The online home of Appleman1234 / Benjamin Southall

The partridges return in their dance

Through the eye to the tiger, time flies

Black leaf of red tree leads to minimal satisfaction

The intertextuality replaced by misfortunate circumstances

Rapture still remains with Euphoria broken and crying

She wants to go home, but nobodies home, so there she lies broken inside

Tooth for a tooth, wrestling fairies endure suffering but don’t find Buddha’s wisdom

Still hassled by the askers and the silent placing their judgement as they blink , they fail to think , relying on good taste and instinct.

Misheard words echoing through a room till the resonance takes over, the symbolism lost like a isohedric clover

Mistrust, contempt along with licquorice over powers the bitterness that rests in my fingertips and pulses through the air currents as they float by me.

Psyche and Cupid’s wasn’t told, the lovers tryst, the gods rage, the plots to thick to fell and be processed into Disney gold.

Aghast and elated the chance so fickle quickly metamorphosizes   into hope, which like the Babelfish makes it so obvious, and the smokers of logic choke on their pipes, calling for plumbers

The boxer and Galileo suffer in silent penitentiary one ensnared by ideas, the other set free.

Words not said, packets dropped, lost in overhead, echos of silence, threats of violence  , as the zombies recur throughout the echelons

Wisdom comes and then goes, as pathetic minds have buffer overflows because their thought rate can’t accelerate and their actions only serve to exacerbate their clouded judgment.

The music and bird song that is supposed to soothe and calm, instead incites the brewing storm , disregard left the window open late last week. The monsoon comes , the rains begin, even after the floods are gone,  there remains the wind.

Today I saw the sunrise, and it made me realise, just how much I was missing living in the city, though they are gone, these words still remain, reiterating and proliferating through the thought palace.

As they say we are moving ahead, but to where and for what ? Points outside of a Cartesian space, clothes spun from invisble lace, black marks on a speckled face, the dynasty’s silent embrace.

May your checks not bounce and you resolve not falter, and may you always have a crying shoulder.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

How are you all ? I know I promised video blogs and things but currently I haven’t had lighting on my side, despite having the technology for a feasible implementation. Something about the darkness I find more comfortable then any light anyways.

My music is old, slowly growing and changing like most things, but it gives me inspiration to reflect, and support to deal with the emotions and illogic I encounter in the jumping , hopping and bouncing of everyday life or life everyday.

I have read all but one of the books great Aunt Jackie gave me for birthday / Christmas. Interesting what see classifies as regular / normal reading, given she is unaware of my reading habits.

Is it weird that tragedy seems normal ? Disasters seem to all ways make more news than happy things, and crisisses (I think it should be crisisi but dictionary disagrees with me, it must reserve the -i plural for -us suffix, so us becomes i) seem  to force people to action , instigating the choice of survival or death.

This choice of survival or death is just as easy of the choice of a cake or death, maybe that is because it a Boolean choice, with only two options (yes I am aware I am repeating myself / being superfluous, but an amazing number of people don’t seem to know what a Boolean / binary choice is) or maybe because one of the choices is death, and mortal beings as a rule generally like self preservation.

When you start adding other options into the question, it becomes more difficult for people to answer. For example Cake, Comfort, Liberty, Improvement, Death ? I recently watched a TED talk video on different the mathematics of the decision making and the speaker pointed out several interesting things.

The first being that when given a difficult Boolean decision with a default specified, because of the difficulty most people go with the default. (The example case was organ donation in different countries, the difference was largely because of the form for driver’s licenses being inclusive or exclusive)

The second was that given a Boolean / Binary decision, and then given a Ternary decision with the third option being similar but less than than one of the other two options, having the weaker option in the decision, made the stronger option more likely to be chosen then its alternative in the binary decision / choice.

For example, given the choice of a free trip to London, a free trip to Paris , and a free trip to Paris except you have to pay for your breakfast, the free trip to Paris would become more popular when the second option was included in the decision choices.

This leads me to think what result a survey that had the default option as death, would have in terms of its responses to the decision making process, would everyone be through in their filling out of the survey if they realised that their ignorance could cost them their lives.

Imagine for a second that every decision could that you make could cost you your life, would your choices be influenced by this addition ? Why ? Why not ? Suddenly the question of the what topping to have on your toast in the morning isn’t so trivial ? And what about the decision of whether to say Hello to someone or to not say Hello ?

We train ourselves to make decisions from an early age, but the basis and reasoning for our decisions isn’t always a rigorous as we believe or perceive it to be.

I am volunteering at the Lifeline Book Festival until next Sunday, and today I had the opportunity to work at the Helium tanks inflating the balloons, it was very interesting to contemplate and listen to the answers to the following questions

1. Would you like a balloon ?

2. If you would like a balloon, What colour would you like ?

Listening to the answers and asking the question soon lead me to the mental line of inquiry ?

1. Would you like to keep living ?

2. If you would like to keep living, What type of life would you like to lead ?

I would love to have the opportunity to ask various people these 4 questions and contemplate their answers and the motivation behind why they gave the answers they do / did.

I return to University for one more semester (hopefully)  in late February. Additionally I have various other side projects which I want to gradually chip away at.

This blog entry has already asked enough questions, and I don’t even know if my reader base still exceeds 1 (me), but you are welcome to comment / answer the questions asked if you wish.

Thanks for your time,

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

All my assessment for this semester is completed and now I just await my results. Now my eyes / mind / various other squishy appendages turn to all the objectives and things that piled up on my floor or been pushed aside. (Actually my floor is clean, suprise I actually managed to clean my room whilst studying). Meanwhile I have been organising what needs to be achevied during both this gap from study and in the following semester.

Spent a large amount of time looking at networking equipment (switchs, routers, smart switchs,etc), (hacking NG GS608s via eeprom to enable the BCM5398 smart managed switch features, if NG has them turned off), as I have several LANs coming up and various purchasing decisions to contempt and iron out. Ironing makes me feel like eating waffles. I also have to organise some visual / video stuff inorder to work out a movie night I am having with a grandparent.

Was part of an interesting discussion the other day regarding the value of life ,whether the creation of life was just as immoral as the destruction of life and whether creating life, just lead to the newly born experiencing pointless suffering. ##philsophy on freenode isn’t what it used to be, in fact I don’t think it ever was what it used to be. As the semester ends, I have recently been answering various questions about my future and the possibilities. The more I think about it, the more I realise that the answer isn’t something static that is easier to vocalise into comprehensible means.

The steps we have control over are the steps we take, and we can only take one or two or three or possibly seven steps without falling over in an heap / queue / stack / <insert data structure here>. Incandescent featureless footprints taken in the fabric of time, make me wonder whether such blemishs have an impact in the grand scheme of things.

Best wishes and have fun

Benjamin Southall

Hey everyone,

I was going to write another joke post similar to my QUT IRC sketch, but then I realised that I wasn’t feeling as satirical at all today. So instead I have a few things to update people on and a few more things to mention and poke a sharp pointy non stick like object at for all to ignore. Firstly I am not blogging to you all live from Hamilton Island, and I am not from the UK. To my parents, my siblings, my grandfather, my godfather and anyone else that reckons I should attempt to masquerade as the Best Job in the World winner, I say thanks for the suggestion but no thanks.

Attempting to masquerade as this person, would probably involving me changing my appearance and gaining an English accent and hiding the person I would be impostering in some sort of underwater pressurised cell in my secret underwater lair in the Great Barrier Reef, and fun and awesome as this all is, If I actually attempted to do it, their would be several consequences which include

• One of my secret lairs would being no longer secret
• I would have to blog to world why the Great Barrier Reef is awesome and spend a lot of time snorkeling, which isn’t that hard to do but takes away time that I need to work on my university assessment.
• Eventually I would get busted as my English accent would be not good enough or I would get knighted by the Queen for services against the Global Recession and services in support of conservation for my English accent being too good

A second thing I should mention is my pagerank still seems to be intact despite families assurances that I had been bumped to the 8th page of Google when they used Macca’s Wireless to check emails and stuff (This is why you shouldn’t let your siblings get addicted to WoW and other online games, as then the shared internet connection goes away and the other family members have to resort to Macca’s wireless).

The amount of media hype regarding this job, got me thinking about it, particularly as the person who won it has a similar firstname and the same surname as me. He gets to housesit a luxury house in Hamilton Island for 6 months, to basically have a six month vacation and gets paid $150k for it.  Evidently it is a publicility stunt, apparently $100 million of publicity from the media hype on media hype has already been generated. And this very good for QLD’s tourism industry, to quote Ruth Apelt’s song “Tourist-led Recovery”, “yeah we’re banking on a tourist-led recovery, that’s what I know, that’s what I know, and in QLD we say, yo way to go!!”.

But is a paid vacation really the best job in the world ? I mean 150K for 6 months is approximately $834 dollars a day or $105 dollars an hour for an 8 hour work day. In terms of rate of earning there are plenty of other jobs that can earn people $105 dollars per hour for an 8 hour work day, so it doesn’t win there, but I do suppose it is rather cushy. However once that job is finished, the money stops, like all employment, however the personal publicity he will obtain, would probably help him find future work.

But is the rate of money earnt per hours worked the most important thing in making a job the best in the world ? From an altrustic perspective it certainly isn’t, from that perspective the best jobs in the world would involve the saving, supporting and development of other people’s lives. This would have people with Doctor’s without Borders and councillors and social workers as having the best job in the world. From a hedonistic perspective the Hamilton Island job isn’t the best in the world, because in terms of hedonism, there are other jobs that cause more pleasure for less sacrifice or pain. From an egoist perspective the job isn’t the best in the world , because it isn’t ultimately in the individual’s upmost best interest’s as if he was offered a better offer, he would be then obliged by belief system to take it.

Jobs are perceived by most people as a means to an end in earning an abstracted concept which humanity assigns value to. The best job in the world is when your occupation isn’t a chore or a job, but is a passion, so you don’t even perceive as being a job or a means to end, you do it because you love it, despite the consequences negative or positive.

What do you think is the best job in the world and why do you think that ?

I would love to write down some more on this question but I have to get back to work on my university assessment.

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

From Fools and deception, to new life, remdemption and the Spring Equinox in the Northern hemisphere anyways, considering that most know this time for its church services and chocolate egg, I guess we haven’t moved that far at all.

Holidays are symbolic and holiday spirit and passion for holiday traditions is a state of mind. I don’t think Maple or wxMaxima (CASes) would be able to solve or derive the meaning of them anymore than most humans do.

It is so easy to get caught up in the hype and FUD (fear, uncertaintity and doubt) and lose sight of our heritage s human beings and the rituals that were so important long ago, that have since been misplaced. It isn’t hard to become engulfed into mass indoctrinism whether its purpose is economic in the supposed crisus or religious in times when a lack of belief ,faith ,hope and trust in ourselves is so common.

I have been almost as busy as the bees that helter skelter from spring flower to spring flower in search of pollen. My tasks however to be a less leisurely pace and are accompanied more with clattering of keystrokes and whirring of  computer fans.

Buses are fun to miss by two minutes. Puzzles are fun to solve, especially if your short on time. All the life and death carefully modelled with non linear ordinary differential equations and then steady states found and typed up into Latex via Lyx.

Balance is important in more ways than one, considering how much I was sneezing on Tuesday. I have rediscovered and given new life to some things that have been dormant a while including the LainOS revival project, several changes to how well rebecca(eeepc) is runnig from a kernel update, the acquisition of an 18plus card and various other things. (UXA causes Blender menus not work render properly, EXA causes title bars of windows to be slightly glitched)

After this LAN I am at ends today,I will probably catch up on sleep and then proceed to working a precarious pace towards the goals I need to reach. For the moment for  the buses missed, I will just have to catch the next ones.

Meanwhile I will just keep swimming, rembering, bideing my time, hoping that everything falls elegantly into place.

What does spring mean to you ? What puts a spring in your step ? Does your life feel redeemed by your existence ?

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hey everyone,

So much is happening that it either flies straight by me or a I get blown to the ground trying to process it. I guess it is that time of year. My patience and resolve seem to be tested by every circumstance. Updates on things my NAS and laptop are both still getting fixed. My powercable for the external usb drive also got accidentally sent to Taiwan with Invahoe. My foot is sore due to 3.2 by 2.1 by 1cm lump that is beside a nerve and in between a tendon and bone, so my foot is constantly in pain.

Uni wise, I have various formulative assessment due by the 17th of October including a differential equations assignment which is just over half finished , group projects for numerical analysis (computational mathematics) 2 , it core project management and advanced network management.

The advanced network management project is currently ontrack having just finalised the asterisk voip over IP setup and the additional Openldap directory services. I have spent significant time debugging my CSC choleksy solving algorithrm but the more time I spend, the more frustated I get at Matlab and having to use their sparse CSC implementation and wrapper functions rather then writing my own.

The project design stuff has the hazardous due to the contents of the 2nd project plan being mainly reflected and stored in my head rather than dancing down onto paper or digital media. My mind it wanders , filled with currents of endless pain from the nerve it my foot, the conversations and thoughts around me, the reflection on my negative circumstances and other ideas ranging from deep sea power generation to influence on the world based on actions of individuals / groups and causality.

This is probably still incomplete but rather than force people to wait and read something quite lengthy (lengthy enough to be nominated for a Pulitizer Prize), I may as well just end here and type up an additional post or 7 for everything else that is happening later.

The question for now is If you only got one chance to make your life mean something ? What would it be ?

Thanks and Best wishes to all

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

Ivanhoe (My NAS) is finally getting its USB ports repaired and Ulrica (my laptop) has had its power circuity repaired and is getting the fan replaced (hopefully). It isn’t raining here, but I almost wish it would. I have been watching communitychannel for a while now, and I dare attribute my desire to video blog to seeing her work and having so many potential readers make up excuses based on their laziness and my post’s longevity.

Anyhow, she asked an interesting question about whether I would let anyone stand under my umbrella, which really made me think. Because most of the large umbrellas I get my hands on , end up breaking or being ruined by the weather or other people. Despite this I am quite sure that I would most likely give them the umbrella to stand under alone and get wet instead of them, until it was time to get my umbrella back.

I don’t mind the rain at all, and have the strategy of wearing multiple layers when there is any chance of rain, so that the outer layer absorbs or deflects all the water and the inner layers stay dry. The only problem with this strategy is if you spend prolonged amounts of time in the rain, your shoes and socks get drenched, particularly if you don’t watch out for puddles.

In the case of spending over an hour in the rain, your best bet seems to be to just were minimal clothing and thongs or barefeet and just get wet.

My left ankle is strangely sore, like it is sprained or streched or something, I am not exactly sure what causes the pain, but it makes walking hurt significantly more than normal. I have tried various methods to alleviate the pain, but to no avail, at least for now.

The umbrella question for me becomes a metaphor for a morality gedanken (thought experiment see Trolley problem on the vilionist in a coma), for both how different people cope with stress and life circumstances and for the amount of moral self sacrifice / ability to be loved and give love.

People like to take the easy path, despite the consequenecs for doing so. In the subsquent rush to adopt apathy, indifference and ignorance as the easy methods out, they don’t seem to realise the sacrifice / consequences they cause themselves and others.

To quote Red Gum, “If you don’t fight you lose”. Huxley and Orwell clearly demonstrated the means that humanity could be socially conditioned in order not to care, think and question. When there is nothing left to fight for, will we have lost ?

Or are we losing already … ?

(Apologies to those who lost Pachisi or any other game, it wasn’t intentional)

Thanks for listening / reading,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hey everyone.

This has been a long time coming, but here it is, it will probably be disappointing as I don’t really feel like talking but meh. Lol I rambled on a whole bunch of interesting , funny and random stuff as usual.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Enjoy

Hi,

Its study week , the week dedicated to the cohesive repetition of techniques and methodologies that allow the recollection and presentation of fluid information or application of knowledge to take form in items of assessment.

The weather is wonderful. The cold keeps me cool, the rain keeps me wet, but not wet enough. The code keeps me focused, Gradually habits get influenced or broken, solutions to problems arise and more challenges face us as we live.

Several interesting discussions have occurred lately including the discussion about humanity’s stupidity being infinite (lets just say I disagree with Einstein and have a logical basis for doing so), the discussion about the game and double or n-think. Ignorance, discovery and recognition make for an interesting meme let alone amusement. Imagine if an IT lecturer got hold of this and hid carefully a subliminal reference to that which we lose by knowing and face palm without questioning.

Subconscious subliminal triggers could be the key to brainwashing or habbit forming the entire world, and yet my own snares lay decadent, covered in dust and spiderwebs, so sublime that they seem camoflauged in auspicious reality and never sprung even when the bait is tasty pizza or hamburgers.

Pruning is important in the maintaince of fast growing climbing species and humans are no exception, focus and willpower is required to avoid being left too long in the shade to stagnate until fermented.

But now my mind turns to the peach and to the folk song and piano solo I know so well, for with each person comes their own mental triggers caused by emotion or illogical mental association if these were harnessed for uses more beneficial to the society, success would be eminent, however at the same time we would lose a piece of ourselves in the process, doomed to remain a broken jigsaw piece for eternity.

Why do the JW’s expect me to drop what I am doing to engage in a discussion about my beliefs, and then leave 10 minutes later, when they can’t make me an easy convert ? People are so similar, unless you act like they expect you to act, you say what they expect you to say and you fulfill their limit processes on your character instead of being free to paint outside the lines and dance in infinity, why must reality be a consensus of oppressionistic judgements rather than a fondue of perceptions with some chunks of personalisation and attitude added for flavour.

Now I am hungry, is non toxic really non toxic ? Could I eat a crayon ?, apparently they test chemicals for safety individually and not in chemical combinations because the permutations are far too numerous, and yet we will soon have quantum computing and can model all most anything approximately, but don’t as the funding hasn’t be allocated yet.

Eventually people will realise that rates of change matter to our reality and society, the total differential of human morality,  it matters, the rate of change of the environment and ecological support systems, it matters, the jacobian of the influence of the internet on capitalistic society and people’s approach to social interaction, it matters.

The world will come crashing down, if steps are not taken, but currently that doesn’t matter, baby steps are taken, stumbling blocks are made, and yet people are not prepared to sacrifice the now for the future (and yet they unwillingly do so already) or sacrifice their freedom for reason, people value freedom more than the ability to itself live.

Thousands of people have died, so others could live free, if the rates of change and the reality calculus are ignored,we will be dying for freedoms, that the future will never get because at this rate the future will be lost or forsaken.

We could force a rollback or reversion to a previous circumstance and society, and avoid problems now, we could use what we have in multitudes to develop and implement solutions to scarcity in the context of reality, or we could sit comfortably in our lives, unaware of the dangers that lurk under the bed or in the closet, the children see it, but the parents don’t believe, choosing to forget when they were children themselves, and instead focus on their important part of existence.

Did you see their smile, did you see them cry, did you see them laughing as in their souls they died ?
If you manage to see my bubbles (they aren’t pointy), let me know ….

Hope your thinking hard and staying focused,
Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

I know what I said. No more reading extend paragraphs of text which appears to be mildly interesting or boring depending on your emotional attachment to knowledge. Instead there was supposed to a bright flash based audio player that streams my voice (not that it is really anything all that stupendous, but it is mine and parapharsing Jewel “This voice is small I know, but it’s not your’s it is my own, but it’s not your’s it is my own, I am never broken. “) to whoever wants to click the play button.

Unfortunately that isn’t the case. So you will probably have to keep on reading or fall asleep. Your choice , not mine, and entirely upto to you. If you are going to fall asleep while reading my scribbles (Well they are typed so they aren’t really scribbles or etchings, but if I had to write them up in hard copy they would be with lots of little weird metaphorical and random pictures.) , you may as well make yourself comfortable by getting a decent sized chair unlike the one I am currently sitting on, a pillow and either a sheet or doona.

Alternately if you happen to have a giant beanbag of comfyness, that would work just fine as well. You comfy yet ? When your comfy either read on or sleep your choice .

Life is a busy thing. My laptop is now being repaired under warranty, however they are charging me $130 for it (it should take 3 to 4 days), this means I paid $170 total ($40) for the new ac adaptor (which works but doesn’t solve the problem).

A warranty is an obligation that an article or service sold is as factually stated or legally implied by the seller, and that often provides for a specific remedy such as repair or replacement in the event the article or service fails to meet the warranty. (From Wikipedia)

Because the manufacturer of my laptop has definitely provided a remedy to repair the product if it doesn’t meet the warranty, which is exactly is what they are obligated to do. However the contents of warranty (apparently didn’t cover the pressure spots on my lcd laptop screen, which became dead pixels eventually, but by then it they said it was too late to repair under it warranty, and they could replace it for $900) don’t mention whether the remedy of any problem which doesn’t live upto the standards of the warranty is paid for by the consumer or the company providing the warranty.

I read my warranty booklet (5 pages approximately 10 cm square) and it doesn’t mention who pays, nor did it mention any detailed expectations that the laptop is supposed live upto.

Previously when I tried to get my LCD screen fixed, I was told that if I had brought in my laptop to the service centre (which wasn’t the address I was originally given) as dead on arrival (even though it wasn’t, as it was in an operational state it just had very small (around a pixel, pressure spots move and aren’t static like dead pixels) , hardly noticable pressure spots which grew bigger later leading to dead pixels) during the first week, they would have replaced the lcd screen under warranty (not charging me).

I recently was able to get a bag replaced with a new one as part of the bag’s 5 year warranty. When this happened I took it in after two years (which is the same time as my laptop) and they were happy to replace with the similarest model to it they had (as that model was no longer in stock) after seeing my warranty card and receipt and other paperwork. They didn’t charge me, in fact as the new bag was cheaper than the original they gave me $20 credit.

What I am wondering now is , is a warranty like insurance, is it money you pay upfront or in installments so that if something happens to cause the product not to live up to the obligations in the warranty, that money covers the scenario of replacement / repair of the product, or are we as consumers expected to pay extra money for a warranty which only gurantees a solution to the problem provided we pay for it ?

But enough about my warranty queries, moving on …, Advanced Calculus is awesome. Partial Derivatives are Sexy, to quote our lecturer (He is awesome! ). Thanks to his awesomeness , clarity and passion I finally clearly understand what a differential is, let alone the fact that I don’t have to do calculus slowly like I was taught in highschool but can speed it up (This is like being shown howto speedread when you were forced to only read aloud.).

Even though one of the lectures starts at 8am, I can think of little else to cheers me up, than some advanced mathematics (calculus or otherwise) early in the morning. On the subject of Mathematics, “Happy Pi Day !”

I have to finish coding up a prime number generator for ITB749, the tutorial exercise was just to teach for and while loops in C (which I know), but having done ITB712 and being a maths student I thought using Sieve of Eratosthenes was a bad choice given it is the opposite from an algorithim design perspective and thought the Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena primality test would be faster computationally.

However after finding in implementation in C , I ran into some hiccups, it uses both the GMP (gnu maths precision library) and Maple hooks to do the required mathematics. This got me thinking and if I can find time, I may write an entire implementation in C, or alternately just use the Sieve of Atkin instead (*sigh*), although primegen (http://cr.yp.to/primegen.html) already has one for that.

I was trying to write a double sieve algorithim in my head ,but it got confusing, and while I don’t have anything yet to show for the tutorial (unlike Cheater’s quick and dirty Sieve of Eratosthenes implementation ) , I think the tutorial has taught me more than I could have ever expected it to.

Cheater needs to focus on writing the oscilloscope kernel driver for poscope anyways , and needs to stop playing BF1942 and Defcon. On the subject of drivers and games, I finally did the usb sniffing for my digital voice recorder (jnc ssf-22) and will eventually start writing a libusb based driver for it, and we played Inquistor at Uni on Thursday, it was epic, despite the rush to create my character, my terrible luck with the dice and my morale at the end of it. (I apologise for being so demoralised by the end, it was only because I had pumped myself up way too much at the start. Silly excitement.)

Anyhow, I also installed lots of portable apps on my usb stick so I can survive till I get my laptop back and use IRC and IM wherever I end up. I also caught up with Redhatter today and helped setup a demon laptop to smoothly run Xubuntu for Maddie, as well as honing my Python skills helping first years.

I have a busy weekend ahead of me, with some voting, some coding and lots of caculus study.

Best of luck to you all and have fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234