what is that?

when you see question time on tv (if you're unlucky) or some other debate, people who asks questions are told off if they make a statement instead of asking a question. Oprah has got around this minor inconvenience by adding the words, "what is that?" to the end of a statement.

if anyone cares about the lance armstrong cheating, but not enough to see a tv celebrity 'interview' him, here is a summary:

"you cheated! you're a dick! what is that?"
"I'm a dick. i cheated"

as for me, i'm still doping with creatine and am now up to 79kg! 1kg away from target although i still appear to be the same size. how very odd.


turns out writing is much more difficult than the thought of writing. even with a great idea you have to do all the story arcs, the dialogues, the twists (and the turns) as well as all the bits in between. it seems a good idea is no where near enough. nonetheless, i shall plough on. i have written only a couple of thousand words so far. i've stopped to write a basic plan of where things may go and signposts along the way, and then i can get back to writing 500 words per day.

here's a picture. next week - bear up a tree.

cinematics

i'm giving up on the cinema. not because it's exorbitantly expensive. nor because i'm so old that i don't like modern day films. but because i'm so old that i don't like modern day human beings and no longer care about hiding this fact.

There's not much worse than a collection of people. for example, i heard a great definition:
democracy (n), where any two idiots can outvote a genius.

that's a bit of a tangent though. i dislike the cinema because the odious cretins that we are forced to share a confined space with seem oblivious to other human beings. they have no qualms about talking, playing with their superbright phones and worst of all, eating like an animal which has been starving all winter, and finally gets that first food of spring, devouring it in double quick time afraid that a lion will chase them away.

i need to quit my job.

i have too many other things to do

1) write 500 words a day for a new book idea. this is brilliant. if i can get 15,000 words done in a month i'll be very happy

2) learn to program objective c. writing an app at the moment. a very simple one so hoping for it to be finished in a week or two. again, need to spend an hour a day on this (minimum) as i need to learn new stuff and then also make the app.

3) exercise. this one can be done while at work. taking an hour out my day to go to the gym is probably my favourite hour of the day.

4) reading. i like to read. i go in and out of phases. 30 minutes before bed is nice. i should find a good book. recommendations? i haven't read many of anything. except chuck pahalniuk. i read most of his books already. even things like a confederacy of dunces needs to be told to me. (although that one i read thanks to yakshi)

5) sitcom writing. that's tough. i need lots of funny ideas for that which take time. still, i need to allocate some time for that too.

6) patent. i almost have a patent. i need to build a prototype, make it official and licence it. in the next few months.

7) i think those 6 are enough. and working takes out my entire day till 6pm. and gives me only 7 hours per day to achieve everything. and i have to waste some of those 7 hours eating and drinking and cleaning my self. every day! why isn't there something that can clean and feed me in my sleep?

an absence of stars

stars sent me an email to say because i haven't played there this year they'll steal my fppees. i'm pretty sure i played there in Jan and Feb. i think i need to earn one vpp to keep my fpppees. i wonder if spending some fppees on a tournament will suffice?

party also sent me an email to say they're going to steal the $5 bonus they put in my account because i haven't played there for 180 days. seems a bit mean to offer it to me, tell me i can't cash out less than $30 or so, and then steal it back if i don't play. maybe mean is the wrong word, it's more like they're trying to prey on weak minded people and get them sucked back into the claws of gamblor.

i'll probably try and play a wee bit on both in the next few days.

in other news, no jim for a while meant no weighing. to my surprise and delight i had put on a couple of kilos since my last weighting so up to 77kg now. 3 to go till target acquired. it should be noted that said target should be reached in muscle as opposed to fat! and i think my waist is increasing again. i need to channel my thoughts into making my other muscles get bigger instead!

news

i think i've said before that this is one of my favourite songs. mostly because it has an unhappy ending. something most songs lack.
sadly, now is an appropriate time for me to post it.

i am ashamed

i only recently saw the star wars trilogy.

turns out it was a bit rubbish. maybe i've been spoiled by more recent movies with proper special effects.
that said, it has a great story, and some interesting concepts.

also, it's influence has spread into culture everywhere. sadly that kinda ruined it for me since i knew all the twists in the movie...

anyways, i saw this and it made me laugh

tour the france

wiggins win. it was quite amazing. and soon he will reach the pinnacle of british sporting achievement by winning sports personality of the year. unfortunately, abbreviated to spoty.

my sideburn tribute has been going well since the summer, however a hair cut is due. why is it not called a hairs cut?

in other cycling news, mark cavendish is pretty much the greatest sprinter of all time. i think his level of underratedness is criminal although is probably more appreciated outside of the united kingdom.

i have written here for a while. i have two writing projects now. one sitcom, one sci fi book/tv series. the book/tv series premise is awesome. building characters now. writing with a friend and i think when i've done one chapter i'll stick it here for feedback. though that probably won't be for quite some time.

it is late and i still have much work to do. luckily i went shopping so have some food for company.

every now and then...

...i remind myself of just how much i hate myself.

yesterday i continually made excuses to not approach a lady on a plane because she was too hot.

i am now considering phoning easyjet to make up a story of how i found something belonging to her and asking them to ask her to get in touch with me (since data protection probably prevents them giving me her details.) i know her first name and seat number which should be enough for them. being male, i am unable to understand the difference between romance and stalking. it's probably not a fine line, and yet i am unsure upon which side of the line this proposal lands. (advice in comments appreciated thanks.)

in other news i may have finally found a flat where i can live alone. hurrah to no housemates.

target acquired

house hunting is, to me, like shopping. after i've been into 2 shops/houses, i'm fed up and no longer care. my primary aim becomes to leave the shopping area immediately, with or without my desired goods/house.

the thought of shopping is even worse.
this explains my poor attempts to find a housing situation better than my current one.
also, it's cheaper to live with someone else. much cheaper. but most people are dicks and not worth the discount.

along with the friday round up (which for this week is simply, read mine and tell your friends), purely for my benefit, i will list my current weight status:

putting on weight goal.
total time available 10 weeks.
end of week 1
current weight 74.7 kg
target weight 80 kg

muscles status - sore arms chest and shoulders. (this is good!)
mind status - hungry (also good)

cheating on this blog

i started doing some writing elsewhere!

i've never been a fan of writing. but i have decided to write a book with a friend. just a coffee table book. he has many good ideas and has written books before. it doesn't seem particularly expensive to get it published for just a few copies that we would begin with. and i reckon it would be pretty cool to have that on my ceevee.

coming up with lots of ideas is pretty tough though. especially when you have a day job. although the day job can be great material for writing.

take for example today. i've been doing some work on modelling. (mathematical modelling!)
it has two key elements. in brief, one of these elements is to limit the number of customers to see the effects that this will have.
today, my new boss (who replaced my awesome previous boss) was talking to me about what i do in a failed bid to understand what i do.

i explained the two key aspects including the one above. i explain how it takes time to run, mostly because of this one part of it. she then asks, can you just not limit the customers?

amazing.

the whole essences of what i'm doing is to limit the customers and see the effect it has on many other things.

how is this person my boss i hear you ask?
i ask that same question every day. (not to her. yet.)

toast

my toastmaster career ended pretty quickly. after one visit to the club, and one misplaced axe maniac joke, i started playing football again on the same nights so i never went back. i noticed everyone gave speeches which followed the same guidelines. unable to come up with material, and before i didn't know i wasn't going back, i wrote a speech in the hope i'd have a chance to talk to them from the pulpit.
since i'll never say it there, i'll say it here.
These are the exact words i planned to say (apart from the ones in brackets)

My speech
(reading from sheet)
Greeting everyone.
Thanking ringmaster. Thanking toastmasters. Thanking fellow guests.
Repeating title of my speech
Pausing for thought
Opening sentence. Seemingly unrelated to title. But you know I'll get there in the end.
Telling a funny joke.
Pausing till the laughter dies down. Still waiting.
Expanding on opening sentence. Taking a direction that is unexpected.
Pausing to make eye contact with audience.
Leading this thought into a joke, observational humour based on something you do which you don't realise is weird, but everyone does it without realising everyone else does it too.
Looking up from page to make eye contact.
Pausing as I see the green light comes on. Pretending not to panic when I see how much more I have to get through.
Scanning page as I look for key point to mention. Mentioning key point.
Pausing for dramatic effect
Key point has tied together opening sentence with title.
A rhetorical question about where my idea leads.
One final pause before thanking everyone.
(turning over to paper to reveal a blank sheet)

a new low

yesterday i applied for a job. looking for jobs in scandanavia because of women (although i know finalndia is not really scandanavia, and is my choice of prime location, it's not really big enough to have jobs as far as i can tell), i applied for a job i can do at ericsson.
to set the scene, this job had been open for about 2 weeks, and not apparently closing for another few days.
well, in record time, they didn't just reject me, oh no, a mere 12 hours and 41 minutes after i applied, i got an email in response to say there's no longer a job opening.

these are a few of my favourite things

watching 4od through chrome. no adverts!

pancakes

smell of freshly cut grass

chocolates

a few russian and most finnish women.

speaking of finlandia, after raikkonen won the grand prix on sunday, i thought i'd listen to what he has to say. famous for not saying much, during his live interview he said a swear word. i think it was shit. (the word he said, not the interview). not to be outdone, vettel then come on stage and said the word fuck.

larry david.

pictures.

and that concludes, this week's 'my favourite things'

science thought that confuses me greatly

time.

almost every single physics process looks the same backwards in time and forwards in time.

people have learnt to tell which one is which on a large scale, something attributed to entropy (the idea that things always get messier). so when a glass smashes into a million pieces you can tell if a video shows it going forwards in time or backwards.
even though entropy makes it clear in our understanding, there's no good explanation why this is the case.

(for counter example, take a ball, throw it up and catch it, and that video will look identical forwards and backwards.)

and it's not so simple when mathematically looking at processes. eg an electron going forwards in time looks identical to a positron (it's antiparticle) going backwards in time. EXACTLY the same. some dude postulated that there could be just one electron, and it goes forwards and backwards a lot to make it look like there are lots of electrons and positrons!

as for things travelling at the speed of light, they don't even travel through time!

all forces and interactions have no sense of time. as in, stuff can happen forwards or backwards, and you can't tell them apart*. many interactions don't even include time as part of their equations. eg the gravitational attraction between the earth and the moon, or the repulsion of the same end of a magnet.

things that no one knows include:
why time goes forward
whether time is continuous, or made up of very small steps

thinking about these things is painful to my mind.


*there is one fundamental force which isn't perfectly symmetrical and explains why there is more matter than antimatter. iirc it's called CP violation, and this violation means when you add time in there, it might look different forwards and backwards. i remember something here then explaining there being more matter than antimatter but even if i merember that correctly, that's for another day.

its definitely not about the bike

i read the whole reasoned decision thing from the usada. i never used to be at all interested in cycling till a few years back. it's quite an interesting team, tactical, mental and physical sport.

a few things struck me in and about the report and it's surroundings.

1) there is no scientific evidence. they very occasionally allude to scientific evidence but didn't really say they had any, let alone provide any.

2) the case is built almost entirely on what other people have said. nothing else.

2a) nonetheless the case is quite strong.

3) they have many occasions of terribly flawed logic
exhibit a) person A sees something. he tells persons B and C.
person A swears he saw it. person B swears A told him he saw hit, person C also swears person A told him. That sequence is described as triple confirmation of the event occurring.
amazingly, they do this on more than one occasion, calling things doubly confirmed when it's just a person A and B.
exhibit b) they say that if people who confess have nothing to gain from the confession, their confession is worth more.
i assume this means that if people do have something to gain their confession is worth less.
they then proceed to say how all the confessors have had nothing to gain. which is blatantly wrong. writing books, tv appearances, reduced sentences, etc. there was lots to gain.

4) it's weird how as soon as he quit, lots of his ex team mates got caught. like they suddenly forgot how to avoid getting caught.

5) he's still quite good at triathlons.

6) it's a shame if it's true, and it appears to be true. i hope that his cancer charity doesn't suffer.

as i imagine others have said, it seems that it was indeed, not about the bike.

Revenge is good

for some reason i started thinking about the selfish nature of humans, and that oft quoted aspect that people only ever doing things for themselves. and it's possible i've remembered an exception. the experiment goes something like this:
i sit you down at a table. i tell you there's someone in the room next door. i place £10 in front of you and tell you to offer as much or as little of this as you like to the person next door, the rest you keep. the catch (of course there's a catch!) is that they have to accept the offer for you both to receive the money. otherwise you both get nothing.

in theory, they should accept anything, since 1p > 0. however, most people would reject a deal splitting it £9.99 and 1p, because of revenge. this concept is so ingrained, i don't think anyone who took part in this experiment offered so little because they knew it would get rejected.

people rejecting offers which are too low, and hurting themselves is purely spite. but this fear of revenge where people hurt themselves to hurt you more is apparently good for society.

a guy at MIT called Dan Ariely has written books and papers on the subject. My only problem is that he called the book the upside of irrationality and then described how all these seemingly irrational actions were rational. so it should be called the upside of counter-intuitivity.
anyway, there's a nice clip of him explaining it here



turns out, revenge is also done for selfish reasons since you benefit long term.

clarification

although it may seem more like objectification (it's not)

for verification purposes
1) flag girl (aforementioned post)
2) gym girl (who seems to have stopped going to the gym)
3) canteen girl (who i think was staring at me earlier in the week)

however, i was unable to find/talk to any of them this week. i did however, make a terrible and very brief conversation with an insanely attractive lady. she reminded me a little bit of the lady villain from die hard 3. but with a more attractive everything. an 11/10 imho.

luckily i had to travel to south london this week which was incredibly scary.
next week i think i'm going to have to talk to one of these ladies as there is nothing else on the scare table. hopefully, this scare goal will turn into more pleasant experiences!

while i still remember, i realised that when you go out in a group of three, and you all sit in a line, (eg gig or train) the person sitting in the middle has a lot of responsibility. you have to listen to whoever is talking. you sometimes have to choose when they both speak at the same time. you also have to decide which one to talk to when you have an idea of talk. a lot of responsibility. and i think some people take it too lightly.

flags

for the first time since starting (almost) regularly working out a few months back, i think i've noticed an increase in breast size. this is a fantastical development. i haven't weighed myself in a while, and while i hope the weight count is going to up a healthly amount, i fear that following a bout of gastric troubles i may just be where i've been for the past few months. never mind, onwards and slightly upwards.

also, i have updated my goals section. i found i ran out of ideas on how to scare myself. going rock climbing was a great one, especially as every time i go i do a slightly more scary climb up a wall. haven't been for a few weeks though.

also updated is the 'get a job' to 'get a better job'. but before i leave i should probably talk to one of three attractive girls that i have found. the trouble is which one? (or more accurately, in which order do i want to get rejected.)

i also need to decide what to say. i don't really have an opening gambit. except for one who i asked about the flags marauding around the walls of her office. i could begin by saying "hi flag lady". but that's as far as the conversation in my head has got. i didn't ask her name the one time we spoke, but i'll call her flag girl for future reference.

the only thought i have for what to say is based on louis ck's asking out of a librarian toward the end of episode 4, season 3. i couldn't find a clip online for you, nor could i work out how to record it off my computer. but just know that it's good.

slam dunc

duncan jenkins was a hilarious parody account on twitter.

a self titled "perspiring football journo" he made quite funny comments quite regularly, and all rather original. he often tweeted about liverpool, as the man behind the scenes was a liverpool fan. a month or two back, the account pretty much stopped.

this is a link to the story of why. it is more amazing than the lance armstrong case.

(also, every time i see the villains name, Chang, i think of Chang from community)

an assortment of thoughts

"wish me luck"
really? if you need to ask for it, then maybe it won't be sincere if people offer it. what next? wish me congratulations? wish me presents?

birthday card etiquette. why can't i just throw the card away straight away? perhaps not in your face, but by that evening, i don't need the card anymore. also, is there a time limit for how long you're allowed to keep a card? there should be.
i can't remember if this has been done in seinfeld or curb. if not, i'm doing it.

if hot drinks cool you down, why don't cold drinks heat you up?

i always forget how much i hate the cinema till i get there.

when you have a job, how are you supposed to go the bank to cash a cheque? who uses cheques these days anyway.

why is there money in my pokerstars account?