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: