Lord Andrei's Blog

Been working on this one most of the day. This is the first of several. Also.. if you post this meme or have posted it… please comment with a link to your post so I can jump on yours.

and now…

Comment on this post and say Pardon me, sir. Do you have any Grey Poupon or something like that. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

Here are the first set(s) that I was asked about:

From princekermit:

קבּלה – I use the Hebrew spelling because this word is most usually spelled wrong as Kaballah. No really, to see what I mean, check out this post.

Anyway, I loved codes as a kid. I’ve actually invented one or two cyphers that I think ‘intelligence organizations’ might be interested in. That being said… Kaballah is my cypher into mysticism. It blends esoterica with coded treasure finding. Quite fun.

cocoa development – I have been a professional (meanin’ gettin’ paid fer it) software engineer for about 15 years. But the thing is that I have maybe four formal college classes in the field. Everything else was learned outside college. I was a Theatre and Radio/TV production major. One of the major things that is ‘expected’ of an SE is good knowledge of “basic libraries”. Effecitively, knowing not just how to use the card catalogue, but where the common reference books are, and about 25-50% of the contents of those reference books. When I joined the industry… I was a bit behind. Ask my coworkers about my C++ knowledge. They’ll agree. Cocoa… was a new library that appeared while I was in the industry. (Those of you who are NeXTies can just hush up now)… So.. I got the same jump as others. I like the language of Objective -C and I love the Cocoa Libraries. (Very intuitive)… So I have a high interest in Cocoa Development.

esoteric trivia – When I was a kid, my dad had a Trivia encyclopaedia. And let me tell you this was obscure stuff. It was alphabetical and included alpha-numerics. It was like reading wikipedia in places. Entries like: 1313 – The Mockingbird Lane street address of the Munsters. Since then, I have grown to be a fount of (perceived to be) useless information. I love it. Sometimes people actually get an “Oh? Really?!?!” moment out of it and take it with them. To me… that makes it worth it.

ethical hedonism – Hedonism is the absolute pursuit of pleasure. Or more essentially that good and bad can be equated with pleasure and pain. Now… I’ve never been a fan of such vague terms as “Good”, “Evil”, “Pain”, etc. Personally, I view the process of ethical hedonism, as using the feelings of pleasure to drive an understanding of True Will. Rather than simply add ‘and vice versa’ I want to describe that the process works backwards as well. As I learn more about myself as a person, it steers what does and doesn’t feel good. And if you really want to know what drove this description… ask shimmeringjemmy about the first time she kissed me.

These last three are tricky. I read them and thought, “Are they in my interest list?” Nope.. They are in my dislike list. But you listed them.

my self image – I honestly don’t dislike who I am. But I have a very difficult time being fair to myself about my image. I am hypercritical and often convinced I’m not as good, pretty, thin, etc as I really should be.

scientology – This one is simple. Short and sweet. The first contact potential members have with this organization is thinly veiled brainwashing. After you join the brain washing becomes more severe. And I can not respect or like or support any organization that attracts its members through coersion.

sun saturn conjunction – This is just something i have to deal with. What this means is that in my birthchart, the planet Saturn was in the sky in a similar place to the sun. From an astrological point of view it represents limits placed on self. Don’t like it.