learning and browsing

-
Well it's a fine how-do-you-do; my other memory stick died! For those keeping track, that's the second of two 1GB OCZ sticks dying. At least, I think it's the memory that's gone bad -- I suppose it's entirely possible that the motherboard sockets are gone, which would be quite the pain. On top of the cost of replacing the motherboard, there's the installation process. So yeah, I'm really hoping it's the sticks themselves that have gone. Strange, it's so quiet in my apartment when the computer is off. Is this how it must've been, back in the 19, uh, 1910s? I remember as a kid disappointed when in a house that didn't have a computer or TV.

The reason for rebooting my computer, for indeed it was otherwise working fine before I turned it off, was that I'd been fiddling with the webserver and needed to update my HOSTS file. Yes, fiddling with the webserver because I'm getting familiar with MVC and in particular, Symfony, a PHP MVC framework. Inspired, you might say, as I've been learning about MVC at work. That and jQuery, a nifty JavaScript library. Oh I am learning a lot, reminding me of my university days when faced with reading textbooks and scanning articles; mindnumbing stuff. Maybe my brain just gets full? Whatever it is, I get tired at work, head-droopingly tired. Thankfully I have started doing some real, productive work which keeps me awake through stress i.e. concern that I didn't actually learn anything and just slept a lot.

Looking at real estate listings is a lot like on-line dating -- you flip through descriptions and pictures, musing what'd be like to live there/date them. After you've seen a few places (met a few faces), you get an idea of what to expect based on the profiles. And so you act less often, growing tired and not feeling the need to see what they would really be like. Oh sure, you believe that there's one out there for you, and so you keep looking but day after day of mediocre or unsuitable (or simply totally out of my league) matches does drain one's will, leaving one to compare them with the ones that got away.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

fifty is the number

-
I turned fifty last month. We had a small party with old faces, lots of laughs, and, at least for me, a reminder of the life I had before the pandemic, before having a kid, before my colon surgery . That is to say, a good time, and I hope to have many more like it. I do feel older, in practical, daily ways. For one thing my eyes have gotten much worse over the past year, so bad that I find myself looking over my glasses to look at my phone. My skin is just ravaged by this dry winter air, well beyond anything I'd ever experienced. A lifetime of neglect and sun-exposure has finally caught up to me. While I'm not exactly getting heavy I have noticed a softness building up around my torso. So over the past few months I've taken to doing modified burpees as my daily exercise and have been pretty happy with the results. I do them in small bursts, HIIT-style, and that seems about the pace I can afford, both on a time and energy level. I do try to play video games but I definitely ...
Read more

Dying, up close

-
In media people are portrayed as alert and cognizant right up to the moment they pass, able to give a final message to a loved one. Not so with my father, and I feel his death is more typical of the experience — a disinterest in watching or reading anything, increasingly jumbled speech, a loss of any appetite or thirst, just long periods of sleep. Finally a day or more of near-constant sleep, his heart beating slower and slower, until we turned away for a moment and he was gone. Though really he had been dying in varying degrees for weeks, his bodily performance a far cry from even a couple months before. It’s been over a month since the funeral  but the events leading up to it are still fresh in my mind, a history where my dad still lives, still has advice for me, still has smiles for his friends and family. My grief comes and goes, gradually trending to a melancholy, a deep sigh in my day. In truth I have been grieving these past few years as signs of my father’s end would appear...
Read more

a return to the mood

-
Image
And yet life goes on. In June we had a short visit to Montreal, packing in the usual sights and flavours, tempered by the heat and our own waning energy levels. We took great advantage of the hotel's pool, swimming a joy I never tire of, encouraging Sora to get more comfortable in the water. I didn't have much opportunity to pick out my old haunts but I could see that the city has grown since my days there, shimmering halcyon days full of youth and opportunity. Indeed every moment on the streets would bring waves of memories, of friends faded or forgotten, my head lost and spinning and trying to breathe it all in again. Obviously very different now but seeing it anew through Sora's eyes gave some fresh pleasure. We made the trip to the recently updated Biosphere, probably the highlight of the trip, the biomes living up to their names. My heart shatters at the thought of our poor Ontario Science Centre being stripped of its wares, each precious exhibit cast out, the unique, ...
Read more