whilst sick in bed

Freaks / the Hilton Sisters:
check out Bound by Flesh on netflix for a overview of the sister's lives.  Interesting tidbits of early showbiz

CORE (netflix):
Stereotypes abound, too long, but laughable.  Unlike a mostly insufferable "Gravity"; here we are spared the asphyxiation.

Building Pharaoh's Chariot

How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn & Peter O'Toole
on the Question of Forgery

fading but never sleeping

surrounded but always isolated

windows look into extinction
store fronts that haven't sold for years
can you trust a city
whose arteries haven't seen sunlight
for a hundred years?

ears are ringing with everything
but eyes that see nothing
walk right past

consumption is inevitable
in a place that has it all

more steel reaches for a starless sky
whites move into one neighborhood
the blacks into another
signs get bigger, ads are brighter
prostitutes find another corner
despite what the papers say,
things are being sold
nothing in this mad world changes

For the past month or so, I have been diving back into the world of coding with C.

My first unofficial experience with coding was in high school on the TI-83 and TI-89 calculators, where I programmed very simple things in TI-BASIC.  At first, I made simple programs to make my life easier--things like calculating the roots of a quadratic equation.  Nothing fancy.  In my junior year, I drew a picture of a cat using various functions overlaid on top of each other and wrote a program to allow a higher number of functions overlaid at one time than was normally allowed, as well as animating the cat pooping into a litterbox.  (Classy!)

My first official experience with coding was in college, where I took a class in MATLAB.  I had wanted to take C, but it didn't fit into my schedule, and neither did Java, so I took MATLAB instead.

Why C?
I wanted C for the same reason language students study Latin--although Latin itself is not very useful in day to day life, it facilitates the study of many other modern languages.  Even in my early forays into C, I am seeing much of what MATLAB took from C.  Perhaps this isn't a sensible way to start into coding--I note the grimaces when I tell people I'm trying to learn C--but I can be stubborn, and I can't get it out of my head that I need to learn how to code in C.

I can't remember the last time I've had the energy to learn something on my own.  College never came completely naturally to me and often left me feeling too drained to do anything that I liked at the end of the day.  I was forced to temporarily abandon a lot of my hobbies like sculpture and reading, further draining my satisfaction with life.

Learning has come much easier to me since I began to learn how I learn.  In my last years of college, I started to use the internet to supplement my self-teaching.  I read the assigned textbook, but also began better at finding information from other places, be they course websites, Wikipedia, or friends.  I am good at researching, so applying this toolbox to my schoolwork improved my performance.

Teaching myself programming on my own has benefited from the same toolbox.  But I also must give credit to my improved health over the past few months.  In the fall, I started taking iron supplements for anemia.  The past month, I have adopted a vegetarian (approaching vegan) diet.  I feel increased energy and generally healthier.  It's been a great time and I haven't felt better in my adult life as far as my levels of happiness and motivation.  So, now, back to K&R.

I had never noticed this after months of taking the same way to work.  Maybe it was because the train went extra slow around this corner.  Or maybe I was paying more attention today.  


Either way, a small sunbeam peeked out through the clouds across the apple.


Was it just because we were looking?


Let's always be looking.