Hello, E2.

First: The boring stuff. She got my mix tape and silly letter, but she is all but ignoring me. Oh well. What's my attitude? Fuck her. What's the point of putting effort into maintaing a relationship with someone that yields no friendliness back?

Second: Exciting stuff.

Subpoint 1.. Just got a new set of headphones. Sony MDR-7506. Highly recommended! They're closed headphones, which I love because it blocks out sounds. They also sound very true to the original sound.. They're comfortable, and even have a frequency range that goes lower than your average headphones. You can really hear bass with these phones that you can't hear otherwise.

Subpoint 2.. Put through an order on Amazon. A CD Burner, and a spindle of CD-Rs.. Mix CDs here I come! ( : I also ordered two magic DVDs .. featuring Michael Ammar. Cool stuff. The Michael Ammar tape I have is great. It's too bad that he is the only magician putting out DVDs, though.

Subpoint 3.. I am learning how to juggle. I've got the basic two ball exchange down in my left hand, but not my right hand yet. It's easier than I thought I would be.

Subpoint 4.. Going to a BBQ for the honors program of my school on Saturday night. Collegium V has a lot of cool people in it. I am psyched.

Subpoint 5.. I am ready to go on my shopping spree ... ( :

Subpoint 6.. Today I realized that my Rhetoric teacher has a true enthusiasm and interest for what he teaches. That excites me..

Subpoint 7.. And finally, I guess it is possible to have fun while being alone.. Anyway.. See you guys later.

Standing in front of the vending machine at the M&T Regonial Corporation Center, all of which I am about to vacuum. This is part of my "other" job. I don't consider it my job though, simply because my bosses (Phil and Carole S.) are the coolest married couple I know. I think of it as hanging out with Phil 5 days a week, more or less.

Anyway, back to the vending machine.

I have 60 cents, but most everything is 55 cents or less. So what do I get? I have no idea. I need ideas quickly, time is precious, and my upright Electrolux is calling my name, wondering where I am.

What to get?

Click!. The lightbulb finally turns on. Where am I going to go when I get home?         Everything2

E2

What's E2 in the machine?
Peanut Butter Twix.
Sweet.
Bless the gods.

Getting up in the morning has become quite a challenge. I am consistently around a half of an hour late for work every day, unless I have to be at a customer's site. And some days its much worse, and have to call in to say I'm gonna be late.

I couldn't get up on a Monday if someone fired a gun outside my window. Here's the scene:

I'm in bed, all wrapped up in my flannel comforter, which hasn't seen a washing machine since my first week in my apartment--last year--nice and warm. I don't hear the back-up alarms on the trucks at the convenience store, next door. All is well.

Then, my alarm goes off. The first alarm is a radio alarm. I keep the volume rather loud, and I worry that it will bother my neighbor. So, I jump out of bed, slide quickly across the room, and turn it off. I walk toward the door, and slip into the waiting bed I pass on the way. I have at least 12 minutes until the second alarm goes off.

Now I'm back, under the blanket, getting toasty. Just as bliss is reached, the second alarm goes off. This time it's a beeper, from the same clock radio. It sounds just like those back-up alarms, which I now hear, as my sleep is being quite disrupted. In spite of my need to get up, I set the second alarm to go off in another 15 minutes. This goes on for about an hour.

Somedays, much like today, I forget to re-set the alarm, and end up popping awake some time later. Now I have about a half of an hour to get to work, and I'm in need of a shave. I also wear a shirt and tie, so we're talking about a time consuming grooming process. It sucks, and I hate the way it makes me feel.

Somehow, I manage to have these things happen every morning. On the very rare occasion that I get up with a lot of time, something bad inevitably happens, and I'm late anyway.

I thought maybe it had something to do with living alone. I started that last year, having moved out of my parent's place, and gotten rid of the girlfriend a long time back. There's no one to prod me to get up, but that's not a good excuse. I think it's something about work, but I can't put my finger on it. Could be my health, or some sort of depression. Who knows.

For now, I'll go to bed, and try again tomorrow.

Just finished watching Who am I? starring Jackie Chan as Jackie Chan with short-term amnesia on video. Brilliant action sequences again, including some really cool rally car stunts - and driven by a cute girl !

Light relief from another day at work. I've been at my practice for more than a year now, and I love it when patients come back to see me for their 6-monthly check up! Some families have been for 3 check-ups with me!

The story with one the patients I saw today was that she had always gone for her check-ups - and sure enough it was on her treatment card - but her gum disease had gone unnoticed before! I had noted her chronic suppurative advanced periodontitis at her last check-up with me.

I am sure that the last dentist could not have missed the bleeding and pus exudate from her gums. I could just press gently on her gums, and this surge of pus would come out. Teeth were beginning to loosen. It was advanced perio! Needed specialist treatment.

So she's now seeing the periodontist - and there's only one of them in Wollongong, NSW, Australia. BTW, he does great business! But she asked me why didn't the last dentist pick it up and she was ANGRY. She always had a suspicion that something wasn't right about her gums. How was I supposed to defend my collegue? I knew the last dentist should've sent her to the specialist earlier, and not risk loosing teeth. But I also know that the last dentist was a very responsible (& experienced) lady - where did it go wrong?

Hmmm... She thought that I was exaggerating on first diagnosis, thinking that I was "inexperienced". Of course, I'm not supposed to take offence at this. Which I don't, honestly! She told me this today, at her second check-up with me.

I guess one of the lessons from this is not to trust one person's judgement to the grave. Besides, {medical} professionals are always happy for you to get a second opinion - it doubles the chances of a correct diagnosis, and (hopefully) halves the chances of litigation for incorrect diagnosis/wrong treatment and lost time & money.

I got in to work early this morning, about ten minutes before seven. I don't really have set hours, but generally work from 8am to 4:30pm.

My wife and I are dropping the kids off with grandma this evening, so we can spend he weekend together. I said yesterday the my marriage is failing, and it is, but we can still do things together. Maybe even still be intimate. I can hope...I am lonely.

There is this guy i work with. He is resisting the departmental shift toward Macromedia's Dreamweaver because he is incompetent. He can only use MS Frontpage, and that only barely. He is our "Deputy for Web Production", whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. Really, what can you do? Today I am going to go in and remove all of the bogus tags that Frontpage puts in, clean up the HTML, then call and say "Oh, I made some changes to the pages you put up yesterday, tell me what you think."

Dumbass.

For the less-observant among you, I accidentally put this day log yesterday. Since I hadn't finished it, here it is again. (Mental note: could write 'psychic' day logs by writing them in the next day)

My local coffee shop was out of my faviourite syrup. I had to change my order for the first time in two years!

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, catch up on sleep, more like).

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 barely lasted 10 minutes but I glad it went (it was pathetic).

For some reason I somehow manage to pick up all the weird patients. Today there were these two teenage girls, who presented with headache, nausea and pain.

They look like they're sick. Turns out the story is that they bought some heroin to inject up from a drug dealer they had not bought from before. They had heard that some of their friends got sick after buying from this guy, but did that stop them? No ... they even noticed that the heroin they got did not look like their regular dose of heroin (it was a little brownish), but did that stop them? NO ....

So 45 minutes later they fall really sick and turn up in the hospital emergency department not long after. As one of the poor doctors manning the subacute section there, I notice that the triage sheets for the next two patients to be seen have exactly the same history, so I bring both patients into a room at the same time.

Then the trouble really begins. They keep on wailing about how they are really sick. One goes on saying that she is so sick she feels like killing herself. On examination they both are febrile with a temperature of 38.0 degrees Centigrade, heart rates of between 120 and 130, normal blood pressures, possible abdominal guarding and no respiratory signs.

The one who says she feels like killing herself did seem sicker than the other one but she then asked for morphine. Intravenously. hmm...

They are offered panadeine forte (Tylenol #3 for you Yanks) and aspirin for relief of their pain but they refuse it saying they won't be able to keep it down. Strangely enough, they do manage to drink a cup of water each ...

Anyway, IV cannulas are finally put into their arms after a few botched attempts by yours truly (complaining and yelling never made my job easier) and they were calmed down with metoclopramide (an anti-emetic, for nausea) and some IV fluids.

The two girls were first seen in one of the rooms and they needed a bed in the acute section for monitoring (the plan became that they should be sedated until they slept it off as their condition did not seem dangerous). As it turned out, they had to wait for the beds to be emptied. As one bed became available, there was a short argument between them as to who would get the bed first.

"I'm going first."

"No, I'm going first. I'm sicker than you."

Sheesh.

Anyway, they were sedated with some midazolam and kept quiet that way until they settled down.

What a couple of characters.


There was another IV drug user that I saw. This one was an older lady with a foreign body in the sole of her foot. She had stepped on a needle dropped on her kitchen floor by a friend of her boyfriend. Sure enough, the needle punctured her foot and got broken inside her foot. All attempts by her to take it out herself failed.

On examination, her foot was quite tender over the area where the needle had penetrated her foot. Otherwise, her foot was normal, there being no neurological or vascular deficits. X-Ray of her foot revealed a broken needle of about 5mm length embedded in her foot with at least 4mm between the tip of the needle and her skin.

One complicating factor was that the person who dropped his needle there was Hepatitis C positive. So this woman wanted a test for it. No sooner than I had taken blood from her, ordered the relevant tests for needlestick injuries, contacted the Sexual Health Clinic and asked about HIV prophylaxis and was going back to ask her if she knew what the HIV status of the needle-owner was that I found she was nowhere to be found.

She had disappeared. With that obviously painful needle still stuck in her foot. She had had a surgical registrar have a look at her, who was in the process of booking an operating theather session for her for the quick removal of the needle under X-ray image intensification and she had gone Walkies!!

She probably went to have another shot of heroin or something like that. They expected her to return ... hopefully before the embedded needle turns into a big abscess.


Sheesh. Drug users. Trouble. My thoughts about the two young girls was the pitiful thing was that, even though they went through what might have been the sickest they ever felt in their lives, they were still likely to go back for more heroin later...

*sigh* ... what can you do?

well well well...
yesterday i went to see tom verlaine play music to man ray's silent films at hiroshima mon amour... it dragged on a bit and reminded me of bill frisell's guitar work for buster keaton's silent films... still it was nice and i ran into mimo who i hadn't seen in months... went to work today. did nothing. ate lunch at the mensa. nodded. I'm begining to feel comfortable here and i'm not getting as angry as in the first few days when my nodes would get dved... Who cares really...It's been 19 days since i quit smoking cancer sticks...
Um, ah... mailed Kerry his copy of the MMW show from London, so he can put it on the net... mailed dad a letter too. that's bout all. Tonight it's all about smoking hash and drinking wine.

Work seems to be going by slower than usual today.

Don't get me wrong, I love my job. Today just seems to be boring for some reason. Maybe it's because the sales staff is in New Jersey for the weekend, so the office is quiet. Who knows?

I'm getting more and more frustrated with my manager. Ever since he became the director of security, he seems to think I don't need to be informed of anything that's going on - including the happenings in my own department. This has gone on for the past two weeks, and it's not getting any better.

I bought a Dreamcast game on eBay earlier this week - Dead or Alive 2. It was in my mailbox last night. I opened it up and started it, only to find that it's a pirated Japanese version! The eBay seller is dealing exclusively in multiple copies of Dreamcast games. The inserts in the jewel case are clearly printed on an inkjet printer. I'm pretty pissed off about this. $30 for a stripped down, illegal foreign copy of a game. (I wouldn't mind the full version in Japanese, if it was legit.)

I propose a new feature! Ever since I moved to Atlanta, I have been exposed to some really unique cuisine that I had never even thought of trying before I moved out on my own. Much of it is very good. So, starting today, I shall node a Lunch Log in with my daylog. I encourage others to do the same! Okay, so maybe today's lunch log isn't one of the best examples of this, but as I said, half the staff is gone today, so I ate lunch here.

Lunch Log: Half a package of saltine crackers, some sprinkled with hot sauce.

Oh boy. Do days get any worse?

I doubt it. It was looking to be great day. I was all ready to ask out the current "girl of my dreams" and go to a party that evening. Went to school this morning, nervous of course, to inquire of my liason what she would say when I asked her out. My friend told me she'd say no.

I was suitably depressed and, eventually, angry.

So I didn't ask her at all. I mean, I as much as know she would've said no, so why degrade the situation further, right? Well, that was pretty unpleasant, I can tell you.

The party was good, lots of fun people, bu the dinner was awful. Ever eaten Indian food? Don't. Too spicy, too wierd, too expensive.

And that was my day. Fortunately, it's almost over.

Teaser:

("These are the voyages")

The preceding 40-odd hours have been fraught with emotion.

Gee, that is such an innocent sentence....

And yet....in that short timespan, I've been fired from a comfortable but futureless job, and hired for a promising-but-tough job that is sure to take me all the right places.

Quick flashback/background:

("Five years ago...")

I used to be a career programmer. I got tired of that (yes, my geekish friends, there are other kinds of geekdom worth pursuing) and took up history as a field of endeavour. Recently, I got my BA (with, I might immodestly add, the record highest grade average at my University).

All the time, I've kept on working as a freelance programmer, part time, for the same employer where I used to work full time. I've been there since 1989, believe it or not. Recently, given my academic level, I'd been planning to junk that job and get a new one, more relevant to the study of history. I'd been offered jobs at the Royal Danish Archives, and elsewhere, but I hadn't taken them. They paid less money (civil servants don't exactly cash in on their careers), and my existing job required no brain at all. I was simply too lazy to upset the apple cart.

Recently, my place of employment, a newspaper, had been the object of a buy-out, and the new owners were known to be trimming the fat (that would be me - hi, guys!).

Fast forward to yesterday:

("Meanwhile, at the newspaper, our intrepid hero, supecting nothing....")

When I arrived at work, my boss (who, I might add, is an all-around nice guy, and the only boss I've ever had who I really like) called me into his office. "We have to talk," he said - and, hey, I knew what that meant.

Sure enough, I was fired. No surprise. My boss tried to break it gently, and promised me a long and gentle tapering-off of the relationship, if I so desired. He knew that, as a student, I'd have to go shopping for a job immediately (I do have two kids to support, after all), and he promised to make it as easy as possible for me.

I didn't pretend to be happy about the situation, but I was openly relieved. My own laziness had been keeping me from quitting, even though I knew it would be better for me to do so - in order to get a more relevant job. After all, being a web programmer may be all well and good - but it has no real significance on the CV of an historian.

Anyway, we parted on amicable terms, with an agreement to fix a final date sometime in the very near future - and I went job-hunting.

Not for long, though...

Denouement:

("Leaping tall buildings in a single bound...")

Having spent a customary sleepless night considering the matter, I went to the University today. In a far from random manner, I went to see one of my teachers, who'd been my guide through the difficult subject of the Second War for Schleswig-Holstein a little over a year ago. He had a high opinion of me, I knew, and he'd always struck me as being a mover and shaker, one of those people who are connected.

I presented my situation, and Bona Fortuna smiled on me. It seems he'd been looking for a research assistant with precisely my qualifications. Ten minutes later, I had a tentative job offer (subject to a few funding considerations, but pretty much bankable). Not only that, but this was precisely the sort of job that I'd been thinking about getting, in order to get started in the field of professional history, for over a year.

Go figure.

Postscript:

("Sour apples")

Yes, there are some sour apples, but only a few. I should be completely overjoyed. Really, I am.

But...

It's just that I'd so wanted to be the one that quit to go on to better things, instead of the one that got fired.

I guess what pisses me off is that they beat me to it.

- 30 -

(in other words, EOF)

Our company is still in the process of moving its far-flung employees into our shiny new building, and I, being both semi-new and "one of those computer people" (I figure such an influx is a new thing there), sometimes, with my scruffy, spacy (and multifaceted non-anglo) appearance, will get mistaken for a delivery person, or, worse, an intruder. I've had small incidents the last couple of days; yesterday, when someone's passcard failed to operate in the elevator (instead of the pleasant beep of acknowledgement when he passed his card o'er the electro-Cyclops thingy, he got the sound of a flu-racked touch-tone phone), the person entering the elevator behind him kindly swept his card and took our requests for floors, pressing the buttons for us as we packed ourselves in. I started to tell the bad-passcard guy to go to the second floor and have the card checked, or maybe take it out of his wallet before swiping, when another employee interrupted and began a long explanation of pretty much the same thing. To me. Rather than give him an "I WORK HERE, BUD" lecture, I just listened, smiled, and waited 'til I could get to my floor.

Today, after taking a cigarette break outside, I stumbled back into the building, high on nicotine and fumbling for my passcard, as usual. One of the front-desk people, apparently someone new, barked out a "where (the hell) are you going (, scumbag)?" at me; I had to kindly explain that I was headed for the __th floor, and that I worked there.

Maybe we should wear company uniforms.

At work, on a Saturday morning, somewhat cranky.

Backing up 230Gb of crappy user data onto AIT tapes before a rebuild of the primary netatalk server. And oh lucky me I crashed out my 500+Mb mail archive yesterday so bad I seem to have lost all my archived email. I'll have to restore from a backup in December, which of course is in a different city (not such a problem one would think what with DSL and so-on, but it's on a CD-R in a drawer..) Grrrr.

It's overcast and rainy here in Sydney. A whole weekend with my name on it, and here I am inside this airless office for the next 38 hours..

oh g'wan, si, why not have a good moan

hours and hours later...

Our hero is still frigging around with Linux. The server was not happy with the repairs, and I'm now on my fifth install. I'm just trying to figure out why I'm getting a kernel panic on this Dell when I've got four other identical boxes running the same distro very very happily. I'm not in tears, but I feel a little tightness around my throat and I feel like a hug. I've been going since 5am today and I really do not want to be here for a 20 hour day....

9:26pm

I woke up a little early to get on the net and check my email. I don't know why. Sometimes I think I might actually get unsolicited correspondence from a friend. It never seems to happen though. I guess sometimes I think that there's always an extremely slight chance that Sara might write to me.

Anyway, so I go load up my email client and notice my DSL line is down. I tried restarting it, then rebooting my computer and still no good. It would connect for about 1 minute and then disconnect. I called to check the status of the network and they said it was ok. I called back to talk to tech support and they checked into it and noticed something wrong. They said they'd have it fixed by 6pm.

So I went on into work, arriving nearly on time. We (CR, JS, and I) had lunch at Steak & Shake today. They have damn good hamburgers. Everyone at work was talking about the big paintball game tomorrow. About 20 of us are going to get together to take our aggressions out by shooting each other. Sounds fun.

I got some debugging done today, but ran into a strange problem when I was simply copying an integer into a structure array. I eventually found out that I wasn't properly keeping track of how much memory I allocated for the growing array. I fixed it and pretty much left off there.

I hung around work for a little while and then when one of my fellow programmers decided to leave, I decided to go ahead and leave with her. I usually try to walk the ladies out at night since we've had some trouble with burglars breaking into people's cars at night. It's awfully dark in the parking lot, and I think someone should escort the ladies out at night.

I stopped for chinese fooooood and by a sports store to pick up some "protection" for tomorrow's paintball event. I have heard some bad stories about guys who didn't wear "protection" while playing paintball and I don't want to become a story for someone else.

I got three checking account overdraft charges yesterday. It figures that my tax return finally makes it to my account today, along with my bi-weekly pay. If only that damn tax return would have came yesterday, I'd have 90 dollars more in my account right now.

Well, I feel pretty good tonight. I don't know if I feel good because I took Kava Kava today, or if my mood is just good anyway. I've got a headache and I still am in a good mood. It's strange.

I don't really feel like going to the gym tonight. My headache is one reason, but the other is that I don't want to be sore for tomorrow's game.

Oh well, I'm going to go find something to do now, right after I go back and hardlink a few items up above. I seem to be quite verbose tonight.

I did it!

I finished my project for work.
*sigh*
Now I better get a big raise or this place can kiss me and the project goodbye, I'm not above deleting the project if my raise request is refused.
Does that make me a bad person?

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