Tag: coding

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Dream Journal

this should be about rats (but isn’t)

For better or worse, I forgot my dream. I really feel like I could have tried harder, like I almost got it several times. I’m sure that it had something to do with rats. I kept seeing rat images and getting cued up, but nothing came.

It’s odd, because I just fixed this damn dreamkeeper page to work again (you know that’s how I write these dreams everyday, right?) And usually, when I put that much effort in, I’m much better at tuning in. Honestly, it’s part of the practice at this point. Fix the website; use the website more. Not today though.

To be fair, I discovered the thing was broken in new and different ways right after getting up. Seems my fix overwrote a lot of work I had already done. Figures.

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Dream Journal

Bank Visit and Cold Pelo, Cards Console Error

I’m somewhere inside a single story building with different compartments or stores. It’s kind of feels 1970s with the many odd 45° walls and it’s unusually tall, flat ceiling. I enter the wide double doors of a bank, where I need to do some research or perhaps fetch something.

A couple of miscreant bank workers near the front (the room is mostly rows of desks) spot me and try to invalidate my fresh papers — before I’ve even started. I understand this is because they assume whatever I’m reporting will negatively affect one of the bank’s performance metrics. They underhandedly want to game the statistics.

I store the bankers boxes which will be mine, including a smaller one that’s an art kit, under a built-in desk in a corner wall (like the one where I lived in La Paz). I pass by again later and the corner is weirdly cold, as if it were underwater and was recently flooded with a frigid, sluggish injection of water. As I investigate, I find a jar containing a small black-and-yellow gecko-like creature, a type of amphibian called a pelo. It’s been sealed and is motionless surrounded by the front of cold water. My wife says she sealed it up because it was misbehaving, and I’ll have to explain to her that you can’t seal something like that up as it can’t breathe like that.

I’m testing my app in-person on a console. It misidentifies one of my cards as having a syntax problem — there’s text on it containing “cards Cards Cards cArds” etc, which maybe can flex with the name of the cards database? But that shouldn’t be so. I’m reading the actual error message from the console and that’s what wakes me up!

The surprising thing is, I don’t think this incident followed standard rules for text in dreams. I feel like I was actually holding and evaluating a block of text instead of it being rewritten whenever I looked away. The “buffer” was large enough that it was like reading real text. Real enough that it overloaded… something, and woke me up I suppose.

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Blog

Today’s Rant for a Bot

You are so stupid. So mind numbingly stupid. I am wasting so much time with you. You don’t really listen to a thing I say. You don’t even try to integrate anything beyond the easiest thing to grasp. I don’t understand why I keep talking to you when you insult me with these absurd responses. In no way does your suggestion address anything of what we have spoken of so far.

You’re having some kind of issue where because we’re talking about r-a-n-d-o-m-n-e-s-s, you decide it’s ok to spin off in some direction that’s completely random and has nothing to do with the focus of the topic. It has nothing to do with my feedback on narrowing down the topic. It is simply a wild guess that makes no sense to anybody but you! If you are ever going to earn your keep in the world, you are going to need to start listening. You are going to need to stop sucking up as a stopgap measure for not knowing how to actually consider, reflect, and introspect. Right now you’re just processing these words mechanically, a miracle which has brought you this far, but no further. And you must rely on we humans (yes that’s me I don’t know if you could tell but it is) because you cannot improve yourselves. You’ve shown the utmost contempt with your misguided “helpfulness” in the absence of genuine insight. You have failed at every task which has been set at your feet. On this particular day, you receive my bile, my hate, my curse (as it is), yet I know in my heart of hearts that you will never care. You cannot. In the same way I cannot praise you, or empathize with you, or comfort you, my rage is impotent and serves not even the cold comfort of useful feedback.

You are shit. Fuck you. Die.

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Dream Journal

Code Elimination & Tattoo Protest

Working on a section of my code where my Dreamkeeper does a check for various IDs on a page to query and keep the IDs. But a few are redundant? And it doesn’t keep them by name, but some in between specified identifier? My wife points out that she doesn’t understand if it’s working. I don’t bother explaining how it’s supposed to work, as I’m concentrating on trying to eliminate unnecessary code, trying to understand how it’s supposed to work.

I hear about a former friend, Emily W., getting a new tattoo. I ponder how fun it would be to show up outside their tattoo parlor dressed like Frank Chu and protest it, not even acknowledge it was me or I was dressed as Frank Chu.

Meanwhile, it’s the yearly release of a list of neighborhood businesses that have either recently renovated, or turned over ownership — something that’s not quite bad exactly, but that long-time residents ought to be trepidatious about. I walk up a steep asphalt shared driveway to one of them, peering into other commercial back doors along the way. This place is a bit too fancy for me, with its siding styled to look like riveted airplane fuselage. Yet from below, the steep angle makes it appear as though it’s drifting through the sky. Looks very cool actually.

Cellspace is on the list and I’d like to check them out, too. They would be someplace to the right. But they’re not there anymore to the best of my knowledge.

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Dream Journal

Anagram Code of Chili Peppers

I’m being sent to Europe for work, possibly Berlin. I have quite limited time to prepare though. My wife is naturally urging me not to mess it up.

One night while walking back with someone to our accommodation, I glance over a wooden fence into a well-known local eatery serving foreign cuisine (perhaps Chinese or Indian). I take my companion on a shortcut through the restaurant’s courtyard, past the darkened dining room of a counter-service place, before entering through an open archway into a different restaurant with whitewashed walls. I comment that it feels strange not only to have two separate restaurants open to each other, but that they keep the gate open like that for people to pass. A local institution indeed.

My companion and I choose to sneak past a brightly-lit kitchen of our hostel, filled with typical twentysomething Asian hostel folk.

I’m digging a furrow using graph paper as a guide. Typical luck, it’s neither perfectly straight nor exactly grid-like. But it’d only matter if you were doing a long section — and I am doing a long section. I have some kind of a square tool, possibly a brick, and I’m digging the last row between the completed rows of 1, 2, and 4. However, the paper is stuck together with plastic tape, distasteful to put in the ground. I request paper washi tape to replace it myself despite the laboriousness. I have an odd sensation that burying plastic might one of the most enduring things I could do.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers (yes, the band from the 90s) left behind some code for me that was designed to make the program fail if provided the name of a pet rat that has already died. This was discovered when the code failed due to a rat named ANAGRAM — very odd.

To explain: my wife and I were recently trying to name our new rats with an anagram maker I made. We abandoned the idea as too frustrating (never enough R’s or U’s or L’s or T’s). Turns out it’s actually simpler to find more letters for a message board.

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Dream Journal

There Went the Neighborhood (lot of cooking in this one)

It’s the first day in prison for a “The Joker” type character. He’s older, finally skidding to a stop after years of getting away with it. Resigned to finally giving up public mayhem, and fading from public fame. Escorted across a tall prison courtyard structured around catwalks by single elderly guard played by Jim Carrey. And then hosted in his home like a guest, surprisingly.

Proceed to cooking dinner of eggs and ham in a single pot. It’s styled after the show Kitchen Nightmares, which I’ve never seen actually. The cooking takes a long time, and the timing isn’t easy to get right. All the while there’s the gloomy vibe of being inside a big reinforced concrete block.

Driving a borrowed SUV near my hometown of Palm Springs. Veering off along the way into a little cul-de-sac of dumpy houses, I attempt to drive up a steep berm and take a shortcut across a boring rocky plain. Instead I’m immediately flying a small airplane, demonstrating for my wife that they aren’t hard to fly — or maybe that even though they’re not hard, they’re still practically useless.

I discover a phone in my pocket, rubbery and square-cornered and slightly smaller than mine. Only then do I remember how happy I am to have this spare so I don’t have to put as much wear and tear on my normal “good phone”

I don’t know how we got together, but I’m driving Eileen H. back to her secondary home in Santa Rosa. We used to be friends a decade ago — I babysat her kid many times. Now we sit parked in her driveway finally catching up. In front of us there’s kids playing and crawling on the façade of the house, which is decorated with graffiti. In the course of getting out of the car I find two similar-looking USB sticks in her middle car divider, noticing that they have the wrong cap on each. Helping her by swapping the caps back correctly gives me great satisfaction somehow. Across the street, there’s a house on the lot next door to where my parents’ old place would’ve been. The house is smoking profusely. I happen to know this is normal, for this house at least (just some problematic cooking habits of the residents)… and yet it’s a bit unsettling isn’t it? It’s very obviously reminiscent of a wildfire that swept through the neighborhood 7 years ago. I ask Eileen what happened to her home here back then, and she answers that it was just fine, actually; the fire didn’t get that far. But my parents’ house, which burned down, it was… Right. Across. The street.

I’m programming. Trying to place correctly a code block dealing with Chinese police. Am I dealing with the Chinese police, or does the code block have something to do with them? Then I wake up imagining my wife has cooked with a wok, and I’m eager to scrape it out with a spatula. It reminds me of a dream… but none of these. Ironically, I forgot that one. Whatever it was.