The Days of the Flu

In these days of approaching bird flu, what would you think if you stepped out of office one evening and found this - a bird's nest, complete with twigs, hazelnuts, and some other stuff - on top of your car's windshield?

The Little Words

Very often, it's not the important, big words of a language which are lacking in a non-native's vocabulary. After some time, it's easy to discuss God, work, and Schopenhauer in a foreign language. No, it's the little words you aren't taught in school.
Or how to express the idea of "Ich habe mir diese Tassen bei Jacobs ertrunken" in any other language but German?

The Porcupine Assembly

Yesterday, I preferred to go to sleep. However, I got convinced to attend a philosophical lecture in a café nearby - allegedly a regular institution there. In any case, Schopenhauer was the day's big issue, due to birth- or dying day... and I have to admit that to my somewhat lousy brain, Schopenhauer isn't a great hit. Going home with just one idea would already have been a noteworthy achievement, but I even retained three of them. Since I do not want to pass on any boredom, in short words, my idea about S.'s work is... he thought up some deep thoughts about porcupines, food, and prison.



I believe he spent most of his time considering the feelings of porcupines, who seem to be very dumb animals. They tend to mull over food, drink, and having intercourse, but since they want to cover up their primal drives in front of their comrades, they try to engage in arts, science, and philosophy. Unfortunately, everybody knows that porcupines only mull over food, drink, and having intercourse anyway.
What's more, those poor porcupines don't have houses or any other decent dwellings, so they gather in prisons, somewhat like rats, as far as I understand. In any case, they become prisoners, and not out of their free will either, and this makes them an assembly. Mind the difference - it's not the porcupines gathering which makes the assembly, it's rather the assembly which makes the porcupines stick together; those poor animals.
And what's even worse, they don't have fur, either, so they always feel cold, at least that's what Schopenhauer says. So they cuddle together, but those hopeless creatures have lots of stingy quills, so they poke each other and have to move apart again, those repulsive animals. So they feel cold again, so they move closer, and this continues to repeat several times, until they settle on an agreeable distance to each other, as they can't live without each other, but not with too much of their disgusting and offensive traits either.

That's the essence of Schopenhauer's teachings. Or so I think. Or maybe it was Steiner. Or Stirner.

The Difference A Queue Of . Makes

...

It's even more, how should I put it, dramatic/bad/stupid of me than I thought.

I just found a bug which has been extant for many many many months... delays, existing for no reason... strange effects with real-time messaging...
... all of which stands witness only to one all-encompassing theory:

Looking for a bug in your code, or any error in any system, is completely futile - or at the very least extremely inefficient - if the model underlying your assumptions about the suspected place of the initial mistake is wrong itself.

In less abstract terms, I thought the messages I send in from one end of a communications link always arrive within a certain finite time at the other end. Notwithstanding delays from computation load or anything, those messages should arrive, or get lost when hitting an overflowing buffer. However, with the framework I use, they end up being queued deep inside the system, without so much as a hint to the amount of data backed up. I can only fall to my knees and thank the camera that it offers me an easy way of interacting with the whole system - otherwise I'd never have found out about this, and this problem, permeating several communications links in my software, would have lain in hiding, waiting for me to trip over it... everything I'd have been building would have been faulty.
Incredible.

The Difference A . Makes

你好？
好。很好。你呢？
我是德国人。
这是我的中文。。。汉语？
Wow. This is something I accidentally found on my newly-installed Linux... SCIM makes entering those hanzi above sooo easy!(Let's see... 汉字。） Well, it's useless if you have no idea which ones should be the right ones in the right place, but still, it's cool it works.

But the topic should rather be... the difference a "." makes.
Suddenly my PiMP2™ became incredibly slow... so slow that I couldn't get a decent sample rate from my Polaris™ camera. And guess what, the reason was... the Evil Dots™. I kept sending "."s in order to be able to detect when communications are lost, but those Evil Dots™ make it impossible to work. They completely - and for reasons unclear to me - clog up the TCP/IP queue, the Qt™ event queue, or anything.

Therefore, I think my thesis is saved, since I can just get rid of them and speed everything up. So, no more "Sorry sir, I couldn't finish my thesis on time because the compiler is too slow"™ and no more "Sorry sir, I couldn't finish my thesis on time because I had the Evil Dots™"™... hooray.