I will liken my cleaning habits unto a garbage-collected memory management system. I store most objects in a heap (literally a heap on the floor next to my bed). When I have to allocate space to store a grocery receipt, a book I’m reading, or mail I don’t want to deal with yet, I put it on the heap. In my mind I try to keep a reference to each object, but slowly over time many of the references are lost and the objects become irrelevant.
Then cleaning inspections come along, or maybe just a random cleaning urge. That’s when it’s time to collect the garbage — to deallocate the space taken up by stale old useless objects in order to make room for new useless objects! So I go through the heap, one object at a time, and when I come upon something that isn’t being used any more, I either shred it, recycle it, or trash it. Thus the garbage is collected, the heap size is decreased, and I can happily continue allocating space for random stuff with abandon.
The main problem with this system is that I always have a huge heap of stuff on the floor, and I have to spend time sorting through it every once in a while. But boy it’s easy to use!
More conscientious people probably manage space manually, thus keeping their heap size down (to the point of nonexistence, even) and avoiding the need to do periodic garbage collection. The danger there is the memory leak — if no system of periodic garbage collection exists, allocated space will just go on being used even if it’s forgotten about.
But my metaphor is now way overextended. Ah, but we did just pass our inspection. Go GCMM!
I think I need to be a more open person. I’ve always tended toward keeping my thoughts and problems and worries to myself. I mean, sure, I have a blog, but when do I ever write about my innermost fears and feelings? All of this is very ironic since I’m a strong advocate of openness in software and government and other things. I’m just not very open about my own life.
Three Degrees of Josh: How much I trust people determines what treatment they get. I made the cheesy graphic all by myself!
I think the “Who the heck are you?” section has grown a little bit recently. But the main change is that the yellow circle has grown considerably at the expense of the green circle. Some of the bogus reasons I give yellow-circlers when I’m down:
- “I was tired”
- “I just felt really irritable all day.”
Some of the real reasons that I rarely discuss are:
- plain old depression with no apparent cause
- “doubt traps” in which I obsess over reconciling some particular church doctrine with some seemingly-irreconcilable observation
- panic attacks (much less common these days, thankfully, but still occasionally rearing their ugly, irrational head)
- loneliness
- lack of pizza [ha ha, it's a joke]
I almost never talk about Mom’s suicide, or about my shorter-than-usual mission experience. It’s all rather silly, given the amazing family and friends I have who would be thrilled to support me should I ever give them the chance. Surely this also deprives others struggling in similar ways (especially the pizza-deprived, who need as much support as they can get) from the realization that they’re not alone in their frustrations.
I wonder how I can open up and stop acting like I have to hide my past and my present, at the expense of my future.
Notes
You know, it’s kind of easy to get freaked out about a possibly approaching tidal wave of global fatalities when every day brings so much news about the “swine flu pandemic”. While that does seem to be frighteningly real possibility, I liked this:
While the infected need access to medical care and anti-viral drugs, the rest of the world needs an inoculation against scary statistics and misinformation. [A Vaccine Needed for Bad Statistics]
In other words, yes, this could be a global catastrophe. But, unlike what a scan of recent headlines will make you think, that is still just a possibility. Maybe it will be 1918 all over again. Then again, maybe it will be forgotten like SARS. Whichever way it goes, I’m going to try to keep my panic level proportional to the body count.
By the way, here are two cool maps: 1 2
Okay, I know I just had a post called “Two Ideas”. I guess I’m feeling binary lately. Here goes….
The two books I bought today
- Algorithms — this is for Computer Science 312. I think it will go a long way towards being able to understand what the people in the NLP lab are always talking about.
- The Art and Craft of Poetry — this is for fun. It was something like half off and I think I might get some good ideas on the process of poetry.
Two poems I just posted
- The Poet’s Trap — a musing on poetic (non-)conformity
- “And Ye Would Not!” — don’t be a monk and get involved in civil wars. Maybe be a monk. Maybe be in civil wars. But don’t do both. (At least not at the same time.)
Two more days until I return to school
- Sunday
- Monday
(Yeah, those two days. Not any of the other ones.)
Multiply it all together…
…and you get 8 book-poem-days, known in le SI as 8 hansens. Perhaps the units are a bit unfamiliar, but the student can nevertheless easily comprehend from this example the power of twos. Or was that the powers of two?
The Power of “Too”?
Bye.
These ideas have rather caught my attention: