So I’m finally back from my one week break. I’m somewhat disappointed with my lack of exercising these days, and much of it boils down to my sciatica interfering when I start working out. That aside, it’s been a roller coaster of emotions.

For starters I moved my laptop to use elementaryOS, and so far I have no regrets. It’s been a delightful experience. I think the next iteration of it is around the corner (maybe?) with the next Ubuntu LTS and it’s going to be a hell of an upgrade. What I worry at the moment is the lack of updates in Spotify I hope that when Ubuntu LTS kicks in they finally update their client to use a recent version of libgcrypt.

As for my application. I’ve been pondering for a while what to do with the user interface as it’s been a very stressful task of bringing something good to the table. My fault lies within the need “to be original”… sadly original these days is incredibly hard so I’m going to focus on bringing a sane and solid experience even if the design in the end reeks of “boring”. It really stresses me as while part of me want to provide something really solid I can’t come up with a good interface without sacrificing something. Well, tomorrow I’ll be sitting once again sketching a new and predictable design.

I’m no designer though… so all I can do is just try.

You know, never in my life I considered myself a classical music (using the term as macro) guy in the term that I never spared a thought about it. These days I would take my time going through the various artists Spotify lines up in their “Related artists” section. Amusingly all began in a “silly way”, I was binge watching Your Lie in April and some of the works that were performed during the series were to my liking. I should say that when I say “silly” I think there’s this preconceived notion that if you are inspired through a medium that is meant to be pure entertainment somehow it makes your experience “less” than others.

I say this because obviously I wasn’t raised listening to many classical figures–that at a mere second of playing the tune many in the scene would recognize it–no, nothing of the sort. I got interested in it because I watched a anime series, which I recommend to anyone with an interest in the medium.

In the past though, I have shown great affinity to progressive metal, jazz… so thinking about it it might not have been as incidental as I previously thought, or maybe it was. Who’s to know.

I started cleaning today found textbooks lying in my shelve and on the floor I was quite surprised that there were some I’ve forgotten about like Mastering Regular Expressions and Guide to Japanese Grammar. At some point in my life I do want to learn Japanese, like any language it’s overwhelmingly complex; I know there are people born with that gift of learning any language in a short time, sadly I wasn’t born with a gift like that. This year my goals strays far away from learning Japanese, sadly, mostly because I have to focus on other matters I want to take care of.

It’s been undoubtedly a hell of a year, where hell isn’t a synonym to “awesome”, “terrific” etc as some would expect. This year acted as a pandora box back in January and February dealing with a lot of issues. It was also the year I had to leave online communities and focus solely on myself due to health issues, and said health issues I’m still taking care of.

I made myself a goal, and that goal was to push myself to learn C++ and to delve into C. I’m rather proud that I’ve kept that goal up to this day. This blog’s C++ speaks volumes rather than me saying it. It was never about quality posts regarding C++ as a language, but a continuous effort to keep myself engaged in the language. As I kept learning I pushed myself to learn Qt which some of you have seen me talking about in the past.

As to why I’ve been pushing myself to learn C++, well, months ago I was talking about not being satisfied in web development. I wanted more, I wanted to push myself to the traditional desktop and being able to contribute to C/C++ related projects. The journey was hard but not impossible, even now I’m not an expert at all just another person striving to learn more about the language.

And with that I’ve forgotten on how to learn a language. When I say this I say it in the way that the last language I learned was Python and I’m really rusty at it since I don’t write python code. C++ has a lot of pitfalls and convoluted subjects like const-correctness which can be quite messy, passing by reference or value when it comes to it and believe me even if it sounds absurd it can save you memory to being with. It’s not the same referencing to an array pointer containing 500,000 elements and passing an array of 500,000 elements.

I’m a persistent person, I think that’s one of my qualities and yet one of my downfalls. Debugging and understanding most of the time goes together, when I don’t understand something I must “take it apart” and “look at how things are done” specific breakpoints. This was the case with QAbstractItemModel and it wasn’t really your typical “model” in terms of web development but something that was engineered to be the base of all models in Qt.

I haven’t had any type of trouble in college. My grades are pretty steady, and I feel like the remainder of my bachelor’s degree is going to be pretty neat as the courses left aren’t hard to deal.

The growing fear always been once I’m done if I’m just that guy that can get into software development shop, a part of me tells me yes, while the other says probably not.

Talking about fears I’ve wanted to take control of a few aspects of my life such as health, while I’m not going to spend my time being vague about the issues I’ll just say that I hope to conquer a lot of things in this 2016 and put my life back on track. Part of me leaving online communities was because I became too dependent of forums looking for social interactions. Truth is I needed to go out there, the real world not in a bubble where you find like-minded individuals to share things on a daily basis. Not that I’m the type of person to debate or bring “controversy”… I’m too lazy for that.

And yet I’m not satisfied with my progress. I fall back to old habits that I must get rid of as soon as possible. I need know when to leave an ongoing problem alone, I need to know my limits of when it tackling programming issues as I think as many of you programmers out there sometimes a bug happens and you just keep thinking about it and your special one is upset because your work is invading family time.

My goal isn’t perfection…. never has been even though sometimes I think I’m being too harsh on myself. It just that I have a great appreciation to an individual, and said individual has achieved a lot in such a short time that I can’t help but not call quits. And maybe, just maybe I’m holding that individual on a high pedestal but the person has given me every reason to believe a lot of things can be achieved.

And yet here we are.

All in all, it’s been a crazy, really crazy ride for me. All I know is that I must work twice as harder in 2016 to regain the trust of some individuals, and to excuse myself for some actions I have done in the past in real life. I guess you could say to be a “better person” whatever that is nowadays. More thinking before talking, more pacing yourself, just a bit more of everything that requires interaction with other people.

The list of things I want to improve myself is long, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 pages long. Point is, if I complete at least 50% of what I proposed myself since this year, and the new goals I have set in motion in 2016 then I would be very proud of myself. I guess I could just sum it up in wanting a more active life than being in front of a computer in my free time.

But you know, it’s easy to do the talk, gotta do that walk as well. So, we’ll see how things go from here.

I’m around! I’ve been dealing with some things in real life so it has taken me a great deal of time. Most of why I have been away has been about my health, the other is a moderate burnt out that I’ve managed to get under control.

I’m back to reading Qt documentations. I’ve been fairly active reading Qt Interest mailing list for quite some time, and glancing over the tickets of issues that affect me (like zlib.h not found can’t compile in Windows in general). I’m still pushing myself to learn C++, I think by now “learning” seems like an odd word to use, yet appropriate if you use other facilities provided by C++.

Most of what I’ve programmed have been fairly straightforward. My application is still going strong, just a while ago I managed to commit and push a few pending changes.

Qt 5.6

Qt 5.6 seems to be the definitive version I will be using mostly because it’s the version that will contain complete WinRT support. To me it’s very important to be able to provide my application through different platforms. At the same time Qt doesn’t exactly make it easy if we start talking about in-app purchases that many applications integrate.

Reading list

I’ve managed to get a copy of Effective C++ by Scott Meyers so I have that going for me. All in all a new round is about to start for me to finish my application and finally release it.

To me, this is one of the hardest subjects I’ve tackled in my life. Harder than learning a programming language, harder than using a complex application. The results of being a socially inept person doesn’t have to do with “when to keep the mouth shut and show empathy”.

I don’t get people. Sometimes, it’s hard to understand the irrational thoughts–and believe me we aren’t stranger to irrational thoughts either. At best we are closer to being irrational more than they are. Getting people is hard, there’s no other way around it.

So what? Well, honestly I feel like the field is full of irrational people, hence why I said we are more irrational than “normal people” that aren’t in our field. We don’t know how to communicate our problems, or solutions.

If I tell a person the most logical answer to an issue that have been giving him/her grief with the family, then, do you think everyone can digest blunt “logical solutions” over a more humane approach?

And that’s what I want to get at. Although we eat logic everyday that does not make us right. If you think handling situations is all logic, then you’ll have a hard time dealing with all the in-between variables that might just become collateral damage due to your blind decision on just using pure logic.

And that was my downfall.

I don’t know how many people I’ve pushed aside, or burned bridges with over the years. The things I do remember I just learn to live with it; there’s no way around it. It’s hard to make friends, real friends. It’s so easy to lose them though, so incredibly easy it’s almost criminal itself.

I just wish that sometimes I could go back in time and change some things. Sadly, the world moves on and there’s no time to spend on “what ifs” or “if only…”. What’s done is done, the show must go on.

That’s why, working towards a better social attitude is the answer to most of my problems. It’s no longer about “how knowledgeable you are” or “how intelligent you are”. If you are incapable of basic social interactions then I feel we are missing something bigger.