Brian's World

Pants

I’m adding pants to my frustration list. Currently I own approximately 10 pairs of pants which I wear regularly, most of them are sized 30×32. Well since you can’t see me via this blog, you might not have noticed that I have grown at least 1 inch over the past year. What does that mean? The 30×32 pants no longer fit. Okay thats a lie. They fit, and I don’t really have any problems with them, but everyone else comments they are short and look small on me. Stupid ankles. While my legs have grown a few inches, my waist has no. Here come the problem, all the stupid pants have longer lengths but they come with a larger waist. My waist did not grow, I do not require larger pants to accommodate it.

Logically I require pants with the same waist size (30) and the next length size (32+2 = 34), so 30×34. Unfortunately such a pant is not made for mass distribution. I will not see on these on the shelves at any stores at the mall, and even online is hard to come buy. They have special stores for large people, special stores for “big and tall” people, even special stores dedicated just to underwear.. but they do not have a store that cannot carry a pant sized 30×34? I am sorry I am not larger in the waist, I am sorry I do not have an extra 2 inches of fat around me, but would you please make a pair of pants for me?

Yes, I could wear a belt with them, but the second I loosen the belt the pants fall down. If my butt was larger than my waist I would not have this problem, but I have no butt… which creates mucho problems when trying to wear a weight belt while scuba diving. I do not want to tailor cargo pants or jeans. If these were fancy pants I would consider it, but they are not so I shall not. Also I assume they would have to tailor a 32×34 to fit, because there is no spare fabric on a 30×32, and they don’t make a 30 waist in anything extra long.. tailoring the pants width is not something I view as easy.. height is simple but width is not.

This brings me to the topic of underwear. I was at the mall this past weekend (not on black friday) and looking at potential gift ideas for Christmas. As I strolled through the various stores I think kept frustrating me. Underwear. I expect a store like Victoria’s Secret to have undergarments on display everywhere possible, that is what they sell. I do not expect every other store to do the same. What I found strange was all the plastic models were wearing tops like sweaters, nice shirts, t-shirts, etc, and just underwear. What gives? Can the model not also attempt to sell a pair of pants? I understand most of these models were upper torso models, meaning they had small thighs for legs, but I would very much like to see a small chunk of pant on there. Not some pair of underwear poorly matched to the top.

I also have a problem with certain phrases on underwear. Call it my rant against sexually display, but I do not support underwear that says just about any verb. Also, I see no need to print sexual terms on undergarments. I would wager some statistics on the fact that if someone is at a point where they can read your underpants, you are most likely already in situation that can quickly intimately escalate. I would argue that same escalation would occur regardless of undergarments verbiage, but I lack any test cases to prove this.

Driving home…

M*A*S*H is on right now, I haven’t seen that show in a very long time. It brings back memories of high school or middle school when I had very strict TV watching habits. Now I rely on BeyondTV to record what I want when I want it. It lacks the ability to record “shows you used to watch and wouldn’t mind seeing again for old times sake”. That reminds me of “The Pretender”, one of the best TV shows ever. To bad it never was very popular. Imagine the Bourne series but a few years earlier, and on tv every week.

In other news I drove home from RPI today for Thanksgiving. Theres never anything exciting to do while driving, so I just think. Today the traffic was going ~ 5 mph slower than normal, so I had extra thinking room. I came to several con conclusions, I was sad to realize that I’ve lost Ally 4, leaving me with a minimal number of allies in a certain category. Ally 4 isn’t off my lists all together, but they’ve been moved into a different category. I’m surprised I didn’t think of this sooner, the data was available for processing several months ago. Stupid me for not processing it and adjusting my weighting system accordingly. I guess I’m back to where I was a while ago, actually even then I likely had someone who might be able to serve a similar purpose. Hrm… honestly, I can’t seem to recognize anyone else who might qualify as an ally in that category. Shucks. I do not have a game plan, but I will think of one at some point. Stupid people.

I also spent lots of time exploring decision trees. In the car I explored the decision trees of past, trying to identify which choices might have pushed me more towards a desired outcome x. Am I happy where I am right now? For the most part yes. Is there room for improvement? Most definately. How easy is the improvement? Not very. It all traces back to my mentally of avoiding certain situations and capitalizing on others. I dislike the concept of “trying” something with the intent of canceling later. I feel if I try something my decision tree will be permanently altered by that experience, and I’m unsure if I want to go down that route. I also know I’ve failed to capitalize on lots of situations that, if I had fully invested in, might have proved more beneficial to myself and others at the moment. I would like to consider myself agile enough to hop on board a project/idea and plunge it out rather quickly, but I am not. And I’m not ok with that right now. Stupid me.

I don’t know what to do, its moderately depressing to look at things with the loss of Ally 4 and some poor decisions on the life of Brian decision tree. None the less optimism is critical.

Being home this week will be interesting. Mom is home permanently now (retired) and dad is taking plenty of days off (semi-retiring soon) so yea, no more peace and quiet. I have a feeling things will go interesting. I could really use some relaxing rest, but just as I put on a collared shirt everyday, I know I will not be permitted to relax and rest. Hopefully dad doesn’t want to cut down a tree tomorrow, that has the potential to mess up everything. I am looking forward to a haircut though.

I’ve also determined I could use a team of people to help me with projects. Essentially to serve a recursive daemons to trace down ideas I throw out there, it would be pretty awesome. I’ve been tossed this amazing thing that I would love to run with, but I cannot do it alone. Not with the end of the semester, Christmas approaching, Digital Signage, Helping with the College App process for K^2, Studentdev getting >100 users, the list goes on. Its just another idea that is 99% awesome but 1% realistically do-able. I do not advocate for there to be more than 24 hours in a day, I do advocate for those 24 hours to be spent as effectively as possible.

Right now sleep seems effective.

Data

I would call my life data-centric. There tend to be three states to my data-centric life: data acquisition, data processing, and data usage. Without each of those three steps the entire concept of data is useless. What exactly is data? Well in my book, data is data.. its hard to define. Its input, things watched, heard, told, touched, read, etc. Data is pretty useless in itself, thats why it must be processed. When a person processed data is becomes knowledge, when a computer processes data is just becomes more data. I think thats what might seperate us from computers. But thats besides the point, once you have knowledge based on some data, you put it to use. You retrieve it, display is, tell it to others, combine it with other data, etc. The more data you have, the more cool things you can do with it. Math alone is kinda boring sometimes, but if you have physics or chemistry to put it to good use it becomes a little more fun.

Why am I thinking about data? Well I started pondering data acquisition, arguably the hardest part of the process (most definately for me). I really like to get data, because I find processing it and using it very fun, but sometimes I dislike the steps that one has to take to get data. In high school I really liked getting data about social events, that was the thing for me to learn about. Why? Because I didn’t go. See I could not go and not know about it, but that would make me stupid. Its better to be informed, while I still did not go. Hence the need for the data. MySpace, AIM, Chatlogs, emails, gossip, etc. provided most of that data. Initially I was overwhelmed by it all, but I processed it, came to some conclusions (the primary one was to avoid high risk social scenes at all costs), and moved on to get more data. Whats great about social data is that there is so much of it out there, and the pile never stops shrinking. People will always keep doing stuff, socially interacting, creating more data to process. In theory if I was able to process all the data available (lets assume its finite but very large) I would be able to predict social behavior with a degree of accuracy. That is neither here nor there, actually its off topic.

Back to what I was saying, I like getting the data. Getting in a relationship with someone provided a whole bucket full of data, and continues to provide data. Yes, I keep on processing it, but the conclusions I come to tend not to be very helpful or good, and I have the data to prove this. I’ve also been enlightened into several other worlds where there is data to be gathered in, unfortunately its all but impossible to do so. Small questions are a small start, tales provide a little more story, but the problem with gathering data from any source is that the data is skewed in a certain direction. It helps to gather data from as many sources as possible, but even then the data will still be missing viewpoint x. The best technique would be to gather data directly from a 3rd person view, similiar to an omniscient narrator or something. Unfortunately there is little hope for me to become invisible, ghostlike, etc.

So what do I do? I guess I should turn towards other data and see where I can apply it. In theory I think you can relate N number of items perfectly to provide results for any X items (i.e everything relates to everything in some way), but to do this with any level of accuracy is crazy. I do not know.

In other, non data related news, (as if there was news that wasn’t data.. ha!) I have completely forgotten what I was going to say. Hrm. My Quotes system will be ready soon, and I hope everyone out there will try it. That would be cool. Also, we debuted MyRPI-Space this weekend, so far we’ve had over 80 signups.. pretty impressive for emails sent Friday afternoon. So far the server hasn’t melted, burned, etc and CPanel seems to be holding it own. Its nice to see a pet project of mine finally take off… the idea spawned from a blog I wrote Nov 14, 2006 entitled “Free Webhosting & Tired”.

It is 11:04pm. Goodnight moon.