A First Post

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Okay now that I've got that one out of my system I should probably act like a civilized human being. The first step being writing"civilised" properly, regardless of what Google thinks is correct spelling. Time to start talking about, you know, a topic, I guess? Why don't I start with starting things, like this first post. Starting is hard. For example, I have just stopped caring about forming sophisticated and/or intelligent sentences because I've been staring at a blank page for a quite a while now. I started this blog on the 18th with the intention of immediately starting to write posts. It is now the 23rd.

A key step in the process of starting things, as I may have just hinted at, is the art of not giving a shit. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, as pretty much from day one parents, teachers, government officials and professionals advise people to give more shits, i.e. "Youngsters should really give more of a shit about politics" or "Son (and(?)/or daughter), you should give more of a shit about your grades at school!" However this argument misses the point of putting effort into something entirely. Being concerned about the effects of effort is not the main driving force of it. Motivation, involvement, taking pride in effort and not caring what others think about some form of "work" will result in its completion. Being concerned, fearful or feeling obligated only works in cases where choice is limited: you have to get through high school (and almost certainly university) if you want to get anywhere in life, according to the tradition view on education which, for many cases, is true, although for others this argument fails. When there's no obligation however, like in writing music or writing this post, this attitude is crippling. I don't need to write this, so why "waste" the effort and run the risk of failure or humiliation? Much better writers will almost definitely laugh at my style. So fuck it, I'm going write anyway.

Therein lies the key (I can't tell if that's horribly cliché or good style, so whatever, I'll just roll with it) to just doing...anything not strictly mandatory. More than the minimum. Holy Spirit of the unedited Star Wars Trilogy, I'm at the third paragraph! So by now I've covered the not giving a shit part, so what about the other three? Well, I just took some pride in having already written 2 paragraphs. Feels good. Feeling good helps you stay motivated. When something's being done, even if it's not all that great, you're doing something at least, right? Motivation can also come from anticipation. I can't wait to finish this article now so I can read it because I am a horrible narcissistic bastard. Loving your own stuff is cool. Do that. Just don't overdo it, like Lars Ulrich. Don't be a Lars. Huge tangent here, but I can't believe "Ulrich" isn't in the spell checker by now. Maybe the English major graduates of 1894 or whichever group writes the dictionaries these days haven't heard of this newfangled "Metallica" thing. It's not like they've been famous for over 20 years or anything. I don't care how red and squiggly that line under "Ulrich" is, I'm not changing it. Take that, spell checker.

Okay essay time on the nature of human creativity is over now. Let's talk about other stuff. So in my computer science studies, I often have to do some runtime analysis, or other various things that involve timing a piece of code. It just so happens that, as a typical computer scientist, I am incredibly lazy. Thus, I don't want to have to manually enter data points into Excel to make a nice graph to show that an algorithm runs in O(n²) time WHEN I ALREADY GODDAMN KNOW IT DOES. Computer science RAGE! So I looked into Google Chart Tools for some nice graphs. It's some pretty simple but effective stuff. Just copy-paste Google's sample html, change some options and data and voilà! A cool graph. But I'd still have to do all the data entry myself, and I'm lazy. So I wrote a nifty piece of Java code that takes data printed to a file in a simpler-than-XML format (sloppy and informal, yes, but also easy for newbies to learn) and turns into into an html file that displays one of those nifty Google charts!

Googly!

It still has some bugs, and currently only supports the line graph style I need for my assignments, so at the moment it's not worth showing off. I'll put some more work into it, and when it's done I'll give an update with a link to a jar, the source I'll have repo'd somewhere on the interwebs, and a little guide on how to use it. Not that it'll be useful to any of my zero readers. But whatever.

I'm so clever.