nerd

I don’t say the word “blog,” despite the fact that it is recognized as one. I reference the full word, “weblog,” because that’s what it is, a log on the web. Captain’s log, October seventh… I always think that, you know, when I cross the word “log”.

Anyway, that’s beside the point. Back on track here.

Another word I use only in its full – though almost entirely unknown to be so by the majority of the population, as also is the case with weblog – form is the word “perquisite”. I do not use “perk” or, even, “perque”. I use the full form, always.

For both of these and more, I am a nerd. 😉

Post-a-day 2022

Nerves

I think I’m nervous. I’ve been hesitant to share with too many people about this whole computer programming and engineering thing. And I think I finally saw today why. I think I’m afraid that I’m not actually good enough for it. I’ve always seen people who do this kind of thing well to be of a caliber above me, somehow. Super brainiacs, so to speak. I’m certainly smart, but I’ve never considered myself to be that smart.

And yet, as I mentioned while speaking of my concerns the other day with the family friend – who, by the way, is one of those super brainiacs and who has confessed complete confidence in me on this endeavour -, what I have done and can do with human languages is, in its core, remarkable. Sure, it is normal and no big deal for me – it is my own brain’s workings, after all, so I know nothing else. And yet, compared to how most people’s brains work around language and languages – especially people who were not born into a multi-lingual or bilingual family -, what mine does is a total anomaly. I’ve always held that I have a math brain…, and that language is just math to me. But who ever crosses that barrier between math and language/writing? Indeed, who ever dissolves that barrier? For me, it just doesn’t exist.

And so, I can see how my brain is already set up to step into that role of super brainiac, in a way. It already is a super brainiac around language education and teaching. Now, let’s have it expand into the real of computer language and art. I am ready to create, and to improve all this junk that is out there everywhere, currently wasting people’s time left and right…

Let’s do this.

LFG

Post-a-day 2021

Learning

I began last week learning something entirely new to me. Okay, so it isn’t exactly entirely new to me – I first learned some foundations for it back in middle school. Mrs. N**** taught us in computer lab. I think most of the other kids, the girls especially, weren’t huge fans of it and didn’t really get it too well. But I was and I did. It was HTML.

Hypertext Markup Language, that is.

And, you know, though I didn’t ever realize that I could pursue learning HTML, I did pursue learning other languages. Remember, languages and math are all the same thing to me. So, a computer language just feels like a fun cross between the human spoken/written languages and the math ones. No wonder it was easy for me to pick up, and no wonder I loved it back in middle school.

But I never knew that this was the foundation upon which all of this ‘computer programming’ and ‘software engineering’ was based. Don’t ask me how – I don’t know how I didn’t ever make that connection. But, finally, I did last week.

And I’m doing beginner work on it all now, starting off with a course on HTML. Though I’m in this course to learn HTML, I kind of feel like reading the comprehensive list of code for HTML would be easier for me at the point. The blocks of text that attempt to explain things to me are often much more confusing that just looking at the actual code itself. I regularly go back to the text after reading the code, and decipher it that way – the code makes more sense seen than talked about. Does that makes sense, how I said that? I guess it is like just about anything else: you can talk to me for days about it, but, until you show it to me, it is just words and ideas, and doesn’t fully make sense or click.

But this stuff is clicking. And I’m liking it. A lot.

I’ll finish the HTML foundations course tomorrow or the next day, I think, and move into CSS or iOS app development training next. Or both…

It’s funny, though. I can tell this is important to me, because I won’t let myself cover too much direct information in a day, so as not to confuse it all later. And I am excited every night before bed, as I plan out when I will be working on it all tomorrow.

Man… did I mention that I’m a nerd? Well, it just got a bit more obvious. 😛

Post-a-day 2021

Show me how you nerd

I mean, let’s be real here. How many people actually spend time looking up and reading about punctuation…. just because they are curious? And how many people do it more than as a one-time-thing?

I do not believe that the count is very high, but I know that I am one of those select nerds. 😛

Post-a-day 2021

Nerding

I finally looked up something that had been bugging me. You see, for the workout called “Murph” by CrossFit, something was off. CrossFit said to wear “body armor” or a “20lb weighted vest” for the workout, back when it was first announced officially.

However, the workout itself was the workout done by a man named Michael Murphy. He was a Navy Seal. (Wait for it…) And yes, David Goggins trained with and knew him. (He comes up basically every day, now, no matter that I don’t even try.) From a combination of interviews I read that were about him, I learned that he wore the Navy-issue body armor vest while doing the workout. Someone mentioned in the interview – I think it was his dad – that the vest weighed 16.4 pounds, and that Michael would finish the workout, on average, between 32 and 35 minutes. That means that he did, in just over 30 minutes, a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, and another mile run, all while wearing a 16.4lb vest.

But the workout says to wear a 20lb vest. What gives?

Well, I finally looked up the government-issue body armor vests, the ones that were (are?) worn by the Navy from, at least, the year 2000 through the year 2017 (possibly still now, but I didn’t delve that deep). It is called the Interceptor Multi-Threat Body Armor System (IBA).

And guess how much the total weight is. Just guess.

16.4 pounds.

It was an upgrade in lightness from its predecessor, which was 25.1lbs and went by a different name, and the latest version apparently weighs 33.1lbs.

So, under no version of this vest would Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy have had a 20lb vest. And, given the years that he was a Navy SEAL, he would have worn the 16.4lb vest. If he only wore the outer shell of it, it would have been only 8.4lbs. Those are the two options. Not 20lbs.

Anyway, I know officially now what my goal weight is for this workout: 16.4lbs in the vest.

Hashtag NerdAlert ;P

Post-a-day 2021

Homophones ;)

I never quite understood what was going on in the song, though I listened to it multiple times… I attributed this to my lack of knowledge on the history being referenced within it…

Even when I watched it happen on the stage, and I listened carefully and understood almost every single word in it, I was still slightly lost… as I considered it afterward, I saw that it just still didn’t quite make sense to me – why such a title and then have the song be talking so much about what it was discussing?

I was guessing that it was showing how problems in the government’s leaders’ lives always had a risk of being life-threatening, and so there were two sides to being in politics at the time (and a third during the war itself, but from an enemy, not an ally)… thus the “dual” of it… the duality, would it be?

Anyway…

It suddenly clicked for me tonight, though, as I prepared myself for sleep, and contemplated Lafayette’s 19 words in under three seconds –

And I’m never gonna stop until I make ‘em
Drop and burn ‘em up and scatter their remains, I’m

…

Is it “duel” instead of “dual”?! I asked myself in sudden doofus–feeling inspiration.

I quickly checked, and, of course, it is, indeed, the “Ten Duel Commandments”.

Still a play on history and phrasing, but not in the way I was interpreting it… similar, but not really at all the same idea. 😂

Oh, the fun of spelling. 😛

P.S. Extreme gratitude yet again for the beautiful gifts that Lin-Manuel Miranda shares with the world at large… Thank you, good sir… 🙂

P.P.S. Daveed Diggs,…. dude… I kind of love you for your space of fun and for your spectacular precision. 😀

Post-a-day 2020

Fish for dinner, but not to eat

At a friend’s home tonight, I had a homemade dinner combined with a spontaneous private lesson in Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters).

The lesson was mostly about fish and how, even though the pronunciation is different for different fish, they all have the same first character in their name: fish, sakana 魚 🐟.

What was extra fun about it is that some of them actually helped me learn what on Earth the fish actually are.

For example, saba 鯖 is the word for mackerel.

It is a combination of fish and blue.

Aka “blue fish”.

Did you know that mackerel have blue all on their backs?

I do now. 😛

It was definitely a fun lesson, and it all started with her showing me the kanji for shark, and my saying that it looks like a shark on the right and a fish on the left.

(It really does!)

And then she got all into how “fish” is in the kanji of all the little fish dude names.

It turns out that shark is made up of “fish” and “crossing” (and not something like “fish” and “monster”, like I was imagining).

Shark calligraphy

I guess it makes sense: the thing that crosses fish…

But “crossing” still totally looks like a shark to me.

Post-a-day 2019

Grammar Nerd

I submitted a semi-formal complaint today at the grocery store.

…..regarding grammar…

You see, they’ve been redoing posters in this store recently.

One of my favorite posters was replaced by a somewhat lame poster, right where I can’t miss seeing it as I enter the store.

That was already an annoyance.

Now, add onto it that this semi-lame poster also incorrectly uses the word (the adjective, in fact) “everyday” in place of the correct, two-word, adverbial version “every day”.

That blew it up for me… I wanted to vandalize like that little comic-type drawing is of the old lady spray-painting a correction on some sign, and being carted away for it by the police.

I could practically picture the whole thing.

And so I considered doing what I had done on a sign at my high school once, and just taping a piece of paper over the sign, displaying the correct wording on my added piece.

(Yes, I actually measured the sign letters on this new sign at school that read “PULL UP SLOW”, and hand-wrote “LY” in a similar red block script, taped all over the paper to seal it from rain, and then taped it deftly and thoroughly to the edge of the sign, in line perfectly with “SLOW”, but totally sticking off the edge of the sign, due to how the words were placed….

Not long afterward, the sign disappeared altogether…….. eventually to be replaced by a new sign that read “PULL UP SLOWLY”….. success.)

But the sign was so big, and I worried at being accosted by police or being given a ticket for it, despite my noble intentions…

So, I casually brought it up in conversation with employees here and there, and they mentioned that they would say something about it to management…

And then I waited…

And, months later now, I walked in today and saw this blasted sign, alongside a new sign that listed the store hours, underneath a bit that reads “Open Everyday”…

That was it.

I went straight to the help desk, and calmly asked if I could make a small, likely pretty odd complaint.

Of course, was the response.

‘It’s about the posters outside,’ I said, and three heads and three pairs of eyes suddenly popped straight at me, aghast.

I assured them that it wasn’t anything bad about them, and then carefully explained what was wrong, that I, admittedly, am a teacher and am accustomed to correcting this sort of thing all the time, and that I didn’t mean to freak anyone out, because I know it is a small thing, but I want them to have the accurate version.

And so, as I explained why “everyday” was wrong and “every day” was right for the two signs, the guy who was the initial person to talk to me wrote a note to give to those in charge of all the signage, and he even showed it to me, so I could verify that he’d gotten it right.

He had.

And I was relieved.

They even said that they hoped I still would come to the store (I had told them that it made me not want to come back, it was driving me so nuts now), which I found to be sweet.

Whether they saw me as crazy or not – the guy did say that I needn’t explain myself, not in the least, so that’s hopeful that at least he didn’t find me to be crazy – they were still kind, and still wished me well.

I then did my shopping with a great sense of relief – at last – in my body, having finally done something that truly could handle that “everyday” situation (which, unfortunately, is becoming a sort of everyday event, now that no one seems to learn grammar and spelling anymore).

Post-a-day 2019

Check one

One down and two to go!

I actually wrote the paper this evening/tonight, and I like it!

Yes, it could be loads better, but I’m okay with how it is… I’m not trying to publish it, but complete it, and Inhabe done that.

Tuesday, I’ll present about it, and I likely’ll get super nerdy about everything I learned in my research, as well as all the new research I kind of want to do now, based on things I found that left my appetite unsatisfied. 😛

I’m a dork and nerd at heart, and I totally know it…

That’s a big part of why I’m in school again – I’m opposed to our grading system and standard assignment styles, but I love to learn and to share what I’ve learned. 🙂

Now, to do the whole paper thing over again tomorrow morning and daytime, with a presentation of that paper in the evening! (Yikes!)

Post-a-day 2018

Work your nerd

I found out today that my brother had felt unease about his nerdy knowledge on various topics. Quite frankly, I had always admired him for said nerdiness. Whenever he was interested in a topic, he’d do what he could to learn as much as possible in a short period of time. And then, if it was something that he really enjoyed, how continued to learn about it in the years that followed, becoming ever more the genius on the topic. Possibly the best part of it to me was that these often were topics that had almost nothing to do with his work or schooling – it was purely things that interested him. Nowadays, he is still the same about it all, though he definitely has certain topics on which he could be considered an expert after so many years and hours of study and work dedicated to them.

I guess, growing up, I just didn’t know his world of friends and classmates and, eventually, colleagues, because I was so much younger than he was. I had no idea that they didn’t know about his nerdy areas in his life, too. They apparently only knew about his cool, chic, sporty side (from what I understand now). He, it seems, was afraid of being rejected for his knowledge and studies. Now, though, he has begun to embrace his nerdiness, and publicly so (think social media, etc.), and he has been discovering how much respect exactly that aspect of him; especially since he is cool, chic, and sporty, but loves knowledge and nerding out over certain things. He is discovering that he had no need to be insecure about his interests and knowledge. Plus, despite the fact that the public has been responding really well to his nerd side’s being exposed, he already knew that it doesn’t really matter what other people think of him anyway – that’s their own business, not his. What matters is what he thinks about himself. If he is happy with who he is, then there is no reason not to express that in his life. So, he started finally expressing himself, nerdiness included. Now that he has been doing that, he has also found that people are grateful to him for sharing himself and his passions with the world. Super duper win-win, I say. And I am proud of him doubly, for keeping up the nerdy knowledge, and now for sharing it with the world. 🙂

Post-a-day 2018