I met this girl
She's walking through one of my dreams
She kissed my eyes
And everything that she said
Made so much sense to me
That I still feel like I'm half asleep

My dark angel
She gave me diamonds for eyes
She walked by
Now I'm hypnotised
By this dream
That just won't stop
And I feel
Like I've always been lost in this dream

The rumours of heaven
Only speed the truth on earth
My dark angel
Shine your light on my curse
You are the other that I have to find
Until I do
I guess I'll see you 'round my mind

So Colorado
Is a place I have to go
I heard a rumour
She loves the mountains and the snow
My dark angel
She gave me diamonds for eyes
My dark angel
I offer you my heart
My dark angel
I think I loved you from the start

Cause there is this face I know
That I've never seen
Sometimes I feel I'm living in
Someone else's dream
Still I'd like to thank you
For stopping to talk
And I wonder
Just into who's dream did who walk
Oh my dark angel
Shine your light on me
Shine your light
Shine your light
Shine your light on me

08/30/99

Eeek. End of the month. Things keep rockin' and a rolling along. And even though it was wet outside, and kinda dreary. I couldn't smell the rain anymore. I have a feeling it was all in my mind in the first place. (Those of you who don't understand feel free to email me about it, or else just nod and smile).

VPN still rocks. I suppose I should go back to it. Hmm... interesting, the boss figured I'd be finished the frontend GUI to our VPN stuff by 3 and it's 3. Wow, he's good.

08/29/99

Ugh. What a day. My (our) brilliant plan of going climbing was squashed by, you guessed it, rain. It's a good thing we canceled I think as the first sun I saw today was around 6, and this morning there was that ugly drizzle that while not really rain soaked everything and was miserable.

Rex's eye is closed again, and pussing a little. I don't know what happened, but apparently he sneaks out sometimes when roomiewife goes out to have a smoke and maybe he got in a fight or something. It was fine till a few days ago. I'm going to clean it up and give it a couple of days however till I start worrying too much. I mean, I know I shouldn't worry, but I still do, you know? It's the paranoid, see-the-possibility-for-the-worst-no-matter-how-remote in me. But I'm working on it. Honest.

This eve I headed out to a little pub with a buddy of mine to solve the world's problems, had a good time drinking a "fruit blaster" (do you know how hard it is to get a non-pop, non-alcoholic drink?) or two that was ok. We met up with the Smiling Man and Jay and sat and shot the shit for a while. A nice ending to an ok day. A long day anyway.

08/28/99

And the cards do fall...
Well, I got sleep last night, went to bed at midnight and got up at 9 or so... and I plan to do the same tonight. It's 10pm and I'm gonna frag for a few minutes and then hit the hay. Today was semi-productive. I still haven't done squat on the code I want/need to write but I vegged, got a letter in the mail, scoped out some stuff for something at sometime (and it was good... yay, it was good) and got some minor shopping done. Now at least my cereal in the morning won't be to dry.

Going climbing tomorrow with my good buddy Brad out to Harrison assuming the weather holds, and then to the parents for dinner and the out to see the Smiling Man (and possibly the Chief) jam (going out to hang with a buddy after the parents dinner thing). I hope tomorrow is a good and stress free day. I'd ramble about my advocation of the 3 day weekend but I don't have the ambition right now :)

08/26/99

A couple of rants today.

First of all.... Malda comment your bloody CODE! In playing around with the slash source for getting Iambe's comments threaded, I came along such uncommented gems as this:

my $sibs=$$comments[$$C{pid}]->{kids};
for(my $x=0; $x< @$sibs; $x++) {
  ($n,$p)=($$sibs[$x+1],$$sibs[$x-1]) if $$sibs[$x] == $cid;
}

The threading is a whole other story. I hope I can do it without being completely insanely sql and processer intensive. Far as I can figure right now, I do something like the following.

The table is set up with the data fields and a cid (comment id) and rid (reply id) field. rid is set to -1 by default. If you click on reply to a comment, it's rid is set to the cid of the comment you are replying to.

Simple huh? Well, my problem is in the rendering. Unless I can suck everything into memory and manipulate them in perl I'll end up doing something like this.

for each comment...

Select any comments with a rid of it's cid

For each of those comments

Select any comments with a rid of it's cid

...

When there are none left print out the comments

all

the way

Pretty ugly huh? Anyone got a better idea? I could probably make some sort of struct in perl and suck the data into that and then do the same thing, but with only one database access (select * from comments where pid=$pid;). Wish I had a faster box so I wouldn't have to worry about all this. Hmm... I really should email the guys from dell/compaq/alpha to see if they want to donate some hardware.

Rant #2:
While I love Alan Jackson as a singer, he has some really good songs, but he, and JRFM (my radio station) are driving me crazy by playing his fscking "Little Man" song all the time! Argh! Sorry, but I'm really beginning to hate it.

08/25/99

*yawn*
Well I actually got to bed at a semi-decent hour last night. I helped Tiggersol's GF's parents pack up his and K's stuff into a truck (why exactly do you need a tv, vcr and stereo tig, if you're not taking the bed? Oh well. Except for a splattering of rain it all went well. I came home after and found my key didn't work in the front door.

Damn.

Tried lock. Knocked. Tried lock again (something was stuck in it or something). Phone. No answer. Damn. Phone again. No answer. Roomie's jeep is downstairs so he must be out with friends. Damn. Play with lock some more. Finally roomie comes to the door looking very tired and "wtf is going on".

Phew...

Todays random tip of the day comes from an anonymous friend of mine:

Just a suggestion, but I hear that it isn't really a good idea to walk into
an outside corner of a wall in the dark. It may cause bleeding, pain, and
uncontrollable laughter in observers. Or so I hear.

Anyhoo, I've gotta do an install of some new hardware at one of our sites today, and pick up the LWE pictures. Oh, and do things like shower and change, and not do email and journal updates at 8am. Silly boy.

BTW, VPN is very very cool. I'll give more details later on.

08/23/99

The weirdest things happen sometimes. While running today I was passed by a car in which someone (a random East Indian Teenager whom I did not know) yelled at me as they passed what I could only identify as "yasreafasfasdfas asdn lkjfooowefszxdrf". Or maybe it was "yasreafasfasdfas asdn lkjfooowefszxdra", I'm not sure. At the time I figured it was either a curse or a blessing to white strangers who run at night. Anyway, I ignored this and kept on puffing away. When I got to the corner I found the car (and the one ahead, presumably a convoy of some sort) had stopped and the youth had gotten out and along with his friend were approaching me. As I pulled up to them I was asked if he had swore at me. I told him that I had no idea, I hadn't heard. Apparently he had yelled something like "nice running with you" to me, thinking I looked like his teacher or something. His friend I guess thought he had sworn at me and insisted he stop and appolagize.

Wierd.

I kept on running, after taking my leave of them.

The run by the way, was good. Shorter than it should have been but much more intense. Short bursts of hard running, followed by fast walking, followed by more hard running. I felt good when I got back. And now I have supper in the works (spaghetti) and while Ragu is nice and all, my mom still makes the best spaghetti sauce and meatballs known to man. And if you have a problem with that come on over and I'll show you (or beat you up and take your toys, whichever feels right at the time) :-)

Mental Note: Get more sauce from mom, I ran out.

Weird computer crashes today. As you know I finally got my work HD set up last night (Debian, lovely Debian, with dselect and no more of this rpm shit!) and things were working fine when I left this morning, having returned my system to its normal state. However when I got home I had a kernel oops, and a rebooted system sitting at the Debian "enter root password or hit ctrl-d to continue" prompt. Rebooted and fscked, all was fine. Get into X, turn my back. Freeze. Fsck. Upped the cpu voltage a bit and rebooted. Now things are working ok. I guess the heat from the day got to it or something. I'll take the core voltage down tomorrow night though if everything continues going well.

More Religious Stuff
In installing SETI@Home on my new box at work (did I mention how good it was to have that system finally going?) I got to thinking about ET and life on other planets and wondered how our ultra-religious salesperson viewed it. So I talked about SETI@Home and asked him if he believed in life on other planets, and he said no. "Why?" I asked, to which he replied that he didn't know. "Well you must have a reason to believe or not believe" I said. He said there was no proof for it. "But there is no proof of God either and you believe in him right?" He responded with the expected "well there is proof of God". I chose not to go into a discussion on that at this point :) I asked that since there was no evidence one way or the other, why did he not believe. He didn't know, but he said he could talk to someone who could explain.

Ok, it was a bit of a bait, I admit, but I wanted to see what the religious view of ET was and he pretty much answered that his upbringing and religious views didn't allow for things that weren't metioned in the bible (though when did the bible ever mention my Emerson CD player huh?) as things that were created. God created the universe and everything and nowhere does it say that he went off after and created another garden of eden.

But that's not the point. The point is when he didn't know why he believed or disbelieved something, and fell back on someone else. Now, this is a problem. I have always been taught and I have always believed that you should take something and think about it, analyze it and figure it out for yourself before you make some sort of decision on it. I know you can't always do this, and you have to accept that there really is a Pluto out there somewhere, without having gone to see it yourself, but as humans we must always quest for some deeper truth, some other realization to the questions that are presented to us than what is handed down from our parents and teachers and fables and folklore and religious writings. This is not to say that you shouldn't listen to these things, hell, take them and absorb all you can from them! But don't take something without thinking about it and coming to a decision by yourself. This is a lot of times hard to do. If your parents for whatever reason completely disbelieve in say, life on other planets, and will give you no other explanation than "the bible tells us so" or "there just isn't" or "uncle bob says so and he knows about these things" it's very, very hard to stand in front of them and say that you think maybe they are wrong, or that you'd like to pursue this (in there minds) hopeless search for non-existant knowledge.

But this is something we must do or we do run the risk of turning into a race of machines. The race of mindless workers knowing nothing other than what they are told and with no hopes or dreams for anything beyond what exists around them. This is something that scares me about a few things (Microsoft being one of them, but this is not the purpose of this rant), and I hope that you, the gentle readers of this humble page, will take to heart and pass on as best you can to those around you.

ObRandomBitch:
And why the hell would the boss tell me to install another HD on a box with a bios from 1994 that doesn't support more than 2 hard drives! Awk! Remind me to take my O2 mug to work tomorrow to make him jelous

08/21/99

Call it a last blast before a new life. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. And all that. Last night I went over to Cyranth's place for a First Person Shooter Party. China Whites (whatever they are) and Mike's Hard Lemonade were the drinks of the evening. When I woke up in the morning and recovered (I recall having at least 2 very deep spiritual conversations with at least two separate people, covering such issues as relationships, love, ego, heart, self love and so on) we headed out to Vancouver for a Aliens marathon. Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection. Ripley kicked butt in all. But now I think it's time to sleep. I had a nice and relaxing day of doing nothing but there is a lot of work to be done tomorrow (laundry and cleaning and re-installing Linux on my work hard drive (assuming it's not totally screwed) and so on).

08/19/99

Later...
I was going to write about my trip onsite (twice) today, but right now sleep is more important. Tomorrow...

Earlier...
Blue Rodeo. 5 Days in July. Track 6.

08/18/99

Be still my numbed brain.

08/17/99

2:44am
Geek self doubt comes when you have to do something you know you need to do but are petrified of the consequences. Scared that you're not good enough to come out the winner on the other end. Scared shitless that when you rip your heart out and put it on the table for someone to look at they are going to scoff or mock and walk away. Scared that you might have made a mistake and now you are in the middle of something you have no idea how to deal with and no idea what the results will be at the end of the day. No clue as to what life will bring now that your guts are exposed. Wondering if tomorrow will be the same as yesturday, and what of the day after tomorrow. And after that. What of those around you? Geeks are some of the gentlest people I think and we don't want to hurt anyone. Sometimes we do. Sometimes it's from not knowing how to deal with things. We don't want to do it, we don't want to have it on our minds and consciences but we also know what is right. Back in high school we found that computers didn't judge or question or have feelings that could be hurt (cause god knows I've wanted to hurt my computers feelings enough times) or things that need to be done. Binary. 1 or 0. Right or Wrong. Black or White. So much easier to deal with than people, with their feelings and emotions and wants and needs and things that made less sense than 1 or 0. So we dealt with the computers, wriggled our ways into their innards, found how they worked, found how to make them do what we needed them to do, found that when they did something wrong it was our fault, our code. So we went back and tried again. And again. Till the code ran properly. And maybe in this time when we were figuring out how to make the computers work properly we missed out on how to deal with people. Missed some of the rights and wrongs and things to day and not say and things to get intense about or not. So now we're all grown up, still able to make that code run but also missing some of the training we need. Some of us are worse than others. Some of us will hurt, and get hurt, and cry and weep and sob and then stand back up and go back at it. Because despite the doubt and despite the lack of training we are good people. You and you and you, all of you. I know you all. Geek self doubt runs from the school hallways to the cafeteria. The office buildling to the small basement office. Not online. Online there's no face to see contort, no voice to hear choke up. Online we are safe. Safe from the pain and self doubt behind a wall of electrons. Knowing that no matter what goes on in the universe of the Internet we are still safe behind the moniter, and that the world outside isn't real, and can't hurt us. Knowing we can code or chat all night and turn it all off at anytime at the touch of a button. Forgetting that sometimes there are real people that are affected by our so called Geek Self Doubt. Forgetting that even though we're hidden away other people can and do get hurt by the choices we make. And not always having the tools to fix what we've broken. Self doubt is when you don't think you're good enough. The code says you are. The profiler says you are, but you're not ready to go out into the Real World and ask, because you're petrified about the answer. And some day you do. And somtimes the answer is good, and sometimes the answer is bad. And no matter what that answer is. Not matter what, we have to keep fighting. Fighting for love or power or position or stature. Fighting because no matter how many times we've been kicked in the proverbial nuts and fallen to the ground, and no matter how much duct tape you've wrapped around your heart, you still have to go on living, because we are good people. Because the world needs us to go on no matter what. Sometimes we fuck up completely and we have to try to fix things and sometimes we can and sometimes we can't. Sometimes we would rather take the blames of the world on our own shoulders than hurt other people. Sometimes it's too late for that and all we can do. Despite our doubts of how things will go in the universe, and who will hate us and who will love us. All we can do is try our best to survive.

08/16/99

Today I will speak on Geek Self Doubt(tm) and Geek Insecurity(tm). However, not right now, as I'm at work. When I get back tonight though. Strangely enough, this has nothing to do with me this time, honest, it's brought on by others, no, not even the ones who you think it's about, but others (yes, really).

08/15/99

Wow. Home sweet home. More of a wrap up available here.

After the expo I headed to a place near LA to visit a friend of mine. Except for the (literal) hours of walking around in search of things like colleges, backpacks, internet terminals and combs, I had a great time. A $30 cab ride and 3 hours of waiting later (the next day that is) and I was on a plane bound for Seattle. A quick changeover (read: ran like a madman to get on my connecting flight) and I was on a Dash-8 to Bellingham. A short flight later (beside a guy who in lieu of using his tray simply left his cup between his teeth when he had finished his drink).

Arriving at the bellingham airport I found that baggage needs approximatly 40 minutes to get from one flight to another. Hence, my bags weren't there. The people were more than happy to ship my backpack to me as soon as it go there, send it up by taxi and whatnot, but since my car keys were in the bag that wasn't here, that wouldn't be needed. I was perfectly happy to camp out on their floor though. Instead I sat and read Rainbow 6 (by Tom Clancy) as I had finished Brave New World (excellent book by the way, I must put a review up sometime... I'm also thinking of turning the UFie Movie Review Site into a review site in general, books, software, movies, videos.... ). I thought I'd have to wait till 9:30 when the next flight came in (and since we landed around 7 this would have sucked), but luckily it was on another flight and was put in my hands at around 8:30.

Except for a drive up the I-5 when I should have not, and an interrogation at the boarder (had to explain how I went down with 3 people, stayed longer than them and then came back alone), the ride back was uneventful.

When I finally got home I found that Arctermom and Arcterdad had stopped by (to check to see if roomie* were actually feeding the cats) and had done some cleaning and laundry for me (something I've not had done since I moved out 3 years ago). Thanks guys, it was really great to come home to clean. Strange, but great at the same time.

Now I think it's almost time to try out my new Happy Hacker keyboard.

08/14/99

Back. Alive. More updates soon.

08/09/99

00:56am
Well I finally got everything all ready for the trip tomorrow (today).... got back around midnight and have spent the last hour or so frantically packing, writing notes for roomie*, getting money, passport, clothing, toothbrush, cell phone recharger, etc all ready. Wonder what I forgot?

Said goodbye to one of my best friends for the last 4 years or so. Darren is heading with his GF to Edmonton to start a new job as she goes to school at U of A. I met him through an ex-girlfriend of mine and he and Brian and I hung out for a long long time. Now Brian is in Calgary, Darren is heading to Edmonton and I'm still here. Hell, for all I know in 6 months I'll be in New Mexico or something. Funny how life is though... I am sure though that we will remain close through the net and all. It's sad to see him go though. I let him win at pool when we played tonight though :)

Anyway, dude, I won't see you for a couple months (till I get a long weekend to come up and visit) so good luck and all that, my best wishes go with you in your new life.

Now to do some updating and stuff. I'll be outta here till saturday (the 14th) evening, but I'll try to update via the UFies LWE page.

"I'm leaving... on a jet plane....
(in about 5 hours I have to get up, eek! I want to finish off my vi/emacs article first though!).

08/06/99

1:40am

On the other side of the glass from you
I screamed
But you didn't notice
and just walked away

Ok people, it's very very easy. You go into the underground parking, and stop in from of the keypad. You put in your secret 4 digit code and press the on/off button. This makes the display go from xxsecs to disabled (or something like that). Then you park your car and walk upstairs. This means you don't set the alarm off at almost 2 in the morning and get me up from my already muggy drowse.

I admit I have no idea if the system resets itself or if you have to re-enable it when you get out of the underground, but quite frankly I don't care.

Lots of good news today. Travellers have landed, work deals are being done, and people got days off. A good day all around. Had sushi with Celt and a couple of people from her work. Yummy.....

Now for that 6 hours of sleep I've been craving....

08/04/99

Well, the floods of mail regarding my religous war have stopped... well, ok, they never really started. I did however get a comment from one of my best friends (and one of those weird Christian people (but the good kind)).

Oh yeah, as for your first girlfriend's comment about argueing
with us religious nuts, see sig.  8-)

--
Brad
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason
   themselves into" -- Rick Adams, in alt.folklore.urban

08/03/99

Result of my run today:
Bugs injested: 1

But now, a minor rant:

I saw a bumper sticker on the way back from my run I had to comment on. It said:

Now, both have a huge number of holes. ie: no one knows what happened before either God existed or the big bang sprang into being. However, from what I have seen at least the evolutionist types are willing to admit they don't know and don't hide their lack of knowledge (personally I'm not ashamed to say I have no clue what happened before the universe existed) by sweeping everying under a "God just is" or "God created it/made it happen" blanket.

Now I have to ask, seeing as I've said so much already, do we have to know? Do we need to? I say yes and no. Human nature is to know everything we can, to explore personal, spiritual, and geographical boarders. Does knowing where we and in fact all of existance came from matter? Yes. Should we know for sure. Hmm... maybe not.

Another piece of advice I will pass on now too. Never argue with a religous person or a philospher, as you will never ever win. That is something my first girlfriend told me and it rings true still. I know now why though. When you have built your existance, your life and your afterlife on certain beliefs, having someone say something like "but how did God come to existance" is not going to make you say "hmmm... well, I guess you are right and I am wrong".

Rant over. I saw the bumper sticker and had to comment. So there :P~

08/02/99

3:40am
I suppose the reason I'm still up is that I injested about 16 glasses of coke at Red Robin tonight eh?

2:50am
On orders from above (well, below geographically) I'm updating my journal. Appolagies for the delay, this weekend had been mega-busy. The beach trip on saturday (wow, going out into the big blue room) and the resulting vegging on sunday due to my back's burn (Note: tanning oil does not protect you from the sun) were pretty cool. Monday was a meet in the eve with celt and illiad and iambe and roundtop and minupla and javajawa and sillz. And a very confused waiter when Iambe told him "I like to be flogged" in response to "what would you like to order". Long story, probably best not to ask anyway :) I'm sure it'll be appearing on her column sometime soon.

The vi(m) vs (X)Emacs article is coming along slowly. I was going to do more work on it the afternoon (well, my afternoon was 5-7 or so as I got up at 2 :) but I vegged a bit and played some Q3 (which I'd be doing now if I didn't have people downloading stuff from my ftp server as I'm downloading stuff from elsewhere. Ie: 0 bandwidth.

It'll get done though. Note that this is being written with XEmacs :)

Too all those who will be not only packing up but actually moving across the country in like ... a day, more good luck and best wishes to them.

Now, it's like, 3am and while I got a lot of sleep this weekend, I have to get up in 4.5 hours to go to work. Cheers all.