Over the weekend: trying to develop programming skills

Writer's Journal

Over the last couple of days, I pulled down some of my books on programming languages and set out to begin some learning. For a while I have wanted to get myself to a place where I have a full grasp of at least one general purpose programming language as well as a shell programming language. Those languages that I aspire to understand had been determined years ago and have not changed since: Perl and Bash. Bash is an easy choice because I have been using the Bash shell on Linux and Macintosh for years. As for Perl, I have been drawn to it because of its regular expressions capabilities and flexibility. In fact, I bought books on Perl and as well as another on Linux that covered shell programming in detail some years ago, but I never spent enough time on any of them that I learned all of the basics of either language.

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Dark coast

Scratchpad

I’m on the beach. It’s night. The wind is still as loud as I remember it. Somehow I know I’m not really here. It’s just a nocturnal deception of closed eyes. But I walk to the sea. The skin on my feet feels repulse with the shock of the cold water, the bitterness of September’s Pacific revisited. The wind so strong I feel it wishes to take my hair off my head. With only a sliver of a moon, my eyes can barely see the rough surface of the beach dirty with debris nature-made. As I wince again with another gelid splash of salt water on my ankles, I observe a knowing state in my lucidity: not one of those I stood with on these beaches is here. The dream maker has brought me to the beaches I have not touched since I was a child, alone. And though I know nothing as certain, they feel as ancient travelers who traveled by sea who were never seen again. If there is a soul who makes these dark worlds and locks me inside them, I would find them and hold them under this cold September Pacific till their skin turned blue.

It depends

Scratchpad

When I take this photograph of a paper towel, I am thinking how this is not a “good” photograph and how one might talk about the large amount of negative space in the center and lower left part of the image. I also think of how the image is only shape, color, and texture; how the shape is the most prominent feature; and how Rothko’s paintings consisted of simple shapes and colors. In a way this is a kind of anti-photograph. Apart from a little flare in how I compose the angle of the paper towel in the shot, I simply shoot the photograph because it is, in the thinking of many photographers, a “bad” photograph. In a sense the photograph is about nothing, but its lack of an interesting subject in the eyes of others is the reason I take it. What I am creating is both something and nothing, and it all depends on how you look at it.

Introducing Scratchpad

Scratchpad

Scratchpad is now live. The purpose of Scratchpad is to have a space where I can completely disregard the idea of polish and take a more anarchic approach to art, thumbing my nose at any rules I wish to ignore. I have needed somewhere I can test out new ideas and be free to make something terrible. You should never expect anything here to be refined. It is, and always will be, a messy space.

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Diminishing the role of my smartphone

Writer's Journal

Unlike people in their teens or early twenties, I did not grow up with smartphones. There were no apps or YouTube. Only books, my Sony Walkman, television, and my own imagination. As a kid I spent more time on books, my imagination, or playing outside than I spent on television. Yet later in my teens, video games eventually took a larger role in how I spent my free time. Eventually, in my late teens and early twenties my first laptop computer became where I spent most of my time, and most of that time was spent reading online. Today the smartphone has largely replaced my laptop in terms of time spent on it as well as being the primary place where I read.

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