The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr. Kent M. Keith

Many thanks to IrwinResources.com for these quotes, found here:

1. People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centered (including me). Love them anyway.
   
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
   
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
6. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the littlest people with the littlest ideas. Think big anyway.
7. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
9. People really need help, but may attack you if you do help them. Help them anyway.
10. Give the world the best you have and you will get kicked in the teeth. Give the best you have anyway.

Forgotten Dreams

It is a real bugger when you have a truly good idea (or an idea that sounded truly good to you at the time you conceived it), and just happen to forget it when you mean to put it down on paper, or really want to put your mind to it and can make neither heads nor tails from the notes you actually took...

Truth about: Science, #000

An interesting problem with the world nowadays is that math and all applied sciences may actually make very little sense to any person, unless they can manage to think out of the box.

The most common example is that you begin counting from 1, obviously, but you end counting in reverse in 0; this is the result of a simple fact: numbers don't signify anything in particular. Rather, numbers are tools, just like any other mathematical entity. 1 can show quantity as well as a physical limit, where x parts of an object a make up its entirety.

In the above example, you actually start counting from 0, but never mention it, because 0 signifies a non-quantity and thus you don't take it into account then; however, when you count off, it signifies the devolution of the previous quantity of 1, i.e. the reduction of any x parts that make that 1 whole, leaving us with 0: 0 has just become a quantity of time - in reverse.

P.S.: Likewise, and this is the funny part, goes with years: there is no year 0; 0 signifies the threshold between B.C. 1 and A.D. 1; this is also the reason the millenium turned around in A.D. 2001 and not A.D. 2000, by the way...

Gigabytes and Gibibytes: Your DVDs are only 4.38 GiB large!

Quite some time ago, computers were invented; unable to use any other means efficiently at the time, Homo sapiens made them based on electronic parts, which store and handle data in a theoretically digital manner: electricity is passing or not (or its levels changed); later on, the same principle was applied on magnetic particles and optical tracks. This limitation made the use of the binary numeral system necessary, and thus we resorted to calling the closer equivalent of 10^3 (1,000) parts in it, the 2^10 (i.e. 1,024) parts, a Kilobit of data; likewise, 1,024 bytes made up a Kilobyte, and so on.

Rather recently, scientists argued that the SI (think "metric") prefixes signify multiples of the unit they preceded by the 1st, 2nd, and nth powers of 10, were n is any integer divisible by 3, as well as their negative equivalents (e.g. 10^-2). Thus, only 10^9 Bytes should ever be called a Gigabyte.

To compensate for this problem, the old [prefix][unit]s are now called [prefix]i[unit]s; for example, what we used to call GBs are now GiBs, and so on. The new prefix stands for "binary [prefix][unit]," but instead of calling the new units by this longer name, the new standard suggested that only the first syllable of the old prefixes is to be kept for binary prefixes, and the second is to be replaced with "bi," making a GiB a Gibibyte, or a MiB a Mebibyte, for example.

This produced an interesting situation: companies still use the old terminology but with the new, correct meaning; thus, when you buy a 500 GB hard disk drive or 4.7 GB DVD, you may actually believe you just acquired a 500 GiB HDD or 4.7 GiB DVD; in fact, these are just 10^9 bytes nowadays and not your typical 2^30 that we still used back in the day - this means you just bought a 465.66 GiB HHD or a 4.38 GiB DVD.

Us & Them

Us, and them
And after all we're only ordinary men.
Me, and you.
God only knows it's noz what we would choose to do.
Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side.

Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who.
Up and down.
But in the end it's only round and round.
Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried.
Listen son, said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside.

"I mean, they're not gunna kill ya, so if you give 'em a quick short,
sharp, shock, they won't do it again. Dig it? I mean he get off
lightly, 'cos I would've given him a thrashing - I only hit him once!
It was only a difference of opinion, but really...I mean good manners
don't cost nothing do they, eh?"

Down and out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.
With, without.
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Out of the way, it's a busy day
I've got things on my mind.
For the want of the price of tea and a slice
The old man died.

Pink Floyd - Us & Them

The Scars Left

I have more than a couple of small disfigurements all over my body; most promiment are thress scars I got on my left hand throughout all these years (a pocket knife cut that I accidentally made, another caused by punching my fist in a wooden door in anger, and another from a pencil which pierced through my the bottom of my palm), the knuckle of the ring finger on my right hand cracked once (this was a punch to a wall) and never quite mended as it should, and I have another two scars I got on my face as a child (one from stitches across my left eyebrow, the other from my front teeth punching through my lower lip), but I most recently got another two scars.

Two worry lines across the right part of my brow.


What I have realised all these years (and which few people I know seem to understand fully) is that it's not a matter of whether you are alright or not. In fact, you cannot just be all right. Something, something, no matter how insignificant, will certainly be askew. Should that make our lives miserable? Rubbish.

Bee Happy!

These past few days I resolved that I won't allow myself to feel depressed; I won't allow things to drag me down; I won't allow things to boil down to nothing; I won't let myself get angered or miserable over foolish matters; and I won't allow myself to grumble over any malice or mischief or misfortune.

The world is meant to be much brighter than we deem important to realise; if it's dark and downcast, it will get clear yet again, sooner or later.

Truth about: Relations, #000

Never completely trust the advice a friend gives you; it's not a matter of him or her being dishonest, or trying to enforce a horrible agenda of their own, or anything even remotely similar, for that matter. If they don't have any of the above inhibitions, your greater good will be their first priority - at the expense of almost everything, maybe even their good standing with you.

PS: That does not mean you should disregard their advice either; just take it with a grain of salt, for they care for you and happen to have different perspectives.

Truth about: Computers, #000

Most of the time, when people say they can do nothing about the problem you face with your computer, they actually mean that their patience has run too thin to deal with a problem that could normally be averted if you dealt with your computer with greater care.

PS: Ironically enough, that seems to apply to a lot of things apart from computers.

Etiquette

The art of knowing when to feel insulted by or free to insult another in polite company and how to act on these feelings without losing face...

Conversion to lingua franca: complete.

Moved on from Greek to English.

Expect more posts.

6 years, 6 months... 6 of what, next?

I've not put up any recent posts for quite a while. It's not as much an abandonment of my post; rather, it's been my inability to cope with the perplexity of the situation I am facing, in more than one ways, I might add.

I do not want to live in the past, unlike what others might presume. In fact, I very much like leaving old happenstance and errors behind and trying to make something anew. Despite my best efforts, though, I've failed numerous people (I reckon), and whether they may have had a part in it is entirely inconsequential if past misgivings are not mended, one way or another. Telling that to others and making them understand it, however, are also two entirely different matters; to make ends meet in terms of a social living instead of going hermit all the way can literally be quite the impossibility when others, no matter what reason for, whether rightful or wrong, avoid you.

I have learnt to live with that; what I have not learnt is living apart them.

I miss you.