of Visual Studio back in high school. Sometimes it would compile my C++ programs, sometimes it wouldn't. It was so buggy that simply copying the contents of the file into a new project would cause it to compile correctly. I played with C# as well. Java and C# are quite similar but I never went too in-depth. I'm partial to web languages tho. In particular I like mixing PHP (SQL if necessary), JS, and Flash (of course HTML as well) to make the back end and front end do things they couldn't do on their own.
Also thanks for your concern :)
The idea of death disturbs me. I've laid at night imagining not existing - not breathing, not thinking, not eating - it's a scary thought. I try not to dwell on it.
But seeing as I'm entering the health profession, I'll have to learn to deal with it sooner than later.
Life, on the other hand, is rather amazing and even more amazing to learn about. :D
I hope your grandmother will be alright.
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