Finding everything in nothing

No more voices around .... no more lights.... sounds of nothing .... music is move alive than ever ... you become to know the unknown ... you get a chance to live the unlived .... see things from a different angle ... feel the moment ... freedom approaching ... like a new found smooth sense of sobriety ... giving life a chance of what it needs .... far from the ever reflective reactions ....

.... part of what happens between 2 and 4 am.

The Professional

This post is not about the movie with that title, it’s about a rare breed of human beings. The word is often used for people who do some work, know how to do something well or often times do something for a living. The word is quite often used as a synonym for “Specialist”. The specialist is a person who masters a technique or craft. A specialist selects a domain, like any domain of knowledge, engineering, arts etc. and excels in it.

A specialist is good at something; can’t we just recall this person as a professional in that domain? This is the point and what a significant point this is, the answer is “No”. For someone to be a professional, the person has to be involved with other human beings. Professionals usually work on their domain as it relates to others, and this is exactly the key point here, relating to others. A professional artist as an example works on art which will eventually be used by others for a reason. A specialist in art, an artist, works on art without considering how it can be beneficial to others. A scientist who is only a specialist works any scientific matter as it pleases him without caring about how it can be used by others and whether it ever will.

The professional specialist would be a much more complex human being. The professional, needing to interact with others, not just the self, would require follow the guidelines of ethics. Ethics being the rules for human to human interactions in this case. In order for the system that the professional works in to succeed, the professional would need to play by the rules of the game. Systems, aka Companies, require a few basic rules for the games they run. These rules include truthfulness, commitment, collaboration and respecting promises/contracts. The professional knows these by heart.
Some people are neither specialists nor professional, well fine, they can just enjoy their time and hopefully try not to get engaged in serious interactions with others.

Some are not specialist but professionals, this is quite ok since the system they work in can very well find out what they are suited for, if they are suited for anything and much time will not be wasted.

Some are specialists but not professionals, now this is where the danger is. People tend to bind professionalism to a specialist by default which is really risky. The specialist can show some sparks, gain attention, make the system rely on her/him and then let the system down just when it is time to deliver something because of lack of professionalism and the absence of the basic traits I named above, the simple rules of the game. These people do excellent things but you see that only as long is every process for creating it is bounded to the individual alone without considering time, as soon as the creation process expands to more than the single self or you try to measure the time, problems start to arise.

The book “Smart and gets things done” by Joel Spolsky is another view for the same issue, it’s one thing to be smart and another to actually do useful things. An interesting negative loop can be observed here and that is a lot of times the more specialist an individual is, the more they feel they do not need to follow the simple rules and act like a professional, a false feeling of feeling special which has a tendency to contaminate their talent and reduce the opportunities that ironically would help them excel in the domain of their specialty.

Some are specialists and professionals, no need to mention that magic occurs around these people, leading to the success of themselves and those around them.

I wish there was at least ways for us to get educated and trained in professionalism, it is even more important than the knowledge and skills in the specific domain of specialty.

Answers.com on Specialist:

"One who is devoted to a particular occupation or branch of study or research"
on Professional:

"One who earns a living in a given or implied occupation"

Haskellers

Our first Haskell programming session was held this week along with three Fanafzar Ninjas, yzt, fhm and barj. Our goal is to get to know the language and see the world from a different angle. We might not use it eventually for the daily coding tasks but thinking from a Functional Programming aspect should be valuable and help the thinking process in general.

Real World Haskell is a free online book which we follow. Quite a good book.

Go foward in Reverse

Freedom, oh the sole sensible target for our soul.

This most complicated parameter in human lives. Love, the reality we are hardwired to sense. New experiences, the revolving platform we desire to roll on to feel alive, the gain freedom, to find love. Finding the love that we run away from once found in search of the freedom out there we seek with excitement to experience the rush of love again somewhere in between the lines of becoming and blurred by the reality of being. The everlasting effort to find happiness, guiding us to blame on the dynamics around us, mainly the society, leading us into solitude, only to make us believe that “Happiness is only real when shared!”, shared with others, which will lead to a society again.

Spiral out, keep going, Spiral out. Is there a sign of evil here or is this all that is real? Our quest for beauty, the beauty which is all here, a beauty which was always here. Searching reality, reality which we try our best to hide every second. Entrapped by time, enslaved by the repetitions of actions, actions which follow the pathway of betrayal towards our subconscious, leaving our conscious, moment feeling, life feeling, love sensing, free mind in solitude. Is there an escape strategy from this loop or should we enjoy the moments of this merry-go-round?

"And in my darkest moment, fetal and weeping.
The moon tells me a secret. My confidant.
As full and bright as I am, this light is not my own
A million light reflections pass over me
It's source is bright and endless.
She resuscitates the hopeless
Without her we are lifeless satellites dreaming dreams.
And as I pull my head out I am without one doubt
Don't want to be down here feeding my narcissism
I must crucify the ego before it's far too late
I pray the light lifts me out before I pine away.
before I pine away.
before I pine away.
before I pine away."

Thank you Sean Penn, thanks for making such great movies. “Into the Wild”. Wonderful movie based on a true story, great accompanying sound track by Eddie Vedder. And special thanks to Ash for pointing us to the movie.

I gotta see this again.

The Real Ones

A real coder once said:

"Of course, none of this would have mattered unless the code could be compiled very quickly, so full-blown traditional compilers were out of the question. Instead, we wrote a streamlined compiler custom designed for the task, which we call the "welder.""

In fact this is how it can be, if the environment isn't what you really need, just BUILD the environment for yourself.

This code was Michael Abrash, talking about the software renderer they made called Pixomatic which performs DX7 level hardware functionality on software.

In fact it's been the work of people like him and Carmack who have worked on Quake that shaped the 3D games world for ever. Magic happens when real people join forces.

Swine Dance

This time it is called the "Swine Flu". The whole pattern seems to repeat itself, an outbreak, seemingly of a newly heard disease, everyone talks about it, the news show governments and meetings and plans and quarantines, people are afraid, for a few weeks your favorite news channel resembles a lot of Hollywood movies about outbreaks and after a while, everything is under control and you will never hear about it anymore, hmm... was it Mad Cow Disease? Sars Disease? Enter Swine Flu.

The whole thing seems a bit strange. I feel that there are a lot of things unsaid about these stories and the level of reality behind these shows remains a mystery. Whatever is behind all this, I assume that there exists high incentives for many controlling entities.

I wonder how the whole thing might be related to "Economy of Fear", one great article about this subject is here, a little paragraph from it:

"By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people's wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify."

Or this article, with this excerpt:

"The economy of fear was always used to keep people down, to remind us that there are forces out there bigger than us. But, it seems, the doomsayers try to be bigger than us, try to tell us to change our way of living, our thinking, our whole existence."

In any case, take out the mask, you won't ever get that flu!