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.
Author: Paul R. Ramer
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Act Like Them
Scratchpad
I act like them.
I speak like them.
I hang like them.
But I’ll never be one of them.
I’m only pretending.
And they don’t care about me anyway.
Introducing Scratchpad
ScratchpadScratchpad 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.
Diminishing the role of my smartphone
Writer's JournalUnlike 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.
With this time in isolation
Writer's JournalI have been off all social media lately, only popping in a few times to briefly say something. My phone buzzes with fewer notifications now that I deleted many apps, even ones I thought I could not live without. My days feel more peaceful and my eyes turn to the space in which I live, seeing more what has meaning to me and what does not.