Had a few trippy dreams lately. The one from a while ago (which is strange, as I seldom remember anything for more than a few minutes after I wake up) was me riding down the hill in front of my parents house on one of those razor scooter things, and launching off the bottom of the hill (it's a hill with a curve at the bottom, and below the curve is farmland with trees on it) and somehow maintaining just enough lift to maintain flight. Just a tiny bit too much though, because I kept on trying to reach down and grab at tree tops as if I didn't and I kept on maintaining the lift I was I'd end up going over the cliff below. Just as I grabbed at the last tall tree just below me and my fingers slipped off it is when I jerked awake.

The one I had last night involved going out for Dim Sum (mmmmmmm..... Dim Sum....) and leaving without paying. I didn't mean to though, and felt really bad, and drove back to pay. Somehow I backed my car into something (slowly) and smunched the rear corner and the spoiler.

Firefly and FireflyMom have been doing more changes around the house. Seems like they are replacing shelves with rolling shelves/drawers. This is good, because it'll let us organize stuff better. Hopefully it won't make it easier to get more stuff, which would suck, because there's too much already. Last night I came home to a houseful of people, powertools, and chaos. I did the only honorable thing and hid with my head in the sand, and watched some silly movie that was on.

Oh, almost forgot. Yesturday I got the honor of being invited back to my school as an alumni to be part of their "Directions 2002" show. What the theory was was that they have all these booths (recruiting, etc) and students and guests wander around. One of the booths was the "Alumni Insprirations" booth where myself and a gaggle of crim students (I was the only CIS person there) stood around. The theory was that students come over and talk to us, and we tell them how wonderful the workplace is, and how they have to do well in school to become wonderful like us. Not a lot did though. To be honest, of the people I talked to, one was looking for an RCMP display, one wanted to look at the pamphlet that I got, one was the co-ordinator of the Alumni thing, and the rest (there were about 3) were old profs that came over to see how things were. Oh, and one guy who wanted to know if I worked where I work and if there were any job opportunities. Lets just say I enjoyed talking to the profs a lot. It's not every day you can get into a discussion on ASM code and gate logic and how that relates to C# and programming in this modern era. I gotta thank SilverStr though, as he was invited as well, and gave me a ride (I had carpooled in yesturday).

I say "though" a lot? 4 times in the above 5 paragaphs. Is that normal? I really worry about these things... probably not something to worry about though.

Thought for the day: "I have cats so I can talk to myself without people looking at me funny." -- me

02/21/2002    -{ "She Shoots She SCORES!!!!!!" }-

According to Engel no American really cares about hockey, but I think he's full of it. Of course, after the Canadian womem kicked some US ass in the fight for olympic gold (in a close 3-2 game), I can see why. We had a goal advantage for most of the game, 2-1 up to the middle of the second period, and 3-1 up to the middle of the 3rd. There were some really shitty penalties called against us, 12+ in all, it was crazy. The Canada/Finland game last night was much better... the ref's just let the players play for the most part. Course, in a Canada vs. US for gold, on US ice, with US refs, it wasn't surprising. Our women did awsome penelty killing and managed to keep the defense up and just did an awsome job. It was a great game from both sides.

Of course, Americans have the Glutton Bowl to dry their eyes with. Yes, that's right, the glutton bowl... another invention from the people at Fox, with events such as butter stick eating... ahhhh the glory that the redneck toads that were competing must feel to know they eat more sticks of butter, boiled eggs, or whatever. It was impressively scary though, with announcers that think they are at the olympics, or at least, the WWF.

After watching it for a bit (approx .042 seconds) I switched back to something else. I ran to do some laundry, and came back to find my lone fish (of the three, the one in the fishbowl by itself) on the floor with the bowl sitting on the desk (they are on a shelf above the desk). I figured the little guy was dead and I just hadn't noticed the commotion when I came in (basically I headed to the couch for dinner). I got a piece of toilet paper to give him a proper burial, and he jumped! A bit of fumbling later and I have a groggy fish enjoying a late night snack :)

whew!

Oh, and thanks to the tenant here who moved my laundry into the remaining time in your dryer. Thanks! a kind gesture, and I'm glad you're not a mean hottie.

02/16/2002    -{ Go Canada! }-

Well, deadline came, was extended, and now I wait for it to go again. This weekend will e a working one most likely, and as it's almost 5pm on a Saturday, without me actually having done anything, I hope it'll be a successful one. It's not that the code that needs to be written is hard, but it's getting used to the API and constantly finding little things that I didn't know existed.

Go Canada! We kicked ass in the women's 500m speed skating, were awarded the gold in pairs figure skating (after a very bogus and much talked about call from the judges) but got our asses kicked in hockey by Sweden on Friday. Not sure what went wrong, either they were really good or we really sucked. I have to agree with Muckhead's comments that the Canadian team just didn't have the get-go they should have.

02/12/2002    -{ "you brought me something / we both know what memories can bring / they bring diamonds and rust" }-

12:46am
Wow, what a busy last little while. First of all I got sick, probably thanks to SilverStr (you updated your page yet? :), but whoever it was there was some nastyness going around the office. It turned out to be bronchitas (no, I'm not going to bother trying to spell this late) for at least a couple of people, and Engel and Joker ended up with phneumonia infections in their lungs. Not fun. Lots of sick people. I ended up taking thursday and friday off at the end of last week in an effort to a) get better and b) feel miserable in a cosy place. Nothing like going to work and wanting to do nothing but go home for 8 hours :(

I'm feeling much better now though! There's still some yellow gunk coming out of my lungs, but I no longer feel physically drained and wanting to die. This is a good thing. Even went to the gym this morning. The run was only 15 min, but it was good to get back into it. I'd go to squash tomorrow... erhm... today, but it's pretty late, and I'll need my energy for tomorrow.

See, in the midst of everything they decided that we should add more cool new stuff to our app. This is a good thing, except that it seemed like it was all landing on me. I finally got the library I needed to write done a few minutes ago (and it keeps getting non-sucky!), which makes me happy. Looking through the rest of my code though, there doesn't look like there's any need for it, except for things that aren't converted by the Java side of things. This is good, as it'll let me concentrate on doing what's needed for the program that I get to write tomorrow, for Wednesday.

Of course, by the time I get to start writing the program, there'll be more to do that'll need a re-write of the library. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that right now, and want to get the meat of the app writen first, and then worry about the little niggly bits like getting data :)

If anyone cares, the library is based on LT XML, who I thank for their non-suck-ass API and decent documentation.

I have to give SilverStr credit for finding it in the first place though, as up until then I was trying to use Expat, which while it may be fast, does things in a matter that I just didn't grok and it ended up being a very frustrating exercise.

Now I get to go to sleep and think about how the heck to deal with getting values of something like "aalert.highports" or "users.user.email where user=alan". That'll be interesting.

Now back to make sure there's really nothing to do :)
.....
Drat! Looks like there's at least 3 programs that need to suck information from the library :( Argh, oh well, back too work.

1:55am
My semi-elation that this wouldn't totally suck (deadline in 2 days don't forget) have pretty much to a crashing halt. The LT XML library does really stupid things like exit() on an error, instead of being polite enough to just return an error code. Oh what fun we're having...

02/04/2002    -{ Well it sure is Monday.... }-

How do you tell it's monday? When you get to the gym at some awful time in the morning for squash and get out of the car to hear pppppppppppppppssssssssssssstttttttttt and discover your tire is flat. Turns out I do have all the parts needed to put on a spare, something I hadn't had the need to do so far in the lifetime of my car. Nothing like wandering around in the freezing cold on your knees at 7am. When that was done I went in, played some squash (kicked ass thankyouverymuch) and then hit an OK Tire on the way to the office to have it fixed. 10 minutes and $15 later I'm at the office, caressing my box of kleenex, and mucking around with VPN settings.

02/03/2002    -{ Sentinal can lick me. }-

God I feel like crap. I really shouldn't be going anywhere. Course, I'll go to work and spread this around to everyone else, fun fun fun. I think the cough throat lung thing is gone and I'm left with just a really good cold. Nose is raw and dripping, and if it were possible to remove my own head I certainly would do so, if for no other reason than to stop having to go take out the garbage every few hours, as the wastepaper baskets are full of used kleenex. Maybe the neo-citron will help.

02/02/2002    -{ They're looking for cheese that smells like feet. }-

*snark*

According to the doc I went to (on the advice of Engel who went to his doc) I have bronchitas, or something like that. I have some antibiotics to kill off any bad side effects, but other than that I just get to sit around resting and coughing up lovely phlem. At least my legs have stopped hurting from the very intense squash game we had last week. I didn't realize how painful "squash ass" could be... not being able to put on your own socks really sucks!

Currently I'm working on some bugs for work, and compiling GARNOME, a nice alpha2 distro of the GNOME 2 files, which apparently plays nicely with a current install.

Wow, did I get some intense kitten love this morning... nothing like a little grey fuzzball rubbing herself against your face and demanding to be petted, loved, and scritched at 8am on a Saturday. Could be far worse I suppose :)