From the “Josh trying to interact with audience” file

So like most normal human beings, from time to time I take part in the act of exchanging currency for goods and services.

I have noticed, when doing the analog version of the aforementioned act (I.E not through the tubes) that there are two kinds of consumer:

1. The get it done’er: pays for item, thanks the operator politely, and departs said location.
2. The juggler: pulls out wallet, pays for item, thanks operator, and departs said location, however while departing location, the consumer is busy putting wallet away, reconnecting any portable music players or other similar devices back together.

I would describe myself as the latter consumer kind. What type do you identify yourself as?

DrawHelpers?

Yesterday I uploaded a project of mine that I have been using a while on various image manipulation projects and the like.

Basicly what it is a class libary with a couple handy things such as the RectangleHelpers class, this class allows one todo some handy things with rectangles, such as creating a system.drawing.rectangle class from two points.

The logical operators class does Boolean operations on images, I should point out that the code in that class is not mine, I can’t remember where I found it, I do remember it was in a article of code-project or similar.

the rest of the classes are fairly self descriptive.

Some new code

I have just created a new open source project.

Have a look and I’ll post more on it later.

Exciting!

Seriously Cool 3D Projection

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

Post that follows the previous one.

Yeah, the subject of this post is a bit random.

So anyways, moving foward from the last post I made (for those of you that need a recap, I have depression, currently getting better), I am getting better, though some of the side effects from current chemical aid are moderately annoying (dry throat, increased irritability).

before moving of the topic I would like to settle a couple of things

• If anybody who knew me during the STC years reads this, please rest assured that you did not cause it. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but still, I don’t want to give you the satisfaction of knowing you affected me
• The underlying reason I got the affliction is something I don’t plan on talking about at the moment, maybe in a few years I might…

Anyways, I want to move foward, although at the same time I do have current affliction, so I probably might post a bit more on that for a few more posts over the next while. Feel free to ask questions or whatever.

Now then, that leaves the slightly unanswered question about my future. The short answer is that I now consider programing to be a hobby of mine, nothing more. I plan on following my life’s major calling and becoming a creative in the moving pictures industry. For those of you that have known me personally (Hi David!!) for any length of time; I don’t think this will be a huge shock for you. Oh and my interest in robotics is starting to take off again, but that is for another post.

I do plan to blog more, around once a week I think is a manageable amount for the time being, I plan to actually have content and not just random garbage like some people.

I have changed JoshBlog’s motto from “Hi I am josh and I code stuff” to “My soapbox I can shout on”.

That’s about it. Questions?

Life, the universe and the Gremlins in my head.

Well.

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Buckle in kids cause this post is gonna catch you all up on whats happened in my life since my last post.

First and formost, in fact, the main thing really,

I got diagnosed with Depression around June the 8thish, on the 7th of June I had what you might call a mini breakdown, so I went to the Dr the following day and she told me that I more than likely had depression. From there on in for a few weeks my state of mind was far from what one would call healthy. I thought about suicide many times during this period, thankfully I have an amazing family and some pretty good friends (and by this time, an incredibly helpful psychiatrist and Dr) so I got through the initial coming to terms with it period.

After a while of steady decline my Dr and psychiatrist decided that it was time to send in some chemical help to fix the problem, so I got put on to some happy pills, after a few weeks of upsurge I had a couple days of absolute misery and pain, so it was on to another medication, the week that I changed pills for the first time was amazingly hard and frought with darkness,  lucky my mother was able to take some time of to help me through it.

My mood improved a little over a couple of weeks and then, one night when a party was thrown by my parents for one thing or another, my mood plumeted, the tears ran down my face in front of about 20 people. the darkness was winning, (and not the I-belive-in-a-thing-called-love darkness either ) I honestly consider that night to be the closest I have ever come to harming myself. As a result of that night, I got put on to another medication, within one week I was already feeling like the fog was lifting, I was begining to feel amazing, I can’t really describe that feeling.

So fast foward 5 weeks and here I am, still with a long road ahead but now I can see the sun and smile.

I am not completly over it, currently the nights are the hardest as I can’nt control what my subconscious drags into my dreams and nightmares. However, I am managing, day by day, week by week.

Part of me thinks that it will be something that follows me most of my life, all I can do is roll with the punches.

So you may be wondering why am I posting this?

Really to get it of my chest and out there, maybe even to give hope to other sufferers of the darkness currently having a rough time.

I have more, but I need to build the confidence to say it, even now, as I type this, my hands are shaking like crazy.

Prediction

Heres a quick prediction. In the year 2011 North Korea will do somthing bad.

Gluster – Cluster Filesystem

More as a not to myself than anybody else, Gluster is a Cluster Filesystem. Could be good to model StoreMore on it.

Chronic Stupidity (part two)

Last post, I gave  quick summary of why NZ’s govt sucks. and began to slowly detail what they should do to kinda help NZ citizens out. I should point out that while this is primarily aimed at NZ there are no reasons why this can’t work in other country’s, of course they should hire their own citizens .

Now many of you, after reading that will be thinking that adding more staff to an already bloated bureaucratic infrastructure will make things grind to a halt. What we need is a well implemented and designed electronic system (this could be designed and built by a NZ based company) for handling some of the forms and things. The way people would use the system should be similar to the following:

1.  Person gains a smartcard / one time password card from their case worker or whatever when proper identification verification is complete.

2. To fill in forms they authenticate from their own computer or from a goverment owned computer bank, this could include fingerprint verification or other biometric verifation.

3. Forms are electronicly taken to the correct department and added as work items for government staff to process (staff will see this sorted ascending by request age).

Ideally Department head’s would have acess to near real time statistics on number of work items processed per worker and other such things. This would help cut down on staff slacking on the job and would also show who to promote into management, this would avoid idiots getting into positions of power.

By now you are probably wondering how the government will pay for this, well, Based on my quick calculations with the latest NZ statistics Quarterly employment survey data, a flat tax hike of between 50c and $1 a week to people who earn more than 30K per year should be sufficient to cover the prices, of course, with National at the wheel this will never happen.

So, What do you think?

Cronic stupidity

Ok, Is it just me, or are the people ruling this nation a bunch of complete idiots?

In these current hard economic conditions, when people are turning in ever increasing numbers, to services provided by the government. The government are laying of 1000 staff. that’s 1000 jobs. Even before this current period of economic woe, govt services already had massive backlogs of work. these backlogs are only gonna get larger.

Our National led government (BTW: John Key should really change his first name to Don) seems content to do absolutely nothing to help anybody in particular at this present point and time. In fact the major political issue seemly faced by the government is a bit of road work in Auckland. and even that, when / if it gets of the ground will undoubtedly not even start for a couple years.

There are a lot of other stupid actions being undertook by the people we elect to make things better, but that’s a topic for another day.

People are suffering now, not in a couple months, but now, the more we wait, the worse things are gonna get.

While there are a large number of people willing to work, Why don’t we capitalise by temporarily doubling the numbers of government case workers and the like to clear the backlog. Of course make it clear to them that they shouldn’t count on having these jobs in a couple years. when the backlog is cleared we make sure to keep roughly half of the temp workers to continue aiding democracy while reducing bureaucracy.

That brings me to the second part of my plan. that I will post tommorow, but it involves the internet, and a number between five and 100 million

I would like to point out that I might have something wrong, so dont be a troll, be an orgre