NaNoWriMo 2012 Completed

Looking forward to next year!  I got a plan...
They said you could edit your certificate in Adobe Reader but it wouldn't open for me.

Retrain the Brain

Went for a good long run this morning.  Cleared the head.  Set myself up to study all day.  And I did!
Thinking about ones reward circuit and how I've maybe trained myself to fail.  And that I need to retrain my brain.  That is I've trained myself to accept that big rewards are not worth the work by giving up and moving onto something easier.  And that maybe that creates a vicious cycle where my brain strongly objects when I try to climb the ramp to get the cheese.  Well no more!  I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!  I'm breaking the cycle.

1 more week to go

till I'm done classes for the fall semester.  I'm looking forward to not having anything due.  The constant stick at my back is tiring.  But it'll be worth it when it's over.
Had a good talk today with the system administrator at school.  It's nice how much you can get out of a simple chat with someone.

Maps - yeah yeah yeah

Long day.  Slept about 2 hours last night.  Finally got presentation one finished.  One down, one to go.  Learned a lot about maps, but just the tip of the iceberg.  Realized why there is an entire department dedicated to geography.  Also, if we're going to make a geo-data based app we might want a geographer on hand, at least as a consultant.  So, that means two tests, one presentation, one assignment and one long paper to go for next week. Then it's exams.  But tonight it's date night and I'm going to chill before hitting the hay early.  42,000 words today!

Know your errors

One of the reasons given for keeping a blog is to explain one's errors.

What's my major malfunction currently?

Deployment.  Deployment. Deployment.

I'm looking at delegating the task or learning it myself.

Parse seems a good choice but I don't like handing over control to a third party.

The alternative is MS or OpenSource, or RubyOnRails.

I like OpenSource but not PHP.

My solution is to talk to our server guy at school and get advice.

Cause I'm running in circles trying to figure it out on my own.

I mustache you a question

Writing is blog is hard..wah wah..
I'm not even writing anything important.  Just trying to keep up the habit until I reaaally have time to think about it and do something worthy.  For now, it's habit making time.  A little every day.  Getting used to the idea.

Budgets and Spending

With Christmas coming up it's time to tighten the belts.  I've started again using Mint.com and seeing where our spending is going.  It's incredible how much waste occurs through negligence.  A lot of money could be saved on ATM charges.  The bank fees are insane.  These things could be tightened up with some time and diligence.  Banks and insurance companies are aware of this.  They take advantage that few of us have time time or patience to look into the charges and passively accept them.  Well no more!  I'm looking into switching our bank to a lower cost, no-fee option like PC Financial or a credit union.  Beware creditors - I've got my eye on you!

Become the state you will remember

What I'm doing write now is going into memory.  In the future, I will have access to this memory.  Is this what I want to remember in the future?  The state I am in now will become knowledge in the future.  Knowledge is recollection. I seek to become one I want to remember.  I think that is a good judgement of my actions at the moment.

It's Friday, Friday

Crossed 30,000 words, just cruising along.  At this rate I'll finish on Nov 27.
The book sucks but I'm okay with that.  Next year, or the year after, might be good.
The thing I like is that I finished my assignment last night.  I was tired but made myself do it and
today I wasn't scrambling at the 11th hour to get it in under pressure.
Just gotta keep it up...only 6 mos to go..

Tired but I'm working baby

but at least I got my assignment done - which is better than I was the last two assignments for this course.  It's done the night before.
Now I just have to keep it up.  Phew!
I have to watch for burn out.  I've set up a new pace, and I've got to get conditioned to it.
What happens is a week or month from now - I'll change back.
SNAP like a rubber band.
I've restarted this cycle so many times.  I hope it's going up.
At least in 6 months I'll have some piece of paper like in the Wizard of Oz.
I hope it's the Wizard who gives it to me.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

I'm in good shape, I passed 25,000 words on NaNoWriMo and nearly aced a test today.
My belt loop is tightened a notch while my weight has increased 18 pounds..
My runs times and distances are increasing while my average minutes/km are decreasing - 5:05min/km (including the 2 minute cool down).
My weight-training weights are going up increased about 20 lbs per exercise.
I'm thinking about the Toronto marathon in May.  That means my run training increases in the new year and adds an extra long run to the weekend.
School's coming to a close.  That degree is hanging like a carrot.

Then what, who knows?  But I have a plan.

Almost there...

Crossed 23000 words today on NaNoWriMo.
It's been another great experience.  Digging into one's brain like some self-administered neurosurgery.  One interesting side-effect seems to be, I feel like I'm getting better at it.
Entered into the experience without a goal, and now the goal seems to be emerging.  The point of NaNo is forming as I go along.
 If I had to give advice at gun point it would be get up early and if you're stuck lower your standards.
The point really isn't to show off to anyone.  Of course, it's more about the journey not desti-yadayada.
The harder challenge is this blog.  I'm still rather shy of what I'm assuming the worst to be a judgmental critical unforgiving albeit non-existent audience.
Coming soon pictures! and more positivity!

Here comes another one.

It's opposite day.  Like the George Castanza technique.  George failed at everything, was jobless, girlfriendless, moneyless so he decided to so everything the opposite.  If he ordered ham on rye he'd order chicken on white.  Or something like that.  If I'm failing I'm thinking about Castanza.
Like instead of surfing on Reddit - I'm gonna go for a run.
Instead of not writing this blog today, writing it.

Calvinism, The Protestant Reformation and the American Work Ethics

Actually it's not cubed.  But I digress..
Already missed one day.  It's been busy.  There's always more to do.
Yesterday we learned about Calvinism, and the Protestant Reformation.
What this explained was that was the historical precedent for the American work ethic.
That before, we would 'work to make our means' and that was it.  The rest of the time was given to leisure.
There 179 or so holidays.  But when the Puritans came to the states they said 'sloth is evil' , 'sloth is a deadly sin'.  And therefore the opposite of sloth, is work.  So work must be a virtue.  Work showed, proved our faith.  And that was an important status symbol to show everyone.   How faithful you were.  And to show how faithful you were - you showed how much you worked.  So the Calvinists got rid of holidays - if people were caught taking the day off on holidays, even Christmas, they were whipped.  Pretty good motivation to not be caught lazing about.  So it seems to explain why hundreds of years later, we have this neurotic drive to work all the time, this guilt for taking the day off instead of just enjoying it.  And also why the same A-type isn't observed as much in Europe - Italy, France and Germany.  If you're working long hours that signifies that you don't know what you're doing.

New New Post

Successfully did a GeoLocation test last night at :
http://cliffordcoulter.com/
Our group's project is to create an app for tours.
So the first step was to do a geo-location test and it was surprisingly easy to get a user's location from their phone.  Also it was surprisingly easy and fun to use Parse on the back end.  Makes me wonder why I would want to handle the back end side of things - the services they offer are extensible and reasonably priced - $0 for what we need right now.
Now I want to try and get users logged in through facebook.
The issue I'm having is with
"need to initialize Facebook.Util", so that's what I'm working on this morning.
Other things on the to-do list for this week include:

• CISC 497 paper on "Winner-Take-All" society
• test on Friday in Microeconomics
• I should probably get started on my next presentation for CISC 490: Topics in Computing
• CISC 499 Project proposal due Nov 9!

I better get back to work!

Maria Callas - La Traviata - YouTube

Maria Callas - La Traviata - YouTube

New Post

Someone somewhere on the internet said it was good to keep a blog.  I thought I'd try to create my own site but it's taking too long, to get it up and going so in the meantime here's this one.

The issue I'm having with the site is deployment.  I've been trying to do it in Visual Studio using Cytanium as a hosting provider.  That problem is many fold but in a nutshell there's too many areas that are incompatible.  The challenge is to get everything talking to each other all the elements pointers pointing at the right places.

First it was VS 2010 wasn't compatible with SQL 2012.  So I upgraded to VS 2012 but it comes with .NET 4.5 which isn't supported by Cytanium.  Then there's the database choice, SQL, SQL Express and SQL compact.  All the tutorials for deploying a VS project start with compact and then convert to Express, but all the changes made to the transformation files, the web.config files are half done manually and other places done automatically by VS so you don't know what is modifying what and where.  It's like this black box with holes in it.  And to get you to fix somethings by poking a screw driver into it.  So you don't know what you're fixing where or how it's connected to the other parts.  I'd rather have it all open or all closed.  Not half and half.  And then to get all the different parts on the same platform.

I have become quite attached to the MVC model.  

But in the back of mind the whole time I wish I was using open source components.  MS has a habit of sucking you into there products and making you dependent on all their software.  I feel like their new baby is Azure and everything about the three seems geared to get you to sign up for Azure, create a profile and let them take care of everything.  

But after months of no success with MS, I'm fed up.

Now I'm looking into CodeIgniter or Parse.