Too Close, Too Far, Just Leaving Me With Scars

If only it was the other way around.  That would be much more satisfactory.  But I'm working it, maybe there's some practice to be had.  Though it's not exactly the same.  Who knows?  You can't just measure something flat when you need to measure how tall it is.  You're forgetting about the variable of gravity.  That makes all the difference.  Maybe I can compensate for it?  Not everything can be solved, but we can do our best to try.

I didn't think I would be back on those streets, or just that one in particular.  But I was.  The houses I knew, the park I had driven by so many times.  But how time changes, and none of us are the same.  What happened?

So now that I'm back with the program, I can get some good guitaring in, and do my best to sort out my situation.  I'll get there.  Just have to keep at it.  It's fun to play guitar!  I just want to get a new idea down, but I haven't had a new one in some time.  I guess part of that is due to not playing all that much lately, but I have been incredibly busy for some reason.

It's incredibly disconcerting to discover that all the places I have been to in the past have developed problems.  Hong Kong?  Now full of protests and crackdowns in light of the Chinese government exerting their influence.  Malaysia?  Grenade blast the other day, killing one and injuring 12.  Maldives?  Sinking into the ocean.  I really enjoyed these places, and I wish things could be better for the residents of these nations.  But I guess you have to realise that all countries have their problems.

Let's talk about information or data gaps.  So Facebook is a highly valued company, ditto with Google.  With the absence of proper products to sell and market, what do they deal with that is so valuable?  Information.  Everything you do on these platforms, and across platforms is tracked.  Website viewing habits, shopping, emails, who you interact with are all recorded and put on your electronic file in massive data houses with impregnable security.  There are some who mask their habits and personal information by deliberately putting in false information or deliberately withholding information in platforms like google or facebook.  But that's where an information gap can occur.  To verify the accuracy or veracity of something, you don't think the fb application or the messenger application (or a whole host of google applications) aren't monitoring your personal details and interactions and those of your friends?  Let me put it in an example.  A does not provide their address details on facebook or on google.  An information gap is created.  A is friends with B on facebook, and they interact with each other on their phone (texts and calls).  Google and facebook know this, so their applications review B's contacts on his phone to review whether an address is in there and report back to the server.  See, despite A creating an information gap, B has inadvertently filled it in.  How worrying.  It also harks back to things such as face recognition in photography.  On facebook I never tag my face in there, because they have a learning system, yet when pictures of me have been uploaded, the system somehow knows it's me and tries to tag me automatically.  Scary, isn't it?

Haha, and on a completely unrelated note, why is there no proper compatibility between hotmail and the native mail app on iOS?  Gmail syncs fine, so if you view an e-mail on gmail in a browser on a computer, it's automatically counted as read on your iOS device.  Vice versa if you read it on a device first.  But with hotmail?  You have to review the e-mail on the device and on a browser to actually get rid of it!  It's crazy.  You would have thought they could figure that stuff out? 

Why are people distracted by shiny things?  Ladies love big shiny jewellery so they can show off to others as a sign of status, it really has nothing to do with feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality.  Why?  Because if that were true, there would be a lot of antique jewellery out there, and there simply isn't.  I tend to find women are far more distracted by their phones and I'm worried by the trend.  All these mothers out with their kids, focusing on their phones and not paying attention to what is happening in front of them.  Seriously!  Other girls just staring straight down at their phones while walking ahead.  It's nuts!  I'm shocked there haven't been more accidents of this nature.  Do we all need to be plugged in all the time? 

There's a move to review the curriculum at schools and I'd be inclined to agree.  Most of what we learn is not relevant to life or even to history.  But what weirds me out is that there's a call to introduce more judeo-christian values and morals and western history into classes.  What?  That's something I don't agree with!  Education should be secular, because facts are facts.  All we learned about in history was western rose-coloured lenses history.  Aboriginal history was only covered for half a semester in high school.  Politicians just don't get it.

Then we get the former Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone on the Guardian saying that criticism of the widening gap between rich and poor is just a case of envying others.  That's absolutely disgusting, and totally typical of conservative politics.  They want to keep everything for themselves, and not share it with others.  It's all about who they know, who they can brown nose, and how they can maximise profits and become the richest, be the greediest and what not.  And to criticise that sort of monopoly and that mentality is apparently just envy?  No, because they work systems to ensure this is the status quo, and there is no hope for others in terrible situations.  This is Australia, and 1 in 7 people live in poverty.  That's a significant figure for a supposedly developed nation.  It's the sort of argument only a rich person could make.

Wow, I'm surprised at how productive I've been today!  Not just on here, but work wise and other stuff, it's good!  Hopefully this week can be a good blogging week.

With a bit more time, I'd like to be able to actually commence the blog intro/retrospective.  I know, time has gotten away from me, but it's something I am aching to do.  There'll be a lot of posts to get through and tag.  I look forward to it, though, this blog is our baby. 

Be still my gentle heart, it's not palpitating is it?  Everything is demure.  Am I getting enough sleep?  It was a crazy weekend.  I'd like to just be able to do nothing for a while.  But looks like I've still got 2.5 hours to go until I can get out of here.

2 hours.  Still working.  Getting there.  Yeah, I'm on instagram.  I don't post much, cause I don't really take pictures of anything.  But I've noticed that everyone is keen on posting selfies.  What is this?  Does everyone need that level of validation?  Are people that insecure?  Does everyone want to be famous?  You can't.  The idea of fame is dependent on more people being less famous than you, so that they can recognise you.  People need to understand that - it's not an equitable relationship.  This big concept of of you posting pictures of yourself is just insane.  It's borderline narcissistic.  Why are people so obsessed with this phenomenon?  I shall never understand.  Then again, there's a lot about the world that I just don't understand.

More needs to be done to promote self learning.  People get force-fed a certain ideology through schooling, but with self learning, people are free to read and decipher whatever information they can come across, and then reach an informed decision themselves, as to the facts in front of them.  It's much more satisfying. 

One hour and 15 minutes, I can do this!  Do I know everything?  No, but I know enough.  Or do I?  There's always that second guessing.  Alright, one hour!  Gotta make this count.  There'll be even more to get through tomorrow.  But I'll be on top of everything. 

Hahaha, 9 minutes!  Time flies when you're busy.

Joaquin out.

Saturday Night Blogger

We know how to do it!

So instead of doing absolutely anything else in the world, I am stuck here and wasting my time. Well things work out as usual.

But not all things end without purpose. I can still use my nuance developed from so long ago to get what I want. It's not all for naught. I can still get things done.

Do you ever look up and just look at the stars and just go wow the universe is so vast and we are so small in the grand scheme of things? And you realise we are just wasting our lives in the grandness of it all, stuck in these trivialities and pointless things.

I guess I can make up for not being able to blog for the majority of the week. I don't know why I haven't been able to get music before! I didn't get anything new in ages because I had stopped listening to new music and then I have been using iTunes to get stuff. So when I didn't have money in my account, I didn't get anything. But then I just rediscovered torrents! How good are they?! You can find almost anything, it's the best!

With every other form of retail exchange you can return the item if it is not satisfactory. But the Hollywood machine is so insidious they give you a trailer or a music clip and expect you to go see a movie or buy a cd or DVD based on hype. What if it's no good? I'm not paying for that! I get stuff for free. If I enjoy it, I will support the artist and buy the item, I have no qualms about that whatsoever.

Can I go home? I'm stuck in the ass end of the city and there is nowhere to go.

Maybe it's all a sign that we can get along and put everything where it should be. But I'm not sure yet. Still gotta stay alert and I'm always learning more than I'm actually using.

But as always this isn't the place and I don't have the time. There can be room to move. I could just fall asleep right here.

There are times when I hate my phone but then there are times like this when I'm consumed by boredom that I'm grateful to have a smart phone where I can pass the time.

I'll call it here for now.

Joaquin out.

Blended Misconceptions Of Us

I'm with the program, you can be sure of that.  I haven't had time to blog this week because things have been incredibly busy.  But I need some productivity and inspiration to just get it going and get some results on the board.  It is hilarious how you notice things.  Not everything is small.  Daylight savings is killing me.  I can't sleep, I can't rest, I can't get anything done at home.  I feel ineffectual.  Maybe Valeria was on to something about the hesitation?  That, and curiosity killed the cat, and you can consider me slain.  You wait, and then it's all done.  It's all over.  You take the opportunity and that's it.  It goes against every fibre of your being, but in the end, that's the right result.  You can only just blame yourself, and that's what I'm doing.

I had a lot to blog about in my absence, but of course I didn't write anything down, so it's all now lost in the ether.  Just letting you know that I'm still here.  But I'll keep this here.

Joaquin out.

Confirmation Of Confirmation Bias

This was just one of those days.  I just did not want to wake up or get out of bed, and my entire body hurt.  And before this day has even begun, I know things are going downhill fast.  But will there be a correction?  It's like trying to watch for the graph and hope it stops going in one direction for so long.  But either way, the Y axis is always variable, but the X axis is constant.  It will move from left to right.  That's a fact.  I've got a fair bit to get through today, in fact for the next full week.  But I've also got stuff to blog about so maybe I'll get to that first.

What's the difference between knowing and not knowing?  If the end game is the same, it's all zero sum.  But some things have been proven, and with educated guesses, I suppose even I could be right.  And how paths may have been crossed!  And things I did not want to know but always suspected have been proved.  It's a weird, weird world.  But I reckon I'm the clueless one.  Now things are making a lot more sense.  Right on the money!  Now there has to be an additional layer included.

I think good instinct must be married to common sense.  It must be rooted in common sense.  An animal that is acting on instinct is only successful if common sense is applied. I know, it's weird applying the concept of common sense to an animal, but I mean from the animals' entire scope of knowledge as a species.  Bad instinct is just random pure chance, because it's not rooted in any form of knowledge.  You would put your hand in the fire because it looks pretty, but you're not aware of the heat until it's too late.

I'm really concerned about exclusivity in retailing.  If you have an inferior product and charge an inflated price for it, it will sometimes outsell comparable items that do the same job, but why?  You'd think in a truly free market, consumer choice would dictate that the inferior product would fail.  But look at high fashion and luxury goods, it's a thriving market.  They release things like bags and really impractical things with hideously expensive price tags, and because of branding it will be valued highly and coveted by the market.  You can get similar or superior products for much cheaper!  It's a pointless exercise.  Some things I will never understand.  And it pertains to all products, not just this sort of stuff!  You can buy luxury phones overseas with jewels, and gold plating, but they have hardly any smartphone functionality!  What good is the phone??  Yikes, some things make no sense.

Damn these weird days to hell.  It's cold in the morning and then warm in the day.  I can't keep up with this.  The kind of exhaustion I have is one where I could just pass out anywhere and be happy.

Ahh in the old days, we used to play murder in the dark and jumping over the floor (as lava) in darkened rooms.  I miss those days.  They were so much simpler and happier.  Nothing lasts forever.

Things are just getting wildly out of control.  Maybe there will be a change. 

So much to do!

Joaquin out.

Prelude To An Error

It's strange that you can be certain of one thing, only to realise in a horrible moment that you were wrong all along.  It talks about an interesting facet of human belief, reasoning, and understanding.  But it's always important to make sure you learn from them.  Things are coming way back into balance and it's weird.  There are some changes that should not occur to the status quo, or else I'm going to be without a paddle in the proverbial creek.

Been a crazy morning, lots of work to get out of the way, and I still have stuff to get through this afternoon.  But I can find the time to blog!  Interestingly, we're about to pass a major milestone here - 30,000 page views!  That's insane!  I'm very proud!  It doesn't give an accurate reflection of total blog views, because people can just come to our site via the URL and then just navigate from there, without picking a blog title.  So who knows what the actual number is?  It doesn't matter.  I write for myself, not for the views or the links or the references.

Ahh fuck!  Just been dumped with more work!  This may make getting out of here a harder task than originally thought.  But suck it up and just do it.  As I listen to Martin, just do the work.  That's it, just do the work. 

Let's have a thought exercise.  What if I just changed everyone's clocks and watches and all timed devices.  So let's just move the time forward 47 minutes, arbitrarily.  While in reality, time is really 47 minutes in the past, but because of everyone's shared belief or shared delusion, time has just moved ahead 47 minutes and they're none the wiser.  That's the sort of view we hold about so many things, such as religion, currency and pretty much every other major idea.  If we just changed how we thought, things could be so much better.  But people wish to cling to having the clock 47 minutes ahead, just because everyone else has their time set that way.  And that solves nothing, and we are all worse off for it.

Wonderful news!  Australia is now directly involved in the war effort in Syria and Iraq.  Instead of laying back and just taking a support role, or even a humanitarian role, our air fighters are now directly involved in bombing targets in both countries.  Wonderful!  And the public just support this!  We are sheeple.  There's no real opposition in Australian politics, the Labor party is a joke.  They lost the race to the bottom, and now they are just keeping to the same line to remain consistent.  There's nothing Western democracies love more than warfare with people from vastly different cultures.  Some things will never change.

We're seeing an assault on our rights and our privacy at the moment by the government (surprise surprise).  Our government recently passed legislation allowing the entire Internet to be monitored (read: tapped) by our intelligence agencies on the strength of just one warrant.  Great!  So all your metadata and what not is up for grabs anyway, and then there's the added bonus of journalists facing 10 years prison if they report on matters to do with national security!  What?!  We live in a totalitarian state where nobody is accountable?  This is a conservative government's wet dream!  The public is too ignorant or passive to care. 

I might have to just call this one here because I have so much work on.  Gotta get a move on!  90 minutes to go, and now I'm cursing the clock for different reasons entirely.

And there's only more of this to come.

Joaquin out.

Glazing Or Frosting?

I don't actually know what the difference is between the two, I just needed a blog introduction for today.  We are living in times of horrible injustice out there.  One example is our treatment of asylum seekers.  For those of you not playing along at home, Australia is notorious for not wanting to share its resources with those seeking shelter and protection from discrimination and harm overseas.  They tend to regard these people as queue jumpers, and welfare wasters.  Such is our wanton disregard of them, we voted in a comically bad (almost evil) conservative government, because the mainstream Australian public didn't like hearing that people were arriving on boats to the country to seek asylum.  So instead, this new government now intercepts boats in international waters and seeks to return them back to where they came, against international rules, and the agreement on refugee rights that Australia is a party to.  The Navy does all the dirty work under claims of national security, and nothing gets reported to the media.  So the boats are still coming, it's just that nobody can report on it.  What fools the public are.  Instead of treating asylum seekers with humanity onshore, we put them in detention centres in other countries, where guards routinely abuse and mistreat these people who have already suffered great amounts.  So they're left to suffer more, and their mental illnesses pile up and they commit suicide, go on hunger strikes to protest, and harm other prisoners.  That's what they are, they're not being processed.  They become prisoners almost indefinitely, as they're lost in the bureaucracy of a government that does not care about them, and the public is unmoved by their plight either.  A few of them have died in captivity, and we're now hearing stories about the guards forcing female prisoners to shower naked so they can be offered hot water.  This is barbaric, and our government and wider public have the audacity to call these people the ones breaking the law?  Disgusting hypocrisy.

Another example of crazy injustice on a global scale is the new decision from President Obama to relax the rules surrounding drone strikes on civilian populations on Syria and Iraq.  Previously, the order was that drone strikes would never be allowed unless there was an absolute certainty that no civilians would be harmed (even though many still died, but yeah whatever it takes to help you sleep at night), but now they are just allowing drone strikes without that consideration.  So what, they're actively treating civilians as collateral damage now?  That's so sick.  And the public is saying that ISIS or ISIL or whatever the media buzzword acronym of the day is are deliberately using civilian human shields ala Hamas in Palestine and what not.  Even if that is the case, that's no excuse to deliberately target, or even accidentally kill civilians in warfare. If you're a civilian in one of these places, it's most likely that you don't even know you're living next to one of these monsters, and then all of a sudden your entire family gets blown up, while some idiots halfway across the world with no understanding of the planet outside of their narrow viewpoint will justify it by saying it was your choice, or that you must have known.  These are dark times.

And I'm still tired today.  I don't want to wake up.  Not now, not ever.  Things don't seem to be making much sense.  Has humanity as a whole taken a turn for the worse?  Or has this all happened before and it's going to all happen again?  We never seem to learn.  There's too much going on at the moment.  I'm having a tough time focusing.  Maybe people expect too much.  It's time to get a move on.

Next week will be an even shorter week for me, so probably won't get that much time to blog much.  Wow, it's actually October and I have not commenced the blog intro/retrospective, but I will get a move on with that shortly.  It'll be nice to have it out of the way by the end of this year if that's possible. 

Damn, things are getting busy!

Joaquin out.