Experiential Report: Transit Pluto Conjunct Natal Neptune

Prelude: To all astrologers who claim that the above mentioned transit is “insignificant” and that its impacts are rather “subtle” and “impalpable”… I’d like to give A Big Fat Double Cheesy Mac Middlefinger.

I’ve experienced the last progression of this transit during the past summer (I’m not fully but almost done with the last of 3 degrees orbis) and it’s been nothing less than a ride on an emotional rollercoaster, without seatbelts. What officially happened back then is documented in the article “Knockdown”.
Long story short, my sister rebuilt a part of the house she inherited and I was financially and emotionally very involved. (She had her first return of Saturn at that point in time, in the 8th house – that connection is obvious, I think).

But that was only one of three progressions, and each of them hit me.

HIT ME.

Not like a slap in the face. Rather like noticing that I’d been free falling… in the very moment when I hit rock bottom. But hey, that’s what Neptune is known for. It veils the most obvious things.

Note: NEVER EVER make life decisions when your natal Neptune is affected by a transit. You’ll feel great while doing it – but you’ll regret it as soon as the veil falls.

Neptune is in my 5th house, by the way. It is the house of pleasure and life force, of childhood and children, close friends and love affairs. Basically all of these topics have been affected by the transit.

My daughter started with kindergarten. I lost my best male friend by pairing him off with a psychopath (FELT great – WAS wrong, as mentioned before). My best female friend is still with me (Thank God!!) but she also found someone, and she’s really busy trying to have babies now.

I will withstand the temptation to go into deeper detail about my own romantic life.
Just let me put down one painful truth I learned during the transit – which now doesn’t feel painful any longer, because Neptune, after all, is a healer too.

***

Romance is like a beautiful day in autumn.
You are foolish if you demand it to persist, because indeed, it is a gift.
It is neither granted to you nor to anyone at all.

The only safe place in the world is in your heart, in your soul,
and when everything falls apart, you will notice that.

Love is not about reaching a “safe haven”.
Not about sharing a bed with someone. Not even about sharing a life with someone.
It’s not about harmony. Damn well, it’s not about harmony.

I’ve seen my parents secretly admitting that they still love one another after 20 years of divorce.
Beyond all the fights an injuries, beyond the separation and the obvious failure… this overwhelming force is making it all look so miniscule.

There is no escape.
There will always be this one love so much greater than you.

It will mock at the life plans you make with your tiny little intellect.
Mock at your attempts of sugarcoating something that for sure isn’t love.
Mock at YOU if you put anything above it.

So forget about safety, forget about promises, forget about calculation.
Love finds you, inevitably.

***

Having understood this, and fully indulging in that understanding, I need to ass-kick myself to do more coding again right now.

“Nebuchadnezzar” or “How to avoid the UNSAFE keyword using an unmanaged C++ DLL from C#”

This post is a sequel of “Escaping the matrix”. Check it out before you read on.

* * *

Now we’re there. FREE.
But the UNSAFE Keyword kinda sucks, does it?

Well, normally I’d give you the advice to: “Take a risk, dud.”

But in this case there’s indeed someone out there to save our butt… in a morbidly beautiful ship called Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar (Source: DeviantArt, Cold-Levian)

Marshalling, that ship is.
(Don’t you ADORE how I’m using these analogies?)

It’s morbid character comes from the fact that it’s only quick in very basic cases, as in the example given. (Swiss Ephemeris only uses very basic data types in its interface… which is wonderful.)

To use an unmanaged C++ DLL from C# without switching to the unsafe mode, do the following:

1. Remove all the UNSAFE keywords from the code. (You guessed that, didn’t you?)

2. Marshal every string as a StringBuilder.

[DllImport(@"C:\somepath\swedll32.dll")]
static extern void 
swe_set_ephe_path([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] StringBuilder path);

public void SetEphemerisPath()
{
  StringBuilder ephemerisTablesPath = 
    new StringBuilder(@"C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\sweph\ephe");

  swe_set_ephe_path(ephemerisTablesPath);
}

3. Replace pointers with references using the ref-Keyword.

[DllImport(@"C:\somepath\swedll32.dll", 
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
static extern int swe_calc_ut([...], ref double xx, [...]);

4. Make readable function names.

public int CalculatePlanetOrOtherBody([...], double xx, [...]){
  swe_calc_ut([...], ref xx, [...]);
}

And now go have some fun

Protected: Building site photos (deprived from the public due to really weird traffic increase – just mail me for the pwd)

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Knockdown

My summer and autumn of 2011 were totally taken in by my sister’s project of tearing down and reconstructing a huge part of our parental house.

Finally getting it done was a huge relief. Parts of the house were so decayed that most people would not believe me that I spent the first ten years of my life actually residing in that house.

A few days before the final demolition, I took some pictures. There were tears in my eyes.

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These were really moving moments to me. This was NOT at all about something as banal as architecture.
It was about making peace and saying goodbye to my childhood. For good.

Book review: “Tipps gegen Liebeskummer” (Advices for the lovelorn) by Armin Opherden

I recently bumped into this on Google books and I was so happy I thought I simply MUST share this.

The book I’m going to present is a collection of texts which reflect the the author’s outlook on life and love experiences, which are – IMHO – truly outstanding and farsighted. The texts used to be online a few years ago on his personal homepage. I was a regular visitor, as I gained a lot of comfort from them back then in my heart-achy teen years. (Armin, if you ever read this: Thank you so much.) However, one day, the text collection was taken offline due to copyright infringement. That was a few years ago.

Now that I bumped into this book on Google, I am really happy and excited to find the beloved text collection again, which had accompanied me during some of my darkest days.
Armin Opherden had decided to publish his texts in book form, after all.

The book is in German, unfortunately. It should be available in every language, though, for everyone in the world.

I’d like to cite one text named “Plant an apple sapling” that I find very touching at the moment.

[...]
How often must I wonder about people who are no older than 15, 20, or 30 years and believe that their lives are virtually over, or “botched”!
Today’s sicko beauty, youth and efficiency madness is significantly responsible for this.

[...]
I can only recommend everyone not to take part in the madness! Even if you’ve been right in the thick of it, up until now, chased, hectic, superficial, even if you’ve made many mistakes and your relationships ended in misery: You have all the time in the world to make a new beginning! Take the inward turn, find yourself, plan your future in the peace of your mind, be what you like to be and think in long terms! You’ve still got all your life in front of you.

[...]

See? The guy is amazing. These are the faith lines of my current chapter in life, and I strongly encourage you to make them yours, too.

Intermezzo

Helga.

HELGA.

HELL-GA.

Genetic Algorithm from HELL.

Just to make one thing clear: I want to be the creator of that algorithm. Whatever it may do!!!

Healing hands

This time I cannot promise that my post makes any sense, or at least deeper sense (as usual). I simply promised to publish pictures of my hands on my blog, which my colleague Johannes Hieslmair made, who is currently writing his Master’s thesis in the context of Machine Vision.

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Nothing more to say, actually?

As I am sitting here, I am wondering about quite a few stories that the hand pictures might be able to tell.

One of them is told by the gesture of crossing middle and ring fingers. It is a gesture that I started making a lot, unconsciously, ever since I started belly dancing. You may never take these two fingers apart, because they are supposed to hold your veil (even if you dance without it). It’s my story of rediscovering and learning to love the softer, more feminine part of me again, after having gone through childhood full of divorces and violence against women, after having gone through a male dominated education, several male dominated jobs, and the assimilation that goes with it. But that story is still being written, so I’ll let go for now.

One other story that comes to mind is that of healing hands… well, of feeling hands at least. I am having sort of a coming-out now as I am telling you that I’m gifted (or maybe rather cursed) with the ability to feel human auras with my hands. You may feel tempted to brand me as an esoteric nutcase after that statement, but it’s true. I feel it all the time, and it’s there. And because it’s there, I cannot ignore it. And because I cannot ignore it, I am restless all the time. Being a methodically thinking researcher and having supernatural sensations is quite a bit of a contradiction, and I’m aware of that. But it’s also cool. Being aware that science is never finished, realizing how intangible truth really is, gives you a view on life that is amazing. You cannot go wrong. Life is a journey, and whatever you do, it is full of promise.

Key-Words

-- --------------------------------------------------------------
-- Author: Helga H.    
-- Date: 05/01/2011
-- File: coalesce.sql
-- --------------------------------------------------------------
-- you know you're seriously damaged when you're trying work and 
-- no matter what you do, you can't stay focussed.
--
-- CO-A-LES-CE.
--
-- the encounter with a single little sql keyword totally puzzles 
-- you and makes your thoughts drift away,
-- wondering about the meaning of love, 
-- of human relationships, 
-- of transcendence.
--
-- wondering, if loneliness is a natural feeling or just plain 
-- pathological. 
--
-- you close your eyes.
--
-- yin and yang. day and night. body and soul. mind and matter.
--
-- why would you miss that non-existant significant other 
-- so painfully if you were to be without it?
--
-- where does the yearning come from?
--
-- your eyes open without you actually wanting it.
-- there is your desktop. and your screen. 
-- and that stupid little cursor thingy blinking at you.
--
-- so you hack on.
-- --------------------------------------------------------------

SELECT * FROM sakura WHERE (shadow LIKE COALESCE($S, '%'))
startdate <= year(now())+1

“Escaping the matrix” or “How to use the Win32 Swiss Ephemeris DLL from C#/.NET”

1:00 AM. Sleepless. Pondering. Up for dill pickles.

Repeatedly, I’m experiencing vivid symptoms of progressive intellectual pregnancy.
And it’s true. I’m bearing the idea of creating an astrological tool of my own, so I’d like to share the birth experience with you.
Well, at least the pains. ^^

Recently, I found a very extensive code library for computing planet positions. It’s called Swiss Ephemeris and it’s available right here.

The library is written in one of my favorite programming languages, namely C++.
Ohhh yes. Good old C++. No frills, just beauty. ROAR.

In spite of all the love for platform independent low-level languages and puristic coding style, I’d like to create a flashy front-end for my tool, so I’m gonna use C# on the .NET platform with loads and loads of pretty flashy *bling-bling* WPF functionality *bling-bling*.

Like the idea?
Yes? Come closer, then. All we need to do is escape “the matrix”. The cozy, safe environment of the .NET virtual machine, that is.

The Matrix (Source: DeviantArt, mrfu709851)

The first step outside of the matrix is to declare C# function wrappers which specify the entry points of the Win32 library:

        [DllImport("swedll32.dll")]
        static extern void swe_set_ephe_path(char* path);

The second step is to declare an unsafe class that contains all the methods which encapsulate all of the extern function calls:

    public unsafe class SwissEphemerisWrapper
    {
      public void SetEphemerisPath();
      ...
    }

The third step is to create a fixed scope if we need to pass parameters outside of the matrix:

        public void SetEphemerisPath()
        {
            fixed (char* path = ".\\sweph\\ephe")
            {
                swe_set_ephe_path(path);
            }
        }

Done. Took the red pill.

P.S.:
Read the Disclaimer, if you dare.

Embarking on a journey

I don’t know where I come from, I don’t know where I go.
I have started a journey and I simply cannot turn around and go back, act as though nothing had happened.

I cannot make the things undone that I did. I cannot make the things unseen that I saw. Whatever I felt, it has been graved into my heart.

Every journey starts with a single step. It doesn’t even need to be a step forward.
It can also be a step backwards or even better: A step inside.

I step inside to discover the beauty of me.
I take a step backwards to see the beauty of others.

There are so many white spots left on the map of my soul.
Quietly, I’m embarking on a journey to discover them… and to fill them out with their true colors.