Kurt Nelson

The Lot Drawn

Kurt — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:15:35 +0000

Imagine a place where all you have to worry about is nothing. Food appears when you need it. You are surrounded by pleasant company. You have no job, money has no meaning, what you enter with is all you have and will ever have. The weather is beautiful and taken care of, the temperature warm in the day but cool in the night, an endless supply of sunscreen at an arm’s length.

The catch is there is no inside. To stay in this utopia, you must stay on the lot. As long as you do that, you wil be fed, there will be a bathroom, and you will be kept safe. There is no electricity or modern conveniences. For how long would you stay in this utopia without ruining it? At any time, you can go inside, leave the lot and quit. You’ve still got free will. But how long until you try the forbidden fruit out of boredom?

Beauty

Kurt — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:38:45 +0000

Beauty as the sunrise from the sky.
An orange peel around the sphere of the earth, peeling away.
To the east, a glint, a glimmer of light.
To the west, rich, deep, black envelopes all.
To the old, it is forgotten,
to the new, a preview of what is coming.

From below, the sight is amazing,
from above, the sight is astounding.

Yet some maintain this sight does not exist, is mearly a figment of my imagination.
To them, I guffaw.
To see the sights that I saw and deny the existence of it all?
How crass, how crude, how unbelivably rude, for I know it is all true.
How do I know they ask?
It’s all about the point of view.

From below, the sight is amazing,
from above, the sight is astounding.

When one sees a work of art, how is it defined so?
Most would argue that you just know.
When I see the light in the east, I don’t attribute it to me.
When I see straight lines of water, it’s more than just science.
Beauty is more than just the eye of the beholder,
but the eye of the maker.

From below, the sight is amazing,
from above, the sight is astounding.

Even things as bland as pure white haze have beauty.
Disect the parts, don’t look holistically.
White water, but not ice.
Floating in the sky as I fly by.
It got up here all on it’s own, by itself, through a process of nature.
And some say it just happened.

Something didn’t happen

Kurt — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:18:20 +0000

The boy walks into the room and notices the amount of men waiting. They are all happily sitting in chairs, quietly staring into nothing. None of them notice him. He quietly takes a chair in the corner and sits down. Nothing happens. The men around keep staring, their eyes blank, minds blank, senses quiet. Nothing is happening. But then his ears adjust to the quiet. He hears it in the distance. A faint voice. It sounds like a spring day in a meadow, quiet, soft, green, fresh. Unbelivably fresh. It says, just wait, I’ll be right there. He looks around the room. No one else seems to have noticed. Their eyes continue with blank stares, nothing changed. Nothing happened. The boy wonders why he is here, and if it is ever going to happen. He resolves that if all these other men are waiting for it he might as well too. The voice is there again, as faint as before. It says nothing, but is heard. “It’ll talk to me when it is time.” The hum of the environment around him can no longer be noticed. The drip in the air conditioner, gone. It’s a peaceful bliss. He might as well just sit it out, it can’t be much longer and it is so peaceful. Nothing happens. “The voice will come to me, I’ve been told that is what it does.” He sits. And sits, waiting for the sweet voice to come get him.

What he doesn’t notice is no one else has moved. They’ve been there just as long if not longer. What all of them have failed to do is simply walk up to the receptionist and ask if it is their turn. If he did, he’d find that it was ready for him and something would happen.

Sleep Typing

Kurt — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:19:17 +0000

I’m sleep typing. That nebulous stage where I really should crawl into bed, but don’t feel like exerting the extreme effort to relocate myself 2 feet to the left and 3 feet vertically. I slip between conscious and unconscious, but continue typing, continue instant messaging, coding, texting, all the things one should only do while cognizant. But the best creativity falls in this uncanny valley, where I can say what I think without inhibitions for better or for worse, with no repercussions as long as I relegate it to a word document on my desktop, to be parsed and posted and post-consumed from a more perfect conscious state.

Midnight Adages II

Kurt — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:17:56 +0000

A what is wrong with my brain moment brought to you by caffeine and a lack of sleep. Hey, with the internet even the most worthless information can and should be shared, right?

A useful life tip

Watching and observing people is one of the simplest forms of learning in this world. Dealing with people themselves on the other hand is one of the most illogical and insane processes on earth. No amount of learning is useful in an indeterministic system where cause and effect don’t act like cause and effect. Predicting the outcome of Schrodinger’s cat is safer than predicting the output of the female species since men don’t have nine lives.

And to be taken light heartily…

When probability is your only friend in a game of cards, you’re playing poker.

What good is knowing the time when you are already late? Stop looking at your watch and run.

Instead of just sitting there and complaining about the problem, tell me what you are going to do about it. This way you can be made fun of later instead of me then complaining about you, raising the net happiness value of the overall situation.

Midnight Adages I

Kurt — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:09:09 +0000

You win some and you lose some. Pick your battles. Great advice for those actually in control of the military. The civilian has no call, they can’t pick the battle or are prepared for the fight. They just choose to put themselves out there and see what comes at them and hope they survive. The trained private has no call, they can’t pick the battle or the fight, but when it comes, they are prepared. This is the difference between foolishness and faith.

When the wrestler goes into the ring, they are not there to fight or to win, but to put on a show. They may fight, they may win, they may cower, they may lose. But in the end, it doesn’t matter as long as the audience is engaged. What is the show and who is the audience? This does not matter, as the show should be you and the audience no one.

The Athletic Programmer

Kurt — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:42:34 +0000

Sometimes I think it would just be easier to just throw my best at my work. I’d happily have someone paid to constantly coaches me and tell me how I can improve and have me work on the skills that need improvement. Instead we are used for the skills that we are already good at, regardless of if there is room for improvement. Part of an athletes job is to sit down and hone their skills, spending hours practicing. Only a small fraction of their time is spent performing but by this point they have neared perfection. In corporate America, all of our time is spent performing with almost no time to practice and only the bare minimum of training. We spend most of our time doing the tasks we are already good at and not expected to learn new skills as part of the normal routine. If I were able to spend half my day coding brand new things in frameworks and languages I had never used, the other half of my day would be more productive and I would probably do a better job since I had spent time building parallel neural pathways. They always said in school practice makes perfect, so why doesn’t that same principle get applied in the real world?

Google gives their employees 20% time to perform mental exercise and practice and look where they have gone with that. How can you have your employees become athletes?

The Linux Lifecycle

Kurt — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:36:08 +0000

So sometimes you need to pick a Linux distribution to install on a machine that is possibly going to be up and running for a really long time. Here’s a diagram of the lifecycles for Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu. Basically if you want long term support, always go with RHEL. (I made this for my LUG@GT Linux for the Enterprise presentation)

Life Tidbits I

Kurt — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:11:46 +0000

If you are unhappy with something, fix it.

If you are unhappy with someone, communicate it.

Controlled rants are good, they let you organize your thoughts.

A blog post is often just a controlled rant.

When in a room full of people, you can often learn more by observation than conversation.

Are you a conversation circle floater or commiter?

Stand your ground when confronted until you get a full scope of the situation.

Politics and religion are a great discussion item, but only in small groups.

Fall of the Freshman: The Army

Kurt — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:49:41 +0000

Do they not see what happens around them?
Are they naive as to the purpose of the men encircling them?

The wise men sit on the edge, praying for them to learn, to notice, to join their ranks.
But they are blind to them, only noticing those encircling them.

They get attention, a private army of attention, at their beck and call for them.
They don’t know why them are around them, but that they are there and there for them.

The wise men say from the edge: Ignore them, for they are not who they claim to be.
But they discard their wisdom, only listening to those attending to them.

But then the army changes allegiance, a new General is in town. The old one gets thrown aside, tossed to the wind, and forgotten.
Only then do they listen, and they listen hard.