Randomness

Jun 4, 20079 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jun 4, 2007

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This journal is just a collection of random thoughts.

I'm learning to play "Mad World" on the piano, singing along. Rhapsody gave me the score. It's kinda nice. I want to have finished learning it by Wednesday. "I find it kinda funny that the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

In unrelated musical tastes, "Perfect Day" by "Lou Reed" is nice. Because of what I'll mention later.

But I've been listening to My Chemical Romance mostly lately. I assume that pachunka hates them; really, they're not that good if you're not used to the sound. But I like them. I like them a lot. Cheers Rhapsody88 for showing me around. Some might argue that I'd be a fan of better groups if I had listened to more around this gender. True, because I've tried some, but not much. One of my favourites are Hawthorne Heights, from emo/screamo/punk/sca. And many more, well. Hopefully, Orange Juice will help me broaden my music interests.

"Will you defeat them, your demons, and all the non believers, the plans that they have made?"

Some of you might know of the old Orange Juice system I once made. Well, I'll redo it from scratch when I find some time for it, this time "multiplayer" mode. For those who only know about the old system, or for those who don't know about it at all, it's going to be a strictly closed (i.e. no open registrations) music sharing group. Basically, a web site where you can see a huge library of songs, much like last.fm. With automatically filled information about each artist, song, album; automatically filled song lyrics; and other cool stuff. It will have a streaming flash player so that you can listen to stuff just like that. Unlike last.fm, you will be able to play any artist, song, album you like, download full album or single song mp3's to your own computer and so forth. Songs in full length. And upload your own music if it doesn't exist. The basic idea is: I have many computers; some are laptops, they don't have huge HDD's. I want a centralized place for my music on the Internet, that I can play from no matter what computer I'm using or where I am. From Athens, Ioannina, Frankfurt airport, deviantART HQ offices in LA. Anywhere with an Internet connection. I've been streaming over ssh for a while, but it's not perfect. So I'll make this. You understand of course that this raises certain copyright problems. Which is the reason it will be a strictly closed community of friends, everybody of whom will own the music that is on the system themselves previously. The reason this is being done is so that we can listen to any piece without having to move around CD's or HDD's full of mp3's. So yeah. I'll probably give an account to about 30 people, 15 of which places are already taken (friends, co-workers, etc.). If you're interested, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do, but I can't promise much.

Anyhow, this project won't complete very soon, because I'm busy coding Optimum during my non-work time. And what's Optimum you'll ask. I've talked to some of you about it. It is basically the implementation of what used to be known as "The Code Game Project". I've finally started writing a server for it (in PHP), and abresas made the first client (in C++), so we'll play soon, after I also make a client (probably in PHP). Well, in short, Optimum is an algorithmic training game where programmers can compete against each other. The basic idea is that in each game, all clients join a common game, which is played on a "field"; each player "owns" a certain number of "animals" that can move around, have sex, fight, and die. The last player to stay alive wins. Pretty brutal. The way you play is, you develop an "AI" mechanism for your animals strategy that can be whatever you want (defensive or offensive stance, estimate or not opponents moves, combine your animals' strategy or have each animal decide alone etc.), in the programming language of your choice. So you don't play "live" like most games, but just make a program to play for you. If you are a programmer and think that sounds interesting, let me know so that you can come over and compete against us. Some of the programming languages that you could use include, but are not limited to, PHP (plain, on Cake, or on Rabbit), Python (with twisted or not), C, C++, Perl, Ruby (plain, or on Rails), Java. Sorry no Javascript; because you need sockets or at least ability to run behind or as an apache module.

(Talking of fun coding projects, remember Rabbit? That's on its way for release by the way. Pretty stable now! So stay tuned.)

Apart from fun-coding projects, deviantART coding has been very exciting lately, as we're working on many many things. Bugfixing, as usual, but also refactoring a number of existing features, such as our formatting engine, "Chrysalis" (that means faster speed for the site in general, yay!), as well as new features, concerning many areas; some of them are huge like groups (that's been waiting for so long!) and internationalization concerns (utf-8 soon? hopefully), as well as minor ones (did you see what happens when you +fav four pieces from someone who's not in your watchlist? well, go check). So that's been keeping us quite busy, and we've been having lots of fun with stuff like that!

I started ninjutsu recently (thanks for introducing me to this lovely martial art, lordceleborn!), and it's plainly and simply awesome. I think much more enjoyable than Traditional Tae Kwon Do that I used to do, which I enjoyed very much. I think it fits mostly my style, as it is similar to Parkour (which I still try to do when I can!) in many aspects. Some of the techniques are similar to Judo, which is something I always considered learning (blame old friends), but others are more like Jujitsu and Kung Fu. In general, it has a broader range of techniques than all those, meaning it requires much more time and dedication, as one would expect. Although we are mostly taught taijutsu (unarmed combat), some of the techniques we learn involve a staff or a sword

Check out some cool videos www.bujinkan-video.com/

For those of you who've been keeping track of my journals, remember I was planning to redecorate my house? Well, according to some suggestions, I'll probably buy some art for it, as well as some decorative items (arrows or swords or something similar!) Any other ideas are welcome, yup.

I got myself new hard drives. An external Western Digital 500GB, for all my storage needs. And an internal Western Digital 250GB to replace my old Western Digital 120GB which went kaput just a few days ago. Fortunately, I was able to fully recover all needed data. Talking of tech goodies, I want to get a MacBook. Pach convinced me. So I'm probably getting a small black MacBook very soon. I hope. Unrelated, but here a link for all IT junkies out there: check out this Google FS paper.

AstartEnchantress, dkaragasidis, deathstyle (and some weeks back, jujimufu) have at last finished with university exams, so hopefully they'll be able to hang out more and stuff. They deserve some love for working so hard

On a different note, I sometimes wonder if an atheist (or at least someone interested purely in religions with no conventional gods) is supposed to pray. Or rather, if it's okay to pray. Like really pray, kneel and close their eyes, and thank God and ask Him for help for life, and help because one is an atheist. It's ironic, I know. I think even if God doesn't exist, it is helpful as personal means of understanding oneself. Just sometimes, luck brings you so many good things, or even Good Things, that are normally not possible, and you just want to pray and thank God. I feel it's reasonable. Perhaps the God worshiped around me isn't good enough, but yes.

Good things have been happening in my life in general the past few weeks. I'm happy about how stuff has been going. In a sense that I wouldn't choose to be any person other than me in this particular moment.

Does it ever happen to you that you think of the same thing right before you go to sleep and right after you wake up? Yeah. I wanted to refer to an ancient greek quote here, but I can't find it. Unfortunate.