The online home of Appleman1234 / 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

Hi everyone,

How are you all ? How was your April’s fool’s day ? I am blargh.

Google’s April Fool creation of CADIE had me filled with joy, and its removal from the internet has left despair in its place. I really want to combine Google’s suggestion of CADIE, the rat molecule brain robot experiments and the antropomorphic fashion robot in Japan, to create a true Hard AI that has minature robotic body that assimilates computing resources based on the other computing equipment / cloud that it can connect to. (See GIR from Invader Zim, or Questionable Content’s  AnthroPC)

I went to a trivia night with my family for my dad’s birthday yesterday, it was interesting to say the least. Once again it proved that the enemy of knowing the correct answers is self doubt and mistrust.

Maths Modelling lab test went ok (aside from me injecting an imaginary steady state where there wasn’t one, and then realising my mistake and correcting it) and I did well on my first advanced calculus assignment.

I have yet to get Supernova tickets (hopefully I will get them tommorow), which ironically just guarantee me a cooler venue in which to work my contribution to a group project, another two assignments and study for an advanced calculus midsemester.

In case anyone is wondering, I will just end up cosplaying as me, because it is easier and I am short on time.  I talked to jabberwacky today (ai chat  bot) and learn’t that it wasn’t an improvement of my conversations with most people , much to my disappointment.

All the knowledge in my head seems to be reassembling and sorting itself into more complex and dynamic patterns, which is causing me to be surprised by my thought associations and the strengh of my memory. Relevance however is another issue.

Emotively I feel like I am in darkness and isolation, but am still edgy from my tolerance for suffering and convolution highly strained.  I guess this feeling will stay for a while, until I spot something euphoria like a shiny non dead butterfly to temporarily cause lost of focus of my social and workload situations.

It rained today it was nice.

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

Today has been interesting. Friday also was a good day, in which the QUT Tabletop Gaming Club, had our first games night in the new room allocated to us. Games of Magic, Stratego, Chess and Monopoly were played and fun was had by most, if not all.

I also managed to have the online discussion with my INB302 group members the other night, which was quite hectic, but productive.

I have been thinking more and more about recursion as a measure of proof of complexity and a partial proof for reality. We can currently create using our minds or computer , worlds other than the one we appear to exist in.

Phenomenologically these worlds exist to us, however unless communicated we can’t share or clarify there existence with others. In these worlds that we create however, we can make characters, and it perceivable that if those characters had minds, they could create worlds and characters with minds, and so on and thus forth.

You could also use this recursion to create a circular logic structure / paradox, in which your existence is phenomenological creation or observation of the character’s mind , which is the other character’s mind which is in your own.

Currently the hard AI to attempt to simulate reality with free will at an accurate level hasn’t been estabilished, we don’t even have the hard AI to have an inanimate object interface with our reality as though it was sapient and sentient, let alone the hard AI required to implement free thought, imagnation and creativity.

In between the lines of reality, hyperreality, subreality and cyberreality, does recursion of this form benefit us ? Are sophism or solipsism valid mechanisms for thought and approach. Different people interact with the same shared perception / consensus of reality in different ways generating their unique (phenomological) experiences.

Paradoxes are useful when dealing with recursion because they give it a pattern and ocassionally a breakpoint, in which it can revert to a different frame of reference.

Communication of thoughts,ideas and emotions is simple but difficult, because we make it so, in non-dimensionalising and parameterising our dialogue is such that it doesn’t isomorphically from person

A says blah, blah maps to blah2 in common for person A, blah2 in common for person B maps to qwerty. Person A says blah, blah means blah2, blah2 then gets converted back to qwerty so that Person B, understands what Person A is saying.

Person A says blah, Person B hears blah, Person B asks which blah or what do you mean by that ? Blah in what context ?

We need a language that is connationless, emotionless and is such that meaning of the message is shared between two or more unique (phenomological) people.

Ideally if we our brains all work the same way / structure, except with different associations and memories,we could have a thought based language that mapped what were thinking about to a global language value and then attempted to map that value into equivalent or  component parts of another person’s thoughts or memories.

It would work like the Babelfish from HGTG, except it would be based on brainwaves and signals. Something like this is much easier than the current system that allows the analogueness of our vocal chords,body language and an ambigious spoken / written language.

The latter attempts to emulate the isomorphic mapping but isn’t able to due to  both parties mapping their respective phenemological values to the same word and then getting upset when their communication doesn’t ensure that the message is communicated and understood.

Avoding or ignoring something doesn’t make it go away or not exist. (Mildly better strategies include blowing it up (which should reduce most objects to smaller pieces) or setting it on fire (which either makes it on fire, or turns it in smaller piecies which have been burnt)).

Avoidance doesn’t resolve a problem.  Some problems can be resolved by fire and explosions, however this does bring about certain results, intentional or otherwise due to causality.

Can we draw lines ? Are Lines real ? Is Sand real ? Is Sand anymore real that Lines ? If we avoid Lines, we draw only using dots, if we avoid sand , how do we know if it is real ? If we set sand on fire or explode sand and do a decent job of it, we should get glass , but can we set lines on fire or explode lines ?

Best wishes and have fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

2 weeks in. Had my great aunt’s 80th birthday party yesterday. It was quite nice. We arrived at little late which was slightly embarrasing, however the venue was simply smashing. It was a cross between woolshed, old english cafe, and a store that actually had cross generation kitzch items. The desserts were awesome, (I enjoyed a large slice of banana cheesecake), despite the fact that they were all out of waffles (They had served waffles for a party of twenty earlier that morning, .  This didn’t stop Jackie’s friend James from getting the last waffle however.)

The conversation ranged from General Monash, to changing times, to what actually constitutes as a waffle, to the deplorable current state of education (after I asked Jackie whether she had made the acquaintance of my current Advanced Calculus lecturer, who also taught teachers at Mt Gravatt Teachers College), I would have liked to talk more about the Great Wars and the current state of politics, however I didn’t get the chance.

After afternoon tea and birthday cake,  we were invited to have a look at James’ house and his wonderful handiwork and antique collection. His house is a roundhouse and it is similar amazing, from the croquet field, that he made himself, to the gardens and the rockeries, and the fabulous antiques that we didn’t see the half of. Including 2 grandfather clocks and a granddaughter clock, limited edition painted plates and various other wonders and suprises.

Having not gotten more of my studies done yesterday and I am currently at Uni fiddling with freeglut for INB381, and the google ads in my gmail inbox pointed me to an awesome embedded linux smart phone (exeda) and a micro pc (fit-pc). My dad (as he works for Telstra) regularly asks me whether I want a new phone, and if anything like the exieda makes it way down under I may just take him up on his offer, as my current phone an Alcatel OT735 has recently decided not to let me take photos. (it powers down when I attempt to take a picture or video).

Anyhow I better finish these OpenGL drawing questions and the team conflict resolution strategy reflection despite the confliction resolution model being focused on being incomplete and inadqueate and not mapping to actual reasonable courses of action in employment. On Friday we had the QUT Tabletop first Games Meetup and AGM, it was rather fun, I learnt a new canadian card game called Crazy, we played Hangman, and few others played Australian Monopoly and Magic the Gathering.  Shame that Rory didn’t show up with Chess Boards, I was looking forward to a game.

I hope you all are having as much as I am, and getting as much work done if not more

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

Last day before uni goes back, I guess the time has seemed to have flown, but really it just passed by occasionally knocking me off my feet, although more seldom than the random acts of dancing which emotivity throws at me.

The lines between the past, present and future seem gauche, and almost reveal in impressionist values as synaesthesia meets phantasmorgia in my minds eye, propelling me deeper in questions.

So much to accomplish in this year, as I quiet sat reading about General Monash, I reflected on commonalities and disrepencies between my life’s choices and the choices of the real and fictious characters in the stories I stumble accross and then unabashedly dive into, promptly misplacing my scuba gear.

The book on him, not only causes me to feel proud of him, but proud of the ANZAC spirit that he instigated and orchestraed, let alone bore witness to.
I wonder whether it is the same spirit now or like if all things it has been improved and modernised throughout the passage of time.

There are lots of new students with their dreams and illusions intact all queueing for ID cards, or looking cluelessly at maps, because despite graduating from secondary education, cartography, geography and orienteering weren’t their strongest points.

I begin to wish that the IOU GURPS would orthogonally project itself to reality, rather than just act as memory augmentation HUD in my minds eye.
People change but remain the same, the grace and class forlorn but hopeful given the current circumstances.

I also had the pleasure or misfortune of attending a book launch / meet the author session of a book that I thought would be relevant to my investigation on the definition and mathematical modeling of relationships and love, but instead turned out to be an attempt at mass simplication of determinstic hyperstereotypical numerology, but no justification was given for the choice of ruleset and significance associations.

So unlike the remainder of people attending I could see the author skillfully projecting, sight reading, physcoanalysing and hyperstereotyping the crowd before he got their birthdates, maybe my intuition is too keen, maybe my analytical ability spoils the magic of his supposed trick of divining what is best for people based on discrete set theory, linear algebra and largely astrology.

Of course knowing how the magic works, probably spoils the trick. When querying the author, I found that he had little interest in mathematics or indeed the causality of deterministic philosophy supporting his text (if you could call an A7 or A6 pink pocket size book a text ….) and that his origins were more rooted in Astrology and Palmistry.

Neither did he seem to appreciate my historical knowledge of number systems and the history and origins of numerology.

Personally as a recommendation to anyone who reads his book,that both you and you proposed partner undergone personality tests, have a realtionship discussion and identify both yourselves and each other, before deciding whether your love life really does add up.I also recommend that you believe in what you want to happen, because if you believe in it, it is more likely to happen, simply through your belief.

The bushfire seems to be all over the news,  and the public seems to be enthuastic to give despite fears of recession (which is interesting, the fact the we have known about  this recession for at least 5 before it was coming, and if I had my way, there would have been no ecomonic bailout, and society would be forced to regress to a prior state or to innovate in order to survive.), and it strikes me as odd at four particular things.

Firstly, the fact that arsonists give pyromanics a bad name. Pyromaniacs love fire, they like watching fires, lighting fires, feeling heat from fires. Most pyromaniacs know how to safely light and extinguish fires that won’t spread. This doesn’t mean they stupidly light fires that become bushfires and kill people. (I could say more on this point, but I won’t , else my rage ignite with passion and burn down people’s mentalspace)

Secondly, the fact that people are pretending to be victims and stealing donations, I mean come on, where is your respect, where is your honour , where is your pride ? Such everyone has their charity, but what else missing because of that ?

The IT Crowd says it best when they say “You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a baby. You wouldn’t shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn’t go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman’s grieving widow. And then steal it again”  (People do depraved things like this for two reasons, one for the lolz, two because they don’t think they just do ….)

Thirdly, the fact that people wait till disasters to help those that are victims of circumstance, instead of just always helping those who are victims of circumstance, day in and day out, why is quick fix charity to a temporary problem made more important than regular charity to regular people to constant problems.

Lastly, the fact that so many people were ignorant of the fires and hence it cost them their lives / their homes. The television media is all over the fires after they burned down parts of Victoria, but when the fires were burning and warnings and messages were broadcast over the Internet and radio, not many people got the message.

Ignorance has a significant cost. The weather on the news has flood warnings , so why not other disaster warnings. Also the ignorance of people to being aware that the area that they have residence is prone to bushfires / floods / etc.

Of course, my entire point is if people actually built biomes , then this wouldn’t be a problem as the atmosphere and environment would regulated but The Wilderness Society doesn’t seem to agree with that strategy for conservation, probably as something to do with their lack of influence and budget restrictions.

Best wishes,

Hope to catch up with people,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

One week till my Birthday and I don’t feel any different or any older.
I have time now, but seek part time employment that can assist in reimbursing my dwindling bank account.

I have been busying myself with LANINGRAD (which could have been better), coding PHP, studying for next year, helping various people with their Linux related issues, including the reverse engineering of a Linux BSP for the Colibri PXA27X board and various other ends.

My foot is still slightly sore, rebecca (the eeepc1000h) replaces ulrica which is still being fixed. My NAS / ivanhoe is at Altech and I waiting for other people to pick up there act in an attempt to get it back before my birthday.

I passed my maths subjects and got a 7 for the Advanced Network Management (Unix Admin) and 6 for Project management.

My thoughts have ranged from skits, to referencial proofs of illogicality, to partially isomorphic mappings between machine learning and social interaction.

Enjoy the summer / winter solstice ….

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

My head hurts courtesy of the 4 hours sleep and the lethargy attempts to consume me whilst choking and hicupping madly. Threadspace Hyperbol is an interesting distraction, and my reflections on psychology, humanity and other odds ends prance about like a young elk in the spring time.

I am now free from scheduled uni contact time till next year. However I am still required to sort out the CRA mess for one of my group projects, if the lecturer gets back to me, and also to start work and study on two of the subjects I am doing next semester. (repeating Advanced Calculus and project work for the Capestone Project subject).

I am also attempting to lavish my time on a daunting but magnificient swarm of projects and activities.  One is these is my quest for employment, so that I can restock my dwindling funds. Anyone need a part time /contract codemonkey / software engineer or nix sys-admin , or computer problem’s fixed or tution of certain subjects, please let me know.

One of the activities I will be focusing on is more time into updating this blog / website, with the retheming plan going ahead and the uploading and creation of more content. Soto ayam is good for the soul, despite the ignorance of remembrance and death.

I will also attempt to provide some audiovisual material, creative odds and ends, and some extracts of varying literal coherency and cohesion.

At least I am not dead, and ameliration is possible despite vagrancy of mind.

Status:

Foot : Sore

Laptop: Broken, possibily getting Asus EEEPC 1000H as replacement

NAS: Getting fixed in Taiwan

Uni: IT stuff I should be fine, Maths stuff hoping I pass

Social: Still trying to sort out the reasons behind the loneliness and lack of contentment of my own company.

Rest of Life: Pretty much a ball pit of flaming BBQ chaos with a nice salad dressing and some exotic dip

This post’s question is how do you find yourself admist yourself in everything else ?

Best wishes and have fun,

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