Others: [ juliebug | solas | Pixie | Sonya | Alan Cox | raskal | SilverStr | Rynsey | Sillz ]
| 01/30/2001 -{ Fridge Code is COOOOL! }- |
Does anyone else see something wrong with the above? Yes, I've bitched about it before, and I'll bitch about it again. Raising gas prices $0.12 in a day is a bad thing, because it pisses me off. Raise them that much in a week, or month, hey, thats life, but in a fucking day? I remember when the price of gas would move maybe a cent or two during the course of a day. 53.9 to 54.9 was not uncommon. Now jumping more than ten cents!? That's the difference between a small anal probe and vasaline and a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire with no lube and no warning.
End of rant (for now).
| 01/26/2001 -{ Who was it who nailed my door on backwards? }- |
-- me
Another wierd dream last night. I was in a quake world. Or rather, a world where quake weapons existed. It was like friendly fire was on though, because you could shoot rockets and railguns at people and they never died, just got pushed around. There was a big gym, with a pep rally or some wierd thing that was high-school like. I was after this one guy who had taken the door off my apartment and put it back upside down, putting the door handle up quite high. I kept on shooting him but he was way up on the top of the bleachers where it was hard to hit him (like when tig goes up on the rim in dmtowers). He kept on running around. I hit him a bunch of times with a railgun (it was in excessive I think) but that didn't do anything. I went back to my apartment and a bunch of my friends were over, but I didn't want them there because I wanted to pick option D (inside joke, those who don't get it don't worry).
It was quite weird as you can see. Probably something to do with stress from work. ARGH! That's a whole other thing I'll get to some other time. Too much work to do right now to be stressed. I have to somehow turn myself into a leader (of other people anyway) to get a bunch of stuff done and try to not dissapoint my boss. Well, I'd actually much rather impress him. I'll work on the latter first though :)
| 01/22/2001 -{ Falling..... }- |
Things that suck right now: deadlines, performance review coming up, more deadlines, not enough bodies, not enough knowledge, and other stuff. Not sure why I was stressing about a performance review the other day. It's not for a while (next month sometime maybe?) and I know what it'll say... "deadlines not met, employee slated for exectution." Believe me, I wish I could slow down time these days to get more in. I have a bunch of stuff to do now. Not all huge, just lots of little things. Little things that have to work properly togeather. Little things that will be a bitch to finish and debug (and get done on time, though I have to admit I'm glad I'm not a Java coder right now). Figure out a, implement it in b, and then integrate it with c, as well as create d, which works with c, and works properly. The steps aren't that big, but I don't look forward to getting it all working togeather. I told da boss man something along those lines and he asked me if I was not sure of my abilities. Every once and a while I have to go back and ask that same question, when I think I can't do something. Is it because I haven't tried, or I honestly think I can't do it. I know I can do this shit. I've learnt more and had a hell of a lot of fun in the last while doing C stuff. I guess I'd just prefer to eliminate those pesky "deadline" things.
As for the performance review I'm not sure why I even thought about it a few days ago. Guilty concience maybe? In it I'll just tell the truth. Yes, we are/were behind. Yes, I haven't coded as fast as I should have. Yes, I think my coding has improved over the last few months (readability! splitting things into separate files!). No, I haven't been a "good leader" to "my team". Yes, I lock my computer all the time, even when I am one of the only people in the office and you have gone home. Yes, I prefer tuna sashimi to salmon, except in one restaraunt.
I'm coming home tomorrow at a decent hour though. Too much shit to do here. Dishes are still sitting out on the counter, and they're not the easy ones either, these are the second half of the "cleaning out the fridge" dishes, so they are containers that once held what was at one point food, but now has been thrown away, leaving only little bits and pieces stuck to the plastic to fester and turn gross. Cats are almost out of food, litter needs to be done. Oh, and that laundry thing. Clean socks are a must. Doing some other laundry, like towels and sheets would be a plan too. Of course, even if I do leave work early you know that I'll sit here and work on random code anyway. I'll just do it in clean socks (or in between spurts of dishwashing.
The testers (hi Hillyup!) finally got around to testing a project-that-shall-not-be-named. This PTSNBN has been done (that was the cause of my stress at the beginning of the month) for a few days now, but now they have their greasy paws on it they are already finding bugs in code that was working. Bah. Code-rot I'll bet. I had the following:
[...]
/* get start of line */
linebegin = strtok_r( &buffer[2], tokens, &rptr );
snprintf(util, strlen(string)+3, "%s ", string );
fputs( util, file );
/* stuff in the middle */
fputs( data, file );
/* and the end of the line */
lineend = strtok_r( NULL, tokens2, &rptr );
snprintf( string, MAXBUF-1, " %s\n", lineend );
fputs( string, file );
[...]
Or something like that. Anyway, the first call to strtok_r was working fine, but the second, expected to grab the end of the line after the token, gave me garbage. Worked fine before, but not now. Replacing "&buffer[2]" with:
char* line = 0;
line = malloc( MAXBUF );
linebegin = strtok_r( line, tokens, &rptr );
[...]
free( line );
worked perfectly. Must have been debug flags vs. optimized flags doing different stuff with memory or something.
Anyway, like I was saying, they are testing the PTSNBN now, which means that either a) it'll work perfectly and no bugs will appear, leaving me free to work on my other deadlines, or b) Reality(tm). I'll give you 42 guesses at which one I'm banking on happening. It's nice to see it even almost working togeather though. Nice to look at a project and say "I did that, and I made it work and I created this awsome cool thing out of nothing, taking nothing but an idea and turning it into code and then into something" Or in my case, "something" is replaced by "this little utility here, and a little server there".
Ahhh.... there we go, finally some Enya in my playlist. Nice and relaxing, soft.... Must pick up her new album, it sounds pretty cool.
Man I hate browsers. 4 different browsers, all viewing this entry differently. Two of them are supposed to use the same rendering engine as well (galeon and mozilla)... might be a nightly build problem though.... yup, that and it bitching about missing "<P>" tags.
Oh well, bed now, gotta grab my 6 hours of sleep!
| 01/21/2001 -{ "Holiday"? }- |
The house had a HUGE number of DVDs too. And a TV/sound system to die for. Cat5, his second TV/system in the upstairs room put yours to shame! I'm not even going to start on the "main" system :) I finally saw some shows that I either haven't seen for a while or never really wanted to pay for, including Road Trip (not terrible, a good funny movie), Deuce Bigalo (about the same) and Shaft.
TV shows that don't suck lately:
Finding people on the Internet's not as easy as it is rumored to be. Last time I saw, you could just plug a random name into a search engine and you'll be showered with bits and pieces of data about them from a long time ago. At least, that's what happens with me. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find Al Horne eventually. Aside: wow, I thought that old data dissapeared after a while.
| 01/17/2001 -{ Nothing Says Christmas Like a Card from California }- |
Q: How do you train a Glo-Monkey?A: The same way you train any other glowing animal.
Another dream, this time involving co-workers. And porn.
Great, this has to be a sign of some sort of mental breakdown.
The one bit that was semi-interesting was when one of our salespeople came and asked me about my porn site surfing. I responded with "which one?" Never admit or deny anything till you hear the evidence they have against you right? She says "this freshmeat site." I of course proceeded to laugh my ass off, as I really doubt that freshmeat.net has any porn on it.
In the dream I also proceeded to kick our newest java programmer (Colin) off of IRC.
On a side note, my belated online "thanks and you're awsome" to Engel for scooping me up Lord of the Rings, which I've been wanting to finally read for some time now, especially since the movie is coming out.
| 01/16/2001 -{ If I had a Million Dollars... }- |
I also got a couple of things going tonight as well. I didn't get to do testing for work stuff, as right in the middle of literally running the test program, my net went out. As you can see it's back now, but at the time I just gave up and went to bed for my luxurious 7 hours. However, I did get
| 01/15/2001 -{ Do Alien Backhoes use Glo-Monkeys for Fuel? }- |
I was stuck on an island (think Blue Lagoon) with someone, don't remember who. There was no one else around but for some reason we had phone/email contact with Moe. Moe worked at a place that made artificial landscapes (think bryce3d in real life) but he was fired for "having thoughts or feelings of his own." Guess his company didn't like that. Me and whoever else were sitting around and we had contacted some aliens, or something. You know how when you think about contact with aliens you wonder how similar things are with them as they are with us? ie: did they develop the same tools, etc. Well, same thing here, with heavy construction equipment. For some reason we had access to an alien (I think it was alien anyway) equivilant of a CAT backhoe-type device. I got to drive it for some reason, and... do something with it. Dig up the beach or something. I'm in the middle of learning how all the levers work when we get an email/call from Moe, saying to look across the bay. He shows us how he can change the hill from look 1 (don't remember) to look 2 (look 2 was a cave with a couple of elegant houses built into it) through his company. At the end of the convo whoever was there with me tells me that he was just fired, and to be careful with the backhoe.
Very weird. Very trippy. I did watch the Blue Lagoon (or saw something about it on the net over the weekend, which explains that aspect of it.
Randomness: Last night I watched a show that had me find my double. It was one of those "greatest police videos" type shows, except it was on TLC and had extra bits like interviews with people, and bits on the worst (some guy who had accidents all the time), best (a guy who drove the speed limit 100% of the time, no matter what) and the guy who had the best road rage. It was this last gentleman who I had a connection with. He was a bitter english chap who drove for a living and whenever he got in the car critized other drivers. He even made a list of things that pissed him off (people who don't use their indicators, people who are always braking, people who drive swedish cars....). It was hilarious to watch this bitter cout go on about xxx type of drivers and basically how they suck. He felt he was a good driver because he drove ~180miles a day (I do not want his job).
Argh, anyway, time to start off this wonderful monday.
| 01/14/2001 -{ "Disappointing" Part Deux }- |
"Disappointing" was the title last week too, but I forgot to put anything relevant. I was at a LAN party last week and we watched a movie. Someone mentioned that the actor in it (for the life of me I can't remember the movie or the character, but he was an older guy) was gay. One of the people next to me said "how disappointing." Never one to miss an argument about something I of course asked "how so?" They replied that it was disappointing that he was gay because he seemed like he would be the kind of person who'd have a family and grandkids and such. My response of "so?" really meant "who the hell says he can't, just because he's gay you religious homophob", but in a much softer way. I guess I just can't stand it when people are like that. Granted, I never miss the opportunity to miss a fight as well :)
I think one thing I will automatically "fight" about is when someone has a strong opinion of something. I think it was taught young or something that there are always two sides to a story. If some says that "xxx is the only xxx for xxx", I'll say "but what about yyy?" I'm a huge Linux fan and use it for everything (except some games), but if someone were to try to convince me that it is perfect for everything, well, I'd say no, what about desktop publishing, what about people who need program x, y, and z. If someone tries to tell me that doing all your HTML by hand is the only way, well, that's true most of the time, but when I wanted to make a quick page that I don't care about (ie: the realtor home pages I was doing a few years back) I'd use frontpage because quite honestly, while it sucked ass, it was still quicker to set up a few nested tables in and throw some shitty page togeather than doing it by hand. When I want to do a page I care about (ie: my own) I do it by hand with zero questions asked.
Is this some huge character flaw? Probably. Do I care? Not really. I just found it "disappointing" that someone were to write of someone else because of their sexual preference, for religious reasons or not. Maybe they didn't mean what I thought they meant, maybe they did. But it was still disappointing.
| 01/08/2001 -{ "Disappointing" }- |
was working at home, and from somewhere my ex-girlfriend arrived, just
wanting to hang out and shoot the shit for a bit (I think sophisticated
people say "visit"). We did, and then she left to go on a bus somewhere for
a bit, and I went back to work. I noticed that she left a bottle of
anti-lice lotion there, and figured she had them so I'd be best to put it on.
It was like thick hand moisturizer, and it was quite gross, but I put it all
down my arms and legs, turning me momentarily into a gross white thing. Time
passed, and I guess I got bored so I went next door to visit Brad at work.
We shot the shit for a bit as well and I used his second computer to make a
George Jones CD. I changed the password to "Jones" too I think. I wanted to
print out a cover for the CD but he didn't have a printer. I mucked around a
bit more, and even came back for a few minutes after he'd left for some
reason, but snuck out very soon feeling very guilty for being there when I
shouldn't have.
I went back home and had to help some trucker (a friend? relative?) tie down
his truck stuff. Inside the trailer I helped to reef down the cables that
kept the boxes in place. The strap mechanism was free flowing, so I asked
him how they were tightened and he responded that you pushed the strap in
right after the pulley to tighten it. The rest of the workers even had a
rack of small sticks, with designs drawn on them, that they used. It was
almost ritual...
I went back to home and had something to eat (cheese) and put something in the
microwave, while attempting to do more work. Somewhere along the way someone
came along and I was distracted again, and someone took the cheese (or was it
bagels) out of the microwave.
Very strange. I think it happened in a short amount of time, because I woke up around 5:11am and thought "wow, no dreams" (and was very happy to have more than an hour of time left for sleep). Well, either that or I thought this when I was woken up by my primary alarm at 6:40am. Either way it was weird and trippy enough to share.
| 01/06/2001 -{ Do other people have the voices in their heads? }- |
Or...
On an aside, from the next "guest", does starting a conversation with "Well, as you may know I sleep with married men for money..." do Good or Bad for your reputation. Such wonderful phrases like "Your mama a slut, bitch" are thrown about. Such eliquance.
I'd go on a bit about the people on the show, but I'll not waste too many electrons. All I know is I really, really hope that they get these people off a small island somewhere (or maybe grow them... hm....) and that these people never actually make contact with the rest of the population. Maybe because of it's huge ratings (who wouldn't want to watch a couple of guys try to fight, or a couple of girls, or hell, just a whole bunch of people) it's seen all over the place and this is what other cultures think that western culture is (for example, right now a high paid prostitute is trying to convince her cousin that it's not a bad thing that she's taking her sister (19) into the prostitution game). Good God.
Someday, someday I think that I'd like to gather up all these people and ship them to Greenland, just like we talked about in high school. At least the Jerry Springer commercials admit they are "detaching themselves from normal society.
Sorry, had to get that out of my system. I'm going to go back to hiding indoors now.
| 01/01/2001 -{ Humbug2k+1 }- |
I really hate it when I feel that I'm in the same place at the end of the year as the beginning. I'm ahead, but I don't really feel like I've personally moved forward. "Inner-space" or something like that. Bah humbug. Course, I'm known to live in the past, so it's probably just me keeping me back. "That bastard is driving me down!" "What bastard?" "ME!"
The LAN party and chicken ceasar last night was awsome. Two things sucked. Not enough gaming/boxes (people just sort of did their own thing a lot, which is their right of course, but I could have done that at home) and the moving of said boxes around. Don't get me wrong, it was a great time, and moving 2 boxes up the stairs is much easier than across town, but it's still a pain in the ass. Glad I'm not the host having to clean up after all us dirty little nerds.
Here's a pic my good friend Squiz took of me in my own little world. I think I'll head back there now....
