Around 2:15 on Saturday.
Just finished watching Ladder 49. It is real tough to watch this type of movie for me. I get all teary eyed. Tough to hold in the emotions.
It is very hard to watch any type of love expressed on the screen, with the lack of it under my current surroundings. Besides the grainy picture, the ability of most of the inmates to sit still and listen to the audio, and the threat of breaking into tears. Why the powers that be cannot get a power booster off the back of the VCR?
Someone is using the damn hot pot as a fryer again and it seems every time they use the margarine and proceed to burn it down to its component parts I end up with a splitting headache. It seems that the ventilating system does not put much fresh air in to this room. They do not have any filters on the intake either.
Yeah I know I am bitching again.
I actually broke down and played some spades with Tom and Bill. We were in the card playing room, and for the first hour my bunkie, Mark, was there so we played four-handed and the next hour we played three-handed. I was reading the paper but put it aside to join them and now they want more of my time.
I was about to climb on to the bunk and return to the reading but do not want to fall behind on the stuff the mailbox competition that I am working on. I was hoping that I would have gotten a letter yesterday, but maybe it will be waiting for me at Monday's mail call?
The point is that I also do not want you to feel that I am not writing to you if you do not do the blog. It is not like I have nothing to do. I still have not really come up with a schedule of how much time to spend doing all that I need to do. At this point the reading of the books has taken the hit.
I did go out and do the hour walking thing, and I really want to make that an must do each day. It is too easy to skip one day and then two days and then... besides I have to admit it is an interesting time for me since I am usually walking by myself and without the radio, I am forced to spend the time dealing with ME.
On the one hand you might say so what is the problem, narcissist, time by himself should be a piece of cake. Since I have been working on that part of my personality it is not always as much fun as it used to be.
I do not know if it was one of my letters to you but I know I told Mom and Dad that I have never felt so productive and in a few different areas. I started off talking about the hour of walking. The structure here does lend itself to keeping with a program so to speak. When you go out to walk you have to stay out for the full hour. Basically the option is walking or walking.
Then it was back in for brunch, count at 11:15, I managed to shower and shave before noon and then it was off to the movies. They will have the weekend 3:15 count shortly, and then I will be back to type out the rest of this letter.
I still want to spend some time on the papers today. I have made out the Hamilton order for the C++ programming book and will need to type a short note to my parents. It is getting warm in here, I am sweating just sitting here typing.
I still have a whole pile of articles I want to write about. I am going to work on a few polished pieces and send them to the Times. I know the odds of getting them to publish something are slim, but they will be a lot higher if I actually send them something in the first place.
I am enclosing the last two "shakedown" reports, If you would be kind enough to make a couple copies of them both on the same page. I want to keep one for my records here and another to send to mom and dad. The point is that my locker is actually in worse shape than when Mr. King "inspected" it. Also it is rather soon for another shakedown, the one before the King one was over thirty days ago.
There is really nothing I can do about the difference in the way the reports read. If Mr. King happens to look at my locker again next week, I could not whip out the report from today and say, "Well, so and so had no problem with it." It is just further proof how individual this system is!
I am listening to a pseudo rap song that is on the pop station that takes the lyrics form "If I Was a Rich Man" for Fiddler on the Roof and keeps the basic melody. The words were changes to If I was a rich girl.
I know I have asked this before, but if you could look for magazines that deal with C++ programming, I am assuming that I will not have a problem getting them sent in here. In all honesty, PC magazine is really pretty useless on the one hand since product reviews are not really relevant to me. I do like to see the problems that users have and some of the columnists are interesting but on the whole it does not really give me much meat to sink my teeth into.
I also assume that while there are always changes in systems programming is still going to be needed, and while the languages might change, the logic does not. Even if they have "end-user" programming; spread sheets, macros etc. there will always be a need to be able to yet under the hood and tinker. And yes I am certainly a tinkerer.
I am thinking of easy things to start with that should not be very complicated programs to write. One I get the hang of it, I would love to develop ones that could mine the financial reporting sites of our elected officials.
What I am assuming is that once complete, you could launch the program and it would be able to open a website as if it were a file on the local drive. Read a bunch of information, build a local file and then be able to print reports bases on that data.
