Non-Alien Probes

Freakishly cool weather. Joyfully welcomed freakishly cool weather. By the end of the week it's supposed to get up into the 90°s (± 36° C). Although it probably took me at least fifteen minutes to insert the degree characters and boot up the calculator to find the Celsius equivalent, I enjoyed doing it this time because when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard Mac OS the International Character Set is displayed in the upper file menu line as an American flag. If I click on it the dialog box with all the special characters pops up. If I double-click on a special character that's not on a regular keyboard, then that character is displayed wherever the cursor is blinking. Like this: ‡¿‽¶☀♧♡

I'm sure the same ritual has been a default available from some menu, but having it on the top menu line all the time seems to help me think of it as a regular thing to do rather than spelling out the words for the symbols instead. This is part of some computer coding language called Unicode. I don't know much about it. A correspondent from San Francisco who does computer programming for a living wrote that aside from it's other uses that it can be used to write code for music.

There is a distinct possibility that the colonoscopy the VA is performing on me tomorrow could bring heart-rending news, but here I am tonight wondering if I'm too old to learn to write programming code in LISP. The only problem I really foresee is not my age so much as the fact that I'd have to teach myself. I'd have to learn it on my own, and if I had enough ambition to get me over the hump with that, I'd have done it already.

I was in my fifties when I bought my first computer. I took some computer courses over to the Community College. I took a preliminary course in CAD and a silly business course in BASIC programming for office personnel. It was the only programming course the school offered at the time, and it was taught by my nemesis from when I was studying electronics.

The teacher was/is a true nerd and an ex-marine. In my opinion that's a lousy combination for being any kind of teacher of course material based on math and science. True to form, as a regular nerd he was a lousy communicator, but as an ex-marine it was difficult to ask questions to clarify his clumsy language strategies. He took questions from the class as a personal affront.

All this came to bear in this BASIC programming course. It was not a course designed for nerds, but for office personnel as a sort of familiarizing doodad so the the secretaries and file clerks could fathom what was going on around them, although they wouldn't be using BASIC for anything more than perhaps simple MACROS.

I was very disappointed in how the class transpired. The textbook costs $50. It has 22 chapters. The class never progressed beyond the first two chapters of that expensive textbook. The students taking the course were business students. They didn't grok binary systems. Like they'd never heard of them before. I wasn't much better. The best way I knew of binary systems was from the yin and yang of the I Ching I was obsessed by.

I think I might have gotten a lot more from a class in BASIC programming if there had been a real teacher. This guy's boss was a great teacher, but he didn't teach any programming courses. I learned more than I thought there was to know about capacitors in nature. About how electricity is stored in the ground and released by passing storm systems as lightening.

I guess I learned enough in general about how a programming language is used to get a computer to perform the correct functions to ask a real programmer simple questions. Somehow I've got it in my mind that learning any programming language would be similar to learning astrology, but only in that they're both systems for thinking about things. Programming seems like it would be sort of like learning to ask an oracle the right question.

I became a little intrigued by what I read on Hans Reiser's blog and other places, where the story of this guy who was a prodigy with programming, and his specialty was writing the code for file systems used by operating systems. In his case, specifically the filing system for Linux. Then, at the very time I was reading about his genius, he apparently killed his wife, and was subsequently convicted of murder.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser

That was weird. Reading his comments about the difficulties he had getting the help he needed to debug his Linux filing system was very revealing to me about how one would have to think to make something like that happen. Code a file system, that is, not kill your wife. '-)

Several computer programmers have told me that if you have a knack for programming that it will more or less teach itself to you. It's not that having teachers is not a good thing, but to some degree you have to be a self-started and get possessed by the dedication it takes to reach a high level of proficiency on your own.

That's what I didn't have for an acting career although I actually did do my homework. I was surrounded by students who were dedicated to the craft in ways I knew deep inside I'd never come up with on my own. But, contrarily, I did have that dedication to keep on keeping on to learn astrology after I knew what the few teachers I had knew. I had to provide my own incentive to read a few more books or make another hundred natal charts. I never thought I'd do something like that on my own.

I've never needed anybody to push me into writing either. I've had some offers to help me develop the rudiments of writing mo' bettah. It seems silly in a way, but I've kinda always known what I was using writing for. I use writing to find out who-I-think-I-am-is. For some reason that's an incredibly difficult process for me.

I use writing to attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words. I've discovered over the years that I can't write fast enough to find the words I need to say what I see in my imagination if I first try to assess the veracity of those drifting thoughts. Drifting thoughts are slippery devils for me. Sometime I'm more easily distracted from following the trail of some drifting thought.

I started writing a little later today than usual, and when something I thought I could get involved with happened along, and I wrote a decent introductory paragraph to keep me focused, a housefly landed on my right forearm, and I had to stop until I murdered that fly. they're in cahoots, you know, flies are. That's which they cause such strong reactions and force even strong men to become a Lord of the Flies. '-)

I realize it's a strange thing to be writing about, but I've been more consciously aware of the landscape of my colon since my doctor told me she had made an appointment for me. Granted, I have deliberately looked straight into the possibility the surgeons will find something fatal going on in there, but there is also the fact that I'm gonna get drugged up and probed more deeply than any enema my mother gave me as a little boy.

I keep thinking of the stories I've occasionally encountered about people getting kidnapped and probed by odd instruments by aliens that look like preying mantis. I think it's perfectly normal for me to obsess on the possibilities either pro or con of what's gonna happen manana. It ain't gwine be "bizness as usual" tomorrow come hail or high water.