Techblog

I almost forgot that I should write a blog post today. Only 500 words is what I require from myself, but that just seems to be lot at the moment. I have used the whole day to listen to some music from Spotify. I found a CD from Spotify that isn’t too easily found anywhere else and I’m just listening at this. It isn’t a new CD, but something that I just happen to love. This artist is currently number three on my last.fm page, so that should give you some information that I really like her songs.
Another thing that I have done is reading some text about programming with PHP. I have already learned a few things that are quite fun things to know. I know that PHP stands for “Pre-Hypertext Processor” or processing, but I’m just happy to hear that it is a acronym of some words. I previously thought that there isn’t such thing. Another interesting thing was learning about the difference between single quotes and double quotes in PHP. I have been wondering about this while programming it myself. The difference is that with single quotes variables like $variable are just printed and with double quotes their contents are printed. This is a simple thing and I feel that I should have noticed it before, but I didn’t so I don’t see what I could do about it.
I did use skype to have a nice chat with my little sister today. It’s a great thing that it can be used just to keep contact with some important people. It, have used it with many other people too, but I have to say that my family is the most important people here. I did use it lot to keep contact with my wife, while we lived in different countries. So I guess that you could say that I’ve gotten used to communicating with social media like that.
While I was talking with my little sister I noticed that I’m not that good at telling others what I’m talking about. I guess that I do it much as I do writing these blog posts. Because most of what I’m saying is just down to the listener to figure out. I just feel that the ideas that I have are flowing freely in front of me and I just pick the few words that I really like and don’t pay that much attention to the rest of it.
Now I got to say again that the music I’m listening is great. The artist is “Maija Vilkkumaa” and the CD is one of her older ones called “Pitkä Ihana Leikki”. I just love how she makes her music in finnish. Because let’s be honest, she isn’t going to have that many foreign fans. That is a huge problem with some finnish artists. They think that they are going to make it to the top of charts everywhere and they make their music in english for that reason. The truth is that not too many finnish band have made it to international music scene. Nightwish is one of the best known finnish bands, but many others are just not that well known. Some bands are big in Japan and South America. These include bands like Stratovarius, Sonata Arctica and Children of Bodom. All of these bands are something I have listened to in the past.

You might think that I was about to forget the table about the words of the day. Don’t panic, because it is right here.

These words are something that I might even remember. I will try to provide another five words during next week.

I started to work on little PHP. I wanted to make a awfully long HTML table with PHP, which would change the contents on each window and change the colour of each window. I just might be using a wrong word here, I meant the thing that is between >td< in a table. It was just really fun to see how much contents you would get with a simple for statement with some arrays to help change the colour.
I think that the hardest part was just to write the normal things, because I still don’t feel too confident with the UK keyboard. It does have some advantages compared to the finnish keyboard, but because I don’t have the keys on my backbone it is just a little slow. I think that this will change in a while. The only hard thing really is the special characters that you get. What makes that so hard is just that I have a different set of pictures on my keyboard, so I have to learn to use these without looking at the keyboard at all. I can do this with the normal letter keys, but the special characters are still a little difficult.
I had also some other things to think about today. One of my really good friends from Finland said that he might come to visit Norwich on his own. This sounds just great. I’m only thinking what am I going to show him here. He has visited here once before with a group of my friends and I think that we kind of saw everything during that time. Of course visiting some of the same sites if a must, but I feel that there should be something new. I was just thinking that at least with restaurants I wouldn’t want to make that much changes. Nandos is just a great restaurant and I wouldn’t mind to visit it again. Being a host just raises so many questions. Just that you’d like to show him so good time, that he would like to come here again some time in the future.
I have used the whole morning listening to this one finnish metal band called Kotiteollisuus. I listened to their music a few years back in Finland, but I really haven’t listened too much of their music since then. Now I feel like I would have found their music again. It might be this interesting just today, but at least I’m really pleased with this at the moment.
I just feel a little stupid because I feel again that I should write something really useless here to get to the 500 words mark that I have set for myself. It isn’t just that easy to write something if you don’t have a good idea for what you are going to write. This should give some points to book authors in my mind. I know that they have some idea on what they are going to write, but it just isn’t that easy to do.
Now I have passed the mark for 500 words. Writing just feels more fun after that point because you don’t have really anything where you have to get to. But still it has to be 500 words, otherwise these blog posts would be just like 100 or maybe 150 words. They might be easier to read, but they wouldn’t really give me this kind of experience on writing. I’m not saying that I haven’t written text before, but writing over 500 words on a single occasion is something that you don’t really do that often if you don’t set this kind of goals for yourself. You just know that your hardest critique comes from yourself.
I will present a table that will include the five word of the day words here tomorrow, just wait for that.
Just listening to Megadeths Symphony of Destruction. This is just a great song and I think that many people would like it if they just gave the song a chance. That just brought to my mind that I had problems with knowing the difference between chance and change. I do understand what the difference is with the meaning, but just trying to write something quickly those two are too much alike. I confused them twice on one CV and that is quite bad. The song is still playing and I got to say that it is just rocking so much.
I’m just thinking how many words I have written in the past two days. The post from yesterday contained 1000 words and that just felt great and todays post does already have about 750 words, so that would suggest that the 500 words is not that much. I know that if I would turn that amount up to 1000 words it might lover the quality of the text significantly more. 750 words might just be okay, but I don’t really know should I do that yet. I’m thinking that I could add the amount of words at some point, but I don’t know should I do it just yet. If I would do this I wouldn’t most likely want to do the writing all at one go. 1000 words is still quite a lot, that is like 500 plus 500. It would sound just mathematically stupid to add the amount of words that you should have by 100% straight away.
Just another thing that I did yesterday was modified my local MAMP service. I tried to get my sites out using HTTPS, but that didn’t just work perfectly. I just had to copy my backup files on top of the modified files and then this was working just fine again. I didn’t really know that PHP programs should get their HTTPS from the server and not have them build into the program itself (please don’t complain about expressing this in this way). PHP is one of the most interesting technologies out there at the moment and I think that I would really enjoy learning it a little mssore. Something like understanding the difference between include and require is a good start, but there is a long way to go from that point. I personally user Netbeans to write PHP. I know that many people have complaints about this choice, but I haven’t run into any problems just yet.
This post has now passed the mark of 1000 words. While that is great, I don’t know if I should be that happy about it. I can write and I did make this post in few parts, so in no place did I really write those 1000 words at once. I think it is still a good thing, I’ll just leave it there, because I know I could make the whole thing sound like something that isn’t really impressive at all.

I just wrote another application for a trainee position and I’m quite happy with the result. I would be interested on getting a trainee position where I would be studying the use of PHP. At the moment I allowed myself to play a game of poker and write a blog post before I should start doing anything else. There would be a lot that should be done before I could really just sit back this Friday. I should for example clean the whole house, this would include doing the dishes (absolutely not my favourite thing) and hoovering and stuff like that. Yep, it doesn’t sound too fun.
I should though make this blog post about today and what is happening. I think that writing a blog post of at least 500 words each day has already given me a little better grasp on writing with a computer. I don’t really think that it has yet done anything for the speed, but it has given me a certain attitude towards writing and I think that this attitude helps me a little with the speed. Not too much, but every little helps.
I’m playing poker at the same time as I’m writing this post. This makes the writing slow and the things that I’m writing about might seem even a little more mixed up than they usually do. The hardest part on this is trying to think of the right words for something in English, while at the same time you are playing poker and listening to something on iTunes. Doing this many different things at once usually does get really difficult, but for now it feels to be going alright. I have gotten about 250 words down so far and I have the average amount of chips on poker (the tournament has been on for about 60 minutes, so I didn’t just start playing). I have wondered how these poker sites can keep up these free tournaments that offer some money for the winners. When you think about it, it does not seem to be that big deal. For example where I play they let 7500 players in each tournament. The whole tournament has a combined pot of 150$ for all the winning players. This means that each player would be putting 2 pences in the play after the tournament. And this is also a great to lure new players in to the world of poker. Because everyone loves these seemingly free games and then whops, you are addicted. It’s a clever plan meant to suck you into the world. Poker is really fun game, because it gives you the feeling that you’re a smarter player than those, whom you win. While this is true, we have to remember that even the best players lose some times and in the end the whole game is just about luck. Of course there are better players who’ll statistically win you in the long run, but the small games are just down to luck.
I know that I have now angered few person about the whole idea of poker. I know that most of it is skill, but there just are few cases where it is just down to pure luck. For example, we had a all in situation with another player before. I went all in with a pair of 2 (something you just have to do) and the other player called me with Ace and Queen. You are about 50:50 to lose to any pair with A Q, but some would say that it was just luck for me. Because if we had seen A or Q, that would have most likely been the game there. So poker is mostly statistics and reading your opponents, but little luck never hurt anyone.
Now I’m just getting too excited about the game Now I dropped at the place 464. That is sort of good, when you think that it begun at with 7500 players and that you made it to the top 500. But anyway it means that I didn’t win, so there is lot more for me to learn concerning poker.
Word of the day

Now I’m listening to Blind Guardian from Spotify. Their music is good, I just never have that much cared for them. It is just one of those things that you can’t really explain, but what just is. I know that it sounds stupid, but that just is how it is.
Just thinking now if this is the best way to spend a friday evening. Sitting at home on a computer doing about nothing. It isn’t really that bad, but the idea just sounds terrible if you just think about it. I should be out partying or something like that and yet here I am just listening to spotify and writing some blogposts even though it is friday. Now I’m just getting the feeling that I have repeated friday too many times on this post. The amount of words that I have for this post just passed 800. I don’t know if you should see that as a scary no life thing or as a thing that I’m quite fast at writing these blog posts. I’m just wondering that is there really that many people writing blogs in their secondary languages. I think so, but searching with google feels a little useless. You would just find the most popular options and finding some rarer ones would actually require some work. And at this point I should mention that this blog went past 900 words. I could make this post a friday miracle and make it to have over 1000 words. Because that is just what people want to do. Spend their fridays writing a blog post that would contain over 1000 words. I can’t really imagine too many people that would enjoy it, but you’ll never really know before you try it. Besides it is just couple more words and I have done it. 973 now. I think that I’m really running out of things to write about, because I’m telling the amount of words to you all the time. And now I have passed that point and I don’t know really does that mean that I have accomplished something great.
I think that I might congratulate myself and go to get a beer now. It wouldn’t hurt that much at this point. I think it would just make me feel a little better about today.

I have attended to a job club program, because I haven’t been able to find work on my own. Todays session wen exceptionally well. I got a good application and CV made and sended and I found few other interesting places, which I shall have a closer look at later today. I also got to know that I have an interview coming up next month. I have really liked the company that I have it with and I hope that something could be worked out with them. Maybe there would be a training period or something like that, but lets just all hope for the best possible result for this.
My time just ran out. I’m at the library so the time might run out or something similar. That didn’t really cause too much problem while writing something with wordpress. It is all just in the web, so there isn’t really that much reason to worry.
I just read a interesting article from new scientist about the current state of quantum computers. It looked at quantum mechanics and wasn’t really that sure how you should look at them. The idea that there might be another universe with you and so on is just baffling. I started to think that if there would be a universe for everything, the other guy walking in the library would be the King of UK in one reality. Now he was just walking among the common people here in the library. That would kinda be possible in theory. Thinking of multiple universes and the quantum computers that could be build thanks to this is just amazing. I don’t really even know the right words for this, because it just seems so incredible. Quantum mechanics will most likely become a completely new field of science, if we get some good results about using it in computers. This is one of those things that you should really look forward to in the near future.
The main thing here should be my excitement about the opportunity that I got an interview coming up, but reading that article just really put me to thinking about the world again. It’s just amazing how little we know about the universe around us. The text mentioned that our universe could be just an powerful quantum computer. That would make sense somehow. Because if we wanted to construct an universe wouldn’t it have just something like two dimensions. Then the creations would maybe realise that they see just two dimensions, but the reality might have more. While it is really hard to even imagine something like this, could it really be the reality? Our universe might have 11 dimensions, but we can see only few of them. Does that seem like lazy programming?
I don’t believe that we should really worry about something like this, but it is something that we should understand to be a possibility. While we struggle to create decent AI, could it be that we are AI ourselves created by a higher creature? This doesn’t really make that much sense as I said before, but it might be a possibility.
We have feared quantum physics for at least a hundred years now. We are always afraid of the things we don’t understand. Albert Einstein said that it is just not real physics. Today we know that it is real, but we just don’t understand how it is real.
I think that if I continued this article, I would just repeat the same things over and over again and that wouldn’t be too exiting. I have again passed the mark of 500 words by far and I think I can leave this here then.
The word of the day will appear here after a little while. I think that I might make a HTML table about these tomorrow to sum up the first 5 words that we have. I have to admit that I don’t remember all of them myself straight away, but lets hope that going over these words again will help me at least a little.

I the counter plugin that I installed really works, my blog does have a quite many readers. I thought that I would be the only person moving this counter, but it jumped already to over 300 in just a few days. This might either mean that I have some readers or then alternatively it would mean that the counter is programmed quite badly. I want to believe that there isn’t anything really wrong with the counter.
It is just weird to think that your site might have lured over 300 readers in such a short time. I might have something to do with the automatic crawlers that could visit the page. I used to receive frequent spam before I installed the captcha plugin for the comments on my site. This of course gives you the idea that this counter might be just useless. What I would really love that would prove me wrong is a single comment from a human being. So if you’re reading this, please use some of your time to leave me a single comment.
Having a look at the statistics provided by Google Analytics, my site wouldn’t have had too many new visitors in the past few days. The exact number would be three and it does look like these visits have come from Brazil. So hi to you, if you’re reading this. This makes it really interesting, to think that the site user numbers are so different looking at two different sources. I can’t really say that either one of these is absolutely right. Because yesterday at the job interview, the person who interviewed me did ask me about the site and did visit it with his own compter, so that should show up in the stats also. So the right amount could be somewhere between these two number. Exactly where, I do not know.
I used some time also yesterday wondering that what browsers do people mostly use today. Looking at my stats from Google Analytics, Safari would be the most used browser for visiting my site. This comes as no surprise, because the site is mostly about MAC and for that the Safari would be the correct browser to target for. It looks really depressing when you try to look for the new users with this Google Statistics. According to this I haven’t had a new visitor on the site for several months. I know that this information is wrong, because of the interview I had yesterday. Just mentioning that the counter did have the number 417 on it. So according to that I either have a surprisingly active set of frequent users or then I just have an incredible number of these not so real visitors. I would be really interesting to find out a little more about how does this Google Analytics count the number of visitors. It could just count ones that have spend at least a minute on the site, which would automatically drop bots that are looking for a place where to leave comments. I believe that these would just crawl through the site really fast and leave if they wouldn’t find a place to leave any comments or so on. If this is the case, I would have to think adding some other counter to my site or see if the counter I have can be modified to leave out these other visitors.
Word of the day
mal-le-a-ble – (of a metal or other material) able to be hammered or pressed permanently out of shape without breaking or cracking

I think that this blog is most important for my own benefit. I get to write some HTML code (even if it isn’t too complicated), I get to teach myself some English while doing this and I get to practice typing. You can never really be too fast at typing. And for these reasons I decided the 500 words I have mentioned so many times on these posts. This one did go to over 660, but that is just a nice addition.
I did a small modification for the counter plugin. I made that it counts only unique visitors. That counter is reset every 24 hours, but it might still help a little with the numbers. These might give you as little better understanding of these numbers or then not, but let’s not go to that.