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Orientation Reunion, Freshthings, and other news

Posted on by Benjamin Southall

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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 :)

Holiday Paradox, Yumcha,Icicles and raspberries

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Hi everyone,

With the Festive Season and New Year’s Celebrations now over, I have the time to pragmatically approach respite but that desire becomes enmancipated from focus, when I realise that given this was the Christmas we had when weren’t having Christmas, leaves me to marvel at unison between the best laid plans of mice and men being  sabotaged by hungry cats and implusive people and the irony of consistency that ensured our Festive chaotic hodgepodge that was our Christmas invovling lots of travelling, catching up with people and lots of interesting and curious surprises. (This sentence didn’t know when to stop, so I had just let it go or else it would have engaged me in a intextual battle for sentience)

I also realise know that despite the 6 or so weeks of deja vu and premonitions that frazzled my consciousness, the important reminders of Christmas were present regardless.

These included Gratitude, Respect, Hope, Awe, Tradition, Beauty, Peace,Truth,  Trust and Sacrifice. (As a side note I have deduced that sacrifice is quite important to the emotion called love, but that is a tangential interpolation for another time, an additional perpendicular side note, imagine cupid with a nerf missle projecticle instead his regular arrow).

The act of doing nothing implies that nothing is done, but inaction is still action just with a different direction.  The opposite of nothing is supposed to be everything, but yet how many of us manage to do everything  One always does something and that something can be anything, except it seems everything or nothing.

These concepts are such that when we intend or desire to nothing, we end up doing something. (This combined with the law of attraction, probably explains my Christmas, if you can follow it, if you can’t you could always get drunk or smile and nod politely as your mind boggles).

The Chinese Room gedanken got me thinking, the main of point it is that those that speak Chinese have both syntax and semantics in the transformation and communication of language, were as the person in the Chinese room only has syntax.

I wonder that if you gave him syntax that mapped syntax to semantics in a lookup mesh or table, would that make him just as capable at understanding Chinese as those outside the room.

I find that I often feel like Daria (I have been watching it lately) or I feel like the native speaker with understanding of the messages communicating wondering if what I communicate is actually reflected on and understood or just conveyed through Chinese rooms were the information is correctly or incorrectly parsed based on various syntax languages adopted by the systems and people around me.

I bumped my head the other day and it is still sore. Chance has nothing to do with Luck and the odds are such that given reason and choice, choice is taken regardless of purpose or rationality

Abrasive circumstances either result in dust or diamonds ….., which result is upto the the individual invovled.

Did you have a nice Christmas and New Years ?

Did you stumble across a surprise you didn’t expect ?

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234 :)

Incy wincy uboot, Illusions of Progess, and other haberdashery

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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 :)

Headstrong, Grammatical Diversions, Blossoms of Glee, and Soto Ayam

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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

Subjectivity, Oblivion, Casual Disdain and thoughts and murmurs..

Posted on by Benjamin Southall

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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 :)

Rainbows and promise of resolution, each step into ouch, coping mechanisms…

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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 :)

Morality questions and developments, natural vs fake strawberries, and resolutions

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Hi everyone,

I have been quite busy, but not as productive as I would have liked to have been. I got to watch most of The Alzheimer Case last night and I recommend it highly.  It made me reflect on morality and how setienence and genetic moral instincts fit into human development, as all that can actually evolve is the social conditiioning passed from parent to child or from society to individual and then from individual to society.

I had a nice discussion with Tim on how addictions can cause underlying genetic changes to a society, and the question of whether human conceptualisation and to a greater extent human morality is merely an addiction we have to cope or adjust to life.

I have also been further studying copying mechanisms that people use deal with emotion stress and circumstances in life along with other social motivations , dynamics and interactions. I am enjoying both my maths subjects and most of the project work for the other subjects , despite its longevity and depth and pressure.

Not having my laptop (it is being repaired (hopefully)), is quite the inconvience, although having the 6 Gentoo Xen images running for ITN771 is nice, especially as we have VOIP working now. After significant testing I have discovered the real strawberries are much tastier and sweeter than the strawberries and cream Allens lollies.

I found a really good list of skills required to be a Game Developer and was plesantly surprised to see that I had most of them. I have also been trying to deduce Blizzard’s path finding algorithrm from comparing creep path finding in various mazing TDs, the resistance and movement probably indicate a D* or A* algorithrm but I can’t work out the coeffecients from deduction alone and I have a bat’s chance in spaghetti of actually seeing the source code, so I guess I will just never be sure.

In other news I can make full pan sized pancakes without burning them , after the amount of practice I have had. Ivanhoe still has broken USB ports and both my knowledge and recall continue to surprise me when I am able to help and assist people with work from subjects I haven’t done but have some knowledge in.

I would really like to start roleplaying again but GURPS seems to ebbed in to the abyss for the moment and forum rpging is to incohesive for me. I finally got my ext3 drive working with the silly machines from uni using ext2fsd.

I also was reminded by Hui Min about Padan cake and Kek Lupis Sarawak and am now craving Indonesian deserts, however Bondi Bali reminds of exactly why I promised never to go back to Bali, so I will probably end up returning to Java instead.

What type of food haven’t you had in a long time and would really like to have ?

Best wishes and have fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234 :)

Vanishing Sizzler, Demonic Creations

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Hey everyone,

I just discovered that the Queen St Mall Sizzler doesn’t exist. And that is such a shame. I remember when the Queen St Mall used to have a rollercoster at the top of it and used to have a LEGO playground. Such fund childhood memories.

As you probably know the words succubus and incubbus are names of demons that sleep with their victims and torment them. These words come from the Latin root cubare (“To lie”), and the prefixes in and sub, which mean on top and below respectively. Getting bored with just these demons, I began elaborating on less gender specific demons below using other Latin prefixes.

List of Demons

jugccubi I lie chained
juxtaccubi I lie beside
intracubbi I lie within
retrocubbi I lie behind
velocubbi I lie quickly
uncubbi I lie hooked
transcubbi I lie across
strepcubbi I lie twisted
fellacubbi I lie sucking
paccubbi I lie peacefully
regcubbi I lie straight
pravcubbi I lie crooked
phalacubbi I lie shining
percubbi I lie through
oedcubbi I lie swollen
odorcubbi I lie fragant
nudcubbi I lie naked
lenicubbi I lie gently
lacrimcubbi I lie crying
ignicubbi I lie on fire
contracubbi I lie against
concubbi I lie with
cirrcubbi I lie curled (tentacle)
aurcubbi I lie golden
augcubbi I lie growing
audicubbi I lie listening
ambicubbi I lie on both sides
amorcubbi I lie loving
abscubbi I lie away

I just finished fiddling around with indices referencing stuff, it is an a -1 , rather than a, just to spite you…

Saturday was spent with Aunt and Uncle from WA and was quite nice if not a very long day, I got up at 6am (went to bed a 1:30am) and then went to the Rocklea Markets…..

Hope you are having as much fun with assessment and other odds and ends as I am or am not,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234 :)

Clarity, Teardrop, Icecream and steps closer

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Hey,

Darkness falls , surprising success progress, rhymes hit the blackness of the river as I pass strangers and comtemplate hidden metaphors, meanings and realities of illogic and life in song. Clarity comes to me , understanding clearly what was blurry long ago, realising little pieces that had be out of focus like a reflected, refracted fractal rippling towards a nonlinear chaotic realm of convergence back to rationality.

Icecream is cold and good, especially for sad people. Their is no age restriction on Wii Tennis :) .

Have fun and best of luck

Benjamin Southall aKa Appleman1234 :)

Bolting down memory lane, Haven’t I seen this before,Back to back dueling against the pocket watch…

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Hey everyone,

How are we all ? Sick ? Tired ? Exhausted ? Flat out like a lizard pulverised on asphalt from a road train of commitment ?

So much has been happening, ulrica (my laptop) seems to have gone a bit crazy and requires some serious slanting  (between 45% and 85%)to get around BIOS freezing, I think it is related to grounding the USB ports, as the BIOS used to have a bug of freeze when a USB device was plugged in, but I downgraded the BIOS to fix that and now the BIOS freezes when it thinks that the usb isn’t grounded, I think.

I have various assessment due including two group projects that were due this Friday and are now due Monday and a Differential equations test next Thursday.

I have been busy setting up services on a custom Gentoo Linux Harden Xen guest image that I made for the ITN771 group assignment, in the process I found a bug in OSSIM related to nessus scanning that will be hopefully patched in the next release.

I have also been helping various colleagues with debugging in Python and C and this was quite enjoyable given the amount of stress I have had to deal with lately….

I remember so much of what happens from my dreams / premonitions, it is quite unnerving and things and encounters that normally would be unusual or strange seem so familar.

I had an interesting discussion with an atheist again about logic systems face to face in the room of Green, it was a refreshing change from the misunderstanding and cynical debate and mockery that I have come to expect.

I have also had a chance to reflect on the morality of death and human life via the media references I have the delight of being overexposed to like a spectator being inflicting with an entire naturalist colony streaking at a public or sporting event. These movies were The Swamp (Korean, mystery thriller, vengenence flick about wife catching best friend having affair with her husband), Unleashed (Starring Morgan Freeman as the awesome blind piano tuner that liberated the main character from slavery and killing ) and Godforsaken which featured a good kid in the wrong crowd with good intentions but the wrong loyalties which eventually cost him his life.

People are so oblivious to the effects of their actions on other people and the consequences…

It hurts, and caring hurts, apathy is safety but it has its cost as well.

I would write more but I am so stressed and I don’t want to vent any more than I have already.

Did you ever take a chance on a moonbeam ….

Stay well

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234 :)