Tag: blog

  • Life Patterns

    While looking for something else in my web server logs I noticed that some of the visitors of this blog came across by searching for phrases like “pattern of life”, “patterns in life”, “what is life pattern” and so on which also happens to be the title of this blog. I’ve chosen this title because one of the main features of the human species is the ability to discover patterns and relationships between events and to use these models and relations to make conclusions and generalizations. That’s what I do as I try to understand things in my journey through life.

    I don’t know what were my readers actually looking for, because the aforementioned expressions may relate to many different things. Nevertheless I looked on teh interwebs to check what’s out there on the subject and that’s what I found:

    There is a mathematical game called Game of Life, Life patterns or sometimes simply Life. It’s one of the best known examples of a cellular automaton. The game was devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Learn more and try it here.

    Then there is this very interesting Life Patterning Exercise by Results in No Time. It looks like a good way to mind map your life in order to create a more clear picture of who and where you are at the moment.

    According to Monte Zweben there is marketing practice called Life Pattern Marketing. “Life Pattern Marketing is the practice of placing companies’ brand messages on digital screens and billboards that are located where busy people really are. Digital screens are popping up in great places to reach people, carrying short, punchy brand messages that reach potential customers while they pump gasoline in the morning, while they shop for groceries in the afternoon and while they withdraw money from an ATM in the evening. The key is context.”

    On the music front I’m aware of two works that have related titles. One is Life is a Pattern by System of a Down and the other one is the Pattern Life by Despair. I liked the description of Despair from this page: “The heaviest thing in Buffalo, New York, next to the snowfall”.

    There is also a book (xpensive!) called The Pattern of Life. According to Wikipedia its author Alfred Adler was an Austrian psychologist and was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement.

    So there are plenty of things to be found while searching for “life pattern” 🙂

  • hello, world

    Did you know that the tradition of using the phrase “Hello world!” as a test message was influenced by an example program in the book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial.

    I’ve been in two minds about going blogging for a couple of years. I didn’t want one more thing to waste time with, especially having in mind that I’m writing challenged (actually communication challenged). Being an introvert type I’m expending great deal of mental energy trying to express myself.

    Anyway, I hope communication is skill and can be improved by practicing it, so in the long run it may turn out to be the reason to blog rather than not to.

    Another thing is that like most people I forget. Few days ago I stumbled upon a linux related mailing list archive and it was really funny to reread my own posts from like 8-9 years ago. Likewise now when I and Antonia wonder about when something has happened we just go to her blog and check it out. I hope I will have the patience and persistence to update this blog regularly so it would become a valuable database with memories.

    And last but not least: I’ll be preparing for IELTS certification soon so blogging in English is one more way to exercise.

    Originally I wanted to write about many more things in this post but I don’t want to become boring. So here I stop and as Vetinari would have said: “And now, please, I’m sure you all are very busy, don’t let me detain you”!