UltraCrepidate

As I grow in self control, I started to understand that it is important to let go of the concept in which we are the master of our own mind. In favor of accepting the fact that the brain and mind together have certain tendencies and behaviors out of our control. In order to better direct ourselves towards the way we want, we have to understand these tendencies.

Here are a few facts that I know through experiments, experience and increasing my own awareness on every thought that appeared and the reason why I chose the path to becoming well rounded instead of specializing and excelling in one area.

1. The brain has specialized areas that takes whatever input that comes and process them. Including junks that you don’t want.

2. Every time you pay attention to a thought, it gets reinforced and further integrated into your personality.

3. The reality we are in are limited by the few sensors that we posses.

4. The concept of “I” when you talk to yourself internally are made up of different personality from specialized part of your brain.

5. The overmind that controls everything is very inefficient and can only function correctly during consciousness. Think of the overmind as the total vote of all individuals

6. Specialization in one area makes that personality dominant.

7. Part of the brain can shutdown and sleep while others continue on to function.

8. Brain energy has battery like property. Think of the different wave patterns as different clock speed. Consciousness requires overclocking.

Here are some that I am currently contemplating

1. Brain is capable of functioning at higher speeds and escape the limit of the 30fps imposed by the images from the eyes. We need to prove this by hooking a 120fps camera to a recently blinded person (A conversion method need to be made to change the camera signal to brain visual signal ) .

2. Time is a relation of how fast we can perceive reality, therefore the overall speed at which we function will increase(see above)

3. Certain frequency pulses does different things to brain neurons. (A basic first example is demonstrated by shining special frequency of light on brain matter to shut it down, others need to be tested)

None of these are conclusive and are only from my own world. If you agree, great, if you disagree even better. I’d like to read the research on your reasoning.

Before:

13 Layers, 4 filters and 2 alpha channels later:

I hesitated and gave up twice on this picture, but decided to go back for a 3rd attempt to extract Lethe from the background. The look she gave the camera is too good to let it go to waste.

Lethe’s gene is a cross between a cat with short hair and another with long hair to better adapt to the wet and cold eastern Canada. Great for survival, but a pain for extraction. It is hard to extract hair, period. Let along extracting it against a random background in my room that has color ranges from pretty much all of the spectrum.

I simply picked up and left and ever since then I’ve only been able to talk to a few about it. A topic that I usually change quickly. I am afraid of thinking about dancing, afraid that I will start comparing my current self to what I was before. That part of me which is like a rebel against the rest, speaking bluntly of passion and fire while I slowly extinguish its life force. The music had already died in my room.

Every time I hear others at work bragging about dancing, or caught a glimpse of a great custom at the dry cleaners my mind races in a whirlwind before I can restrain myself. The effort usually leave me emotionally vulnerable for the rest of the day. I had left because I realized that my life’s flaw is preventing me from improving. Without equalizing these flaws, the dance will be jagged. Now there are only two goals left to reach before I can allow myself to indulge in that so close yet so far away.
A simple inquiry from an acquaintance sent my heart soaring with excitement. Not happy, nor sad, just excitement.

Then I turned on the music again… my heart choked in my throat.

I never fully understood the Chinese business mentality until I talked with a clerk who works for one of the signature Chinese restaurant chain. While I am still weighing in the pros and cons of starting my own business they charge fearlessly ahead right after they immigrated to Canada. Opening a business and earning your own living is as natural as eating rice for breakfast.

“We are instructed to talk less with the clients to achieve a higher efficiency in serving as much client as possible.” A mentality that will most likely achieve success in China which will not work here. This discrepancy is caused by population density. And because we charge more per client in Canada, the need to retain your client to ensure a steady flow is essential.

The Chinese entrepreneur adapted by being super friendly towards new clients till they are hooked and become regular, upon which point the clients will receive smiles that are only skin deep and the uneasy feeling of “NEXT” in the owner’s body language. It is an effective strategy. Once people become regulars, they need to receive a lot of shit before they decide to switch.

So the best way for consumers to get the best service is to make sure they know you are not a regular. Of course, this is only a general model. There are times you’ll get people who are raised in Canada with a different mentality in which case, the normal Canadian way applies.

“5 minutes”
Was how long it took me to finally pull the handle and open the door. If you’ve seen Richard Gere in “Shall we dance” you can then use that to visualize what happened

Inside, I was swearing and cursing and I don’t know what. The most prominent thought that dominated was :”What the fuck am I doing here?” But wait, I knew exactly what I was doing there. A week ago, I had deliberately opened the yellow pages and searched for an activity that I can never imagine doing which will scare the shit out of me.

Didn’t take me long to find “Ballroom dancing”. To give you an idea of why it was scary you have to get an idea of what my situation was like then. I was scared shitless of girls and had them up on a pedestal like some sort of goddess because my life had been devoid of them.

I spend the first 3~4 years learning how to speak French, then the next 2 learning how to speak English, so being interesting or flirting is out of the question and all contact with female can be summed up to a few simple sentences that I I knew in advance. I am your equivalent of a “tapette” A plank of wood if I were rated on my interesting factor.

The next hour that followed can probably be seen as my most intimate experience ever with the female species. I mean I held hand with a woman! Luckily, that enthusiasm met the hands of one who’s held thousands of hands in her life time and doesn’t consider that experience as life changing as I was. For I think if that were the case, we’d be having orgasms on the dance floor.

Next: meet my first teacher…

To “Dansons” series index

There seems to be an inherent resistance within the circle of any industry against monopoly. Take Intel’s short foray into the motherboard market for example. It infuriated all the manufacturers and also gave them a wake up call as to the reality of Intel. If the rival AMD is not kept alive, Intel can and will enter another market with the goal to take over. They can because they control the information on the most relevant information for any motherboard manufacturer: the chipset information.

People are willing to put up with inconvenience of the underdog so as to not give the giant any more fuel to increase its power. Any computer integrator’s fear is that of Intel integrating everything together. Imaging a PC with CPU, RAM, Graphic, sound and motherboard all fitting into a single chip. The trend is certainly pointing into that direction. In the past month, Intel has unvailed its plan on a new type of RAM and on the new possible graphic processing power, there’s only the reviving of Intel’s old motherboard division left to do for Intel to provide the complete solution. Just like Microsoft has slowly done with the general software market.

The rival must be kept alive, just as the spice must be kept flowing.

That aside, one starts to wonder. Why is Intel moving towards being a complete solution? Market share? Profit? Or is it just “the next thing to do” with a corporation that big? Did they foresee the saturation of the CPU market?

When I just finished reading a certain novel, my writing style will match that of the author for a while. Mimicking the structures and words that they use, it is a natural ability of mine. Same thing with gaits and voices, although it is harder for me to reproduce the sound, it is easy for me to understand movement and pinpoint which part is important to copy in order to achieve the same effect. I admit that I’ve done nothing but trying to mimic someone else for a greater part of my life. What can I blame? I had no idea where I stand i the world.

That being said, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel revulsion the first time someone tried to copy my lifestyle. After the initial rush of superiority, I just get annoyed at the person who constantly observed me, cause I know when I turn my head, he’d become a mini me. Other than that annoyance, there really isn’t anything else, for a fact remains clear. A copy can never surpass the original therefore the original has nothing to fear from the copycat. While the person is trying to be you, you remain ever so elusive, because the you in yourself is constantly shifting with new ideas. A copy can only remain a snapshot of what you were. I know, because I’ve been copying someone else’s movements.

Because it’s a challenge

The goals of my life have never been about money or owning anything in particular. This is because I am the witness to a life driven purely by money.

My parents were born in poverty, where watered down rice ganjee with sweet potatoes is the every day norm. Where a feast means a chicken leg added to the mix of otherwise hunger inducing meal. My dad’s life has been driven by that of money and business. He started out penniless and built a company of his own in pursuit of financial security, neglecting his familly in the process. You really can’t blame him for this though. It was a harsh world back then, some would argue that once your account balance reaches zero, you are as useful as a beggar. No, there’s no social insurance at all.

Trip to Africa, trip to Europe, scuba diving, bungee jumping, sky diving. I don’t want to do any of these a second time. I own a car because it gets me to work on time, otherwise I prefer to bike and run. I want a house because I am sick of having just one bedroom that multitask as art center/machine shop/storage/bedroom/study.

The last goal I can think of is to not having to work and be able to support myself from the interests. However, this one is debatable because I love working and creating something beautiful. Be it a state of the art 3d laser scanner or a simple real time camera.

Hence I am stuck, unable to justify the need to be a millionaire. It is something I know I will become in my lifetime, just as natural as owing a house at one point in my life. I just can’t find the why.

My favorite clerk at Tim Horton’s is having a bad day. Waiting in line, I can see that her frown is affecting the people she interact with. Which is why I decided to flash her one of my genuine smile when I ordered my standard large coffee double double.

I’ve long ago discovered how to infect another with a smile. It’s the transition from non smile to smile.

The understanding came when my dance teacher was lecturing us about our frozen smile on the floor which eventually led to the question “What should we do when we can’t smile all the time?” The answer was quite simple: “Flirt”.

Thus was the reason I spent a few days walking down the street, staring down women in an attempt to make them smile. Can’t say I perfected the art, but on occasions like the present, I am comforted by the knowledge that I can make the clerk smile.

I am having problems finding cheap dancesport events closeby which I can attend and practice taking pictures. It is saddening that the IDSF (International DanceSport Federation) have succeeded in squalshing all the local organizers.

In a coup to hoard wealth and squalsh their money generating competitors, a war was waged between the IDSF and CDTA (Canadian Dance Teachers Association) where IDSF forbids any of their registered members to participate in any CDTA. It is safe to assume that similar rule was handed down in other countries against the local competition organisers. The result of this can be felt when you look at the dminished amount of competitions listed this year.

For a competitor, this means that the entrance prices are higher and travelling costs more. At the same time, the costs are reduced because there are less competitions to go to and less politics to play. IDSF assign their own officials. i.e. You only have to suck up to the selected few judges whereas before, almost all teachers judge at a competion at one point or another and you get marked down if they don’t like you.

I prefer it this way. Then the dancers can have more time perfecting their art instead of rushing from competitions to competitions every two weak. If I remember correctly, the logistics and planning of having to travel every 2 week caused more problems and grief than the dancing itself.

I’ve been afraid of writing in the business category for a while mainly because of the confidentiality and NDA problems that things might create, but the more I write, the more I understand what I can write about… Basically, nothing about the company I work for and just the industry in general. There’s still plenty of topics.
With the coming of DirectX 10 and the scalable programmable floating point GPU which both Nvidia and ATI are pushing out, an interesting dilemma presented itself to numerous people at different jobs. The biggest question on most people’s mind are: what can we do with this?

For the scientific community (Matlab for example), it means that you now have a very powerful processor at your disposable to do number crunching. Codes doesn’t need as much optimization and rounding because the floating point processor can take care of that. So less development time in figuring out the best way to write a program.

But more interestingly of a dilemma is the fact that each computer has two places to do processing now. One on the graphic card for math and one on the CPU for IO and decision making. I say SETI and FOLD@HOME should start taking advantage of these idle mflops that’s going to sit on everyone’s home computer, idling most of the time.

With that in mind, people in the industry like me will be the first ones to start hacking and writing programs that runs and manages both processors. Once it gets big enough someone will create a standard API for the communication process between them. Motherboard manufacturers are best situated to do so since hardware arbitrage should prove to be the most efficient. That or Intel acquires Nvidia merging GPU and CPU together forever.

When Tim expressed his wide eye disbelief in the show “Office”, he did so with the perfect body language. The wide eye, the blinking and the hand pushing against his mouth. Today, I experienced just such a moment caught in between my extremely lax and sway with the wind red headed flatmate and the perfectionist alpha female who continues to have anxiety attacks so long as the lease remains unsigned.

I am just a messenger caught in between having to endure the mess created by both overtly stressed out and overly relaxed people. At least one of them aren’t telling the truth, or most likely bending reality to such a distorted proportion that any static truth will seem like a lie. It is important to understand the motivation behind each person and what will push them to lie.

The red head will lie to appear in control whilst the alpha female will lie to make her appear to be a victim and I will lie to cover any part of me that doesn’t conform to society’s norm and to feel superior compared to others in ability. Since I am dropping the current lease and moving out on my own, whether or not their lease gets renewed on time and without problem has no effect on me appearing superior, I can safely assume that I am not distorting the reality or telling any lies.
Having confirmed that, I took a breather and just decided to say fuck it. Let them sort it out amongst themselves. I was going to help double check that the red head has a place for the future and the cheapest rent possible with a new born coming to the world et all. Fuck it, because it seems to me that these two are intentionally making things harder for themselves in life and seem to thirst for melancholy and self pity.

My life is messed up as is without those, no thank you.

I’ve mentioned several times that the Canadian economy is stagnant. My belief is even firmer after the few weeks I spent figuring out the tax system. Every percentage rate set at just the right price, to prevent any loop hole, or rather, make any loophole non lucrative to take advantage of.

The Canadian economy has matured piggy backing that of its southern neighbor, learning from their rise and falls. Add this to a stable financial industry where a few giants rooted themselves firmly in place to prevent any aggressive new entrants from eating their pie, you get a very boring and controlled ladder system. It is even more obvious when the most discussed and accepted way of getting rich is through tax deferral of an RRSP account. At 40% average income tax rate with a 15% purchase tax on top of that, 49% of your money goes to the government. RRSP please.

It isn’t surprising then, that none of my investments managed to beat the supposed $2900 CDN that I will be getting back from my tax by combining just the right amount of tax credits to lower my tax bracket.

My desk looks like a mess and I just finished reading the booklet of pure accountant gibberish for general tax and another one twice as thick to complement the different kind of investments I have. Foreign, divident, mutual funds, RRSP, GIC. What we need, is to get apple to look at this system and make it into a one button software. I’d be more than willing to put half of my income into having that.

Just my ranting after suffering a 10% decrease in net value. But hey, I wished for it, can’t complain right? See more details in my 2007 Q1 report.

In addition, I opened 3 more accounts this quarter for different purposes. 13 in total now.

Numerous people close to me has brought up this strange trait of mine. I initially discarded this as a minor flaw in my character until today, when Dianne, a recent acquaintance, pointed out that fact.

“Were you in your head measuring the possibilities?” She asked bluntly since she can afford to at her age.

The truth is yes and no. I was measuring some type of possibilities, but nothing pertaining to the topics at hand nor has it to do with anything that is happening. It was just a random thought that occurred and I made no effort on the outside to hide the fact that I am going deep within to explore the possibilities.

A psychology student coined it “Hyperfocus”. A major road block for autistic people which kept them from normal social interaction. People closer to me tells me that they can feel that “your body is here, but you are somewhere else.”

This brings up a question for me. Does it mean that most people can’t do this? That what’s happening in the reality surrounding them forces their thoughts to stick to the sensory inputs? For me, this can happen anywhere at anytime whether at a party, at a dance competition, at work or during conversations ALL THE TIME.

The idea of doing this seems normal to me and I am not self aware or self conscious of how it looks like to others during this process. Following the intrusive train of thought at that moment seem to be more important for me and it takes efforts to tear myself back in order to focus on the present. The range of ideas can be from financial calculations, programming possibilities to how best to measure the taste of certain type of rice.

Are others just more skillful at reining in their thoughts to the present? Or are most people free from these sudden intrusions in their mind?

I didn’t even get to finish my to do list before two colleagues lined up outside my cubicle this morning. I do not enjoy having my flow interrupted yet it’s been happening increasingly lately.

A quick check in my client folders on the current issues I keep track of, I counted a total of 38 folders. My inbox in the morning welcomed me with 17 new emails over the course of the night… none of them junk.

When a customer called to lecture me on proper business conduct to ensure customer satisfaction, I agreed and apologized. My thinking is this: get their money, what is the outcome they want and if the outcome is worth the time/money invested.

About a year ago, I remember thinking that I can never be like this. Looking back, I understand exactly the knowledges that I’ve gained which caused the shift in thinking. To sum it up nicely à la Warren Buffet style: “Act like an owner.”

There are two primary filters that are in effect within me. The first one is the constant calculation of return on cost & value over time. The second is the understanding of the outcome that people are seeking with each sentence they speak. (It’s annoying to arrive at a gain/loss price whenever I think about something, but it does make things easier most of the time)
But why would I want to benefit my employer by thinking for them and acting out of their best interest? My response is, why not? For me, it is a great training in decision making process. I am getting paid to learn and experiment. Of course, when time comes to choose between my own development as a person and benefiting my employer, we all know that my thirst to experience will trump everything else.
More and more, I see myself stepping through all these characters that I swore I can or will never be. Am I descending into hell? Or is this actually evolutionary progress? Either way, I have no regret.