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13 hour days
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2286
A thirteen hour day, 15 hours if you count transport, with a brief moment to sprawl upon some chairs, limbs completely, utterly relaxed, shoes kicked off, behind you the constant gibbering in Italian, the banging of espresso handles and grinding of coffee, it's not much but it's the best I can do.
Father's Day, we're closed, so the weekend is hectic by way of compensation. Hectic with late tables that breeze in at 9:00, 9:30, hardly late for the restaurant industry but late when you're cleaning up, when you've been there 11 hours already and are dying to go home.
In the brief break this afternoon a couple of local garage sales, early starters, nothing at all which casts a taint over the whole weekend.
And dreams, nothing cohesive, loose bits, sexual but not at all, nude ex girlfriends, the shape of women, strange, always promising myself I'll make notes but always lying in that extra 2 minutes until all the memories are dissolved.
A mountain with a cave, green, following up the side along a path, there's a pagoda and hotel, Japanese style, somewhere near the top, and from the top I should be able to find the cave...but it's getting dark, and having found the inn am tempted to stay and enjoy it's hot tubs (red paper lanterns floating overhead); the hotel, the place, it's beautiful and I'm almost wanting to stay forever....
There are the links between dreams, the feeling that each dream is building on, drawing from another similar dream that I had, and I can never recall if the dream was one that I had before this one, or the memory of an older, recurring dream.
But the dreams, at the moment they're the only escape I have, and for 20 minutes I can hang off the chairs, arms, legs slack, unable to move while the restaurant bangs like a poltergeist all about me.
Guitar Hero & Other misuses of time
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Technology
- Hits: 2130
Everyone's played it. Well, everyone but me, but I don't need to, they've told me how it's played.
But I wonder, for the time and effort spent mastering the game, wouldn't it be better to learn to play the guitar and become a REAL guitar hero?
Then you wouldn't be playing the game.....
Or - wait - maybe as part of the game package they could sell a filter - the cable from your electric guitar would run through the filter before running back to the console, and as you "passed" on various levels it would get progressively harder. The filter would convert and compare you're notes to those expected by the game. Same karaoke style, with images of your favorite band playing, chords along the bottom, but instead of learning how to do nothing on a plastic imitation guitar, you'd actually be learning how to play songs by the Beatles, Arrowsmith, whoever...
Now that would be a game. And you'd learn something. You'd have to provide your own guitar, but that's minor.
Or other games. Why are there no world-building games? Games where you learn to build bridges and buildings, high rises, and as part of the learning you need to know the properties of metals, materials, alloys, you need to learn remedial and then advanced physics, any gaming system now could handle it. It would be grooming a future generation of engineers and architects.
I suppose the point of this is, why must entertainment and education be separate? Why don't they integrate the two? Especially given how easy a tablet education is to take when you enjoy learning - and everyone (ahem) enjoys computer games, don't they? Why don't computer games teach skills that can be translated into THE REAL WORLD, I suppose is the point of this.
Just a thought.
The Dolphin Illusion
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1816
Probably you've seen this around the net before, if you haven't I'll explain.
Looking at the picture, chances are you're seeing a couple (man and woman) in an intimate embrace.
But a young child - say, under 10 years old, will probably see a bunch of Dolphins. Look close, closer now, you can see them too....
The point of it is this: A child has no references (or most children have no references) for a couple in a similar pose, and so see the dolphins. As they get older, however, their points of reference change until they see the couple as the primary picture and the dolphins just disappear.
Which is curious, and makes one think: What pictures or patterns might exist around us, that we can't see or recognize because we haven't the perceptual frames of reference? It's hard to say, but it seems foolish to presume that because we can't see or recognize them that they're not there...
Undoubtedly there are entire layers and hierarchies of order and patterns that we can't recognize merely because we haven't the appropriate frames of reference or body of experience. How then can we imagine them?
The Deluge
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2414
It never rains like this in Calgary, or rarely rains like this.
Every day almost, torrents and sheets, it's torrential, a deluge, days only to sit inside and build model arks and be grateful one doesn't live anyplace really rainy, like Vancouver....
It's never been this green. Lush, verdant, the garden overflows with exotic looking plants, the lawn needs cutting every other day...
And work, with the rain, has been busy. It's always busy, busier might be the operative expression. And when after all the surviving is done and the midweek day off rolls around there's other work, web work, work that trespasses on my limited free time, trespasses on my goodwill and easygoing nature, which is becoming progressively less and less easygoing....
So a couple of thrift shops today, a haircut (long overdue, but I like to see how long I can push these things, simply slap on some more hair product..), to the grocery store for some cat food but I neglected to provide for myself and so it's yet another day dining at 7/11, they've a limited (although savoury) buffet, a 3 hour nap (no dreams proper, rather disconnected unsexy sex bits if that makes sense...), wake, more coffee, work, work, some podcasts, work, loaf, and now a brief, utterly useless posting before bed.
It's a bit of a dry spell for ideas. I'm being distracted by a hundred outside influences, work I don't want to do, work I have to do, the pressures of an impending vacation and visit to the dentist and the necessity of finding a proper job; I'm being eaten alive by a million tiny obligations ....
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