Everything Day Logs
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Everything Snapshot

Time: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 00:03:27 GMT
Everything server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU mod_perl/1.21_03-dev
Number of nodes: 625694 (1169 new since July 26, 2000)
Number of users: 17194 (40 new since July 26, 2000)
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New Nodes: [The word "metanode" is overused in node titles] [The Day the EDB ate Himself] [Little Debbie was a Whore of the Media] [Twister: the rules] [Buyer Beware] [Coca-Cola] [Jesus was Mexican] [what if] [lenses] [Jesus was Mexican] [The word "metanode" is overused in node titles] [the cactus is the victim in all this] [Suez canal] [deathday] [July 26, 2000]

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JeffMagnus node count: 3884 (2 new since July 26, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience: 8549 (106 more since July 26, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.201 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.621%
JeffMagnus node of the day: E2 server facts

Ahh what a wonderful evening. It was so wonderful in fact, that i feel inspired to write about it for all of history to know and if an alien race were to see only the E2 database, this would add more features to the human experience.

It all started when my roomate (who just happens to be my best friend for ten years now, and who also happens to be gay) Went to Target and bought a crock pot. A most wonderful invention for many reasons. He cooked the most wonderful roast. Oh my was it scrumptious! And being the college kid that i am, good meals are few and far between. There was going to be much more food than we could eat so we both invited one person each. Our old roomate Stephen (invited by Dave my roomate) and Jen (invited by me, tangentman).

The evening started off very well with dinner and drinks. Once again i found my self in a familiar situation of being the only straight person at a social function. I have 2 straight friends, both being ex-girlfriends of mine. Hi ho. We ate dinner and had drinks and a nice long chat out in our sun room. Dave took Stephen home, which left Jen and I alone to talk about this and that.

I have recently broken up with a girl and Jen knows us both very well, so she can sympathize with me about many things, including relationships gone awry. We ended up in my bedroom (A great place to socialize if you ask me) And we did the whole "I'll show you old pictures of me thing" that people do when they have bonding experiences

We cuddled for a long while and exchanged pecks here and there. It was a wonderful experience. I can still feel the happy chemicals floating through my body. Before she left we excanged a big old smooch that meant more than a platonic kiss. I answered (in a way) the question of How do you know a girl wants to smooch? before, but now i must revise my answer to this:

If it's not obvious, then, you can't be for certain and you don't know and you shouldn't do it. If it is obvious, then by all means kiss the girl! *sigh* I hate being sappy but i can't help it. I think she likes me for crying out loud.

Yet another update: 8/26/00 Well, it seems that i've turned the girl permantly. Who knew? we're not getting hitched or anything, but i think that she's definately found out what the heck she wants out of a relationship. Not brag or anything, well okay just a little, i think i did my part for the human race. i think i need a beer. Yup. Goodnight folks. Happy hunting. *tangentman, rides off into the sunset on his high horse*

Yesterday | Dizzy->Day_Logs() | Tomorrow


8:30 BST

Just a quickie before breakfast ;-P

I saw my brother in his sports car as I walked to work. He offered me a lift, but I declined as it meant he would have had to change lanes and put us both in danger. He really takes good care of that car, polishing, cleaning, hoovering and waxing. For a 19 year old, he certainly looks very business like in that suit.

The plant I bought into work has died. I'm waiting for the snide comments from my colleagues (who think of me as having green fingers)

I must completely read: http://danny.oz.au/free-software/advocacy/against_IP.html (linked from /.)

10:30 BST

My stance on the whole Intellectual Property thing is this: I believe that the free exchange of ideas benefits society; I also believe that people should be free to implement ideas. I work in the Television Broadcast industry - I see, time and time again, closed standards hurting consumers and broadcasters. Sky currently implement a closed standard for their digital "data" services, ONdigital (a rival) implement a different service. This means that content providers would have to author 2 completely different types of service (most don't), while viewers on Sky can't get digital data services by the BBC for instance. I think that anything that is adopted by a large number of people should be made open, freely accessible and freely discussable. (is that a word?) (on related news, there is an open standard for TV data broadcasting. It's called MHP)

In a simple black and white view, I believe that if someone puts a lot of effort into something, they should be rewarded. Is it wrong to copy someone? E.g. If A designs a new thingy, does B have a right to copy that thingy? The problems arise when money, remuneration, repayment get factored in. (truly, money is the root of all evil :)

I hate these arguments - I get dizzy going around in circles within them.

12:45 BST

Why is it that any email I send causes problems? I sent out the link to the against intellectual property page (originally linked from slashdot) to a bunch of colleagues. Admittedly, I thought that I might get a snide remark from my Project Leader (who hates Unix + Open Source), but I didn't realise that people would start ranting at each other... There is a flamewar smouldering amongst my friends right now because of something I did :(

Mental Note: realise that some people hate an ideal enough to attempt to destroy any vocalisation of that ideal.

I sat on the wrong side of the dinner table today, facing the tables by the window. Of course, the girl who talks about me with her friends was there - sitting directly in my line of sight. Why can't some people realise that my head is pointed in a certain direction because of the way my seat is positioned. I am not hitting on you!

sensei's Easily Among the Flowers makes me want to run through a wildflower field chasing butterflies...

13:15 BST

Our discussion has hinged on the economic benefit of the open source ideology. My definition of "The Economic advantage of Open Source" : By contributing a small amount to a freely accessible larger pool, you save much more than what you put in. <-- I'm quite proud of that :)

19:00 BST

Utterly knackered. I am so tired from walking home. My legs hurt with fatigue and my feet ache. But I have lost 4 pounds over the last week - so it's doing some good.

12:33 EET

I'm supposed to actually work at the office today. Interesting.
Today's assignment consists of modifying a co-worker's code, a thing I really enjoy to do. Not. There's nothing as fustrating as working with somebody else's code, especially if it's completely illogical, poorly formatted and otherwise stupid. Even when the code is just dead simple php/html. Nothing is better than complex table structures from completely different projects copy-pasted into existing complex table stuctures, without editing them at all. *sigh*

Note to self: Record more MDs. The selection is too small for a 5-hour workday.


23:28 EET

Stoned on E2 again. The second time I've smoked in a month, and it was two days in a row. Well, I'm not complaining.

Our firm had an another minigolf match today. I think I came in second, but my final score of 74 was still a disappointment. I was aiming at 70. And I could've done better than 2nd position, since I completely ruled the game for the first 9 courses. But then again it was just a game, played for fun. And fun it was.


Today's Writeups:
  • Korg 707
  • Korg DS-8
  • Milenium
  • Day started 90 minutes later than usual for me, around 8am. Seems I haven't had a good sleep-in for weeks now. My last 2 day weekend was at least 6 weeks back.

    Still off the grog, over half way to my 3 month target

    Wrote boring legal stuff for work for the first part of the day, installed a new NIC in Arvind's Mandrake box in the afternoon, taught him some rpm, organised Gemma's dinner, and went off to the CLUG meeting in almost sub-zero temperature this evening at the ANU. There to see a HTML::Mason demo. Seems that the whole Linuxcare team is in SF at the mo, so CLUG wasn't as organised as usual (tho that's not saying much for a LUG IMHO).

    Left before pizza 'cause was missing E2 (sad, I know)

    I roped a new noder in yesterday, akasha is well on her way to addiction and the inevitable fall.

    Enjoying lblack's noding, but think he probably smokes too much.

    Yes, its a new day. Unfortunately, I was wakened to find a bug crawling up my leg. I'm not dirty or anything, it REALLY freaked me out (not that being dirty is a pre-requisite for not-being-REALLY-freaked-out). ANYWAY - The strange part is that I had had a dream that I was being chased through the woods and I was worried about getting bugs on me. Weird. So now I'm awake. And here. Noding. And pulling a string for my cat. (And if you're worried about what happened to the bug, I got it inside a pill container and took it outside. Freedom!)

    thursday morning

    more rain

    this isn't summer. april never ended.

    april come she will

    thursday afternoon

    i just want to sleep a lot. i'm not feeling too well but i absolutely have to go to practice today. i'll grin and bear it and make it through.

    with the man in las vegas, and him saying he'll call me, i feel like i need to stay by the phone (but i'm not). i'm tempted to tell him not to call so that every minute that passes without a phone call doesn't feel quite so... lonely.

    thursday evening

    i called the studio and told them i would be taking another three weeks off. i am going to work on some important stuff in the meantime. right now there are things more important than martial arts. right now i don't enjoy it anyway. i don't enjoy much of anything and that is one of the things i am going to be working on.

    thursday night

    it's been an exhausting day. but i am calm. calm. so much calmer than earlier. good friends and good lovers. and much needed rationality on my part.
    Today began really well. J. made me a beautiful hand-printed tee shirt this morning. The print is rectangular coloured red and black. The main rectangle is made up of smaller ones each of which has a different mesh pattern. It looks really cool. I love it when someone makes a work of art just for me. She's promised to make me another one. Woohoo!

    For some reason a memory of my father from when I was a small child popped into my head. I don't often think about him; I don't really know where that came from. Although I was just describing a memory verbatim, reading it through (after I noded it) it seems like a metaphor for abandonment and this makes me feel a little sad.

    After a promising start things have gone downhill. Water is leaking in from the roof (or possibly the hot water tank) and is appearing under the paint on the plasterboard making huge bulges. When I went up into the loft to check it out I had to shift some insulation out of the way. It raised up a large cloud of dust, hopefully just plain dust and not something really lung-fucking. Anyhow, now my chest feels heavy with whatever garbage I inhaled. Grr!

    Update on the leak. I need a new hot water tank. :-(

    Had an interesting conversation with my brother about God's algorithm for the Rubik's cube. He has found a useful program by a guy called Kociemba that gives minimal solutions (although whether it does it in finite time is another question). Compiled OK with gcc; now I just need to find the disk space for the 64MB table it generates.

    Tomorrow

    sigh... i'm soaked to the bone due to this rain-type apparatus in the boston area. I got to watch _3_ green line trains go by my stop before one finally made a pickup. I "borrowed" my roommate's umbrella (Sorry Leigh Ann) so I could stay some form of dry, but alas, it's really coming down out there. I miss you. I'm semi-bummed. Dream Theater cancelled the last two shows on their North America tour, which contained the Worcester, Massachusetts show I was going to go to (and already bought tickets for).. Someone's been systematically downvoting me. Go right ahead and continue; far be it from me to care about XP, and if you want to get your tensions out, then go right ahead. People should be less stressed anyhow. That is all.

    It's so much easier to sleep when you have somebody holding you.

    Stayed up till 3am, chatting, goofing, got up at 645am to get ready for work. Watched pokemon and ate scrambled eggs, and toast with apple butter.

    And despite it being the third day in a row, my > 4 hours of sleep are requiring me to have lots of coffee.

    Aaaaaah. What a morning.

    Let's try this again. I finished this whole writeup, and was proofreading it when my effing computer crashed. I hate Windows.

    My sister got back from Japan last night, with an armload of Japanese food. She brought me a tea cup from the "everything is 100 yen" store(that's about $0.90US for the exchange rate impaired). Now I need to find where to buy green tea around here. Then I can spend this weekend eating soba with green tea and watching anime. Not like I'll have much else to do; the girlfriend is going to Seattle for the weekend :-(

    Other things are going on, but they're too personal for everything right now. I may node about it at a later date. (this is not taunting, it's a reminder to myself to sit down and write up a few things)
    12:50 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

    Today is my next to last day of work. I wrote my last little niblet of code today; everything has been handed off to my clueless team members and documented to the best of my ability. I estimate the first emergency help call will be fifteen minutes after I get home.

    Saw Hoosiers tonight for the first time in about ten years. Still a first class movie.

    My aunt, uncle, and two cousins are arriving from Florida tomorrow to stay with us for a couple of days. My cousins (ten and four years old) usually get up around 6 AM. I usually get up around 4 PM. My door is going to be barricaded by about ten layers of furniture and whatever else I can throw at it.

    I gotta remember to put my ethernet card back in before I leave for school in a few weeks...

    Girls are insane.

    When I first started listening to music by The Offspring (six years ago, cripes...), I just thought it was cool. Lately though, I've really started identifying more and more with a lot of the ultra-depressing lyrics. The funny thing is that I'm perfectly happy with my life right now. I think I'm just starting to get even more cynical about everything. If I don't find a girlfriend soon I may spontaneously combust. My views on womankind probably aren't helping the matter. It wouldn't kill me to smile every once in a while, either. I think part of the problem is that aside from a brief period at the beginning of my freshman year of college, my standards don't lower when I'm drunk. I've always been immensely proud and protective of that, but a little nookie wouldn't hurt. I'm in the best shape of my life; I haven't had a girlfriend in nine months. I'm whining. I don't care.

    FUCK OFF.
    Watering plants is something I must do, more watering that is, I think the summer heat is setting in a bit, and they're thirsty leetle things. It's odd how little summer we've had this year so far, I've a feeling it will come in late and surprise us all. I don't particularly enjoy the heat but I guess it's bound to happen despite my feelings on the matter.

    I hurt my shoulder somehow, possibly rolling around in the grass, but it was oh so fun and worth it despite unwelcome slightly annoying pain.

    The baby bunnies are getting bigger, which I like not for they aren't our bunnies really, my sister is raising them for someone else. He will probably end up selling them for meat.. I don't think I can let that happen. I may have to hide them all somewhere. This is precisely the reason that I wish I were vegetarian, I always feel hypocritical saying that people shouldn't eat bunnies, when in all reality anything I get close to is going to seem like non good food'y matter. It's sort of similar to the fact that I can be sad when a bunch of people are killed in a plane crash, but I didn't know them so it won't effect me quite so much as it would if they were people I knew on a personal level. Of course, I can still feel loss there, but it's just not going to be the same. Bleh.

    This day is.. too much for me I don't know how much more of this intense happy, overwhelming feeling I can take. I never want it to stop, but I also think it's taking every last bit of energy from my body and pouring it into these emotions that I can't even describe. I don't think I knew these feelings existed.

    I keep sitting here and cradling my head in my hands, wondering at the fact that you could be, and that you would care to even think twice about someone like me. I feel so out there like I'm letting you in more than I've let others in, and more quickly.. it's frightening. I love you, so much but every time I want to tell you I crumble because I can't believe how strongly I feel, and I'm scared, not of loving you, but something else, maybe I just need to let things happen and not fret. I'm always scared but, not like this.. I want this to be more real than anything in my life has ever been. I don't know if that makes any sense to anyone but me, I just know that above all it is what I want.

    I guess I have some things to do today, I guess I should get doing them soon.
                           ..
    
    note: *ahem*. Thanks to those who would pollute my innocent grass rolling with sexual implications! I was ALONE in the grass, thank you very much, it was harmless frolicking.. heh.

    I am NOT having a good day. Left my pack in my buddy's trunk when we went rock climbing, inside was a frisbee,pictures of my trip to Toronto, my keys, wallet, bus pass and work badge. After having to pay the blasted $2.50 to get on the bus this morning, and hastling the security gaurd to let me in without any id, I finally got to work, but I have absolutely nothing to do, which is ok, but its been the case for about 2 weeks now, and I am starting to go insane!!!

    I got the crap pounded out of me in Judo the other day, by Sensei Jose, who came to visit the new club I just joined up with. He is an olympian from Cuba.

    I also just got a new haircut, but I woke up late, so I didn't have time to take a shower, so my bed head is REALLY bad. Plus the guy who was giving me a haircut, didn't speak english, which in itself is not a bad thing, its just that I don't speak portugeuse. So I just let him do whatever, because I didn't want to offend him. He forgot to turn on the clipper a couple of times, and just got my hair stuck in the teeth, which hurt a lot.

    All in all a very bad day.. I did reach 50 XP today though, which is some consolation.

    Uh. Nothing exercise-related to relate today, really (except I have to admit getting the bus home yesterday - I was late!). Walked both ways today, though!

    On the other paw, we have got a "new" (rented reconditioned) video recorder. Our Panasonic has been getting very unreliable at rewinding and ejecting tapes. It finally decided it was keeping the current tape on Sunday. Nothing I could do would persuade it to be parted from it.

    So we're renting a Thorn.

    Yesterday | Tomorrow

    Today I got at work a bit later than usual: normally I consider midday the barrier of lateness (of course, this is in normal days: when demo mode is on, my workday is 0800 to 2200+).
    I have slacked away yesterday, and Monday too. My productivity is crashing, but since nobody has complained yet, I think I will just read one more Slashdot article ...

    Watched Titan AE list night. I admit that I liked it, and more surprisingly my SO liked it too.
    I am definitely going to Italy in the last week of September plus the first week of October. I would have preferred three weeks, but no such luck.

    In an entirely Dilbertesque move, the Big Kahuna has chosen to bless the Goosefood Project with, guess what, outside consultants. True to commonplace, they came in, said that we sucked, claimed that we needed a firewall (the claim came from a graphic designer ...), asked us if we had any Web design experience and left.
    I had to restrain myself from physical violence, and from shouting "I don't know about you, but my first web page is from 1994. I have run Mosaic. How many RFCs have you read, oh-so-brilliant Wired-reading, Windows-using, expensive DOLT ?".
    Yesterday one of our WAN links died, upstream. Countless emails saying "baffo, baffo, we cannot access our mission critical server ! It must be down !". They still do not understand that, even if it is just 30 kilometers away, networkologically speaking it is 18 hops (and about 1500 milliseconds) away, routed through Miami. So if the net goes down, the server may be fine but it certainly is unreachable.

    What else ... I am quite satisfied about my french maids writeup. I am not satisfied about the continuing presence of drill demons in the building. I have switched window manager, from Enlightenment to SawFish (aka Sawmill). The weather is fine, as always here. My SO lives in anguish, for various and bizarre reasons. I am reading a biography of Ezra Pound, and an essay on T.S. Elliot. There are some noders I would like to meet in person, but who knows if it will ever happen.

    I continue to receive an average of five "life stages" virus-infected emails per day from people I don't even know.

    "Why should I take time out of my work to get a windshield?" David inquired, greasy elbows staining the doorway to my office. He had just been told by my co-worker, Sandy, that the Ranger he was working on would not start. It had to be jump started before it could go to service for an alignment. While holding the keys in one hand and the jump box in the other, he expressed was not this was not job either. We had been invited on a discourse of what and wasn't the body man's job. "I don't get paid for that. Why should I do things on a job that I don't get paid for?"

    Sandi, trying to get her customer's truck to the alignment rack, wrestles the jumpbox and keys out of his hands so she can do it her fucking self. "Because the whole job is your fucking job. That's why. When we give you an estimate, that car becomes your job, from start to finish. We handle the customers, you handle the car." I sat back in my office chair and tried my best to keep my voice at an even keel, even light, as though I was joking about the whole thing. David was good at one thing, never letting the argument force him to raise his voice.

    I seriously doubt using that word accomplished much. But it did feel good.

    I saw Starrynight on Tuesday. We went to a Japanese restaurant in San Jose called House of Genji. It was very good--as was the food. Starry's currently at some sort of Apple thingie...possibly on Saturday we'll go up to Nihonmachi and Tangrenjie before he flies home. Yesterday I went to see The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology at the Asian Art Museum, went through the Japanese Tea Garden, and got really lost trying to leave San Francisco. I think I'll stick to BART from now on, thank you very much. I don't think that impressed my SO's father...d'oh! How embarassing. ... In other news, I applied for several jobs, at the museum, Berkeley, China Books, and other interesting places. Now i need to go fill up all the nodes I've linked to above that don't exist yet. yay! content!

    WHEE!!! I got a postcard from Segnbora-T at my new address!!! My first e2 postcard! It has a very odd photo on the front, and niceness on the back. poing!
    Today

    Well, another lonely day at the office. I started and finished working on the project my former-boss-who-is-still-in-charge-of-me-somehow left. It would have been a hell-of-a-lot easier if he had identified the graphics with something other than pic1, pic2,... pic54.

    Since I finished that by lunch, I took a long lunch (due to the slow-ass waitress) and returned to node away the afternoon.

    Pleasant Moment

    I received a love note from my Hubby via e-mail this morning. He knows how difficult it has been for me to sit here doing next to nothing for 2 months, and he sent me a little note to cheer me up.

    Favorite Node Created Today

    moon shadows

    Plans for Tonight

    Eat a quick dinner and go to the Aquarium in downtown Ball Mer, Merlin. Hopefully we will be in time to see the dolphin show.


    Surf City - Here Comes the Sharks

    Today has been busy and odd, but I am much better than yesterday.

    Yesterday was just crazy. I left work early, and drove home with my head spinning like a top. I have always been diagnosed as being depressed, but I think I may have had a manic episode yesterday. I don’t know. My thoughts were racing about a mile a minute and I just had this horrible feeling that if I didn’t get back to my apartment that everything in the world would fall completely apart.

    I got back to my apartment, and rested for a little while. I was able to calm down and get back into a somewhat "normal" frame of mind. Then, I remembered why I spent 5 minutes loading laundry into my car that morning, and headed to the laundromat to get it done. I got home in time to watch Survivor, so I did that and ate some Jolly Rancher’s. Then the rest of the TV shows on sucked me in, and I didn’t move off the couch. I got tired all of a sudden about 11pm, made the bed up with clean sheets, and went to sleep.

    I have no problems getting to sleep lately, but I can’t get any restful sleep. I toss and turn a lot, and keep having dreams that I wake up from but can’t remember a minute later. My alarm went off at 6:45 as usual, and I got up and went to work.

    Work has been busy. Phil’s last day was yesterday, so I have to answer all the support emails myself and take phone calls. It has all settled down now, and I am pausing to think, reflect, and write some nodes since it helps with the think and reflect thing. I didn’t hear from the asshole customer who set me off yesterday, so I have to assume he took the computer to Best Buy and they fixed it for him. I probably should call him back, but I really don’t want to get yelled at for another 10 minutes like yesterday. I figure that if he had a problem, he would have called by now.

    I’ve been making some observations about customers and their geographic locations recently, and I think I will have to write a node about it sometime.

    One of the shrinks I tried to call yesterday called me back today, and I made an appointment to see him in a couple of weeks, as that was the only opening. I’ve decided to start taking St. John’s Wort again as a temporary measure and hope for the best. I’ll stop taking it again when it’s a few days before the appointment. I shouldn’t worry too much about getting pregnant since we use condoms too, but I do anyway. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Probably too much information. :)

    Tonight I have an appointment with my trainer, which will probably put me in pain again. He really went overboard with my arm muscles last week and I can just now sit here and type comfortably again. Of course, this is just in time to get more abuse. Oh well. If it doesn’t hurt, it probably isn’t doing any good. I have to start going in there to work out more often than our appointments or else there’s no point to having a trainer.

    I might go play bingo with some people from work tonight but I’m still undecided about that. I’m going to wait and see how I feel after the work out.

    Nodes That I Wrote Today:
    the letter on my bookshelf

    CD’s I’ve Listened To Today:
    Muslimgauze – United States of Islam
    Alanis Morrissette – Jagged Little Pill
    Dead Can Dance – Toward the Within

    And all I really want, is some patience. A way to kill the angry voice.

    Today I have twice experienced deja vu.

    First, I had borrowed Ragnar! Skunk's TV card, and set it up in my computer... a couple of times... until it started working. I plugged in the PlayStation which I borrowed along with it and turned on Final Fantasy Tactics. As the intro movie played... (A warrior takes sword in hand, clasping a gem to his heart...) I was struck by it. I've never borrowed his PlayStation before that I can remember, and certainly never his TV card, and I'm in a totally different room than ever, but I still got that eerie feeling that I had been there exactly before.

    Second was actually Everything-related. I was power-surfing as usual--I have eight e2 browser windows open ATM--when as so often happens I come across a "Findings:" telling me the last link I clicked didn't exist. I always forget what I was looking for when this happens... apparently I was looking up Edward Scissorhands. Now, I don't know what would cause anyone to have a sudden memory of not finding a node about Edward Scissorhands, but there it is. I've only even been here a week or two, and I just changed the theme from the charred which I've had the whole time to water, so I don't know what kind of familiarity that could come from.

    Deja vu happens to me a lot. It's really weird, like vertigo.

    Next week I'm going to be working in a different computer lab while the one I'm at now is closed for upgrades. This lab belongs to the School of Computing; the other one belongs to the School of Business, and it's really weird how they keep track of things. They made a big deal out of counting how many hours the lab was to be open and saying that if only one or two people were here late at night they might close it earlier. Uy.

    Ah well. I'm all up for an uninterrupted weekend of FF Tactics, Final Fantasy VIII, Legend of Mana, and Legend of Dragoon. If I can rip myself away from Everything.

    I have neglected Everything for too long.

    The girl that I sneezed on became the girl I am currently romantically involved. That makes me feel really good, especially since she explicitly stated that she was attracted to tall, dorky guys. It sounded so suspsicious at first, but then she actually seemed interested in IP masking. Go figure. By the way, she is wicked cool and makes me happy.

    I saw a concert last night at The High Dive. Two shitty ska bands and a semi-decent punk group called Show Off. I thought ska died a long time ago, but these guys must not have each nail being hammered into the casket as Reel Big Fish released more and more albums.

    Today, I worked about 10 hours sitting in computer labs making sure the seat was warm. I am pretty sure that I do not want to see the rest of my career here.

    Woke up after yet another night of insomnia. What is with this 2 am awakening? I blame the bastards upstairs, except they aren't really bastards (one girl..), and they are probably just like me. They like the same music, anyway, much to my dismay. it would be easier to snarl at them if they did not like Magnetic Fields and Joy Division. bastards.

    so after many hours of looking at the cat, dawn came, and I realized that I had slept, as I was forced to awaken. groggy hell, I wandered out to the espresso maker, fired up a batch reminded myself not to spill it between the maker and the fridge (where it is cut with milk to make it chugable). what happens? Spill the whole thing. steaming espresso everywhere. ignored it (groggy, remember?) made another batch. bugger.

    hopped on the vespa and shot downtown. that woke me up. parked, went into the hotel and waited for bossPrime to get done with bossSubprime. greeted them warmly, hinted at a immediate need for more coffee. got a new task dumped on me. Walked down to the ferry, got more coffee, fabricated a plan, blazed home. Nice sunny seattle scooter weather.

    Massaged document all day, whereupon I had another request to meet downtown, so off I went. looking at new logo ideas, and since I am a programer nerd, not a graphic nerd (except vicariously), I found it odd to be invited. somebody is obviously kissing my ass. who? why?

    Turned back around, bolted home Printed document? 10 pages of specification changes. Thought about beer. Now heading back downtown yet again to stall and evolve the dwindling portion of my weekend. Somebody should come visit me, I need the excuse.

    Morning.
    Ate cold cereal, but only because I woke up earlier than usual. Was late to work anyway, SO can't leave the house in less than an hour and fifteen minutes even when she puts her makeup on in the car.
    It was my fault at being mad at her, too, which makes it even more stupid. She didn't know I had been late every day this week, so she had been taking her time, sleeping an extra ten minutes, etc.

    Work.
    I played more with ACID Music, by Sonic Foundry. It is an awesome music composing tool. I have been playing around with trance/techno tracks and they actually sound like what I try to download from the mp3 sites. I am pretty proud of myself for that.
    I coded some. An "intranet survey." BFD. Another spamming script, another 8000 emails out the door.
    I actually sat through four hours of meetings today about what I was supposed to be doing. Hello? I can'r do what we are jabbering about if I am sitting here patiently ignoreing you. "Why yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea! When you code it, then I will make a link to it, MMMkay? Until then you better not go to the sites of multi-million dollar companies and tell me what you like about their site." Morons.

    Home.
    My Wife called about half an hour before I was supposed to leave. The baby is sick, 102.2 fever. No big deal, he is just teething, but he can;t go to daycare tomorrow. My wife cooked dinner, I cleaned. It is what we usually do, but I have been letting her do the dishes while I play on the computer lately. I feel bad when I go back to the kitchen and they are all done, but she doesn't mind. I don't deserve my wife.

    Night. I wasn't really in the mood and so was too sleepy to respond effectively so we get dressed and turn off the lights. She is out immediately, while I am still wide awake. After laying there for twenty minutes, holding her, I slipped away to come node my mediocre day.

    Work was dull. I doodled more. You can blame work.

    Well, it's been 193 glorious days of uptime, but sadly, I feel that if I keep up with whoring my uptime, I'll never get to recompile my kernel and set up the in-home network. Sniffle. Time to make sure my startup script actually works...

    The fun part about Linux is that if I nail all the kernel options I need properly, I can install the network software and run it WITHOUT a damn reboot. I use Windoze less and less every day.

    ADDED INTO MP3 PLAYLIST TODAY: Knock on Wood, Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

    "Smile, Jesus loves you," says the man outside my building. He wears a long white beard, dirty and unkept on his face. He has no legs, they were probably lost in Vietnam, and sits in his wheelchair out there about once a week. "Jesus loves you," he says. Jesus obviously didn't love him.

    I can't stop watching people. It's an addiction.

    I stopped by the supermarket on the way home. The check out girl kept looking at us, then abruptly looking away when I looked back. I liked her. I liked the look in her eye. She was really looking at me, curiously, as I was watching her. It's not the blank look that most people give me. She wore her hair up and you could see the traces of sweat around her neck and forehead, as if she'd been working for hours there and only recently stopped sweating. Her nails were cut short but it appeared like she had probably bitten them off more than anything, the skin of her hands dark and tanned.

    I'm been questioning my beliefs a lot lately, although I have always questioned my beliefs. I'm beginning to think that leaning towards any extreme is not a Good Thing. Here's what I've been questioning: Capitalism vs. Socialism, Linux vs. Microsoft, Athiesm vs. Agnosticism, etc. Is taking the other end of the extreme any less silly?

    I'm too tired to think.
    Maybe the fact that i write these late-ish here, but i can hardly remember today.

    Maybe that attests to how little i do...

    But i do know this...

    woke up late for work. again... that makes, in all likelihood, the fourth time this week. so i went to work without showering (that's ok, no one has to smell me, all i am is Autoclave Girl, i'm well-hidden from the techies).

    And work is isolated enough, had i wanted to nap, i could have, but i had started reading The Ebony Tower... and like The Magus was, i couldn't put it down. mmm, good!

    Along those lines, i had soup (i'm a bad bad vegetarian, this had a little bit of chicken in it, spank me, i'm bad) and a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie. eating well, am i.

    Got all the way to my bus stop after my obligatory three hours in the Pathology building, then realised that i had left my wallet in my lab coat. so back i traversed. and took a later, and not so convenient, bus to Sarah's house.

    Sarah's son Charlie is autistic. He's almost four-and-a-half years old, and absolutely adorable. and at times, absolutely a terror. but today was nice, he actually didn't scream the whole time. progress, progress...

    and as it sometimes happens, it began raining... i like a good cleansing every now and again, though i am not sure if Cleveland rain really counts. so i came home, after a bit.

    made veggies and watched wrestling with Simon, Beth, Eric and Kendra. enlightening... and then this place drew me back, as it has every night, for some reason. some addictive power. so i write about my meaningless day, and think about my life, and read the gorgeous and not-so-gorgeous and honest and funny words of others.

    and that's what i'm doing, right now.
    Let's see.. I noded a lot of lyrics in the morning. Took care of my plants. Talked to ophie about a lot of crappy stuff that has been going on. Talked to my grandmother. Decided that I am totally overhauling my life. Didn't eat. Smoked too many cigarettes. Talked to a fellow noder for a while about silly stuff. Avoided thinking about my love life.

    I noded You and I. This is basically the theme song for my love life.. well he knows who he is..
    Black Hat

    The first keynote speaker, Brian Snow with the NSA, was decent - and unintentionally funny. Two of us suggested within the same minute (separately) that Snow sounded just like Hal from 2001. Anyway, Snow was all about some assurance. In fact, the subtitle of his talk was "It's about assurance, stupid." His summary was that most attacks result from failures of assurance, not function.

    At 10:30 we heard David LeBlanc, Senior Technologist with Microsoft Corporate Security, speak on real-world network security management techniques. He said that a box that's been hacked is like a pool that's been pissed in. What do you have to do? Drain the pool. His point was that once you know a system's been compromised, you take the compromised boxes offline (pull the cables), back it up, and put up a new box - that you should never just fix the immediate problem and keep running. He also talked about dependency loops, dependency chains, and how one needs to understand the scope of affected machines.

    At 13:30 we saw Ron Gula w/ Network Security Wizards speak on bypassing intrusion detection systems (host-based and NIDS). It was good, but the guy to me left had taken off his shoes, so it smelled like feet.

    We saw two more talks: Ron Moritz of Symantec Corp on proactive defense against malicious code, and Mark Kadric of Conxion Corp. on ID in high-speed networks. The general consensus, among Kadric and a couple of other speakers, was that commmercial IDSs weren't good enough yet, esp. for high speed networks (multiple OC3s and greater). He went over the types, and the drawbacks, and I'm really glossing over all of this, but it's a day log. :P

    And that night we had dinner at Benihana then played craps.

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