Monthly Archives: March 2009

The Morning Came Again

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Another fine morning and another beautiful sunrise rising over Toronto.  This may seems like a common theme, but I love the mornings.  I love the mornings cause it matches my personality.  I am a forward thinker.  I enjoy peering into the future.  Little wonder why I enjoy trying out beta software.  Or why I follow future trends.  And I feel happy when I see I bright future coming.

The sky just turned a flamelike orange.  And the Sun is a brilliant orange ball of light.  Amazing how far away the Sun is, and yet how bright and warming it is.  Beautiful.

I figured out my plot and my setting for the science fiction novel I plan on writing.  Interestingly the setting turned out a composite of reality and my own past imaginings.  And plot, influenced heavily by games and novels that I played and read through, should be rather original.  While the novel recycles many of my old ideas, I think it will be original as a composition.

I also found two main characters.  Should prove to be an interesting duo.  An interesting contrast of personalities, hopefully that will drive the story forward.  Part of me is proud of my achieving believable characters in such a simple manner.  Part of me is telling me to not reveal too much and to mix it up more. As Marika notes: getting good characters is something a writer has shape, model and chisel away at.

I think I will start the story off in the morning, with the sunrise.  I run off to write the first chapter.

Grey Clouds, Sunny Outlook

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I get into the office really early in the morning. These past fews I normally got greeted with a dark sky and street lights. Each day the sunrise earlier. But each day the sun would rise, brilliant lines of yellow, orange, red and pink would form across the skyline. In the distance the CN tower, banking towers and skyscraper condominiums would cut dark silhouettes into the brilliant sunrise.

Today I see the dark grey dramatic underbelly of clouds stretching across the sky. The morning greyness feels even greyier under this ceiling of cloud.

Today I am in a cheerful mood. Two more days until my work project changes. A few more tasks and I’ll be able to write my novel without interruption. I also finished reading the book I wanted to finish before the end of Lent. Kubuntu Linux has infested my work laptop. The new upcoming release of Jaunty (9.04) feels and looks amazing. Everything works out of the box, even the webcam and the Bluetooth mouse. Finally I’ll be able to catch up on correspondences. And start working on learning Qt and maybe a natural language (French or Italian?).

Why I Like Free Software and Freedom

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Adding freedom to software is a great business tactic.  It gives back control to the customer, who now becomes not just another faceless entity to pilfer.  Now the customer becomes a client, a person with real goals, ambitions and needs.  And libre software/open source is a guarantee to serve those needs.  But it need not end with software…

The concept of freedom built-in can take things to new heights.  As with Flat World Knowledge.  They make open/free textbooks for colleges.  It is about creating better products, cheaper, available to more people and using less resources.  The brilliance of commoditization, and giving a free hand to your customer.  And ultimately empowering people and improving the lot of the human race.

It is this idea of freedom and empowerment, that keeps me totting the freedom flag and contributing to the libre software.

Echo 14: Something

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Lets try something new.  I’ll comment on Marika’s blog posts with another blog post.  This will make it easier to respond, generate a larger audience and increase posts per day.  Yes, I’m pigbacking on somebody else’s work. 🙂  So without further ado, I present a new sporadic feature:  Echoes to Ramblings.

In response to Ramblings 14: Something.

Movement encourages thought in people. Certain children with disabilities need to move to be able to think. Most likely something to do with sensory-muscle feedback allowing for mental procedures to flow.

If by meditation, you mean clearing your head of thoughts and concentrating on your own body’s functional thoughts.  Yes.  I don’t subscribe to the Buddhist meditation of trying to join the void.  I don’t believe in a void or a collective soul.  Also unstructured meditation is actually dangerous.  A Buddhist friend told me how a close friend of his mediated without the supervision of a priest, and was quite violently attacked by something.  Most likely a malicious spirit (read as: demon) according to him.  I prefer prayer with intentions for that reason.  Prayer in solitude achieves a similar role to meditation, plus it gives a silent outlet for ideas, wishes and concerns.  Whether there is a God and whether He listens on the other side, is a question I leave for philosophers and theologians to ponder.  I believe He exists and He listens to the cries of His adopted children.

Stillness is indeed incredibly difficult.  Stillness being the absence of the chaotic motions and thoughts, is difficult in a universe whose physical attributes can be described in terms of the motion of matter and the transfer of energy.  Silence, lack of distractions is needed and concentrated effort to push away and ignore distractions.  The best time is when there are fewer people.  That is why I love mornings.  Few distractions, stillness and silence are assured.  I get to reflect in the mornings.  Plus you get to see the spectacular sights of light interacting with shadow as the sun comes up.

An Encore

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I didn’t update my blog yesterday.  Life turned out busier than I could imagine.  I am still catching up on things.  I took on so many tasks.  I have a trip to plan.  Writing and reading just piles up around me.  I’m not sure in which direction I should concentrate my efforts.  My efforts to catch up look comical at times.  And my only wish is that I too like those Hindu gods, could possess extra sets of arms and infinitely divideable attention, so I could actually finish everything.  Yet, with all the additional emotional chaos in my life, I still manage to move forward.  In the past, I would of just curled up and moaned myself to sleep.  Today I no longer have that luxury, I need to execute my plans and execute them well.

So a quick update is in order.

Writing

I’m still maintaining my daily blog entries.  Not a simple task at times, I keep on scrunging around for topics to write about.  I’m not sure how my PWC friend, Marika manages to update her blog twice a day and still find time to write books.  I’m marking her as yet another example of the craziness, creativity and sheer amazing output that Finns are capable of.  My own novel writing ground to a halt.  Too many distractions and too many random tasks are to blame here.  However, the novel is moving towards an iteration of an earlier novel idea and elements from other ideas.  I plan on dredging up those previous stories, modifying them to fit the theme and context of this novel.  It’ll probably end up looking like a post-apoc scifi “Jungle Book” of sorts.  If you can get that around your head, great, now help me understand it! 😀

Coding

I’m changing gears at work, so hobby programming is not on my list of high priorities at the moment.  I plan on getting back to Qt as soon as the rest of my life falls into place.  Also I’m holding back from contributing to the KDE and maemo projects for a bit.  I do need a bit more motivation to get involved.  Many using the platforms more often will make that happen.  But still need a working IT before I can even think about developing for maemo.

Life

Learning to feel at home driving.  Cellphone enroute.  Things starting to fall into place.  I just need more time, to get everything done.  Working on bring some sanity and regularity into my life.  This should help on the health side, cut down on giddiness, increase productivity and increase self-satisifaction.  With the warmer weather coming, I plan on getting out there more often.  So projects might need tabling until I have more time.  And a big thing is a planned trip, which will resolve certain important and nagging questions in my mind.

Sleepless in Toronto

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It is  too early to blog this morning.  I’m sitting in at work in an empty office space.  Alone, just a few lights and mostly in the dark.  Still dark outside with some street lights, the slow moving lights of communter’s car and random distant lights of various colours.  The sun still has an hour or so to make an appearance.  The ever present hum of the server room, and my own typing on my laptop’s keyboard fill the silence.  A quiet time.  A time for reflection.

I spent the last few days in reflection, wondering about the future.  Many things have happened to me in the past while.  Good things mostly this year.  Not always things that I recognized or expected, at least not in their current shape and form.  But that is life: organic, uncertain, growing and unpredictable.  In mechanistic mind, the complexity of interactions and the nature of things make life appear chaotic.  Cause and effect and free will and randomness appear.  Surprise should not arise in my mind.  The universe, built upon the chaotic foundations of the quantum world attains regularity from its design and the laws that govern it.  Chaos only appears, because God built a universe where free will can and truly exists.  Causality only paints part of the picture.  This should make me happy, but it also brings indecision.  Causality enforces the consequences of my actions.  But the underlying chaos gives me the freedom to decide and choose my own actions at any given moment.

I realize that today, I stand in a bright and hopeful future.  A future I could not predict or imagine.  No one expected that I should live on the other side of the ocean, far from my family and far my ancestor’s homeland.  Or maybe homelands, since the fate of many nations and peoples form the history of humanity.  No one expected me meeting the friends that I have.  Not ideal people, but good people who help and guide me on my journey through life.  No one expected my working where I do.  I neither planned nor expected such a company existed.  Nor did I plan on working with such a group of friendly, ambitious and professional coworkers.  I definitely never planned nor wanted to work with people so closely, as I do as a consultant.  But over the course of my life, I grew into these situations and all these things shaped me as I do.

So why should the future to look different in nature?  How large of leap it should be not to expect love from an unexpected person from an unexpected land?  Will it be truly so?  Who knows, but God.  And even He lets us play with this toy, the universe  He fashioned  exclusively for us.  His judgement may be swift and fierce.  But His kindness toward such a clumbsy, silly and pathetic race of beings as humans are, is infinite.  And He comes to our aid when we need it.  But I am going on an aside.  I say this publicly, cause I intend not to offer up excuses or lay obstacles to this person.  And I’ll let fate, circumstances and nature run its course, whatever that course may be.  And whatever those effects may be.  I trust God will deliver the right person to me.

It is too early to write this morning.  I have spoken my mind, which my experience tells me most people don’t want to know or hear.  And I may not enjoy their critism or them turning from me.  But I’m not writing for them.  They do not care about me, and I’m less than enthaustic about them.  I write for the person who said yes, when so many others said no.  Even very interesting others, but as sad, as arbitray this decision may seem, they had their chance but chose not to act upon it.  Their loss.  And I turn my attention to this person, and say let us see what comes of this.

It is too early to write this morning.

Worn Out

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Not much to update today.  Yesterday wore me out emotionally.  (Gasp!  He still has feelings!  Oh no!)  So I didn’t get much done.  Today I’m half-tired and half-motivated.  The motivation is really for all the wrong reasons.  I just want to prove to the majority of people how wrong they are about me.  And rub it in their face.  Hard.

Anyways, nothing much going on.  It sucks when reality whispers in your ear, “Nothing has changed.”  Even when you hoped it did.  I’m not sure whether to try harder.  Or just stop caring.  Either way… just another day.

Forced Update

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Ugh…  I feel so tired this early in the morning.  Normally I enjoy mornings.  My best thinking happens in the morning.  Today I feel comatose.  So Marika, if you think that you are the only one whose brain goes on vacation for the weekend… guess again.  This new entry probably comes off as forced.  But I’m willing to suffer for my art. 🙂

Friday’s Latin Mass was pretty fun.  Pretty confusing, and I got lost after the first few moments.  I’m a bit disappointed in what was supposed to be the introduction to the mass.  It came off as “Most of you never experienced a Latin Mass.  And since the Pope is talking about it…  Well then here, enjoy!  And lets discuss afterwards!”.  Clearly a very informative introduction.  I hoping this leaving people in the dark, was mostly a sign of incompetence and not maliace.  I’m not complaining about the people helping to organize the mass.  Many of my friends and acquaintances took part in getting this mass off the ground.  But I’m not sure what kind of meaningful discussion can one have after sitting blankly, trying to follow along.  And the people who are familiar with Latin masses already have an opinion, so why even bother mentioning a discussion in that case?  Still I found it worthwhile to attend that mass, and I enjoyed meeting up and talking with friends afterwards.

The rest of the weekend went by in a “meh” sort of way.  Mostly work at home.

No real work on my writing.  Other than the realization, that I could recycle ideas from a previous attempt at a novel.  This will change the plot of the novel a bit, but not the general theme.  And the older work, which was supposed to consist of short stories in a larger overarching story will work well for this novel.  In fact you can say this novel will be the distilled ideas that I’ve toyed with for over 5 years.  I’m hoping the final product will turn out as amazing.

Also my Internet Tablet officially died this weekend.  So sad.  Glad it is still under warranty.  I miss that gadget already, it proved quite useful and usable.  I managed to extract all the information I needed from the device.  I’ll call Nokia for support sometime today.

Also disassembled two laptops yesterday.  And assembled my old one back again.  Interesting how the design of different machines is similar but with enough difference that components aren’t easily replaceable from one machine to the other.

A Time for Silence

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We live in a busy, bustling and noisy world.  Ever since the industrial revolution and the explosion of commerce and industry, we have learned to make more and more noise.  To the point, we get uncomfortable as my friend Marika pointed out.  We get so used to the background chatter and noise, that when it disappears we feel lost.  But should we?

Silence when not permanent, is as need as the darkness at night.  At night we need to relax.  We need the lack of visual stimuli (in the form of the lack of light) to properly function. Our eyes relax, recalibrate themselves.  Our brains go into organization mode and sort out the events of our day.  Silence lets us to look into ourselves and shut away the noise in our life.  Should one fear silence like one fears the absence of light, when all you need to do is speak or flick a switch to bring back sound or light?  Silence can be oppressive and harsh.  Sitting in a room with a stranger can be hard.  Your mind tries to figure the stranger’s thoughts and intentions.  Sitting in a room with a friend, who you deeply trust is different.  In this case, you share a delicate, intimate and vulnerable moment of introspection where you both trust each other enough to let your guard down.

Learning to accept and embrace silence is difficult.  I learned to start to accept silence two years ago I went on a Taize retreat in Montreal.  I remember sitting on the floor of an ancient-looking church.  All around me hundreds of other people sat around me.  Between each hymn we sung, we sat in silence.  People, strangers from different Christian denominations all sitting in silence in a church.  At first the moments of silence felt oppressive, alien, cold and unwelcoming.  But after each hymn belted out at the top of our lungs, the silence become welcome.  Silence became a  time of peace, relaxation and reflection upon the reason on why we had all gathered here.  We came together to be friends and neighbours.  And to come a step closer to be closer to God.  Ever since I tried to set aside a time for silence, for prayer and for reflection.  It is still something I struggle and wrestle with.

Today, I’ll be going to a Latin Tridentine mass held at the Newman Centre at Uof T.  From what I’ve been told the experience of attending such a mass is very uplifting.  One reasons why are the moments of total silence and solemnity in it.

Dinner at Prince

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Tonight I met up with one of my friends from my professional writing course, Andrei.  Since I could meet him in the early evening, that meant I could get some extra sleep and start work later.  Extra sleep is always a welcome change in my schedule.  Commuting to work by bus not so much.  Work turned out busy as usual with training and work on particularly sticky issue (read issue as a bug, enhancement, change request or combination of the former).

Meeting up with Andrei is always a pleasure.  We ate dinner at Prince, the Japanese eatry near work.  I highly recommend that place if you are up for some Japanese food.  We talked a lot about writing, university, the economy (everyone and his pet dog’s obsessively favourite topic it seems nowadays) and philosophy in general.  I even got into a rant about why technologies such as Linux, KDE 4 and Maemo excite me.  Hehehe… I had a lot of fun.

Interestingly it seems that nowadays my weeks are jam packed with meeting interesting people and having fun in general.  I don’t know if it just a bit coincidental luck.  Or is it because I’ve tried to take a more positive and active approach to life.  Or is it a combination of both?  I wonder…