Netbeans on Windows

I am more than a little bit irritable since I have started my all liquid diet. We are two weeks out from surgery as of today. The major aggravation is MiKTeX, let me do a stack trace to the beginning, after extolling the virtues of Netbeans, I decided to run it on my windows machine.  This was a mistake as I am using Avast anti-virus software and it sees compilers and IDEs not made by Microsoft as malware. In order to install Netbeans I had to disable Avast. So the procedure for that is:

1. Download Netbeans for windows 
2. Disable Avast
3. Install Netbeans for windows. 

Next I installed MinGW, the minimalist gnu software distribution for windows. (Here is a link to the MinGW installer.) After all of this Avast decided that any attempt to scan the MinGW exes by Netbeans was an attack. So after adding the following file system exceptions:

Then adding the following exceptions to the "Deep Screen" feature:

I was finally able to compile C++ programs. Before I got this far I needed to do something even more annoying. It turns out that MiKTeX comes with its own version of libstdc++, and thus causes your programs to bail, so you have to statically link to libstdc++.a in the MinGW lib directory in order for the damn thing to work. So yeah fun times all around for my first day without food since I was a toddler. It should be noted that on Linux this ish just works. 

Purpose

I spent some time with an old friend this evening, I had lost track of what was important in these past few months in my slavish devotion to the path I have chosen academically. Its funny, I know who my groomsmen would be if I were to be wed, who my best man is. This blog is about my hopes, my activities, I want to share them with those people who care about me.

My life is somehow gotten harder over the past few months since I made the choice to alter my life drastically. Days blend together, I cannot keep track of which doctor I have seen and why, its all a wall of memories of lab coats offices and paperwork, the same paperwork over and over and over. The same exams, weight and height, blood pressure, then the questions about medications. My normal is now sitting inside the health care bureaucracy begging to be seen maybe even heard. I could not spend as much time as I wanted to with my friend, because I need to be at yet another teal office at 8:00am tomorrow.

The day to day is bleak, inhospitable but I do it with the knowledge that there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Its a strange thing to choose to remake yourself. You begin to reflect on those things you would like to change, what you want to do with yourself, with your free time. I want to expand my existence.  I want to earn a bunch of money, to buy things, not for the sake of having them, but for the sake of pursuits I enjoy. My life should not be about the existential crisis of my professional choices, I should be able to enjoy it.

This surgery is a tool to reach a healthy equilibrium, so I do not spend any more money on prescriptions or unhealthy food. So I can save, be self sufficient, I can prove to myself that I can set a goal, attain it and drink the rich nectar of its reward. Evenings under the sky with a few friends, a telescope whirring from one object on the dark canvas of the sky to another.

My dear reader I hope that you take away from this, not the despair of my daily struggles but a reflection about what it is you truly want. What can you do to nurture your soul when not at work?