March 3, 2001

Saturday morning, and I'm enjoying my second espresso at the kitchen bench. Gemma is preparing for a drive to Sydney to see the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, which is tonight, up Oxford Street. Me? I'm preparing to take the home server down to install two kickass new 80Gb hard disks. We're planning to rip our whole CD collection (carefully this time!) and then we can sell the damn little silver disks for a couple of bucks each. It feels exciting and modern and radical (well, it's not Greenpeace-class radicalism, but it is calling for a leap of faith and let-go for all those posessions..)

Terrible to see all the animals being destroyed in the UK due to disease. What is it with English people and the way they care for their animals? Are they just unlucky or are they doing something fundamentally wrong?

I've been really calm since resigning from work last week. I met with my headhunter who is really bullish on my prospects. We had a nice lunch and talked for two hours, and he seems to really believe in me. He's putting me up at a number of companies, and beyond a dreamjob at IBM or DoCoMo he's got some intriguing ideas for me at Accenture and The Gartner Group.. I'm willing to design my future over three months, 'cause it's time now to get serious about career. I've worked too hard since leaving school to mess it up now.

Conspiracists alert: something very odd is happening in Columbia. Watch this space.

(still taking photos in the East End)

This place is full of holes. Holes in time, in the fabric of the modern world. Sometimes I fall through one unawares and find myself hanging between centuries, as if I had entered one of the ghost stations from below, climbed those dark stairs untrodden for ninety years and emerged into the old world..

But it's easier than that. At night this whole city, off the beaten track, loses its modern trappings entirely. Keep walking, and suddenly there are nothing but ancient buildings around you, grimed with the soot of years. Pavements slope, cracked with age, old cobblestones gleam, worn shiny with the passage of centuries. The sound of children's voices echoing on stone singing the same rhymes they chanted during the Black Death, while the echoes bounce from churches built upon the ruins of churches built upon the ruins of Roman and pagan temples, so old the tombs of fourteenth-century noblemen within them seem almost modern. The past settles on these deserted byways of the city by night like the heavy London fog of the old films: the back streets are so dimly lit the faint orange glow of the few street lamps looks like gaslight, and fantastically elongated, Jack the Ripper shadows loom on glistening black walls. They never caught him. He was never more than a figure of shadows, of rumour, of pieces of yellowing paper bearing ill-spelt messages. But he left his mark.

And the marks of his passing glow yellow on my maps in the gaslight. Four maps: 2000, 1900, 1888, 1812, following the trails of the ghost streets where my ancestors walked, lived, read about the murders. A tracery of names and places still familiar, oddly unchanged in places. Superimpose the maps and they show the holes where one can slip through, into their world. Like Jack the Ripper, they leave nothing now but shadows: yellowing records in cramped copperplate hands, blurred photographs of ghost places, old tales extracted painstakingly from faded memories. But the streets are still there, and the shadows remain. The past is all around us, in these old European cities. It's easy, sometimes, to slip out of time.

Confused.

It's typical, it's kinda normal... Who am I kidding, it's cliche. The male that can't make his mind up. He's 'confused'... Riiight. Oh well... For once I really am.

By best friend has a point. I'm too much of a good person - so much so that I find loopholes to slip through my ethical quandarys. So I end up somewhere in between... I've very rarely been hipocrite or directly hurt or damaged other people, but I've left alot of damage in my wake and I'm a barren wasteland myself. Really makes me think...

And I don't think I've ever really made a decision and had the balls to carry through with it... Yeah, sure, I broke up with someone or I told so-and-so how I felt about them but it wasn't really my conscious decision. The situation arose and I jumped, or had a specific reason to do it. I can't ever really remember self-motivating myself to a decision - my decisions are a product of the world around me.

So what's that leave? My decision at the moment is to be with "the ex" in some form of exclusive relationship, even if it's going to be short-term. Of course, there's always a but.

My reservations... I don't have any deep feelings for her. Yet. Our lifestyles are radically different, as are our social habits. Sometimes I just wanna chill and code or something and clear my mind, she needs to get out of her house and do fun stuff. She smokes, I don't. She enjoys a signifigant recreational drug use, I'll be damned if I smoke a blunt, let alone a lil' joint. I have feelings for someone else. She hurt me pretty bad two years ago, and after two years of servere dislike toward her it's tough to imagine her as my girlfriend. Girlfriend? ACK!!! WTF?! I don't want a girlfriend right now! I can't handle it...

But, my friends think she's at least a little right for me. She'll get me out of the house, I'll meet new people, I'll give her some much-needed stability and affection, and we have alot of fun. Emotions may grow.

The there's her. I don't want to burn that bridge. I don't want to even move away from it... But she doesn't need emotion right now, she needs to fool around and enjoy herself. She's still young.

In the mean time I've been leading one of them around and acting pretty weird toward the other. I don't like doing either, but I've needed to collect my thoughts... Right. I don't think I ever wanted to make a decision - usually time decides things for me.

People say I'm lazy but I think I'm just scared.

In other news, I finished that dreaded PHP/SQL script to calculate my total hours! I've never gone up against such a challenge and prevailed... I felt amazingly great after walking out of the office today, like I had not just accomplished something challenging, but kicked the living shit out of it. ;) Life ain't that bad all the sudden.

It's almost over!

I don't know how to deal with it.
I don't want to deal with it.
But in less then 36 hours, I have to.

My Mardi Gras week vacation here in New Orleans is almost over, and here I sit, at 2am, logged into the net, debating how I should spend my soon to be risen last day in the drunken capitol of the south...

Sigh... atleast I got lots of good material for nodes this last week!... and perhaps after I fully sober up around Wednesday, I'll start noding them. ;)

Ha! The week has been pretty blah blah blah. My parents came back from Moscow (my bro bought me a shirt that says McLenin's with a big McDonalds "M" on the front, and "Party is over" slogan on the back. Cool!), and after a lot mental anguish I got my rio volt (which I'm happy to say, is a fairly excellent product but that should be a node unto itself).)

Monday and tuesday were fairly sleepy - I attended a course - "Introduction to OOP with Python" paid for by the company. Ironically it was held at the downtown location of the SFU campus. I tried to login onto the SFU WAN, and voila! I'm still registered. Don't know what the hell is up with that. Eh.. The course was sometimes interesting but somewhat dry. Excellent intro though. I think I'll try to code something in Python when I get the time.

The rest of the week was fairly unimaginative, except wednesday. I went to the south arm gym. There was this black chick there...Suffice to say that If I ever get bicepts that big and shoulders that muscled I will be very happy. Of course she looked like one of these ladies in body-building competitions. Her skin looked almost translucent too. Steroids perhaps?

Friday
Today was sort of cool. I had to sign a contract - I'm now a full time employee, instead of a contractor. Damn them! I don't get paid any overtime, and therefore I leave at 5pm sharp. Fuck them!. Me and my partner were playing in our little company wide foosball tourney against the best team. We were loosing 5-7 (but slowly gaining ground!) when the head of QA came in and requested our presence else where. We came back to the game, but ended up losing the momentum that we had. That wasn't pleasant at all. In the end I lost a singles game, where I should've won.
I got of work at 5.25pm. Damn everyone! And got to Richmond. Woke up BJ and we went to RPM to grab some $3.50 teriyaki chicken crap. After that we headed to UBC in hopes of catching some anime and hanging out with couple of girls. When we did get there we couldn't get hold of the ladies on their cells. When we did they bailed. I wasn't terribly surprised, nor upset. Neither was B it seems. We went down to the Sub arcade and played couple of rounds of DDR. I have to admit that i lost it. We headed back to Richmond, and since Mike was at the Canucks game with Dave, we decided to wait for him to come back. I went home and so did B. I ended up reading another 100 pages of Fires of Heaven. It's sort of sad, but Wheel of Time is running out for me. If it doesn't get good soon I'll be bored =\.
Around 11pm Mike got back, and called me. After a little argument I decided to join them. We ended up going to a little arcade, playing more ddr (woot!! i passed kick the can on maniac oh my god! fuck im lame) and a couple of games of VS Capcom VS Marvel. The player 2 joystick was broken, but i still managed to win a few times.
Then we proceded to grab a snack at Burger King. Since it was already past midnight we had to grab take out. We ate it right in front of the RCMP car parked at the BK. Mike threw the garbage out through the side window so the cop wouldn't see it. On whim, we headed downtown to look for hookers. We wheeled around the west side, not finding any. Then a bright idea hit us to head east. Soon after we saw a few women that would definitely match the general description of a hooker. Ugly, scantily clad, out at 1:30am in the morning. I think we saw a pimp too. At one point in time we wanted to scream something mean at them but decided to save some dignity. Heh. On one of the blocks there was a woman with a dress that was cut very high (that is i could see her leg up to her crotch pretty much), but when i slowed down to determine whether she was cute, it turned out to be a man! Dammit. I was surprised and couldn't believe my eyes. So I made a circle around the block and sure enough that was a man! Drag queen my friends called him. After the soul-scarring episode with the man-woman we decided we needed to chicken wings. The pub we headed too was however closed. After about 2 minutes of being on the Arthur Laing bridge we were suddenly hit with a massive i-need-to-pee attack. It was a race against, time and luckily we succedded. We got to 7-11 in Richmond, but the bastard Brock beat me to it. Blargh!. We then headed to 18+ adult store. As a joke we half seriously considered getting kev a butt plug. Exploring the video section was entertaining to say the least. On one box, a hideous woman was displayed - naked(!) with the following slogan - Faces that only a mother would love. That shall be remembered and used in appropriate circumstances. We didn't buy the buttplug. Mike had to go home(he has work later today) so i gave him a ride to New Westminster. We came back, but B wanted to rent the porn from 18+ so I gave him a ride there an home. It's now 4:15am and I should go to sleep.

I shall leave you with this:Women can't bitch with a cock in their mouth!....

PS: before i forget. beanies and the scatman are having a dinner thing tomorrow at cactus club. I wonder if i should go blah blah blah. We'll see how it turns out. heh.

Okay, maybe I just don't get it.

Is it possible that I just can't grasp the reason behind E2?

I typed up a couple of writeups about "The Mole" and I figured that they were decent enough (here and here). They aren't earth shattering writeups, but they have some information in them.

I wake up this morning and there is a /msg from one of the esteemed editors that my writeup wasn't important because "no one will remember it in 5 years". And I think he/she downvoted it too.

Huh.

I was under the impression that E2 was like a giant encyclopaedia, containing the existing knowledge of anyone who adds information. So wouldn't adding information that will be forgotten a good thing? Isn't the preservation of knowledge more important than rehashing information that is/will be common?

Maybe I just don't get it.

My company just obtained some new office space, adjacent to the old. Our CEO called a party in the new space to celebrate a new contract. It was great, except I am in the middle of a diet. So I broke my diet, partially. I abstained from the chocolate and the strawberries, but I did have some wine.

Meanwhile, my boss continues to parade his ignorance. During a conference call with one of our important customers, he says, "99.5% of Severity 1 problems with our software are solved by a hard-reset of the machine." I have a hard time believing he actually thought this. The opposite is actually true. The only times we had to resort to this barbaric measure was when we had faulty hardware.

I suppose one reason he might have thought this is because we do speak a lot of wanting to install remote power-cycling devices (Baytechs, in our case). But goodness gracious, wouldn't you think he would verify his assumption by talking to his staff before uttering something like that? I guess that means he doesn't think rebooting is such a drastic or strange measure to have to take. (Scary thought).

sometimes i love it here and other times i wonder who everyone really is and why they do the things that they do and how they can all be so transparent. so awfully transparent.

so i'm away from home and i miss it but i don't want to be there, i don't really want to be here, i want to be in between everything and swimming or flying or just not touching any damn ground. damn the ground. sometimes you love it and other times it just shouldn't be.

i'm tired of linking. is that bad? probably. link and link.

there are interesting people here. mike makes me laugh just because. and he's cute. he has these interesting facial expressions and i am fond of the way he walks. i don't really know what he thinks of me, i don't really know what he thinks at all. jared is important but i don't know why.

day lo g s. so much quality control. q u a l i t y.

dear phyllis stein: i miss you, it's true.

It's 6:30 pm and I've made it through today (so far) without chocolate, without escaping into nothingness, without any addictive behaviors (ok, there's one, but we won't talk about it here). And the pain has been absolutely searing. I am so sick of crying and feeling so fucking blue. Thank God (who?) for friends and acquaintances who really care about humans and want people to be happy. Cause there have been enough of the evil ones in my life.

So I am going to a party tonight, I don't want to, but I am, just to get my mind off of the pain, and hope it doesn't backfire in my face, like it does half the time. With any luck - I'll have a good time. Now I have to find something to wear.

And someday I will dance on that rat-bastard's grave.

Woke today far too early for a Saturday, and a vacation Saturday at that. The alarm went off promptly at 6:30; quietly blaring classical music into my right ear. Last night I was up late reading a (very) late Christmas present and managed to only get about four hours before dreaded morning reared its ugly sunshine-filled head. Staggered through the rather cold house to the shower where I stood under the pathetic trickle of warm water attempting to wash the suds from my body. My father has installed a Pressure Reducing Valve on our water system. This PRV reduces our water pressure by about fifty percent and is supposed to save my family loads of moolah. While my dad’s intentions are good, I have to stand in the shower twice as long, so I suppose not much cash is saved when it comes to my own bathing and grooming habits.

After the never ending shower, I subdued the pains in my stomach with a large glass of sugary juice and a bowl of raisin bran. This morning was worse than it’s been recently. I never got the chance to call my surgeon while I was home, and I go back tomorrow. The mystery pains are getting worse, and I'm still not as worried as I should be.

I woke early this morning in order to make an appointment to have my car inspected. Its last inspection ran out a couple days ago, and since I’ve been driving exactly the speed limit and following each and every traffic law to the letter. I also had two bad valve-stems which resulted in two of my tires needing air each time I filled my tank. While my car was being poked and prodded I made my way over to the Denny’s next-door and nursed a cup of coffee and some pancakes; two breakfasts today, and both before 8:30. After an hour or so my car was ready, with a shiny new inspection sticker and two (hopefully) properly functioning valve-stems.

Spent the rest of the morning reading the aforementioned late Christmas present. Being wired on the three-plus cups of coffee I consumed at Denny’s, my plans of taking a nap were thwarted. I was left a very alert tired person. Currently I feel like someone has cruelly turned up the dial on my personal gravity.

By noon I met James at work and bought him lunch. Had sushi for the first time in a month (bliss...). I would stock up and bring said specimens back to the Frozen North, but an effective method of long term sushi-storage continues to elude me.

Half of my family is away at a swim meet in another part of the state, so it is just mom and I this weekend. James was gracious enough to accept my mother’s invitation for dinner, and the three of us dined on my mother delicious and infamous Mostaccioli. Incidentaly, this is my favorite home meal. Culinary bliss twice in one day; I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m loath to return north and back to institutional food. So it goes.

After dinner James and I went to see (don’t laugh) Dude, Where's My Car? at the dollar theater. He was very excited about this movie, having already seen and enjoyed it. I’m sorry to say that I only made it for about twenty minutes before I had to leave. I took an extended bathroom break, and was going to go back when He appeared—pissed—and we left. I felt horrible as he was all excited about it. I still feel selfish and rude. All in all, it was a horrible film. To give James credit, he can see the finest details in anything and point out how amazing something can be regardless of its outward appearance. He has done this many times in the years I have known him, and for the most part he is always right. Tonight was the first time I had doubt regarding his radar, and now I just feel like a jerk for disappointing my friend.

I’m so tired, yet I feel the day is not yet through. There is something that still needs to be done, although I’ll be damned if I can figure it out. I know that when I hit the pillow I’m out for ten hours at least, it is so tempting.

Tomorrow I make the jaunt back north to feign my enjoyment of bitter cold and responsibilities.

I spent most of the morning and afternoon sleeping and such. I went with my brother to the Kid Rock concert down in Ft. Lauderdale. I'm not really too much into Kid Rock myself, but I don't really dislike his music. Heck, there's not much music I do dislike. I'm easy to get along with :) It was a good show, but a bit long It started at 8:00 and ended after midnight.

Someone had a green laser pointer which they had flashing around during the whole show. Those green ones are really bright. Too bad they're $300.

Today my friend came home from Tulane University in New Orleans. He's a freshman there, and he decided that he would come home for the last 48 hours of his Spring Break.

So naturally, all I hear about when I see him is Mardi Gras. That's it. Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras. Basically, he said this: "Wow that was great... hey, I didn't see you there!"

As much as I'd have liked to been there, and get wasted and see boobs (gasp!), I wasn't. Truth be known, I didn't even know Mardi Gras was going on until I walked through the living room, and the TV was on E! and they were talking about Mardi Gras...
Basically, I'm no longer a fan of alcohol, and I get the impression that people of that persuasion don't belong at Mardi Gras.

So... then I come on E2, and what do I see?
Nodes all about Mardi Gras!

Can I ever escape it?