October 5, 2000

Today was a good day, I think.

I had to pay the rent, and, in order to do that, I sold 7 CD's. Iggy Pop: Raw Power, Cibo Matto: Viva la woman!, Radiohead's OK Computer (I had 2 copies, I only sold one), Sonic Youth's Dirty, Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and a few others I can't remember right now. This netted me 18 dollars. I know I got ripped off, but I needed the money. Acually, I feel bad, I spent only 10 bucks on rent and 6 on food, which I needed, anyway. It was OK pizza.

Class and work at the help desk went quickly. I had written a 5 page paper at 3 o'clock this morning, and I actually finished it, though it reads like I'm on crack. I had thought about noding my homework, and decided that the teacher would probably find my paper and think I had copied it, and give it an F and expel me from Uni.

I talked to the mac guy at work, and he might buy my iBook, very cool. He explained to me that the MacWarez scene is officially dead, and it had reverted to friends trading to friends, like PC warez had been in the early years, around Windows 3.11 time (yes, I know about BBS's). If I needed any software . . . No, I didn't, because I only use it to type papers, which I think is a waste, but that's what I do.

My friend is thinking of moving down near where I go to school. That's pretty cool.

The girls I love: I saw the other one yesterday, and she got very happy that I could see her. She was depressed when she picked me up and was happy just an hour later. All we did was talk, and it was so nice to be able to talk about whatever and have someone listen instead of waiting for their turn to talk, and I don't talk much, so this was really important, to me.

I also figured out another chapter to my current work of fiction. The protagonist is going to sue God, or at least, Jesus Christ. Will J.C. answer the subpoena, I dunno. It'll be fun.

So, I just came home from my mom's house. I watched three to tango which I must say, had absolutlely _ZERO_ value other than a few laughs. It sure as hell ain't kevin smith. Anyways so my friends from Hawaii just moved out here and you know, I'm a full time student at UNM and it's like, I go to school all day long and they sit around all day doing basiclly nothing. This doesnt bother me much, but when I come home it's like they expect me to hang out all night and party with them or something. Don't get me wrong, I like to kick back and unwind on the weekends when I have the time. But I just wish that they could respect that I wake up at 7:00 am and dont get home till after 5:00 pm. When I get home I need to do some things and get my "not in school" side of my life in order before I can do anything else. This takes at least an hour sometimes more. So by around 7:00 pm I'm hungry, tired, and I wanna relax. I wish I could find a way to tell them that the way they treat me is very rude and I'm starting to feel Alienated from the group. Adam (the gay sissy man) of the group is cool, but damn, I'm getting really sick of him playing the out card all the time. no one cares and those who do care should die so what's the point in making a deal out of it at all? I guess I dont help, I'm guilty of mocking him a fair bit, but still....
And julia, well.. Julia is one of them cute girls and I'm getting sick of it. I feel I should not say anything bad about her but I cant help but feel she could use a good wake up call. This is not at all to imply that I would be ebtter for her. I know I wouldn't be, but I am her friend, and well, I've done a lot for her. So it disgusts me that for a very long time when I was with my ex-GF in hawaii me and julia got to be really good friends, but then as soon as I was single again she suddenly got very cold towards me. To make matters worse I destroyed things when I confronted her about her boyfriend who we all knew was cheating on her. To this day I contend that what I said was because she's my friend and I care about her. However, she seems to think that I am stalking her now. I should never have given her the $100 to fly out here. Which I suppose makes me wonder if I should just say fuck it and make her pay me back and let her live in her own little world, or should I just let her pay me back whenever, and pretend that we're friends?
Anyways, feeling in a way better and in a way worse but all in all I think it's time I wrap this up and get to bed. For the record, they're all out having fun...I have a 9:30 class tomarrow.
*sigh*
</rant>
Having a writeup moving good time,
-Doug

Sydney, 16:29

Today be-ith Thursday - I don't actually think that has any relevance to anything I'm about to write, but it seemed like a good idea at the time to type it. Yes, I could very easily go back and erase it, but where would be the fun in that? I wouldn't have had this fantastic paragraph to write then! (I'll bet thats really upsetting everyone)

I have reached that annoying point where my experiencenow far outways my actual write-up count - so while I have the experience for level 3 now, Im about 30 write-ups short. Of course thats mainly due to the fact that I have done a number of daylogs in the last month or 2. Of course now I can't think of anything to write about to fill up 30 write ups. I could just wait a month doing a daylog everyday but that'd be really boring.

I think in a attempt to create more writeups I shall turn any daylogs I write into several nodes - errrmm.. mebbe not. Lets faces it my life just isn't interesting enough to make people want to go all around everything trying to figure out that I had coffee and a cigerette for breakfast this morning.

I'm really am just meandering aren't I?

I mean lets face it - nothing really interesting happened today. Certainly nothing worth noding about! Yet here I am.. rambling onto my keyboard. Hmmm.......

Well, this is a daylog, so I should really add something about my day huh? Well, I got to work, wrote some code, demo-ed the code, got some lunch, made changes to the code as discussed during the demo, got bored, surfed the web, and soon I will go home. Early. And enjoy it Ha har ha ha ha ha ha harrrrrr. Oohhh eeerr, I think I've been forgetting to take my medication. What the hell am I talking about?

I think I should probably stop writing this now......

Yes, yes I will

First time I submitted this I forgot to hardlink anything - don't you hate that?

And the days fly by… Watch them go, flipping through the air, turning little tricks for the crowd…

…

My sleep pattern has been totally messed up. This is not conductive to becoming gainfully employed, and resuming my takeover of Toronto’s elite dotcom nightlife. I must remain awake all night tonight, and all day tomorrow, in order to ensure that I sleep the proper hours again. Otherwise, I think all my job hunting skills will be quite ineffectual.

I’m getting vaguely discouraged, though. I find myself lacking proper skill sets for this industry. Most of the available positions I’ve seen have required a great deal more programming knowledge than I have, as well as server-side stuff, and more three-letter-acronym languages that I don’t know, and think I would be hard-pressed to learn.

It seems everyone is looking for a web programmer with some vague grasp of design, not an actual designer.

…

If things don’t start looking brighter soon, I dunno what to do, though. I mean, it’s been almost a week since I got here, and there’s been nothing yet. The fellow with the job that lured me here has been incommunicado, and no-one else seems responsive to me as a potential employee.

Jessica’s birthday is in about a week, and she’s in Ottawa, alone. If things still suck by then, I’ll go back to Ottawa, at least for a little while. I miss her, and I need to spend time with her… I worry that she thinks I’m trying to take off without her, that she thinks I’ll just never come back…

The Ottawa-Toronto LD stuff is just an added stress that neither of us need in the least.

Afternoon.

12:38

Wow! For the first time for long time, I sent a bug report that actually was acknowledged and verified! Maybe I still have some sanity left and all these bugs are not just figments of my imagination....

Bugzilla bug #55166. If you want working bookmarks, please go vote for it. That bug is driving me crazy slowly but surely. =)

14:24

Done Usenet + Mail.

Was about to node about psychic Pokemons Abra, Kadabra and Alakazam, but those were already noded. =( Well, probably later - I may have schtuff that some people might find interesting. Like the Japanese names and some personal experiences with these critters. (Like, the TCG stuff, number of spoons they can bend in hour, number of frames in which they appeared in the movie, etc etc... =)

16:54

I was thinking, this morning, of one RPG story. A gamer said that in their fantasy RPG campaign, his hobbit character had had an anthropomorphic vixen as a wife.

And when I logged back to E2, I saw "redheads tend to have sex with other redheads" in the cool writeups column. Hmmmmmmm.

17:52

Played some Nethack... I ate a floating eye, so I got clairvoyance. Yes, me, not the character. "Gee, this scroll might be Scroll of Destroy Armor." Read it. Floomp, AC 10. Died soon. Next game? "This might be Amulet of strangulation." Put it on. WWWWolf-Bar-Hum-Mal-Neu, killed by strangulation.

20:46

Ended up experimenting with different character classes. Now I'm (surprise surprise!) playing a female elf ranger.

I haven't played a female elf in 3.3.x yet... and now that I've tried, looks like Rangers are pretty kewl. I mean, I don't need an assault rifle in Nethack afterall. Just an elf with a bow. *thwakatathwakatathwakata* dead meat. I mean, amazing firepower. =)

---

Other day logs o' mine...

Noded today by y.t.: The Attack
Updated: Jack T. Chick Tracts lupine

It has finally stopped raining, at least for the moment. The Miami/Dade area received 20 inches of rain in 48 hours, the area has been almost entirely inundated with water. The front page of the Herald had a great view of Northwest 36th Street during morning traffic. The six lane road was completely flooded, cars stacked up on the median like it was a parking lot and others still on the road either moving or stalled in three feet of standing water. And this wasn't even a hurricane!

My town only received about 10 inches of rain. Luckily, it is at a higher elevation so there was relatively little flooding. The rain brought the amphibians out in force. I came home last night to three Bufo toads (the poisonous kind that kill neighborhood dogs) hanging out eating cat food on my back porch. One was splashing about in the water dish. I tried to scare them away, but they were not having it. What brave little toads! The cat food is now on a shelf well above the ground. There are no free meals at my house.

back | days | front

Literary Urge

I jotted down a couple of story ideas this morning, but they have somehow been overshadowed by the business ideas I have kicked around with Mark. I hate that; I get really creative quite rarely. When I do get ideas, they come in rushes and I am barely able to put them onto paper fast enough before I forget them.

So, a Question: Do other noders get this? How do you cope? Has anyone found a way to draw the creative urge out, to prolong it?

Global Communication

I have finally got the email reply from onetel's customer service, telling me that, no I don't need a credit card to use their account and that I can pay via direct debit. This means that calling a certain young lady in Michigan will cost me 3 pence per minute from tomorrow. Yay for saving money! (Now if only I had known that about a week ago...)

THANK YOU GIRLOTRON!

Reminds me of a Queen song...

I shall be seeing Hollow Man tonight; I shall maybe, just maybe post a review when I get back...

Later, dudes and dudettes.

* dizzy bows out, chased by rabid squirrels...

20:55 BST

Well, I just got back from seeing Hollow Man and it was crap. Shite. Stupid. Formulaic. Boring.

Avoid

The Boss came back today from Montreal. Sure made a difference at the group meeting. More tension ;-}.

Anyway, decided to get myself a Nokia 9110 Communicator phone, since the offer was quite good. Bought, it almost new from a jaring.pcbase acquaintance for MYR 2500 (about USD 658). Now, I'm not sure whether I'll still keep my current Nokia 7110.

it's gloomy, overcast, little water droplets covering most all of my plant life. i created their rain. i am feeling uneasy, unsettled, almost distant. it's been growing inside of me this past week, stifled only temporarily with reality and half moons pressing in around the thought.

you know we all need saving.

silence. all encompassing silence and, why is the universe enveloped in penetrating _quiet now, when i want it to be so the very least. even with the anything but peaceful music screaming loudly at me i feel, withdrawn, and it is still too blank. nothingness abound. and i am thinking, crashing asleep dizzy drunk, always.

you know you lost your mind.

i look up now and see greens clashing, red stripe white cross line and.. flat, plastic, breathing plastic. it is too real, they are, and i pause to take in the fact that i, moving, living flesh, seem less than they must be most times.

is everyone okay?

he called out of no where, and i slipped into most beautiful reality, melted, i always do when i realize.. the stars listened. all tears were not lost to the night.

my best friend got her finger caught in a conveyer belt and crushed today. she seems almost non-chalant about it, for some reason.. trying to prove something? or maybe she's just like that, i guess. i would probably have flipped out.. it's in a splint thing now, it looks almost cute for some reason.

i guess he won't be around so much for a while. going to be more missing than i care to deal with, but deal i shall. and of course, things are really not so bad, as they could always be worse, or some such stuff. mustn't grumble.

I saw someone who had been hit by a bus.

I was on my way home from the auto repair place, and there was a bus and a car stopped in the intersection of Roosevelt and 80th. At first, the car was blocking my view of the person under the heap of blankets in the middle of the road, and I thought it was probably a simple fender bender.

I could hear the sirens approaching, but I couldn't see where they were coming from, so I stopped. The fire engine and ambulance pulled up in front of my car, and so I was stuck until someone told me what to do. I watched the man under the heap of blankets. He moved his head and hand a few times. The bus driver responsible for the accident was sitting in his bus. I guess he used his bus radio to call for help. But the people from the car had all gotten out, and were talking to the man, and holding his hand. The man didn't look scared. He didn't even look like he was in pain. He was just there.

One of the EMTs got out and started directing traffic, and had me turn around and go the other way. He had a friendly face...I suppose that it's good for those people to look confident at the scene of an accident in which someone has been hurt.

I followed directions, turned around, and went home by another route. I didn't want to go. I have no medical training. I don't even have a cell phone, so I couldn't even have called for an ambulance had I arrived earlier. I got to the intersection right when the professionals arrived, so I would have only gotten in the way. I wanted to help, but I couldn't.

Some of the people who had been riding the bus were standing around, looking at their watches, on their cell phones. They didn't look disturbed. I was disturbed.

I kept thinking about how cold the surface of the road would be on a morning like this. There were so many blankets piled on top of the injured man, but the parts of him that were on the pavement would be slowly freezing, so that no amount of blankets would keep him warm. I could only see his arm and head, and I wondered if he was a mangled, broken mess underneath his coverings. I wondered if he would call out for water because he had lost blood. I wondered what it would be like to be in his place. I don't know if he was cognizant or not. I wondered whether people know what to do in situations like that, or if people who have been unexpectedly, severely injured just wait to be told what to do, and lay quietly until someone instructs them.

I just hope he wasn't scared. I hope he didn't feel alone.

I've got a date this Saturday in Tyler!

Wow, it's been a while since I've been on a date, especially with a nice person. I met this really charming, ambitious, and intelligent lady online, and we're going out Saturday night. There are hinderances, but I think we can work these small things out. We've been talking everynight and everyday at work for some time now (that's why my noding has been lacking lately). We're gonna go see a movie, but at this time we do not know what.

Today's trivia:
Statistically, more babies are born today than any other day of the year, at least for the western world.
Why?
Thats easy, nine months ago was New Year's eve.

- | +

It's been nearly a month since my last entry. A lot has happened since then, but I never stopped to node it because I felt some of it was too personal even for an anonymous pseudonym. So instead of sharing details coinciding with dates, I'll give a quick overview of the last few weeks.

I've finally begun learning whole songs on the guitar. I have a problem with patience and therefore had up until this point been learning parts of many, many songs. I have also begun to sing although I ahve a strong nervous fear about doing so in front of anyone, so I am the only one who gets to hear my voice. I can play about 10 songs in full now, and sing 7 of them. Not bad considering I have just started trying to play entire songs.

My cousin has left to college. My friends have left also. I am left with almost no one familiar to me. An old high school friend has returned from Florida State University to help his mother with bills due to an unfortunate circumstance. I've remained sane through losing all of them, however by IMing them with AIM and seeing my cousin on weekends. She alternates from visiting here, or from myself and her boyfriend driving up to Buffalo.
Which brings up some things. I've been busy in Buffalo. I've managed to anger and attract some girls at the college. Apparently I'm more attractive in Buffalo, who knows. I think a major reason is the fact that I no longer meet new girls here. The only way I could would be through RIT, and yet there are a total of about 7 girls in my 4 classes. Computer Science is not the major to go into if you wannna find some chicks.

School itself is going fairly well. I bombed a CS test Tuesday, but apparently so did the majority of the class. We were thrown into a test taht asked questions of C++ specific syntax and compiler details which we hadn't discussed much. Not to mention we hadn't even really begun coding C++ in our labs yet. The language is entirely new to us, having gone through our first year learning with Java.

The game of Life has been going well for me lately. I'm happier than I can recall for a long time. I'm staying focused in school, I'm improving on guitar, and I have a possible relationship to look forward to. I'm beginning to feel more outgoing and no longer the dorky computer geek/ introvert. Its hard for me to shake the lingering remains of my early childhood and allow myself to realize who I am in the present. I am a competent, intelligent, responsible young guy and I'm beginning to feel at ease with it finally.

To life!

...Beets...Asparagus...

11:13 AM EST -- SLEEP!

Tuesday I mentioned that my Econ class was cancelled for today due to mysterious circumstances which still have not been completely explained to me. So, this means only one thing to me... SLEEP! And Pizza Rolls for breakfast!

10:01 PM EST -- SpeedDisk and faulty RAM do NOT mix!

More experimentation with putting my old RAM chips on the computer upstairs. Last time, apparently one of the chips were still bad (Which makes me glad it wasn't my motherboard at fault). I determined this because Unreal Tournament's install BSoDed me down with Page Faults (Norton CrashGuard tells me these things). Thus, my dad decided to do shotgun hardware replacement to determine which chip, exactly, was bad. Hey, we don't have any other way to test it.

I gave him the UT CD to test it (Going on the logic that if some RAM was bad, that, if anything, would BSoD it down) and left for class around 6:40 PM. I came back to hear him tell me that the install seemed to complete itself perfectly. I figured all was fine, he found the bad chip. Then he told me he ran Norton SpeedDisk for a routine defrag.

My brother and I immediately panicked at that.

Now, don't get me wrong here, ol' Pete Norton and the crew at Symantec makes some damn good utility software. I still consider the Norton Utilities among the top of any "Must get" list for a new computer. But, it's useless without working RAM. Like most any other program. This case is no different.

And don't get me wrong on the other account, my dad's no fool with computers. His knowledge is more old-school than modern-day, though, and he can trip up over some of the newer stuff out there.

For the uninitiated in the arts of defragging, you've either been a (!Microsoft) user for life, or you seriously need some info here. What SpeedDisk and any other defragger does is read fragmented files into memory (Note the key words) and writes them back to disk, all sorted out nicely.

The key words there were into memory. My brother and I immediately panicked. If SpeedDisk was successfully writing and reading from RAM without a BSoD stopping it, the data on the drive might be corrupted beyond belief now. Our only hope was the BSoD that we found when we got upstairs. Time to assess damage.

10:45 PM EST -- My bro never reads startup screens

Remember Yesterday when I said the new computer only had 32MB of RAM? Well, my bro was the one telling me that, not the actual startup screens. It had 64MB all along. Pfshh.

Damage appeared minimal. The computer started back up perfectly (After another RAM shotgunning) and things seemed to run. No worries, then. Now UT runs, albiet in Software Rendering mode, at about 23FPS. Still very playable. LAN party time. We've isolated the bad chip, it seems.

10:55 PM EST -- Keychain module?

I now have a useless RAM chip. Most people with RAM chips on their keychains bought them from someone else... a lousy 1MB or so SIMM chip with a hole pre-drilled in 'em. And bought from a store that sells things like keychain modules.

Bah to them.

I'll have a busted 64MB SDRAM chip that I bought from a COMPUTER STORE on my keychain.

Well... maybe. This thing's a bit big, really.

Nothing like Java in the morning. I didn't even bother getting breakfast; I went straight to Emacs and started coding away. It was such a good feeling. I know it's in me. Sometimes I get really excited about it and start saying things like, "I am good. I am so fucking good. I am a fucking ninjacoder!" It's not that I'm full of myself or anything, it's a sort of encouragement. And it works.

Anyway, Thursdays are my heaviest load days. I only have two classes, but each one lasts 3 hours. It's quite painful. Inbetween classes I stopped by a grease truck and got a tuna salad sandwich. The sky was overcast and it was drizzling, so I decided to eat in my car and listen to my music, watching the windshield gather raindrops. This time of reflection allowed me to notice something - my school's campus has cameras everywhere! There is at least one camera on each of the 8 floors of the parking deck... probably more, since the ones I spotted were nicely hidden. There are also cameras on top of several buildings, aimed everywhere. I know it's for campus security, but it's also a little unnerving.

During a visit to the restroom, I noticed one of the drop ceiling tiles was removed, and there was darkness into the ceiling right about a toilet stall. I immediately thought about the cameras all over the campus and almost expected an eye to come out of the hole.

Yes, my mind is full of silly thoughts like that.