Tadas' blog

#20 Failure is an option.

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:11:49 +0200

If you can dream it, you still might not be able to achieve it.

What doesn’t kill you, allmost kills you.

Winners never quit, but quitters sometimes quit to win at other things.

You cannot reverse-engineer a success story and treat it like some kind of a blueprint, because almost every success story downplays or even completely neglects the power of random chance. Sure, hard work and attitude is paramount for true success, but these are not the only important factors.

A high school basketball player has ~0.03 % chance to join NBA. Are you saying that all of the other guys just did not want it enough? Maybe they should have trained harder?

One might be tempted to disregard luck until one grasps the size of the competition in the field. While thousands of startups are being conceived every day, only 10 % will be successful. How arrogant would you have to be to think that the other 90% simply didn’t believe in their idea enough?

The problem with cheap motivational bullshit is that it makes the reciever believe that he is special and the world owes success to him, no evidence required. She/he becomes the hero in his own mind, the one who is great and thus everything she/he does must also be great. While that might feel good and at least for a brief moment empower a person to do great things, a motivated idiot is still just an idiot.

I can control what I think and do (to some extent). That’s where my influence ends. I have almost no real control over anything else. Good attitude is important to avoid analysis paralysis, but too often that same attitude morphs into wishful thinking and delusions. You cannot just trust that eveything will go your way. Maybe it will, maybe it will not, and maybe it will go in the exact opposite direction. No way to know until it’s happening.

I’ve been working on a side project for the past 6 months or so. As the launch date approaches, of course I have wishful fantasies where it finds wild success and changes my life forever - I’m only human. If I didn’t think that my project deserves to exist then what would be the point in doing it. However, every time I let my imagination run wild I remind myself that it’s only a mirage and as of now, my project is in some Schrödinger’s box, both a success and a failure at the same time. Even if I do everything just right, there’s just no way to know if it will find it’s target users. I’m humble enough to realize that chances are against me. I’m fine with that. If it fails I will just move on to the next thing.

If success is a lottery, then hard work is a ticket. No one owes you anything just because you bought a ticket, but not buying a ticket guarantees a loss.

#19 how to get better chroma key with Sony Vegas

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 12:51:43 +0300

This week I took some stock footage of hand gestures for touchscreens in front of a green screen. I had some trouble chroma keying the footage, but after some fiddling I found a pretty good technique to get it to work. This is more of a reminder to myself and a short tutorial for fellow editors struggling with chroma keying in Sony Vegas.

The default Chroma Keyer plugin in Vegas works only in the best conditions, which is almost never. If your green screen was lit perfectly, you might get passable results, but if there’s even a slight imperfection in the background, it fails miserably. There are better third party plugins, such as Boris FX - heard only good things, haven’t tried it myself - but they tend to get pricey. Adobe Premiere or After Effects does a far better job at chroma keying, but I don’t feel like switching programs just to get a proper chroma key.

The trick lies in using secondary color corrector instead of chroma keyer. Add this plugin, go straigt to the “Custom” tab. Click “Select effect range” and draw a rectangle on video preview window that would contain as much of the background as possible. For some reason the rectangle is not displayed as you are selecting it (unlike in Chroma Keyer plugin), but trust me, it’s there. The plugin will sample the color information from your selection and use it for further processing.

I know, not the best green screen in the world.

Protip: make sure “Best (full)” is selected in video preview.

When you selected color range, drag “Alpha” slider all the way to the left. The background should become somewhat transparent.

It’s someting.

Now it’s time to adjust settings.

Protip: select “show mask” to better see what is happening with mask.

Deselect “Limit saturation”, “Limit luminance”, you will not need it. Make sure “Limit hue” is selected. Set “Smooth” to 0. The real trick is to get the best possible combination of “Center” and “Width”. “Center” represents the shade of color that is processed. Move the slider to find the value that covers most of the background. To fine-tune enter the number by hand. Once you find the best “Center” value, adjust “Width” to be as small as possible while still covering the entire background. This value represents the range of colors that is being processed, so be careful with this, or the edges of the objects might be cut off. Finally, adjust “Smooth” value to something pleasing and add “Chroma blur” (it must be applied BEFORE color correctors in the effects chain) if needed.

Now right-click on the preview window and deselect “Scale video to fit preview window”. Examine the edges of objects. If they are cut off, adjust settings and get less agressive chroma key. If there’s green spill on the edges, like in my case, there’s one more thing we can do.

Add another secondary color corrector. Disable the first CC, pick the green color for second CC near the edge of the objects. Enable the first CC again. Now adjust second CC saturation value to ~0.3 or something similar and fiddle with “Limit hue” selectors, only this time use bigger “Smooth” value. In my case values are: center 162; width 30; smooth 50;“.

Not too bad, eh?

Here’s the end result.

Hope that was helpful!

#18 some months in review

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:40:36 +0300

Finally finished university. No big celebration, no fireworks, no nothing, but closure feels good. Feels like permission to move on to new things.
Finally moved in with my woman. Feels right.
Shopping is addictive as anything else. June consisted of many trips to the stores to buy all kinds of stuff for the new home. Now it’s July and I still get the occasional cravings to buy new shit just for the sake of it.
Short vacations are the best way I know to stay mentally stable.
Side projects are always fascinating until you actually start doing them.
Filming stock footage is my favorite thing to do at the time. Six months since starting and I still enjoy doing it, even though I’m not particulary productive or good at it. I enjoy not having to worry about narrative, viewers or anything else. No pressure, just filming, nothing else. One shot at the time. Pure videography. Feels almost like meditation.
Found a new job with danish company. Excited to start in the middle of August. Being PHP developer beats being glorified webmaster.
The woman is also looking for a new job. Even more excited for her. Gurl gon’ get it.
Bought a new lens for my camera. Here’s hoping it arrives in time for the vacation in August.
Ordered a cheap fitness bracelet. I’ve been counting my steps with Samsung Health app ever since I got Note 3 more than a year ago. Gotta level up and improve my fitness tracking to improve my fitness itself.
I really should start reading books before bed. Not sure if that’s an excuse to buy Kindle or a legit ambition.

#17 from scrawny to brawny

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:37:55 +0300

During my teenage years I took up weightlifting and in the past 8 years went from 65 kilos to 95, while my height remained the same boring 180cm. This leads me to believe that I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to go from scrawny to brawny.

Positive

If you’ve never been in a real fight as a teenager, don’t worry - you probably won’t ever have to, as chances of getting into one are significantly reduced once you become bigger than most of your potential opponents.
There’s just a general confidence boost that comes with being a bit bigger than you were before.
When you are drunk at a party or festival, other people have to worry about not bumping into you - not the other way around. I mean, you become a 100 kg blob of human flesh with bad coordination and 5-year-old’s energy levels - god help those around you.
Your body is more resilient, i.e. breaking bones, dislocating something and such becomes less of a worry. Ties in nicely with the previous point.
Since, hopefully, you bust ass in the gym at least three times per week, you’re are more aware of your physical capabilities, limits, and the pain threshold.

Negative

If finding pants that fit you well was hard before, now it’s pretty much impossible.
Normal fit is your new slim fit.
While on that topic, most of the fancy clothes look best on skinny guys, while you’re left with mostly shirt-and-pants combinations.
You have to suck in your belly to look good in photos.
if your dance moves were bad before, now they are just plain ridiculous.
You have to be really lean not to look fat.
Moving through a crowd without pushing everyone around and feeling like an asshole is harder.
Guess who your friends gonna call first when they need help moving.
You might look more intimidating than you are, even if you try to “turn that off”.
Food is for living, not for pleasure. You will never be able to eat a cake or a pizza completely guilt-free.

Bonus round - mixed feelings teritory

When walking in dark alleys, other people might go to the other side of the road to avoid you, not the other way around. Yes, now you’re THAT guy.
The amount of food that you eat in a day could feed a poor family.
You might break something by merely sitting on it.

#16 Multitasking does not work

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 23:56:00 +0200

I have a quite short attention span (who doesn’t), so I used to multitask a lot. It allowed me to tackle many tasks every day without much planning and…

Well actually, no. The real reason why I used to love multitasking is because it allowed me to feel busy, productive and important. But there was a small problem – more often than not, at the end of the day I would not have much to show for the whole day of being busy. Took me some time to realize that multitasking wasn’t a strategy to manage work, but rather a strategy to fake work.

Real multitasking doesn’t even exist. Humans can do only one mindful thing at a time, so what we call multitasking is simply a frequent switching between tasks. This switching consumes time and energy that could be put into much better use. So yeah, I’ve been trying to quit this habit for some time now. That means turning off notifications on everything except maybe phone calls, making time for every task separately and concentrating on it completely. This approach can be difficult to actually put to practise, but it definitely works.

As for me, it also goes beyond day-to-day multitasking. For the past couple years I’ve had many different activities on my plate. Constantly juggling between personal life, work, university and rock operas is extremely exhausting. However, the real disappointment came when I realized that I was not doing as good as I could at any of those activities. I was simply not happy with the situation.

So this year, after completing my third rock opera, I decided to leave. My excitement for the project was gone and it would have been impossible to handle the job without it. I’m sure the new producer will do much better than I would.

Quitting is almost always stressful, but it can also be strangely liberating – almost as if you become physically lighter. I like that feeling. And my day-to-day happiness level definitely increased up to the long forgotten levels.

In less than a year I will have had graduated from university. I can only imagine how liberating will that feel.

At least for now it seems that the less stuff I have in my life, the more room I have for happiness. Minimalism is quite underrated, if you ask me.

#15 One sentence movire review: The Fault in Our Stars

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:57:21 +0200

This pretentious indie shit should’ve been called "The Fault in Terrible Writing".

One retarded metaphor. Seriously, take that out of your mouth, you’re just embarrassing yourself.

IMDB.

#14 One sentence movie review - Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 22:28:13 +0300

Worst case of “style over substance” - boring, streched out stories (three vs five in the first movie), heroes are not compelling or fun as in the first one, and while visuals are stunning, it’s not nearly enough for almost 2-hour movie (felt double that).

Two PG-13 strippers (that you are supposed to drool over).

IMDB.

#13 One sentence movie review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 12:10:00 +0300

I suppose it’s one of those love-or-hate movies and personally I loved it, but at very least it universally deserves the praise for it’s unique and sweet-as-candy visuals (I think I just accidentally summed up every Wes Anderson movie ever).

Four (lobby) boys with apples.

IMDB.

#12 I saw a hitchhiker today

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 02:31:00 +0300

As I was driving home through my neighbourhood this evening, I saw a man in his forties or fifties standing beside the street. He was holding a plain plastic shopping bag in his left arm. I didn’t have enough time to take a good look at the bag, but judging from the shape he was carrying a bunch of books or just some box inside that bag. He was delicately gesturing with his right hand for passing cars to stop - almost as if he was ashamed.

Where is he going?

Did he miss the bus?

Why is he hitchhiking?

What’s in the bag?

How long does it usually take him to find a friendly driver?

Is he a nice guy or a mean one?

Regarding the buses, I even checked the schedules - he could have caught the last bus going his direction, so he probably didn’t miss one.

I’ve seen him before in that same spot with that same bag, always standing exactly the way I described. I saw him once during afternoon, another time in late evening. Ever since the first time I saw him these and many more questions started running through my head and I have no idea why it sparked such curiosity in me.

Everyone loves a good story. We crave for narrative in everything we encounter. This human quality is pretty much universal in all cultures. That’s why all of us love movies, books, music and just plain gossip - all of these are just different forms of storytelling.

I consider storytelling to be part of our inherent desire to solve problems. Human brain is terrible at handling the unknown. That’s the reason why we tend to have so many biases, stereotypes and even elaborate belief systems guiding us everyday. Human brain is primed to fill in the blanks in any way possible, no matter how unfounded the conclusions might be. We love knowledge, and what we don’t know, we invent.

Have you ever been sitting in the restaurant and watching people coming in and going out? Didn’t you try to judge, at very least subconsciously, what kind of people they are? If I were to put a box on the table in front of you, wouldn’t you immediately start to wonder what’s inside?

Maybe the fire wasn’t our best discovery, maybe it was narrative. Animals do solve problems, but they do not tell stories. Humans do. Maybe this aspiration to tell a good story which would explain stuff around us is what got us where we are today. The best part is that if we keep doing this long enough, striving to improve the story, making it more accurate, eventually it becomes so good that it deserves to be called the truth.

Maybe as long as we continue to do that, we will be okay.

As for that man, I have many unfinished tales about him in my head. Too bad I probably will never find out which ones of those, if any, are true.

P.S. I’m sorry if this post is a bit too all over the place for your taste.

#11 Why bitcoin will eventually fail

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 16:34:00 +0300

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of months, you’ve probably at least heard the term “Bitcoin”. Unfortunately, the concept is much harder to grasp, so you probably don’t really understand what that is. You are only aware that it has something to do with money and is hot right now.

If you are new to cryptocurrency, here’s a short video explaining the general concept.

Few months ago I was looking into bitcoin. At the time, a price of one BTC was ~$220, and they were gaining media’s attention. Of course, for no surprise, it got my attention too. I’ve read everything that I could find on this mysterious crypto-currency-thingy, trying to decide whether it was a legit investment or just a quick fad. Finally, I decided to take the risk, but buying bitcoins turned out to be a tad problematic task. Eventually, I got lazy midway and forgot about it.

Fast forward to a month later – and the price has risen up to $1100. As you can guess, that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since then I’ve been following bitcoin’s highs and lows pretty closely. While this doesn’t make me an expert, but I have some thoughts on the topic that I would like to share. And my opinion on bitcoin is simple: it will fail in the next few years at most.

Let me explain myself. The rush in price we saw months ago was mainly fueled by people hoping to get rich quick. In a sense, it’s an elaborate pyramid scheme: you buy some bitcoins >> you promote it to everyone you can >> more people buy bitcoins >> value of bitcoins increases.

Basically every positive opinion about bitcoin mentions its qualities that make it a superb currency, and that is true – bitcoin makes a lot of sense as currency. The problem is, almost nobody is using it as currency, and instead, they are using bitcoin as commodity. Currency is supposed to be circulating to be in a healthy state. And while technically you can use bitcoins to pay for some things on the internet, you are not going to do that. You will not spend it; you will hold on to them as an investment and wait until the price climbs high enough to make you some nice profit.

Bitcoin economy is not sustainable as there is no real, natural spending – everyone is hoping to cash in when bitcoin goes really big. Eventually, the economy will run out of buyers. Sellers will panic and prices will crumble.

As for retailers, it’s quite hard to accept payments in bitcoin. How do you get the pricing right, when the fluctuation in price is so rapid?

There’s nothing wrong with bitcoin as a concept; it really is a work of genius. Nevertheless, it will suffer from all the hype that surrounds this innovation. Sooner or later, a better, more stable implementation of the concept will come, but for it to succeed as currency, bitcoin must fail.

Of course I might be completely wrong, but for now, this is my two cents on bitcoin.

#10 One sentence movie review: The Wolf of Wall Street

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 01:51:00 +0200

Who needs porn when we’ve got Academy Awards nominees like this.

Four $100 bills, Y'all.

[#9] 50 years of geeky adventures

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 23:40:00 +0200

I was a geeky kid.

I got my first computer in 2003 and the internet came a couple of months later. I do not remember much from childhood, but I consider that time being the beginning of becoming an intellectually mature (-ish) person. I grew up in a small town, so the internet played a crucial role in my mental development by giving an easy access to big ideas, all kinds of information and interesting people.

Internet was much smaller back then. That was before the rise of Twitter, Facebook and the rest of that social media craze. Blogging was pretty much reserved for geeks (at least in the Lithuanian part of the internet). We had some big websites (delfi.lt was around since forever), mIRC, ICQ, forums, many goofy personal websites and that was enough. It was fun and simple.

The web fascinated me since day one. I learned to create my own static websites fairly soon. Somewhere around 2005, I started toying with JavaScript. A little bit later I took up PHP, which opened the whole different part of virtual reality to me. At that time I learned so much that I realised how that computer stuff excited me. Then I started considering building a career around that.

Whew, that was a rather long introduction, but this post is not exactly about me. It’s about my geeky friends and stuff we used to do.

Today php.lt is dead, but back in the day it was THE SHIT. Being around since 2000, it probably was the most active community of web developers in Lithuania. Sadly, in 2005 it was already outdated as it had been forgotten by its creators some time ago. Nonetheless, being part of it was great, as I got to learn from a friendly and smart community.

Lamers and script kids were annoying, flooding forum boards with their stupid questions and requests, so the least we could do was to have some fun at their expense. This is where it all started.

The core of the community started replying to all the silly questions and requests in short and simple pseudocode that we called P4I (Programming for Idiots – yeah, subtle, I know). It would go something like this. It’s the earliest use of P4I code I managed to find.

It went on for a while. I remember some code snippets being long, detailed and hilarious. It was an inside joke, and we loved that joke.

This coincided with discussions about the state of php.lt as a platform for community. It was getting old and no one seemed to care about it anymore. We felt that we could do better.

A skype group was created, consisting of “P4I activists”, and I was one of the first members. There we decided what our action plan should be.

Thus, P4I.LT was born. To make it less offensive we translated the title into “Programming for Intellectuals” (so smooth).

At first it was just the forum, but soon it also became a blog where we wrote articles on programming. Let me be the first to state that the content wasn’t of high quality. Nevertheless, that blog was quite popular in the Lithuanian blogosphere at the time. It went on for awhile.

People came and went away, but the core stayed the same. P4I.LT was not the only thing we did together. We collectively participated in the Programmer’s day competitions few years running, which was exactly as nerdy as it sounds. Several Christmas in a row we did stupid little holiday projects, such as this and that (it has sounds, which only works in Chrome and you have to wait a bit for them to load).

The last blog entry (I managed to find) was written by me on 2009-01-24. The blog was active for about two years and then we just got bored. The forum lasted a bit longer, but not by much. Soon enough project P4I was declared dead.

But the Skype group continues to exist. We still talk, but not as regularly as we used to. People have moved on to other things. I mean, I was in the 7th or 8th grade when it all started and next year I’ll be graduating university. I was the youngest of the bunch. Others have created families by now. A lot of time has passed. But it’s there.

Eric Reiss has calculated that one calendar year is equal to 4,7 internet years. This number should not be taken seriously as it’s there only to emphasize the sheer speed of the virtual world.

So yeah, I’ve been playing and working in the virtual world for more than 50 internet years now. When I first got to it, the web was 4 times smaller than it is today. Let’s see what another 50 years will bring to the table.

P.S. Here’s some information that was hosted on P4I: http://p4i.armandas.lt

#8 One sentence movie review: American Hustle

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 04:44:08 +0200

Director David O. Russell went with Pareto priciple on this one - 20% story, 80% characters - and that’s completely fine by me, since the latter are awesome and highly entertaining; however the movie is hardly a best picture nomination material.

4 Amy Adams cleavages

IMDB

#7 I love podcasts

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 15:31:00 +0200

I really do.

For the past 6 months or so I have been listening to roughly 4-7 hours of podcasts weekly. That was one of the best decisions I made in 2013. Here are the reasons.

There’s plenty of high quality podcasts out there for every topic imaginable - wikipedia says the number is 115 000, and that’s only counting podcasts in English. Whatever your interests are, you’ll find something perfect for you.
It’s not like mainstream media - hosts are usually really passionate about their topic and ratings are not the main concern. They just focus on producing great content.
It takes literally no extra time to consume information in this form. I like to listen while driving (I even stopped hating traffic jams so much), washing dishes, walking, or basically doing anything automatic in nature.
In general podcasts offer higher quality content than, say, blogs. I presume it’s mainly due to blogging being easier and less demanding than producing a podcast. Also, on the internet, written content tend to suffer from freshness and quantity factors. You’ve got to keep your posts relevant, easy-to-consume and frequent if you wanna get to the top, but creators tend to take their time with podcasts to really dwell into subjects. If chosen wisely, podcasts can be extremely stimulating and rewarding.
Podcasts can help limit that never-ending stream of internet content. You form the list of a few subscriptions that are truly interesting, thus eliminating everything else. You won’t find yourself scrolling through news sites for hours, reading one meaningless article after another and immediately forgetting everything. It’s kinda like RSS (I should probably also blog about that godsend miracle), only you can’t be subscribed to several hundreds of podcasts, so you’re forced to choose carefully.

The easiest way to listen to podcasts is through your smartphone. Just search “podcasts” in your app store. My favorite is Podcast Addict.

My personal favorites

I’ve tried many podcasts, but right now I’m sticking with these few:

Freakonomics radio. Hands down my favorite since day one. These guys apply sociology and economics to everything from suicides to NASCAR races. They’ve published two books and a documentary. Great topics, great minds, great quality entertainment, great everything. I dare you to listen to any episode and not to get hooked.
HBR IdeaCast. Authors, scientists and leaders discuss the art of management - but in a wider sense than you might think. Good stuff not only for managers, but for anyone living among humans.
NPR: Planet Money Podcast. Another podcast answering questions about world economy that I’m too dumb to even ask.
Scriptnotes Podcast. This one is about screenwriting and the industry of filmmaking in general. Both hosts are successful screenwriters working in Hollywood, so they know their shit.
The School of Greatness. The host Lewis Howes is a bit annoying (my personal thing, there’s probably nothing wrong with him), but his guests are far more interesting.
You Are Not So Smart. That one is about psychology, or, to be more specific, self delusions. Every episode dwells into different ways we fool ourselves. Mind-bending stuff.

Go try these, then find something for yourself. You’ll love it.

#6 One sentence movie review: Redirected / Už Lietuvą!

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:46:00 +0200

It’s okay, but it could’ve been great if they haven’t forgotten to add some real characters among all the clichés and cameos.

3 naked dudes

#5 Why I give my time and energy for free

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 16:46:00 +0200

There’s this thing in Lithuania called MIDI Roko Operos (Rock Opera). It is organized by my faculty and has been happening since 2000s. What they do is find talented people, form a unique team of performers and organizers (usually ~100 people), then make exclusive, one-time performance. It’s about non-professionals doing quite professional thing. Pretty cool, check it out on youtube.

I got into this more than 2 years ago, started as a director’s assistant. Last year I was the director myself. This year I’m the producer of the whole thing. I lead the team of 13 “department leaders”. Each of them has his/her own team. It’s an incredible privilege to be in such position. It’s also a huge responsibility and it takes big chunk of my time, thoughts and energy.

And it pays nothing.

Why do it then?

I could tell you about this being probably the biggest opportunity in my life to create (at least so far).

I could tell you about the incredible experience working with so many talented people.

I could tell you about premiere night, when this thing that you and your colleagues have been obsessed with for the last ~9 months comes to life for just a bit more than an hour and then it’s gone.

Or I could just say it’s all about people, people and people.

Look, we are social beings by nature, right? Most of us thrive among other people. As hard as it might be to admit that in individualistic culture that we live in. “Everyone is unique and special”. Yeah, well, they forgot to mention that you should also be useful and interesting.

I don’t know, maybe this is common sense to you, but I made this discovery only a couple of years ago. Being a part of something bigger than you is good. Of course, you have to make sure that you are not part of something stupid. You also have to be certain that this thing is not only pretty awesome, but something you believe in. When you got that sorted out - it’s a breeze.

It offers external motivation. I would argue that in this age of internet, work-at-home employees and self-help books we rely too much on our inner motivation to do shit. And frankly, we are terrible at motivating ourselves. An old fashioned external kick in the ass goes a long way.

To get better at probably anything you need to do something unpleasant. Yeah, that’s getting out of your comfort zone. It’s hard because it hurts. And why would you ever want to hurt yourself?

This is where other people come in. They just don’t give a fuck where your comfort zone ends, they have their own problems to worry about. They need you to shut up and do your job. And you better do it, because letting them down will hurt even more.

And so you do. And you become better at doing it. And it’s not even that bad.

Get someone to push you as hard as they can. Or at least become a bit of an asshole to yourself.

Or don’t, I’m not a cop. I just know that it works for me.

#4 Week in review (12.09 - 12.15)

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 02:04:00 +0200

Switching from to-do notebook to Google Calendar was probably the best decision I made this year.
Speaking of Google: last week Google Navigation app tried to kill me suggesting I should just drive against trafic, because why not. Well, fuck you too, google.

Speaking of my android:
Just my luck.
So far, december feels like one really long all-nighter.
Bought a book titled Art of War, wanted to read it for a while now. You should check it out, it’s good.
Finally finished 1st season of House of Cards. Loved it, can’t wait for the new episodes. If you thought House M.D. was rather cynical TV series… Let’s just say that there are moments when Kevin Spacey’s character gives me chills that could compare to Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Finding “not-some-lame-useless-shit” gifts is pain in the ass, but it feels good once you finally figure them out.
Things usually have a tendency to work out.
Sounds of the week: В. Высоцкий - Охота на волков

#3 Week in review (12.02 - 12.08)

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:58:00 +0200

My biggest fear is that the day will come when coffee stops working.
Walking dead mid season finale was awesome. Almost makes up for having to talk myself into watching the series this season.
Die hard is the best Christmas movie ever.

Domino theatre’s latest play is crap and should not exist. I was hoping it would at least be a disposable guilty pleasure, but no - just a really poorly directed and performed play.
Sugar makes me slow, lazy, sleepy and hate myself.
Neckties are cool, I should wear them more often.
I should read more books.
A couple of months ago I almost invested some money into bitcoins, but got bored midway and forgot all about it. At the time the price of one BTC was ~ $220. Last week it rose up to $1000. Oh well.

Article of the week: Don’t start a company, kid.
Sounds of the week: StewRat - Disagreements

#2 Why university is a lot like your retarded cousin

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 01:43:00 +0200

I’m in my 3rd year at university and yet I still have mixed feelings about it. I’m not considering quitting because I like the way words “software engineer” look next to my name and the field itself is incredibly interesting. At the same time it had become difficult for me to come up with real reasons to stay.

As I see it, university is a lot like your retarded cousin. You don’t really wanna spend time with him, but your family is nudging you to and you feel like you should at least try it. So yeah okay, supposedly you could pass some time with him. Hey, maybe it’ll be fun, eh?

No, it won’t. It’s not like you hate the guy, you just find everything he has to say to be quite boring and mostly random shit.

Yet occasionally he has these enlightened days when he’s suddenly awesome and you enjoy your time together, conversations feel meaningful and you seem to understand each other on some level. It’s still hard to be with him, but at least now it feels like an adventure.

You secretly hope that he’s not just a retard, but some kind of a cool autistic genius like Rain Man or Forrest Gump. Maybe he will teach you to count cards or some other awesome stuff.

Come on, university, be cool for once!

But as days go by, you get a sneaky suspicion that this is not going to happen. He’s just a retard again.

Oh, and almost everyone you know seem to have a cooler retarded cousin. At least your friend’s cousin is fun at parties. And this other mate’s cousin somehow hangs out with all the good lookin’ girls. Not your cousin.

And so you continue this strange relationship. Not sure if this is beneficial to any of you, but secretly hoping it all will make sense someday. Maybe at least it is slowly making you a better human being or something.

P.S. do NOT confuse university with education. Education is awesome and you need it. University is only one way of getting it.

P.P.S. I apologize to all the universities and retarded people whom I may have offended.

#1 post

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 02:57:00 +0200

Hi!

Who are you?

If you got here somehow, chances are you already know me. If not, here’s long story short: lithuanian guy, interested in many things, including but not limited to programming, movies, music, economics, politics, psychology, self-improvement, weight-lifting, travel, yada yada yada.

You’re lithuanian, why blog in english?

Want practice english betterer. Friend english student help. Much thanks.

What are you going to write about?

I shall share my thoughts on issues that matter to me and people alike. If I feel credible enough to give advice on the given issue, I might share solutions that worked for me or at least sounds good on paper. And then there’s all the cool stuff on the internet waiting to be shared.

Why?

Mostly because I enjoy writing and want to get better at it. I appreciate your time and I hope you’ll find something useful or at least entertaining here.

How often?

I honestly do not know. My writing process is slow and ineffective and I also have other shit to do. I think one post per week is a realistic goal. We’ll see.

Why tumblr?

Always wanted to know what it’s like to be hip and cool. Still waiting for it to kick in.

What’s next?

Well, you might consider following me on tumblr, subscribing by email or rss - you’ll find links at the top of the page.

That would be all from me. Have a good day!