Public Service Announcement

If you, or someone you love, depends on a particular medication to maintain a normal day-to-day existence, don't [let them] forget to take it!

In my case, I require Provigil if I'm to stay awake throughout the day. I haven't had it in nearly two days, due to a combination of circumstances, among which being the fact that my housemate is suffering from

cranio-rectal inversion.

Setup: Housemate leaves the front stove burner on all day.
Result: Much blackness and vile smoke.
Housemate: Determines that this is my fault, and dumps ashes of his ruined pancakes into my shoes. (Apparently, I should have noticed his error and corrected it, even though I wasn't home at the time.)

To even futher provoke my housemate, I caused his Windows 2000 machine to cease to power on. This, of course, uses some definition of the verb "to cause" I was heretofore unaware of, as I never touched the infernal beast.

The net effect of all this is that, for its safety, I've removed my computer from my room to the safety of kanon42's dorm room until I've moved to a new house.

Everything Snapshot

Time: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 00:19:18 GMT
Everything server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU mod_ssl/2.4.10 OpenSSL/0.9.4 mod_perl/1.21_03-dev

Number of nodes: 817184 (679 new since February 7, 2001 [639.0 wa7])
Number of users: 25406 (80 new since February 7, 2001 [79.6 wa7])
Number of links: 3510250 (11814 new since February 7, 2001 [13055.2 wa7])
Number of writeups: 452114 (281 new since February 7, 2001 [283.0 wa7])
Number of cools: 60611 (185 new since February 7, 2001 [173.9 wa7])
Number of votes: 1956210 (7309 new since February 7, 2001 [7253.2 wa7])
Number of hits: 33051351 (146424 new since February 7, 2001 [143581.7 wa7])

Node to user ratio: 32.165 nodes per user
Link to node ratio: 4.296 links per node
Link to user ratio: 138.166 links per user
Link to writeup ratio: 7.764 links per writeup
Votes to cools ratio: 32.275 votes per cool
Cools to user ratio: 2.386 cools per user
Hits to user ratio: 1300.927 hits per user

New Nodes: [Crom Cruach] [Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)] [My Reasons For Hating Sleep] [February 7, 2001] [The God of Small Things] [Babe Ruth] [why I am named after a biblical "whore"] [My Reasons For Hating Sleep] [regulars] [Cailleach] [why I am named after a biblical "whore"] [regular 17476-gon] [Igor Gouzenko] [gibson] [You Burn Me Up I'm a Cigarette]

Users Online (58): [Segnbora-t] [tregoweth] [yam] [General Wesc] [anotherone] [tftv256] [--OutpostMir--] [kamamer] [bob the cow] [ToasterLeavings] [ukyoCE] [FelonyMPulse] [Chihuahua Grub] [Roninspoon] [wonko] [ccunning] [Jeeves] [Gritchka] [7Ghent] [Cow Of Doom] [WolfDaddy] [WonkoDSane] [Ater] [Kesper North] [Dyslexic] [ZamZ] [yerricde] [SgtCoolGuy] [cha0s] [Zorin] [lawnjart] [Phyllis Stein] [SophiesCat] [AntonZ] [WyldWynd] [iandunn] [moongirl] [karrenlouise] [sydnius] [Phssthpok] [NSA] [untergeek] [GangstaFeelsGood] [Clone] [disarmed42] [Halspal] [Sirius] [Draeis] [cerberus] [riverrun] [Lost and Found] [Andara] [dotc] [Skinwalker] [bigd] [campion] [Igloowhite] [whereami]

JeffMagnus node count: 4086 (-10 new since February 7, 2001)
JeffMagnus experience: 11880 (-7 more since February 7, 2001)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.907 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.501% (Via alternate method: 0.904%)*
JeffMagnus node of the day: Lithium

Note: The Everything Snapshot daylog will return as soon as I work out one that is more pleasant for members of the Everything Whino sect.

He threatened my life.

He implied me in something I am not a part of.

And I am afraid, he is just the type of person to back up his words.

He has made my current residence a living nightmare. He lives one door away from me.

I am not the reason he screwed himself.

Nor am I the messenger he thinks I am.

Nor am I the catalyst that will effectively end the existence he knows, ousting him from the Navy and from the University, forcing him to lead a life much different than he had planned.

If he does anything else, says anything else, I go to the police.

Today was busier than usual. I woke up late, threw on the first thing I could grab from the closet, and rushed out the door after making sure my face was not too frightful. By the time I got to school, it was too late to change. I was wearing short sleeves – the deadliest sin for us cold blooded kind. We’re the ones wearing coats all summer, leaving the windows down and the heat turned all the way up while driving to the beach. I somehow managed not to freeze, which surprised everyone. It was rather pathetic. Every single one of my teachers commented on my lack of layers.

First hour was uneventful. But today was Super Senior Day (aka give us all the money you should be saving for college). I ordered some more graduation announcements and bought a NAHS tassel thing and paid the mandatory senior fee of $45. Filled out a form saying how I wanted my name spelled on my diploma, and I was finished. Of course, I had bought a $35 yearbook and paid the other $40 senior fee for Jungle earlier in the year.

Went to McDonalds for lunch with Stacy, Meagan, and Jessica. The time flew, and we were back at school for band. I had another challenge today. The girl I was challenging gave a thunderous protest to the band director, but he eventually made her do it. I won. Only one more to go and I’m there.

Did my french homework during my release hour, and left school before all the buses could trap me in the parking lot. Got home in five minutes flat – a new record. The conditions were almost perfect; no traffic, no police, only some slush on the roads and no stop signs between 142nd and 168th. This made for quite a speedy ride.

Once home, I sat for fifteen minutes, enjoying the silence of an empty house. Then it was time to go to Hope for class. Nothing too special. Talked about the revolution starting in1789, Robespierre, Danton, and several other nice historical figures. Educational, full of dates and more dates to memorize. Exciting.

Went to the post office afterwards and waited in line for twenty minutes to buy some stamps. I don’t trust those damn postage machines. Probably because I’ve never used one. I’ve never even been to the post office alone before. Sure, I went with Aaron and Seth once in a while for undisclosed reasons, but I was never before on a personal mission. I completed my errand successfully, and was home by quarter after five.

Worked on my latest art projects (due tomorrow), which involved mutilating forks with a pair of pliers and some fire. It’s a wonderful way to vent frustration. And you end up with some neat products to tape to your walls, if you so wish. I still need to finish two paintings, but they aren’t nearly so fun as making deformed silverware into an artist creation.

I left for Jessica’s house at seven. She lives out in the middle of nowhere, past Port Sheldon and on towards Grand Haven. I brought my video camera and we worked on recording her french project, which is also due tomorrow. Meagan and Stacy showed up as well – they were the main characters in the movie we made. This eventually turned into everyone do funny shit for the camera, which lasted until nine or so. We then watched the entire tape. It’s funny to see yourself on TV; I’m so used to seeing the world through my eyes that when I see myself from a different point of view, I can’t even recognize myself.

Got home a short while ago, and am awaiting a call from my beloved.

Attention Everythingians: check your
mail these next couple days.
I was inspired to send postcards
to a select few (I couldn’t
afford more). I love you all, and I love
mail too.

Daylog, or as I like to call it, the great vote dump.

And everyone upvotes because it feels better than down voting, right? ...right?

There seems to be a lot of SAD going around, or maybe just generic angst either way, the evidence is in every day log.

I'm in a community college library. Walking in, I felt the pull from the shelves of books I've never read, and the pull from the public access computers along one wall. Card catalog or page of cool? Some books or everything? I tried the books, I really did. Frustration grew in the 500's when I tried to down vote Candide... maybe I should have up voted, at least it would have felt better...

I think I am the only one here. Drawing looks from the guy behind the circulation desk. "I don't know what you are typing, but you are going to be done in 25 minutes, asshole." Now I'm paranoid about typing cuss words on this computer. And I wonder if they have one of those magic devices that they can use to look at any monitor they choose. Damn I need to get out more. Or maybe it's just SAD.

If I could, I would log in the everyone account on every one of these computers. And check the 'remember me' box. A little democracy never hurt anyone. Heh, what a lie.

So I just got the 15 minute warning. A little premature, but what does he care. In the library, the lowly librarian is king.

In the land of indifference, the man with no ego is king. That's today in 12 words.

Work was suitably interesting today. The computers (see here) that were dropped off yesterday had to be stripped, reconditioned and have OSs installed. I opened up each of the machines, and immediately blew out that cruddy dust you get in computers - you know the stuff, that mutated hair/dust/grey stuff that always makes it through your air filters. And I am not talking about a small amount. I am talking a huge mound of gunk.

The glamourous side of I.T., systems assembly, then ensued. The three PCs weren't impressive, and I find out:

  1. They removed a large amount of the hardware
  2. They replaced the hard drives with smaller ones
  3. Two of the three PCs had faulty memory installed
  4. One of the PCs had a faulty floppy drive
  5. One of the PCs was a 486 DX/100 and thus useless
  6. They left a large-scale SCSI card and a good hard drive in the remaining good PC

Overall, the SCSI card and SCSI hard drive were worth it. And probably more than the remaining hardware put together.

I also got offered three undergraduate uni students to come work, for FREE, for a year. They were described as "good third year Computer Science students". Thats funny. Funny because I am a "fifth year" Computer Science student, but I am still doing second year subjects - full time work and part time study, plus a years deferment to work...

They might be smarter than I am...

But I have experience.
And management capabilities.
That, and I am a good boss.
And a fast learner.


Q: What makes a road broad?
A: The letter 'b'.

Quite a bit of time without a daylog. In the meanwhile, I have gone on a veritable noding spree. The WUs I am most satisfied about are DL, DT and DD; they are nodes that attempt at being the "definitive" writeup on the subject. Of couse, this is a lofty and possibly arrogant attempt.
But if one's attempts were not arrogant, why, then the only possible activity would be to endlessly softlink random nodes to Your radical ideas about X have already occurred to others.

The Job: mostly out of control. I fired one person, for manifestly stupid overslacking. I don't mind people slacking, as long as they do what I ask them to in a reasonable (not geological) time.
I am easy. You can run whatever OS you like. I will not insist on you using my favourite RDBMs. You can download pr0n, as long as you are discreet about it. Napsturbate all day, for all I care. BUT, do what I ask you to do. Which is always reasonable - I have been there, in the trenches of code, and I know what can and cannot be done in a week.

What really pisses me off is the illusion of progress. I will write about it, eventually.

And of course, there is the usual bevvy of new, very urgent and important stuff to do, like fixing a totally hosed database, installing a new help desk, and completing the building and bootstrapping of a new computing facility - by the end of the month, if you please.

The Fun: still reading a lot. I read The Spanish Tragedy, re-read Rayuela (it rocks ! read it !) and a book by V.S. Naipul, The Mimic Men. Now I have begun The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins - I am sure it will be fun.
Very slowly, I am also reading Radia Perlman's Interconnections, a very clear, very profound book on bridging, routing and networking.
What else ?

Intermittences du coeur, of course. Last night I walked out of my home and on my terrace, at about midnight. It was not cold, being in Mexico and all that; just fresh. And very quiet, Mexico City becomes very still at night.
I wanted to think about my future, about whether I really want to live here and about nostalgia.
I ended up staring at the moon for a very peaceful 10 minutes, while I smoked my cigar. The last cigar from El Jarocho, in Coyoacan. Which in turn reminds me of my ex-SO.
She read my photography WU, and she said it was good - that is important. She is a big part of my last five years.

CV two obscene little letters. I blasted another CV into the dark space that I immagine the Internet to be, and Lo! there was some sort of response.
Yesterday I also spent a very stupid hour trying to produce a PDF file on a Linux machine. Don't try, just use the handy on-line PDF generator at www.adobe.com - I mean, straight from the horse's mouth, neh ?

Mistery: I got a very nice response today to two WUs about doing unsavory things to octopus. Everything2 still amazes me.

Family: I talked with my family on the phone. It always opens (no, let me fix that: gouges, digs, claws) a nice pit of homesickness.
But it was good to hear them. They would like me to go to Italy for a week somewhere in March, but that would require asking for extra, unjustifiable vacation days, something I am reluctant to do.

REW -*- FFWD

So I've been on Wellbutrin for about 2 weeks now, and it's been okay, although I really haven't noticed any marked difference in my behavior (except for my mood becoming worse), although I don't know if I can exactly blame that on the drug or not, especially due to the fact that they're ramping up my dosage and I'm up to what would be considered half of a normal dose (150mg)

I'm sort of in a bind due to the fact that I'm introducing a new variable into my environment. When a thought or problem arises, I have to analyze and deal with it, and try to determine if my decision is logical, and also to determine what percentage of my decision is being influenced by:

A) Me
B) Depression
C) Medication

This game is really difficult, and scientific analysis doesn't really come into the picture, but I do have a new unfortunate discovery.

Today I realized that Wellbutrin + Tylenol Cold = ZANG!

That's not necessarily a good thing, as I fell into a weird dizzy trance on my way home from work in my car. So far for the last 12 hours I've been totally wired. I'm totally wired now. I may be totally wired for a lot longer. Totally wired is a song by The Fall. I bet Esther Dyson is totally wired.

I hate Esther Dyson.

I will probably delete this tommorow.

ZANG!

I exited the dreaded Maths room and as I walked to my next class found a note entitled "Dearest Emma". My interest piqued I retrieved the note and unfolded it to find quite an unusal letter. It said, and I quote:
"Hi Emma, how are you. I am good. I wanted to take this chance to tell you how I really felt about you. I was afraid of being rejected by you before so I never had the guts. Anyway, I know you don't want a boyfriend or anything, but I was wondering if you would want to get it on with me? I'm a virgin, and I think you are too, so I think it'd be great to fuck our virginity away together, don't you think? But I don't want to pressure you, I mean, you can be in control and can decide how far you want to go. You can tell me what to do to you and I'll do anything, anything! I just want to fuck you so bad! But if you don't want to then maybe we can just play tonsil hockey or something."

"LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU, AND KISSING? YOU SOON"


I mean, seriously, this guy is completely screwed up. That was a days worth of entertainment for my friends and I, unfortuneately we don't know who the sender nor the receiver is.

Nice day for me. My first day off in over two weeks. Y'see as regular viewers would know (yeah right...) I have been slaving towards delivering a collosal piece of vampireware for flippin' months. Well, the finish line is finally within view. Not to bore with the gory details, but it's almost handed over. Just some more horrible SQL reporting tools and a bunch of graphical admin tools are left, with a little training for the remaining userbase. I trained 50 people so far this week, and as of this morning I'd logged 56 hours in a working week beginning on Saturday. I'm spent.

So today I flexed a day off, being a glorious morning woken in my own bed for a change. Breakfast. Walk Molly. Rode my bike to Manuka with Molly in the basket to get a really funky haircut (short), Mark my hairdresser just hacked in the way I like it, but this time he took liberties and really chainsawed it away..

Home, settled into the sofa, and watched Mission to Mars on DVD and luxury! watched all the extras on the disk too!

Took Gemma out for cakes and coffee to Kingston, went grocery shopping (love it) and have now prepared a nice dinner which is marinating as I type while Gemma watches BBC World....

phew

My relationship with E2 is as good as it's ever been at the moment. I'm downvoting as much as I upvote (I try hard to clear all my votes every day) and I guess I must be becoming part of the furniture 'cause my memes seem to be disarmingly similar to those of many other users here who I respect and admire. Funny that I'm a master of the e-universe in real life but feel like a kid here. Refreshing I suppose.. ;-)

GREAT TO SEE NEW COMMERCIAL BANNER ADS AT E2! SIMONC ENCOURAGES ALL TO CLICK EARLY AND OFTEN!

Noding is hard work

OK, my fifth day on E2, my first daylog. My first few writeups went well, a couple of acronyms, a couple of brief pieces of jargon... And then the wall.

I saw an entry that just begged for a much better writeup. So I started the writeup in a text editor, carefully checking each of my planned hardlinks and supporting concepts, only to find that almost none of them are noded yet. So now I'm noding those to avoid having nodeshells all over the place. And researching the softlinks as well, and failing to resist the temptation to add an entry or two to those as well, not to mention noding a supporting concept for one of those.

Not as easy as I thought at first, but great fun!

Thanks to Rancid Pickle and Demeter for their advice and help.

It's late, off to bed.

14:33

I know, I know, I should be up like a morning bird. I slept too long again.

Reason this time? Well, I got to sleep around three, but someone very near had decided that it's Cool to drill holes to their own walls. At 8:30 or something. So, understandably, I couldn't sleep too well this morning.

Uh, I'm supposed to see the world a bit today. Pay bills and stuff.

Time to face the Challenging Challenges of the day...

17:18

Read some stuff from Slashdot.

Someone had a valid point about software design.

Some fool slapped it +1, Funny.

=(

20:56

Spent last hour doing something "interesting"...

Back when I was in junior high school, once during computer classes my keyboard stopped working.

Since I was at the state of knowledge in which I was teaching the teacher and not the other way, the teacher told me to fix the keyboard myself. Well, I opened it up, cleaned it, and learned a valuable skill that I needed today.

That was a Nokia 286. When I opened the keyboard, I just needed to open up the thing and clean stuff from under and between the keys.

This is a Fujitsu/Siemens "multimedia" keyboard. The notable difference? This doesn't have actual button switches under the keys - it just has a rubber pad (that acts as "button" shafts), under which is a three-layer plastic film with connector lines (apparently the film gets pressed and two connector lines get in contact). Coffee went in the keyboard leaked down, splattered around, and got between the layers of the connector film.

I guess this keyboard is cheaper to build, but it was pain to maintain. I was already thinking I should go to a computer store tomorrow and buy a new keyboard... but for some miraculous reason, I managed to clean the thing up. And I'm not a hardware person, so it's triply miraculous.

It now has couple of meters of painter tape inside it (I never knew I would need to fix computer hardware with tape...) and I have one screw here that doesn't know its place (I swear all screws were in place!!!)

(Kernel warning message: "AT keyboard not present?" or somesuch. Whee. It's an AT-compatible keyboard. Old references. =)

01:04

Ah well, seems like it's a nodeless day. And tomorrow isn't looking good either. But at least I did couple of node updates (not all even listed below, I guess...)


Other day logs o' mine...

Updated: T$R Nazi Live Action TOON

My Marriage is failing. My server is hosed. Someone wanted to make design changes on a web page and broke all of the ColdFusion code in it. I only get paid 50% of what market value for my brand of geekism right now.

I left Everything a couple of months ago, because of a flame war that was going on at the time. It looks like it has passed, so I think I will try again...

Thank you.

Today I completed my eighteenth revolution around the sun, I'm now legally allowed to buy alcohol and go into debt. Isn't it just fantastic?

I've also decided that nothing's going to get me down today. Management test at 10am? Ah, no problem, I'll read over my notes on the subway. Inner Circle trains were all off, so everyone has to take the Outer. For the first half of the journey, I couldn't move, for the last few stops I could bearly breathe. Never mind.

The test didn't go too badly, I just screwed up any question which happened to have a link between a theory and someone's name, the type of question I'm crap at. But I did actually study, so I'm feeling confident.

I went down to the Food Factory with Stuart and Diana, and she bought be hot chocolate and a creme egg as a birthday pressie. After Mechanics, Rhona gave me a card (completely with googly eyes, which is pretty damn cool), and then I went into town to pick up the car to go to Kirkintilloch to get the prize to the raffle I entered ages ago.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd been planning to ask out Gill, the flatmate of some guys in my course. I'd messaged Kyle to see where they were off to tonight, and didn't hear back until about twenty minutes ago.

We r going 2 cathouse 2night, not the art school. & by the way Gill has a boyfriend: me. Sorry. C u 2night maybe.
I knew there would be a catch. She seemed single, they weren't really obviously a couple, I just assumed they were nothing more than people who shared a flat because the university accommodation service put them randomly in the same place.

*sigh*

It's not going to ruin my day, it's not. I can live with it. Smile.

One thing which did cheer me up a lot was the message from Hannah.

firstly, happy birthday proper ü secondly, the txt you sent last night was about the nicest thing anyone said 2 me in a long time. lastly i don't ever want you to forget how special you are. even tho it's only been two years me feels like i've known you forever and i couldn't imagine not. love you lots like jelly tots

Ok, I'm going to get back to making sure nothing's gonna get me down. We're going out to dinner at a posh restaurant soon, and shortly afterwards I'm going to go out and get drunk.

Plug-Ins, recording the blues, and Windows 2000 on IEEE1394

This morning, during Research Project (a class in which lambda68 and I use our 3d design skills to create 7 minutes of crappy animation, but loaded with fun), our technology teacher presented us with a list of plugins available from digimation on "sale." Technology education being the poor bastard it is at our school (not really, but the grass is always greener, or any other applicable aphorism), lambda68 and I were contracted to pick 3 of the offered "low price" items. We ended up with the following:
  • Stitch - Does pretty much all of the clothes-creation-work for us. hoo-ray! Now we need a comparable plug-in for our lives that will work the opposite on women. Let us name "IT" "Ginger."
  • Foley Studio MAX - Object-based sound events. We need it for footsteps, and so on.
  • Phoenix v.1.5 - Some damn cool pyrotechnic effects. It apparently, "blows 3d studio max's combustion effect out of the water!" (paraphrased, of course).

    Went to prison, went home, went back to prison, filled the gar with gasoline, went home, recorded blues in A7 using my phenomenal techniques (pretty badass, if you so will), sat down at terminal, E2. peace. finally.

    An exciting advance in my computer's number of Operating Systems has yielded yet more pleasure for me. Windows 2000 (which I needed to successfully operate my Firewire card, wouldn't work under NT4) is quite phenomenal, despite how much everyone hates MS. They've done a decent job with this one, I tell ya.
  • Last night I was clearing snow off my car at 11:00 in the evening before setting off to the city once more. I know it was eleven as the church bells were gently pealing out Westminster chimes as I climbed into the passenger side of my red Ford (the driver's side door being stuck shut after an unfortunate encounter with a slim jim wielded by yours truly).

    I drove down to the city as a phone-call from Beautiful Girl unnerved me so that I needed to see her—she asked me to come. The drive down was absolutely beautiful. The roads were clear of traffic and the moon rose quietly behind me, illuminating a lovely landscape of snow and pine and mountains always looming in the windshield or rear-view. The moonlight was so bright it seemed that the landscape itself was lit, and I switched my headlights off and drove as a ghost by the light of the moon several times as I threaded my way through the mountains. Drove like a mad prophet jacked up on benzedrine, made a four-hour trip in a little over three and a quarter, burying my eighty-five speedometer several times on any flat roads I could find.

    Arrived to a city mostly asleep. After the mountains it was odd to see anyone awake at two o'clock on a Thursday morning. Climbed the stairs of Beautiful Girl's apartment two at a time, and found her asleep on the couch by candlelight. Woke her and kissed and held and made love by the small flames and orange arc-sodium light bleeding through the windows.

    Now it's mid-afternoon and she's gone for the time being. I'm in the city again, and as usual I have no idea what to do with myself. A severe lack of any desire to venture outside keeps me here, reading and drinking. Had two cups of supercoffee after abstaining for a couple weeks, and my hands are shaking as I write this. The street is wet, I can hear each car as they go by with the sound of old beat velcro ripping. It's snowing too, and I want to go stare at it for a while but in my current state I'm sure it couldn't hold my attention for more than thirty seconds. I'll continue to write.

    I came down here throwing all possibilities of scheduled meetings and obligations out the window as Beautiful Girl and I needed to talk. We still do, but I am not too terribly worried. She harbors the bad habit of not mentioning things that bother her, only bringing them up in moments of weakness after they have fermented and festered for some time. Consequentially, I am left wondering what is wrong. I know her well enough to know something is wrong, but not what. Recently the two of us have been somewhat uncomfortable around each other, and I hope with this impromptu trip of mine we can find some sort of closure and continue on as the future intends. I love her madly, so this feeling that we both harbor drives me mad with confusion.

    So I'm in the city once again. Only a week ago I was here, helping Beautiful Girl move into her new studio, which is right handsome. The heat pipes knock at all hours, and only half the outlets work properly, but it is lovely with decorative arches and hardwood floors and bay windows with the ripping sound of the wet street drifting through.

    My mind is reeling with everything that I want to tell her, yet I'm not entirely sure what to say. Perhaps "I love you and want nothing more than to share a little spot of the universe with you" will suffice for now.

    I think I’ll go watch traffic for a while.

    My hands are still shaking.

    The gears are set in motion.

    If you are an avid follower of my life (and who isn't,?) you will recall yesterday's daylog. The first step is made, I have contacted a friend of hers to confirm I'm not being a complete idiot. Should her query be positive, nothing will stand in my way! Nothing!

    Other than that I went to the gulag, went to see a friend of mine recovering from a coma, went to someone's house to eat, saw two people baptized. Went home, got online.

    Have a great day.

    Encryption run...a-spunk?
    (get it? like run amok? Oh, nevermind.)
    I perused Slashdot. I saw a story about bacteria encrypting sperm. Yesterday it was all about Osama bin Laden using steganography to encrypt things in porn. Evil begets evil, indeed! If you agree with the FBI that encryption only has evil purposes, then looking at evil porn from an evil terrorist will lead to an evil by-product that is also full of encryption. I think the whole thing about encryption being a munition is getting a little out of hand. (Or would it be in a hand in this case?)

    Boot, damn you!
    So far, my boot strap program is supposed to do nothing but dump a little message on the screen to confirm that it ran; and then it just loops forever until I hit the reset switch. I invested a whole hour into writing that and testing it last night, and it's still not working yet. If I can't even print strings to the screen, how do I debug this problem? I guess I have to resort to writing strings directly into the video memory. How gross!

    When should I call?
    How long after a date should a guy wait before calling a girl? I've waited more than a day. Should I call tonight? I think I should. She seems pretty cool so far, so I'm a bit nervous about calling too soon or too late.

    I got up late today and since I was going to be late to work anyway, I figured I might as well be really late. I stopped by Office Depot on my way to look for a new bag for my laptop computer and to carry my school books around in. I found out they were 50 bucks, so I decided I didn't need one that bad.

    The Fast Food T-R Ratio

    I stopped by Wendys for some quick metabolic sustainment, and then headed into work. Some of my co-workers commented on how nearly all fast food restaurants suck, but to varying degrees. We thought about it for a while and we figured that each has a T-R ratio. TR is Taste to Regret. The higher the number, the better. So if you take Taco Bell for instance, the food tastes quite mediocre, and the regret factor about an hour afterwards is usually quite high. Wendy's isn't usually too bad, some of their hamburgers taste pretty good and although there's some queasyness from the grease a little bit later, it's not nearly as bad as Taco Bell or McDonalds, so Wendy's has a high T-R ratio.

    Work wasn't today. I didn't get much done. I was really energetic when I got there, so I was too energetic to sit down and work, yet later on in the day it caught up with me and I was just too tired to get anything done. I should have had some caffiene.

    Near the end of the workday, I'm not sure what happened, but TC was on the phone with a friend and was really upset about something. I didn't want to pry and ask what, but I tried to cheer her up afterwards. She seemed much better when we left. I hope it helped; I hate to see her feeling down.

    I just don't know how to deal with people who are feeling extreme emotions. Do they want to be left alone, or do they want support? Even if I give them support, what do I say? I guess nobody can answer those questions so I should just try something and see what works.

    Today was Neal Cassady's birthday. it's also a full moon and the date on which the Boy Scouts were founded. Here are some Cassady quotes:

    "The secret of the fuse is to think of the soul and not the ego. It took the Chinese years to discover swallowing tadpoles by the dozens doesn't make for effective contraceptives."

    "This Eyetalian --or was it E? --opened a pack of Camels upsidedown, impressed even me."

    "I swore, for all those Saddiday nights I missed when I was in San Quentin I'd stay up every Saturday night for two full years to make up."

    (Excerpts from the movie: "Neal Cassady In The Backhouse," filmed by Page Browning at La Honda, California in 1965.)

    Today is the last day of college for a week. Next week is 'reading week', where we go home and catch up on our notes (yeah, right).

    I have just downloaded the E2 source and am feeling annoyed that someone has already written it. It would make a great final year project for my course.

    I have reached a mental block for nodes, after only a week. Everyone has already noded anything I can think of. I have started 'noding for numbers', as WyldWynd put it. One of the writeups bearly lasted 10 minutes but I glad it went (it was pathetic).

    Going to lunch, might carry on later.

    Today is the day that the Doctor has waited over a hundred years for. He remembers waking up in a train carriage with no memory and only a note in his pocket.

    Meet me in Saint Louis on February 8, 2001. -Fitz

    He's waited so long.

    Doctor Who is a trademark of the BBC.

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