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This story is probably useless to everyone. Those who know me should know all of this stuff, and those who don't know me probably don't care. However, I felt inspired to summarize my life, since I often feel, incorrectly, that it has been a waste of time being born... so here's something for my rational mind to fight off the irrational thoughts brought on by ambient stagnation; and also this is "doing something" rather than being uncreative, or even worse, ineffective whilst trying to be expressive (in other ways which may be more difficult currently).
A slightly less story might be "The Rebirth", which I recently (28 July, 2006) refactored out of this into a separate document, and expanded to include some more details of my activity for the year.
Below, is just some ranting; you really don't need to bother to read it.
Long before Internet access was interesting for most people, I used to dream about it. The idea of connecting to people around the world whose common theme was interest in technology seemed like a form of Heaven on Earth. Of course, by the time Internet access became widely available, it was largely a conduit for providing commercial organisations another way to reach customers, and so on... which is what we have today (2006). A side-product of that is that many people who can afford computers, but don't necessarily care intrinsically about technology, populate the Internet, the chat rooms, the IRC channels, the email groups; write blogs, and otherwise, generate "noise" which sort of obscures the whole interest I had in the the network-of-techies idea.
Actually, "technies" is the wrong word. Even "technology" might be misconstrued. To understand what I'm saying, you need to realise that the Internet I was dreaming about was, strictly an International Network of people who were interested in applications of science; for the dictionary definition of "technology" is "an application of science". This would imply a scientific mindset, and some competence in applying knowledge of science, and tools of science, to some aspects of life. However, even amongst people who are employed and officially qualified as scientists, this is rare, nowadays. I would even go further to say that, on a whole, those who work in so-called scientific capacities are less capable of applying science on a wide scale, notwithstanding any achievements within their particular fields.
However, the point of this is not to imply that I was surprised that the Internet was commercial, populated by lots of non-scientist types, or even disappointing. Actually, having a diverse set of people all available through the same medium makes for an intreresting microcosom of the real world. Rather, this is all a tangent to how I started "using computers". More precisely, my first programmible home computer was a Commodore 64, which I acquired around 1988 or so. Maybe a little earlier, but I doubt it was much later, because I have memories of programs I wrote in 1990. Previous to that I had an Atari 2600, but that being a Videogame Console System, and not a "home computer", I didn't have much fun with it beyond playing a few games.
Now, playing games may seem to be fun, but I am basically a solitary person. I don't generally hate people or view myself as anti-social; but sometimes I might joke about it in order to laugh at the dyadic divide which encourages everyone to think in polar opposites: if you don't love something, you must hate it; and so on. Life isn't made totally of opposites, and even in cases where opposites exist, shades of variation between them often exist, not only as gradients but also, and more likely, as discrete states or models. For example, you have male and female, but you can also have trans-gender from male to female, trans-gender from female to male, and hermaphodites. This is just talking about phyiscal traits, but the closer you look at classifications as applied to nature, the more you find that majority does not rule; but, rather, individuals exist and respond to environment and group dynamics to create a coherent whole.
By "solitary person", therefore, I mean that I generally prefer to spend time alone as a fun thing to do. Many other people wish to socialise as a fun to thing to; in fact, this seems to be the majority perspective, and has lead to the term "extrovert" used to describe them. One might be tempted to label me, thusly, and "introvert", but as I explained previously (actually, I didn't explain it, I just assumed you understood. my bad), that's due to a logical fallacy which expects opposites to be every-present and apparent. My reasons for spending time alone are related to my current drive in life. I view myself as a developing professional, and wish to be totally independent financially. Hence, any time spent improving myself is beneficial. And, guess what: spending time with others is only a minor part, time-wise, of the investment I plan to make to implement these improvements.
The fact that my solitary nature is due to ambition, and not intrinsic personality, was actually unknown to be until recently (at most, half my life ago); and thus I consider most of my life, wherein I acted as a happy introvert, to have been a misunderstanding. Gradually, I stopped acting happy, since I fell into despair anyways, and also, stopped acting introverted, since I don't find it beneficial to be idly ignoring society, either (the word for a place apart from society is: prison; society sentences people there for crimes...); but thus had become my habit, having never gotten into any other habits.
This relates to computers: The Commodore 64 was not Internet-ready, since the Internet was practically non-existant when it orginated. However, there was something called Quantum-Link, which was one of the precursors to the Internet, which it came with software for, and advertised. At that time, I would have to use a modem to connect to it, and pay long distance charges. Which I was ready to do, except that:
Indeed, the C64 would have appeared totally useless to me, if not for the advertisting material which came with it and promised a better world, of tape drives, disk drives, GEOS-type productivity, Q-Link connectivity, and writing programs in BASIC.
So I started to learn BASIC, but since I didn't have a way to save programs, besides writing them down by hand, which I thought was silly since the computer was supposed to be my slave, not the other way around, I got fed up and pestered my rentals (at that time I was pre-teen in age) until they got me a disk drive (which used 5-and-a-quater-inch floppy disks (which actually "flopp"ed, unlike the newfangled 3-and-a-half-inch disks in the more durable shells), and as a bonus I got a printer and a nifty 13" GoldStar monitor (which is still working well today), and thus my hobby started... ).
What hobby?
Programming! I had great ambitions of writing games and doing all sorts of useful things on my C-64. However, I ran into a few problems:
The first thing I did on the internet was look for programming tools. This is, apparently, against Bajan culture, as the things most people start (and probally continue) using the Internet for is looking at porn. Since I was naively thinking that becoming a good programmer would be the basis of my rise to riches, I didn't even think about porn until later, when people got my email address and started sending it to me (I don't mean spammers, I mean acquaintances who were "sharing the wealth"). In any case, I got myself hooked up with DJGPP, which is basically a toolset which ports GNU tools to DOS32 and let you write stuff in C, or C++.
DOS32?
Yeah, DOS32... which is, basically, DOS running in a dos box under Windows. Since I was running Windows 95 on a Pentium-class machine at the time, it made sense for me to develop in DOS. Windows would have been interesting to target as a platform, but I was under the impression that:
I'll explain those later, but I'm actually trying to cut down on the tangents.
So, me and Sam "chip" Steele decided that we missed the C-64, and we started parallel projects to "immulate" it, since
A lot came out of it; it helped me to learn C... in fact, my first C programs were the M-series, intersped with a few things like "KC", and so on... those programs are partically archived on this site, but they generally:
Chip also did some programs, first in QuickBASIC, and eventually in C and he learnt it, and nowadays he's developing mulitplatform games and all sort of coolness. His website can be reached here:[ c99.org ].
The C99 project was something I basically abandoned between early 2000 and sometime in 2001. I'm not sure why, but I do know that I lacked focus and was trying to develop and maintain a "normal" social life. More precisely, I was trying to please everyone who i cared about by giving them what they seemed to like about me. I've since given up on that, because I'm too exceptional for a normal social life, and still aspire to become rich. Also, I have an intrinsic obligation to rule the world with a rod of Fe; which requires a different attitude to life than "I am a mule, come and ride me".
Becoming rich is not a simple matter; this process involves both motivation and lifestyle. In fact, I'm developing a formalizable lifestyle system (which you could call a religion, but it is actually ir-religious and designed to replace Christianity in my mindset, since I no longer accept that my life should be devoted to any religion, but recognize that nature abhors a vacuum and without believing anything specific, I'm likely to end up joining some sort of cult and wasting much of my time being their leverage - time that could be use for omni-prosperity or world domination, instead). My motivation is multiplicit, but includes several universal factors, such as:
So, my secondary hobby could be seen as researching being rich, and my third, working towards being rich. However, I accidentally am apparently rich, by the strict definition of income vs. expenses month. This is because I'm supported in part by others, and spend very little money on myself, and put aside money to sustain me whilst I was unemployed. Nevertheless, this is only a technical richness, not an actually, "take over the world" or even "buy my own house" or "buy my own car" or "buy my own expensive clothes" rich. These appearances are deceiving, but somewhat ironically, many people are deceived by their own prejudice.
I used to call this website, "Threshold of Kohesion". This was a compacted way of expressing the pain which I continually experienced as I tried to bring "spiritual" cohesion to my being. There is a more scientific way to explain the pain, and the goal of my efforts, but it sounds like gibberish so I removed "The 3 Dimensions of Thought".
also see "The Rebirth", which is more recent stuff.
and there's my LiveJournal, hi5, myspace, and K5 accounts. I generally only update the LJ (mundane/personal stuff) and the K5 (more technical stuff), and even them, not very often.
Lord Granitor. 30 April, 2006.