Playing guitar, With Fire

It’s late and I’m going to bed soon, so I’ll be short. Don’t have that much to say anyway.

Today I mostly wasted my time because every time I looked at my books I couldn’t find a decent reason for studying. So I’ve done more interesting stuff I guess, but I mostly forgot about what I’ve been doing. I remember of playing around with Ruby Mechanize to see if I could use it to post comments on blogs, and indeed it can be done. But I was trying to comment on a blog where comments were disabled so it was a waste of time after all. But it surely made me remember how much my memory suck, because I’ve almost forgot how to code in Ruby. Well, fuck that, I no more get angry because of that, it’s just pointless to get angry at all, it just adds to my mental and physical stress.

Fortunately, my musical memory is reliable to the extent I can still dream one day I’ll be able to play guitar at the Speed of Light (reference for metalheads). I say that because today I’ve started to learn some pieces of “Playing With Fire” by Stratovarius, and I just LOVE that diad-based riff. I’m also playing around with the intro of “Pull Me Under” by Dream Theater, and realized how kick ass of an effect chorus is. One day I will own one, but for now the one embedded in my amp will do.

That’s all for tonight, I’ll try to make up for my laziness tomorrow, maybe with a new Flashback entry.

My life is a loop (geek version)

So, here’s a little proof for those skeptical about my programming skills. Took about half hour to write, it’s a C++ version, albeit less detailed, of the loop I described in My life is a loop. An iteration of the loop represents a day, while the meaning of the exit statement should be pretty self-explanatory…

void life() {
  int mood = NORMAL;
  void (*obsession)(void) = NULL;
  
  while(1) {
    int guilt = are_relatives_important(mood);  
    int studying = is_studying(mood, guilt);
    int working = is_working(mood, guilt, studying);
        
    if(!guilt || (!working && !studying && obsession == NULL)) {
      waste_time();
      obsession = waste_time;
      mood = min(mood + GOOD_DAY, NORMAL);
    }
    else {
      if(working) {
        work(mood, obsession);
        mood -= BAD_DAY;
      }
      
      if(studying) {
        study(mood, obsession);
        mood -= BAD_DAY;
      }
            
      if(is_boring(obsession)) {
        mood -= LIFE_SUCKS;
        obsession = NULL
      }
      
      if(!guilt && mood <= SUICIDE_THRESHOLD)
        exit(-1); // failed at life()
        
      obsession = find_obsession();
      
      if(obsession != NULL && free_time() > 0)
        obsession();
    }
  }
}

My life is a loop

Beside having a generally low self-esteem and self-confidence, I consider myself a good programmer. I’ve spent at least 3 years programming pretty much everyday, constantly challenging myself at writing simpler, more manageable and extensible code. And I’ve succeeded, until I got bored. Now I code only for university projects (because I’m forced to).

Giving a proof of my coding skills is no simple task, especially if I want to stay anonymous. But I’ll think about how to do that when I will not be forcing myself to study 8 hours per day for an insanely difficult numerical analysis exam. (Yeah, I’m bored with coding and I study computer science, so there’s a 99% chance I’ll be a programmer for the rest of my life. Indeed a good reason to be depressed, but it’s not the only one: it’ll be too easy!)

So, what’s the point of such exceptional claims about my coding skills? Well, because I’ve condensed as much I could remember about my life in a simple loop:

1. I’d like to spend my days playing video games (World of Warcraft, I miss you so much…) and watching TV series, cartoons or anime, and barely doing anything else. But I feel guilty about doing that when my parents are making sacrifices to allow me to study while I’m doing anything in my power to avoid any sort of job. It’s no surprise I’ve realized how spending my life as a Hikikomori will be hardly, if ever accepted by society or by my family. Given I can’t see how I could get rid of that feeling of guilt, it would not be a bad idea to look for some way to improve my perspective about the future.
2. This could be a constructive activity (which must not be boring) that may actually develop into some kind of job, and solve the money problem (yeah, I thought about crime, but it’s not that easy if you don’t have a natural inclination for it).Given I’m very curios and always looking for new stuff to try, it is almost automatic I’ll stumble upon such activities.
3. Get obsessed with the activity I thought might be my life goal, work on it as much as I can, focus my thoughts on it and forget about anything else, and then…
4. Get bored when what was new and exciting becomes part of the daily routine, when too much work is required to accomplish some improvement and when my goal of making money with that activity is so obviously far away to make it not even noticeable with a Hubble telescope.
5. Get depressed for failing in trying to make my life better, or forget about that and goto (2).

So I tend to get obsessed easily, and this is my primary way to cope with depression. My obsession may be either a trait of Asperger’s syndrome or Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, combined with some kind of Inferiority complex and a need to compensate for that . Unfortunately, I don’t learn much from my obsessions because of my tendency to also get bored easily and lose attention, while my memory fails as much as a ruined, amnesic 50 years old floppy disc with Alzheimer’s. Still I prefer to engage in more or less useless obsessions than face boredom, depression or guilt.