Mark has put in me in a pensive mood yet again. I don't get to see him that often at school, so we end up talking a lot on ICQ. Today he sent me a little limerick as he so often does...

If you say you care
Are you able to swear
That your feelings are true
Or will you say we're through
And add to my nightmare
<

And then he went offline before I could even respond. Sheesh!

I think everyone has doubts whether the people around them are true or not. I know I wonder about people sometimes when they are quiet or moody. I wonder if they are just having a bad day or if they are mad at me or if they dislike me for some reason. Maybe they secretly hate me and are just pretending to like me. I know things like this are pretty irrational, but sometimes you can't help but think them. I know Mark is not alone in these feelings, and I wish he stayed online so I could tell him.

That said, if he did stay online, he would have no reason to believe anything I said. He would just have to blindly trust me, and this is harder to do for some than others. If you have been hurt before, (and he has been) then this is really hard to do. But there comes a point where one has to make a choice between being alone and chancing getting hurt. I still wish he stayed online.

I hope he takes the chance. Sometimes I wish other people's hurt didn't cause me more heart ache than my own.

"What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?" - Lord Byron

Five Years

I've been with my girlfriend, Amanda, for five years today. I miss her a lot, such is the peril of a long distance relationship. I want to eat oranges with her and clean off her sticky lips.

But I'll see her later today, and I'm elated. I have so much to do before I see her, and I don't have money for a gift, but neither does she. We're, like, perfect for one another.

I'm almost happy.

It's been a long time since I've had a good day like this. Today is a good day.

This morning, around 2:30 am, we were driving back from my friend Mike's house in Pottstown, back to West Chester, after a detour to Denny's. Having recently watched Evil Dead 2 and Night of the Living Dead, we were talking about a local slave cemetery, and how one of our more goulish friends wanted to dig up a corpse. Of course, we were all rather horrified by the idea, and wanted no part. Two of us--myself and Jesse--find it disrespectful to the dead, and possibly really bad karma. I have no desire to wake the dead and have them stalk me.

Sara didn't understand our aversion--"They're gone; what do they care?" Hey, gone or not, I don't want to mess around with the supernatural. I'm a total agnostic--I don't know what to believe, be it God, ghosts, or gorgonzola. I went on a rant about my hatred of cemeteries when I noticed that the car had stopped.

Yes, of course, a cemetery. The three of them got out of car. I locked the doors. That's when I noticed the hand coming out of the ground...

Ok, maybe that last part didn't happen. However, I don't like being in cemeteries at 2:30 in the morning.

I have come to a conclusion: I am Sisyphus (no not the noder). There is a Canadian girl who I write about a lot. I have decided that she has no interest in me whatsoever. On top of that she is now seeing someone.

So I have decided to move on, yet I see her almost everyday, and I am so enraptured by her beauty that all of my labor goes for not. In short everyday I push the forgetting-about-her rock up the hill, only to see her again and have it fall back down again. The only positive here is that I won't have to do this for an eternity, but sometimes a couple of months can feel that way.

Today was another seemingly boring day, see March 21, 2000 yesterday, but somehow I plodded through. Got the unwelcome news that my sure-thing job in nyc had evaporated due to my lack of communication with my potential employer.

Other than that I have been chilling out. Played some colin mcrae rally 2.0, which I think stands up and kicks the ass of all other video games I've ever played. Can't wait to get some LAN games going once my life settles down again.

Still waiting on the DSL hookup... may have to rewire the whole house if it requires all four wires in the phone cord to be connected to the outside world.

My girlfriend is studying her ass off, and I am just being a fat bum living off my parents. Sooooo Seinfeld.

10:02

One year on E2!
..and I didn't even get a T-shirt.

In 121 minutes, it has been exactly one year since I joined the ever-growing army of E2 noders. Funny, time usually seems to pass all too quickly, but these 365 days feel like an eternity. In a good way.

For the most part, E2 has been good to me. Sure, I've been systematically downvoted every now and then. I've been insulted with soft links, called an XP whore (which is a ludicrous accusation, looking at all the factual nodes I've created) and so on. But none of that matters. If the pussies don't have the balls to state their feelings under their own user name, their attacks are of no value to me.
What I do appreciate, however, are the numerous great people I have met while hanging around Everything. I would love to provide you a list of those noders right now, but it would become quite lengthy and I would most likely forget a few names that would deserve to be mentioned.
You know who you are! Thanks for your support, friendship and making dull workdays as fun as they can be. I'll do my best to be worthy in the future.

Node-wise, I am quite happy of the stuff I have contributed to the database. There is certainly room for improvement, and my rate of activity has been unfortunately small in the past months. I do my best to correct this, but don't worry.. quality will always be the no.1 priority.
That being said, I will definitely keep writing day logs whenever I have something to say in them. No matter how down cowards downvote me - I don't give the proverbial rat's ass for some negative rep. I also hope all the other dayloggers keep it up, since I really enjoy reading about your days. Since the "Real TV" trend is still going strong on television, why shouldn't we have our own "Real E2"?

The veterans out there might feel it's silly for a newbie like me to make such a number out of my first Everything anniversary. Sorry about that. Like I said, it feels like an eternity. I'm planning to stay in here as long as the site exists, so you'll see plenty of more where this came from. :)

Before stopping this endless babble I have to say something to Mirko..
Don't even consider quitting just because of a few trolls. Trust me, they're not worth it. I understand how a thing like that can piss off a person, but leaving only means there is one less sensible user and the same amount of trolling dumbasses as before.
While E2 has its darker sides and rotten eggs.. It's still quite damn cool.

Ok, that's it for the pointless waste of database resources for a while.. More later.

11 days to my birthday (April 2)

1 day till the local broadband optic fibre network gets launched.

Need I say more?

Yes.

I joined the debating team today, and there will be several good ones, including the police week debates, which is parliment style.

to be continued...

Should be a good day.  NOTHING TO DO!  Maybe I'll get up and go to the OTB or something.  Then again, maybe not.

Maybe I'll go to class.

Hah!

We've got an exchange with Phi Sigs at night, should be OK.  We'll see just see how antisocial I feel when I wake up.

12:38

Last Night's Achievement: Level 9.

As if I care of the numbers anyway. (Whatever I do, I will always stay in shadow of everyone else. I will never be Good.)

Hmmmm...

you have 1250 points until level 10
you have 315 writeups until level 10

I don't remember when I last saw the XP requirement. Usually, my XP has always been over the level required for next level anyway... I guess level 10 is somehow special, then, with its higher requirements. Or maybe I've just become a slower noder. =)

Today's stuff: I remembered Betrayal at Krondor last night, and decided to node the "This Kingdom Mine" melody - of course, this would involve first making a conceptional representation of the raw sound data - in other words, a MIDI file or something similiar.

Of course, SoundTracker (my usual aid in transcribing music) refused to work with my sound card, just like it did ages ago. Hmph. Aureal, Aureal, Why hast thou forsaken me?

21:17

Hahahaa! Calendarmetanode The Dreaded New Nodetype now works! I only need to add some features now... =)

I also hacked togheter a script for E2 access from Irssi IRC client, though that one is still slightly flawed (no /me sniffing, for example). Irssi is pain to work with compared to sirc =(


(Still no navigation...)

Nice day it is today. School at UBC is starting to feel unbearable yet an undeniable part of life. I guess I just don't feel the determination to keep going in the path that I am taking. Maybe Integrated Engineering isn't for me.
Saw my friend today. Beautiful as she may seem, but off limits to everyone but her boyfriend. Interesting enough, teases me by the way she holds my arm, or maybe walks side by side. Hmmm. Feels like its going to rain by the way it smells. You know? That little misty smell that you get?
Then off to work. Sometimes I don't want to go to work when I'm not scheduled to but when a co-worker is sick, you don't really want to refuse because of all the guilt.
After work, me and my bud MrFurious go and chill. Sorta disgusting when the best part of your day is going out to an arcade and playing some weenie games that I never thought I would play.
Now I'm here. Trying not to get censored. Isn't it great. All that is left is to think of how to make tomorrow a better day than today.
It has been a while since I wrote a day log, but not for lack of interest. Things have been crazy at home and at work, and I made the foolish mistake of buying Baldur's Gate II a couple of weeks ago. Evil, evil game; it occupies your dreams, your thoughts, your mind. I find myself, in the shower, hearing the bloody background melody in my head. Frightening, really. Being confronted with my own tendancy towards addiction, I have again confirmed the fact (to myself, at least) that I can never, ever gamble.

My son is still in his insecure phase, and continues to wake up several times each evening, crying for his mother and father. The worst part of it is not the fact that we are both now severly sleep deprived (I find myself nodding off at work) or frustrated with one another, but our collective fatigue erodes our patience. We both find ourselves loosing our temper with Luca over silly little things, and when we raise our voices at him he reacts in the most heartbreaking manner. He freezes completely, opens his eyes wide open and then begins to weep and cry from fear and shock. The worst of it all is that we begin to hate ourselves for not being better parents, which gradually takes its toll. In fact, I'm beginning to think seriously about buying my fianceé a gift: one night in a hotel in downtown Montreal, by herself, so she can take a nice bath in peace and sleep to her heart's content. I'm not sure whether that's a crazy idea, so feel free to /msg me if you think I'm out in left field on this one.


You know, I find getting my day logs downvoted a very interesting experience. It's hard not to get discouraged when sharing what I consider to be highly personal informatin with this community (albeit anonymously), and then having my thoughts, feelings and experiences invalidated by a downvoter. Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, but it certainly doesn't encourage one to keep noding in the day logs.

I should state that I don't mind having my normal nodes downvoted. Some of them are wanting, some are uninteresting and some are highly factual and not of much interest to many people. I take that as criticism and an opportunity to improve them.

I'm a fairly smart guy. I admit, occasionally I do really dumb things.

Last night, I'm sitting on the couch eating my Sonic banana split. It was extremely cold, and therefore somehow difficult to eat. So, for a brief moment, I lost my mind.

I blew on the ice cream.

I don't know why. I'm just glad nobody was there to witness it.

Sadly my pace on E2 has slowed to to some some iota of a crawl, if even that. This is my first node in over a month, excluding the one that was nuked for being a daylog, but not being in the daylog. Its kinda of dispiriting.

I only had one class today in school, finnish. It was spent listening to a guy rant on the importance of a moderated free market economy. The marxist in the audience decided to ask a question. I thought it was humorous and befitting that he was wearing red.

After school I went to work. I'm in the process of changing the entire site I'm working on from a brown-manilla theme to a blue and white theme. I finally worked ou the whole pay thing as well.

I got home at around 5. It was snowing...hard. I decided to chill on the computer for a while. I checked out iritability, now I got axed, at http://wnt.cc.utexas.edu/~ifqy342/comicpage/index1.html. I do not strive for intellectual stimulation in my search for entertainment, but rather´ non sequitor.

That reminds me in english I'm know for my non sequitors

At dinner I had an interesting discussion with my parents. My mom thinks it would be cool if I became a wine taster, on account of my not liking to actually drink alcohol. My dad doesn't want me to succumb to the same fault that he did so he's a little uneasy with it. I think it'd be cool, but again it is my nature and the nature of all man to long for novelty.

Again I am stricken with that amorphous emotion that would best be described as:

BUUUeelllluuaaa......

I its just a non descript yelll of ambiguity and disatisfaction.

Well I'll finnish the day with some History and physics. Still need to do that reading on the kuomintang and the long march, got those physics problems as well.

Today was the last of my 5 day evening shifts in the Emergency Department (I've got the next two days off - yippie!). A relatively quiet night - I was working in the acute area, and there was never any point in the evening when there were more than two slots filled in the "to-be-seen" box. This was, of course, in stark contrast to a few days ago, when the patients were spilling out into the corridors and chairs.

There was a five year old kid today who came in with a headache and fever. The headache had started this morning, while he was at school, sitting down having morning tea. The pain was global (not localised anywhere on his head), sharp and throbbing. His pain built up to severe and was settled, but not completely relieved, with acetaminophen (tylenol/panadol). He had been well the past week although he had been in hospital one week ago for an operation to his penis to enlarge his urethral orifice as it had become stenosed (again) secondary to an operation there some time ago to correct congenital hypospadias. He had been on Keflex (cephalexin) for an infection of the wound on his penis and for a cough.

At triage, he had a temperature of 37.9 degrees Centigrade and was given some more paracetamol. When I saw this kid, he was lethargic and sleepy but rousable. He had no neck stiffness, no photophobia and no other neurological deficits. His chest was clear and his abdomen was soft. There were some slightly enlarged tonsils in his mouth and two 1cm swollen and firm lymph nodes on either side of his neck. His eardrums were not visible due to wax in his external ear canal. There were no rashes of any sort anywhere on his body. There was no signs of trauma anywhere on his head.

A chest X-ray of this boy turned out to show no abnormalities. Blood tests only showed a slightly raised white cell count, mostly neutrophils. The decision was made to lumbar puncture him to exclude a meningitis.

My shift ended at 12 midnight and the decision to LP him was only made at 11:45pm (the bloods were inconclusive and he had not improved on paracetamol and ibuprofen, his temperature had climbed to 38.4 C and he looked no better than when he arrived). I did have to reinsert an IV cannula into his arm as the previous one had kinked and was not working.

I will have to remember to check this kids records later when I go back to work in a couple of days to find out whether or not he had any meningitis as I didn't stay for his LP.


A short financial update:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average does not look like it has any good support at this level. The 9500 level was cut through like a hot knife through butter. hmm...

On a technical scale, there is some minor support near the 9000 mark, but the major support level would be closer to the 1998 low of 7000. Sheesh. Ouch.

Anyone long or holding on to stocks "for the long term" had better hope these levels hold. ... or that you don't really need your money for the next ... lots of years ...

I have been feeling better lately. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. I have recently found my affinity for math again. We have started to review for the AP test in my calculus class so I see it as a way to start over. I understand everything and I feel great about it. Math is enjoyable now, it wasn't for the longest time, and since I plan to major in math and spend the rest of my life doing it, this could have created a problem. But everything is fine in that respect.

2. I found some new friends. Since I have to get a ride to school now, I have had the opportunity to spend more time with these people. An old good friend of mine, and the only ex that I haven't ended on bad terms with (not Jesse). So I wouldn't really call them new friends, but re-discovered friends. Which are the best kind. And a new friend who I do math with every day after school, which re-inforces my liking for math because it has good connotations now.

3. I get a car. I just found out yesterday that my old car has to be totaled, which sucks because I did have a lot of good memories in the Taurus. But now I get to look for a new car, which is always good. I'm trying to convince my parents to get me a nice one but I don't think they'll go for it.

4. Jesse kinda disgusts me now. And I'm only writing on here about him because I no longer care if he gets mad at me for doing it. I'm not exploiting anything about him or us, other than my new-found distaste for him. The lack of emotion and committment he now has appals me. I don't need him anymore. Which is good because he never needed me. Because I have changed my feelings about him so quickly in such a short amount of time, my feelings for him were probably never real anyway. Now I can finally move on, for the first time, for good. After the longest time I'm finally free of this hinderance.

5. I hear from UC Berkeley in a week. I hope I get in!

Well that's pretty much it. I do the same thing every day now, I go to school, go over to Marc's(the good ex) house and do math for hours, and then go home. It might be mundane, but at least I'm not miserable. For the first time in a while I don't feel alone.

I'm so exhausted. Up til 1 am, helping my wonderful daughter (who I am now mad at) with her resume. $18 later at Kinko's she has something worthy to pass on to the powers-that-be. Anyway, who cares. I still haven't studied enough, I'm going to try again tonight and I'm so tired, nothing good will probably come of it anyway.

My mind is buzzing with a chocolate high, and it's really a bad idea for me to have it for many reasons. Tuff shit! I don't care! I've been fscking miserable, breaking down, for over a week now, and I can't stand it any more!!!

So on top of all this emotional shit, which fluctuates wildly from one hour to the next, I am studying for my first Notus Lotes certification test. I don't know that I can pass. I will be wildly surprised if I do, since I'm so unprepared. I expect to jam studying in til the day, only one week away now.

So today is my youngest son's birthday, he's 17. Bought him a super duper strong basketball stand thingy, his dad went in on it with me. We've been divorced longer than we were married by now. And get along better.

This is my first daylog. I'm pretty new to e2, so I'm still finding my way around. I got my first C! today, on my experimental music writeup. This place is worse than crack... I've spent most of my workday on this site, and I find myself getting all excited about XP and levels and crap. Humans sure are easily manipulated with incentives, even when they're abstract numbers on a computer somewhere...

But this place is pretty fucking cool...

In my poking around, I've been amazed at what is and isn't covered in the nodegel. I mean, I found a node for AMM, this obscure British avant-garde improvisation group, but I only found a two sentence node for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gamaliel typed in all of John Cage's Indeterminacy poems, but there's virtually no information on geology. The knowledge density here is so heterogeneous.

I guess that's what surprises me. It seems like a system like this would tend towards homogeneity, and stasis, but because the people who would work on something like this are so strange, it justs ends up as this entirely idiosyncratic glob of information. The idea that I've seen tossed around about training an AI with this is a funny one. What would an entity be like when it knew the stats of all the hard drives on the market, thousands of lyrics to popular songs, obscure poetry, and the origin of truth tables?

In less than 90 minutes I think I will be legally responsible for myself. Although it doesn't make sense, as it was legal for me to have a baby and get married just under 2 years ago. How can I be responsible for a child if I am not responsible for myself?

So tomorrow I get a day of school, then myself and nine of my geek friends shall be going to setup an outrageously complicated sound system and then getting drunk.

I think I talk about myself too much, possibly.

Be nice to mummy as mothers day is soon.

You see, Jon-Benet Ramsey is not dead. She may have been found murdered, but she is not. That was all staged. I know this because my friends and I saw her in Denny's. We were out celebrating my birthday (I was wearing my birthday tiara) having dessert when my roommate John goes, "look, it's Jon-Benet Ramsey!" We all tried to look without looking. There sat two girls with their parents (maybe?), both dressed like little whores. The little one looked EXACTLY like Jon-Benet. It had to be her.

After we laughed about it for a while, we talked about telling the Enquirer about it. "Nah," said John, my roommate. "We'd need proof." It so happened that Mia, my art-student roommate, had a project going on where she was taking photos of things in the everyday world that spelled letters of the alphabet. John's ex-boyfriend Danny and Mia ran back to the house to get her disposable camera while we all sat there in Denny's and prayed Jon-Benet wouldn't leave.

Mia returned with the camera, and the next problem was how to take a good picture of her without her noticing. I believe someone tried taking a shot from the table, but it wasn't good enough. We had to get more daring.

Finally, Mia and the rest of the crowd decided to pretend to pose near Jon-Benet and have her fiance, Reuben, pretend to be taking a picture of them when in fact he would focus between their heads on little Jon-Benet. It really didn't work out too well since we only got the back of her head, but then we did some detective work after the family left and stole the drawings the little girl had left on the table from her Barbie coloring book. The photo quality was nowhere near good enough for the Enquirer to believe us, so I guess we just suck.

After mentioning this incident on my Web site, some idiot wrote to me and told me I was a dumbass because I couldn't have really seen Jon-Benet in Denny's since she was dead and didn't I know that? I think this is funnier than the whole night itself.

8:10pm

Today a bunch of people got laid off from work, including one of my best friends, CR. It was not a good day. TC and I went out to do some running around and were at a chinese restaurant when we called back to work to ask what anyone else might want for lunch. JS told me that they just laid off the customer support department, including CR. That just hit us like a brick wall at a hundred miles per hour. We knew more layoffs were coming with the way the whole industry is going and all, but we would have never guessed it to be so soon, nor would we have guessed that CR would be part of it. He was the manager of the department.

We spent most of the day moping about. Our manager gave us some words of encouragement that since we are the core technical team, we are secure there. Some of us have decided that we aren't going to wait and see what happens though. I am going to probably put up my resume tonight.

I talked to Sara for a little while today on AIM. She had heard about CR's situation as well. We agreed that it would be good for us to do all we can to encourage him to go back to college and get a degree. So we need to do that. I think if CR goes back, I will probably have an easier time doing it myself.

After work, TC and I talked for a while in the parking lot. We drifted across several topics. We somehow got talking about the growing relationship between Sara and I. She was telling me that the signs are obviously there that Sara is attracted to me and that I should do something to help move the relationship along. TC told me about how Sara acts differently about me than everyone else and that we would make a cute couple. That made me feel awesome. TC is such a good friend. I thanked her for being there for me, but she just shrugs it off. She can't even imagine what she has done for me and how she makes me feel.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Sara though. I really don't want to do anything too bold because I want her to be in charge of how fast this relationship progresses. TC told me that because Sara is so timid, that we would naturally have to move slowly, but that I can't wait for her to make the moves because of her shyness. I don't know what to do, but I'm glad that an outside person sees signs of attraction between her and I, so I know that it's not just me being blinded by love.

So today was quite a roller coaster ride. Speaking of which, we tried to talk CR out of going to our Orlando trip next weekend to save money, but he insists on going and having a good time anyway. I wouldn't miss it for the world because Sara is going; I'd do anything to spend time with her. I actually spent some time today writing some notes about her and how she makes me feel. I don't know if or when I will share these notes with her.

Oh well, I'm going to get some food and go to the gym.

I managed to do nothing at work today. Absolutely nothing. I mean i was obviously doing things, but nothing work-related.

We had a meeting where the sales people chat with the developers / designers: I made a paper crane. I am in charge of setting up a domain controller for the design team - I said "why can't we just use the existing domain controller we have sitting in the other room that everyone else is using?" - the reply: "Well if you want full control over it, you will have to use your own because we have 'sensitive documents' on that server." ("Sesitive document this" I tought.)

So around 3:30pm we decided to play 30 mins of Counter-Strike to wind down... we ended up playing for the rest of the day.

I think I'll go back to the coffee shop i went to yesterday, it's nice and quiet - maybe I'll meet a girl to talk to. I bought Trainspotting yesterday at the bookstore - I think I'll read that for a while.
Well, server time, it's well past the 22nd, and local time it's just now ending. Anyway...

Really bad fscking day for Seattle. I hate to say it, but I think this city which has been my home for the last 5 years -- and the first place where I've honestly felt I have a place, even if that feeling is receding -- is in for some very, very rough times. The Boeing Corporation announced this morning that they are moving their corporate headquarters. No warning. No reason given. Assurances were made that they'd keep all the r & d and manufacturing here; that they were only moving corporate in order to be closer to the center of their operations.

As my dad said when we were discussing it, "bullshit." This move makes no sense except as a precursor to withdrawl of production from the Puget Sound. 500 employees, an insignificant fraction of the around 300,000 employed by Boeing, every one of which could jump on a plane and be anywhere in the US in hours, being moved around 1000 miles just to be "closer to more of the business"?

It makes me a little sick...This region absolutely relies on Boeing for blue and white collar jobs alike. 70,000 people in this region are employed by that monster. Given the fact that manufacturing is already beginning to be shipped out to other countries, the land south of Seattle which is almost completely owned by Boeing is worth a very, very large fortune, and the commercial aircraft business is flat, it makes sense for them to move elsewhere.

It's just going to kill this city.

Sigh. I wonder if Portland will have me after I gradjumacate.

Anyway, little of note personally. The ringing in my ears has finally stopped, only 20 hours after the Mogwai concert ended.

And I keep worrying that it was wrong to throw away that eCrush email. I just wish the person would just come out and fucking email me him/her (but I hope her) self.

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