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10/31/2000    -{ Mondays can happen on any day of the week }-

10:13pm
<rant>
Got out of the gym with Cat5 this evening and as I'm exiting the doors a fucking bottle rocket rips past my head. Some little dickhead (or 2) decided that shooting bottle rockets around a corner at the door would be a Good Idea. I was (rightfully) pissed and yelled and ran, and the little fuckheads standing around moved their eyes down and avoided eye contact with this no-fun grownup who yelling at them. Man, adults. No fun at all.

Anyway, Cat5 calls 911 and reports the 100 or so kids milling around in the parking lot and soccer field shotting off firecrackers and fireworks. I felt better. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing about fireworks or firecrackers, hell, I still have a bag of mighty-mites and piccilo pete's from high school sitting in my closet, it's when you have one fly past your head and miss you by a few feet that I don't like.
</rant>

Oh, and on an aside, my leaking-like-a-bullet-riddled-coupe-de-ville program that kicked my in the nuts today by letting me fix all it's show-stopper bugs, but deciding that it's fun to grow from 800 bytes to 18Mb+, then crash.... well, I run it tonight after Dark Angel and it decides to work perfectly! Running for about 15 min and only taking up 928 bytes! WTF? I'm almost afraid to stop/restart it in case it's just my fried brain playing tricks on me.

<pause>

Nope. Starts at 844, login makes it go to 860, info transfer to 924. Wiiieeerdd........ I'm not complaining though :)

Morning
Mondays suck. Mondays suck even more if you forget to reset one of your alarms and are jolted out of bed at 6am (instead of 7am) by that EEEEH! EEEEH! EEEEH EEEEH! noise that only the most well designed (for getting you to them to turn them off that is) alarm clocks produce. Luckily I was able to find said alarm, reset the time, reset the alarm time (which was reset in my sleepy groping of it's minute little dials and levers) and get back to sleep for that precious hour.

Course, now I get up in the sun (or rather, rain) but at 5:30 it's pitch black. Gotta love it.

Mom, you'll be happy to know I'm eating more fruits and vegetables these days. <pause to munch on canned pears>

Got fed up with some programming stuff yesturday and threw some out, and went a totally different direction. I'm pretty sure that this way it'll be done well, this morning, instead of after endless backtracing and debugging (though gdb does rock). Then I can have time to do far more intesting things. I have a couple of projects outside work that I'd like to do some work on too. One is an improved search engine type dealie (details to follow) another a little nslookup gtk/gnome app. Course, there is always the conversion of ufies.org to a slash code site, the rewritting of personals.ufies.org and a host of other things that I'm sure are pressing. That and I have a huge number of books waiting for me, including Diamond Age, the Linux Kernel Book, C Elements of Style, Microserfs (again), Cryptonomicron, GTK/Gnome Application Delevopment, and the Blender manual (hmm.... if I got a blender I could make margaritas too).

Took Friday off, that was nice. No one around, nothing to do. I think I was half dressed by 3pm, and able to deal with people around 5 or 6. Very relaxing, I shall have to do it again RSN. My big project last weekend was organizing my bookmarks, which I did admirably. I lost one section somewhere (linux->gaming) and have to add an Arts->movies (for things like mrcranky.com), but other than that I'm quite happy. I still have to deal with a couple of major design issues, such as these days everything is going in the personal toolbar, which sort of defeats the purpose. Only things that are commonly accessed (and IMHO more than once a day) should go there. The rest should be in a say, Common folder so that no sites on the morning surfing run are left out.

10/26/2000    -{ Please Come to Boston }-

I think I've come to the conclusion that there are some things that some people are good at and some things that people just aren't good at. That and that there are at least two types of people in the world. One is the math/number/coder type people who can admire code and computers for their beauty and think to themselves how awsome it is that you can poke around and find the data at a memory address if you need to. The other group is the artsy group, who love abstraction, acting, feeling and that sort of thing. Things that cannot be objectified or codeified (guess which group I fall into).

Anyway, I was helping an old friend of mine (theatre major) with some programming homework. Sure, I've been coding for more than a year or two at this point, and I know I'm not that great a teacher, but I could see the blank look when I'd say something like "so what does this line do?" "prints out the number" "what number?" "the number in numb [the variable name we were using]" "which is?" "whatever's in there."

ARRRGH!

Don't get me wrong, I love helping people, but somethings I just "get" and somethings you just don't "get" :)

Long day. Bless Electric Fence for finding all my bugs. Curse Electic Fence for picking up bugs where I have no idea what the problem is.

10/22/2000    -{ And if we're lost... }-

Well I figure if tig is going to keep updating his journal, so shall I. Course, there's not much activity out here. I spent a few nights last week in the office late late late (2am fun!), but in the end I think it was worth it. It's nice to have that rush of it's late but I'm doing cool shit!. Of course, there's also the advantage of me working better at night (stop your snickering). Less people, dark outside, no interupptions, just me and the ability to go into deep hack mode while working on code. The code by the way, is done. I'm not totally proud of it and I'll probably go back sometime and make it more extensable and easier to read. Right now if we add more stuff in it'll be a PITA to update. Modularize, modularize is what I've learned :)

Went out to see Legend of Drunken Master today with Tig and Keth and Pommie and Firefly. Awsome movie, go see it. I will be seeing it again for sure.

The folks got back from Mexico (again) a few days ago and donated an awsome colourful blanket to the cause of my ailing (borrowed) couch. Hopefully it will prevent my ass from destroying more of the cusion :)

Argh. Dishes. Bah Bah Bah. Supper is good but dishes suck. Maybe they will have dissapeared by tomorrow night. Or walked out by themselves, you never know. I'd hate to loose my good saucepan though.

So much for going to bed early early. Tomorrow Never Dies was on TV so I watched that tonight, and then vegged here for a bit, and now it's almost midnight so I think I'll head for my 7 hours of sleep. I'm going back to the two alarm method. It's so much nicer (in a way) to be slowly dragged from sleep than having to get up all at once. Work tomorrow on whatever bugs and testing remain, and then tomorrow night perhaps I shall clean this place up. I have to wash my one pair of jeans soon too.

10/17/2000    -{ Alarm clocks have few, if any, advantages. }-

8:59am
Interlude:
I have come to realize that the last couple of days I've been a real bastard around people, with short fuse and all, and for that I appologize. I'm thinking that I'll be in a much better mind when I either dissapear for a while or get some rid of the things I'm packing around in my inbox.

Aside: See (below) what happens when I stay up late coding with pizza?
Aside2: Mozilla nightlys really suck for simple rendering.

7:14am
One of the advantages of using a single alarm method* is I can remember dreams like this:

I was down at Iambe's parents McDonalds Restaraunt looking through a personals service (not mine though) for a date. There was noone there that I was interested in. I gave my free breakfast roll to someone who looked like they needed it sitting near me. Just after (before?) that a girl that I had seen in the personals ads came up to me and looked at me really funny and I made some joke and she went away (luckily). I think I had talked to her IRL earlier that day or something.

I went back to talk to Iambe's brother NateFlex and a call from Iambe comes in to him. NateFlex is playing Rouge Spear, so he hands the phone over to me and she asks me if I know where you are supposed to cut for self-correcting astigmatism. That's what she said, but what she was doing was surgery on her tounge. No idea how I knew this though.

She had cut all the way around the edge of it, and now was wanting to cut on the inside of that (cut around the edge, lift up the flap and cut the inside or something) to correct something. Nate didn't seem to care he had found a First Person Shooter strategy page on the net and was going through that, muttering things like "so that's how you do that". I put Iambe on one line and called out on another, looking through the phone book for the right number. I couldn't seem to decide between optimistrists, hospitals and dentists. After talking to a dentists' emergency number and a hospital person, who both sounded very confused, well, at that point....

It was right about that point (I think) my alarm went off. Lucky for me. Maybe less pizza late at night.

* Single Alarm Method: only have one alarm to wake you up. I normally have two, one set 15 minutes early which I merrily hit the snooze button on until the second one (across the room which I have to get up to turn off) goes off.

10/16/2000    -{ Ever feel that hitch in your chest and wonder if you're about to burst into tears? }-

Bah, it really must be a monday.

So where is that stray tag? Hmm... turns out that Mozilla doesn't support the </STRONG> tag anymore. It supports <STRONG>, but not the closing tag. Or something like that. Changed it to <B> and </B> and it looks fine now in the nightly builds. Wonder if that'll fix the windows problems too...?

Nope, I'm an idiot. When I migrated last month's stuff out I copied the table ends with it. Thanks Tig! <puts on brown paper bag... >

10/12/2000    -{ Redundancy is redundant }-

I've of course already put it up here but if for some reason you don't read my other page of random boredom (bad bad person!), you'll see that Brad had a son! I was presented with this news in the manner of this:

10:15 - go to bed. read microserfs
10:30 - turn out lights, attempt to sleep
10:45 - give up, head out to watch the end of outer limits
10:50 - just one quick game of quake3
10:58 - get my ass kicked and hit /.
11:00 - read that a new mozilla milestone is out 11:01 - download, untar, try.
11:04 - post my impressions
11:08 - reload /.
11:20 - door buzzer goes. wonder if it's someone I know with a blown up car
11:30 - Brad shows me hospital bracelet and tells me the good news

So congrats dude!

Aside: Tig, I get the _, and like it. Gonna go full bore?

10/11/2000    -{ Persistance is Futile. }-

Well, I'm sure the morning news from Washington (the one out here) will show it differently, but I have some results from the Govererns debate for you here. Why the hell are you watching that crap you may ask? Well, the answer probably won't surprise you.

I'm a cynic.

The only reason I'm watching a debate between two people that will have approximatly 0% affect on me is the same reason I watch political ads. I think all polititians are crooks, liers and backstabbers, and the ads that they put on TV show me I'm right :)

The contestants (cause you know that that is what they really are): Gov. Locke and Gov. Carlson.

The results:

Amount of the two minutes of opening statements spent slamming their opponent: 50%
Amount of time responding to the actual question asked during the question period: 20%
Approximate amount of time spent looking at the person to whom you are responding: 10s
% of relevance in answer to question: .3%
Amount of time the responses sounded scripted and human. 5%
Number of times the phrase "We are number one in going from welfare to work" was sputtered out by Locke. 15 in the first half hour
Amount of the 30s rebuttle time spent slamming their opponent. 29.942s
Amount of moving blame to previous governments, Washington (the other one, where things actually matter), or other factors. Any time something bad or insufficient about them is pointed out.
"The issue is very complex." Hurl
References to "Initiatives" or "Plans". Far too many.
% Bullshit in answers 99.9999999999999999999999999999%
Amount of time spent refering to their opponent in the 3rd person ("What Mr. Locke thinks..." "It appears that Mr. Carlson believes..."): 100%
Time spent not looking like they have a pole stuck up their ass while the camera is not directly on them. Nope.
"Coincidental" and "relevant, really it is" stories reminding everyone he's a pastor and is a good God-Fearing Man. 1 by Mr. Carlson.
(I'm guessing that this means he stepped in a church once)
Smarmy remarks to their opponent ("Wow Mr. Locke, you're supporting recommendations and they haven't even come out"). Lots
Reminding the public that if the vote the other one they'll wait another 4 years to see any action. 48
Displays of lack of knowledge of BC geography. 3
Corrections of "mis-statements, which I don't believe were unintentional" ("that mean man lied about me daddy!") 12
Amount of backtracking as to what they are supporting versus what they are saying (or at least according to their opponent) 87%
References to an "esctatic press release" (WTF???) 1
Amount of 2m time spent slamming their opponent in their closing statements: 1:55

See what I mean? Hell, even I can do that!

10/10/2000    -{ My feets were feeling GOOD! }-

I'm pleased to say the great sock experiment mentioned earlier was an astounding success. Laundry (and chore) day (saturday) was almost bearable, as I dumped my laundry on the bed, and simply picked up 2, assured (as I was that the sun would rise in the sky the next morning and that the day would suck) that they would match.

Kudos to Iambe and friends for a great thanksgiving (why do we have it again?).

I came across quite possibly the lamest show on TV. Going head to head with Dark Angel (pah! like it has a chance anyway), it's called "Sheena" or something like that. Basically you're supposed to believe a buxen blonde, with perfectly applied mascara et all, with the ability to transform herself into a leapard (or perhaps any animal she wants, but who cares, I mean, really) at will, lives in the deep jungle or something. Surrounded by what looks like a typical african village, with an African lady who didn't look out of place who is supposed other of the last two of these special peopls.... well, thats about all I got from the 20 or so seconds that I managed to stomach in a commerical break.

10/05/2000    -{ That beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I'll have one more for dessert }-

I love Johnny Cash, I really do. His music may be a little old but with lines like: "I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt", how can you not love him?

So what's up lately? Busy busy busy. Looking forward to a vacation that is permanently just around the corner. It seems that others at work are going away all the time, but I don't. So why not? I'm not that important, and I'm sure I could afford to head to [someplace] for a few days. Not sure what I'd do there though. We moved out company name over to Merilus and made a release of our product the other day. Some minor bugs that are going to be fixed tomorrow (if all goes well). The car is running well, all my friends are (in general) fine. We got another one in the nexus, this one from Kentucky as well. Welcome to the fold fozbaca (your quake-fu will improve).

I had a dream two nights ago that was quite disturbing in a non-haha-disturbing way. I was driving down the road and saw kids picking cats up off the side of the road and throwing them into traffic. I screamed out as if I was in pain myself and hit the gas while turning the car towards them with the full intention of running them down. I woke up with a start right after that. Luckily, I hit the pillow again soon after that and had a decent sleep (probably not in amount, but in peacefulness).

Perhaps this is what it's like to lose it.

Tonight I hit the gym with Cat5. I had to bail on tuesday due to ... something else (no idea what) and went last night instead. Mein ghot that hurt! I came out and sat in the car hoping not to puke or pass out, and then just laid on the couch praying for death. Guess I gotta go more often or something. I'm not sure if it's doing anything but at least it feels good to be getting out somehow. Now what I need is to find a badminton club or similar.... that'd be nice to get back into, as I used to be decent when I went with my dad to his badminton club years ago. I should write my Granny too. I should do a lot of things, but not everything is get-toable right away (and others are just illegal).

Hmm... what do you do with 10 year old fireworks/crackers? Do I know anyone who I really don't like? So many questions unanswered....

10/01/2000    -{ Engel you're a great guy but... }-

While perusing cruel.com today I found a hilarious link. It's about a love of the lower (geographically anyway) species. Here's an taste:

29: Dawsons Creek. They're up, they're down. They're with one person, then with another. She loves Dawson, she hates Dawson. She loves him again, he doesn't love her. She kisses a gay guy. She wants Dawson. They both want each other. They both hate each other. She wants pacey, but secretly wants Dawson. He wants to fuck Jen. She doesn't want to fuck him. They break up and she fucks everyone. Pacey fucks his teacher. His teacher fucks off. Pacey wants Andy. Andy wants pacey. They fuck. She goes to a mental hospital. She fucks another patient...and on and on. It would all be so much easier if they'd just have a big orgy and all fuck each other, it would save time and be a hell of a lot more interesting.

Not that I don't love all americans, but it's quite funny :)

That combined with new contacts (special wack ass ones that seem to be quite good so far), and a new blue rodeo CD make me a happy camper. Just a few little things left to do for work that I'm waiting on other people for, and I can relax for a few minutes before going to work tomorrow morning.