Story Archive (10/2003)

Ain't It Just Bittersweet? (10/29/2003)

We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

How many birthday parties have I been to in the last few weeks? October is a month when a lot of my friends get older. I suppose it's a month when I get older as well. I don't have any photo's yet from my surprise party. The people who took photo's have yet to furnish me with a copy.

Tonight was wonderful and bittersweet. You know what I like about bittersweet moments? The sweetness. You know what I dislike about them? The bitterness. That's the way it goes. If you know the proper numbering of the melodrama's that make up my life, you'll be excited to know that tonight's bittersweet moment was brought to you by melodrama number four. If you do not know the numbers, you can spend a few hours trying to figure it out.

One really cool thing did happen. At a table of around twelve people, after the check got passed around and the total was tallied, there was extra! You know you're at a table of cool people when everyone pitches in a little more than their fair share.

Log Spamming (10/28/2003)

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.

I breezed through the entire Odyssey series in less than three weeks. That might be a new kind of record, even for me. I guess I need to swing by the library and pickup something new. Any suggestions? I was thinking of trying out the Dune or Foundation series.

I've learned of a new form of spamming. I know of e-Mail spamming. I knew of comment spamming (spam engines that post spam comments to people's websites). I now have learned of log file spamming. This involves robots that hit sites passing in the referring web page of their website. So when I generate logs, as I do, the top referring sites are those of these spammers. It's brilliant. It's also evil, but still brilliant.

Hidden Secrets (10/23/2003)

I have a thirty-minute ride home on the train each day now. I think that's the main enabler of my now daily blurts. I'm used to brooding on my way home. I'm used to taking the time to write down that brooding in my journal or on my Palm. Now I'm just writing it down on my website. Nothing has really changed besides the fact that it gets published.

Standing up for the thirty-minute ride home is hard on me these days. Due to one of my medications, my bones ache. I've got my feet kicked up right now because they're just sore from too much standing today. I look like a healthy man in his mid-twenties (or late teens, depending whom you ask). I can just imagine the reaction I would get on the train if I tried to kick people out of the seats reserved for the disabled. Dictum! remember that you don't always know the reasons behind people's actions.

I have a friend who gets great pleasure out of driving slightly over the speed limit in the fast lane while aggressive drivers want to pass him. He figures, in theory, that he's already breaking the law enough; they're the jerks for tailgating and wanting to go faster. He's probably right, but there is always the chance that some person has a valid reason for speeding, and he's impeding it. Maybe the speeder has someone bleeding to death in the backseat and are racing to the hospital.

Random People and Love (10/22/2003)

What is writing?

Words that stay.

I didn't want to start a b--- in the beginning. I think the main reason is that the term "b---" sounds stupid. I got some badgering and I started shoving something up once a week. All of a sudden, I realized I enjoyed this. I like writing stuff down. I like that people I know write back and comment on my comments. How are you at recognizing quotes?

Read by Candlelight (10/21/2003)

All these worlds are yours--except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

Try reading by candle light sometime. I tried it this weekend. I quickly realized that it was futile, except to say that I had read something by candlelight. I swung by the library and got "2010: odyssey two" and somehow managed to read the entire thing in three days. It's been a long while since the stars have aligned in the right way to allow me finish reading a large book at quite that speed.

I have a pile of books to read that has accumulated next to my bed. Yet they are all the books that just haven't interested me quite so much. My soul is tired and my mind is in need of some rest. Good, truly good, fiction books are one of the most restful and pleasurable things I find to pass the time.

Isn't it Ironic? (10/17/2003)

It's the delayed plane, on your last flight home. And who would have thought it figured? I gave Memphis a good old-fashion double deuce on my way out of town. My final flight back used up my last two upgrade coupons, but I needed a nice final first class return. So here I enjoy my large seat and my glass of red wine. It's definitely a merlot, but somewhat more expensive then the $4.99 bottles I'm used to buying. It was a long week; it was a long project; it was a long layover at the Denver airport.

Expensive merlot reminds me of one of the most enjoyable evenings out of my life. It was after one of our Super Saturdays, where we recruit college students. On a Super Saturday we take the kids out to party somewhere. That night we went to Jillian's in San Francisco. It was me and some of my other friends who are true connoisseurs of cheap merlot. So, we're always excited when we have the opportunity to drink expensive merlot on someone else's tab. The five of us sat at a table, drinking bottle after bottle of merlot for hours. The truly brilliant moment was at the end of the evening when the waiter came over and said, "I'm about to close the tab. We have two bottles of Merlot left in the back, shall I just bring them out for you?" Obviously we accepted the gracious offer. Hamilton, Melissa, Pat and Eileen, this merlot is in memory of that night so many years ago!

I also finished the first book of the "Don Quixote" books. It's time to put it down for a bit and throw another eBook into the mix before I take up the second one. The final sonnet to Sancho Panza misted me up. It's a good comedic book that can get me so moved by characters. Perhaps I'll read the next book in the three musketeers series. I've only got one more of those to go until I'll have finished all of them. The final book in that series, "Man in the Iron Mask," promotes open weeping at one scene when the mighty and heroic Porthos meets his end. I'm not spoiling much; "The Man in the Iron Mask" is about the downfall of the heroes. It is a tragedy in its best form.

Openess (10/16/2003)

In recent history, I've had a few friends remove entries from their websites, obfuscate their online journals and move their journals to sites that allow restriction. It's an interesting dilemma these people are dealing with. How comfortable are you letting the world see everything on your page? I suppose that could be better asked as: how comfortable are you letting THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD see everything on your page?

Anyway, the whole online journal thing is weird. My opinion is that the average personal person would happy if everyone in the world OTHER than the people they know read their stuff. I really want friends and family to read mine, that way I don't have to talk with them anymore. I guess I'm still a little squeamish with the concept that coworkers as well as the hot babes I'm picking up on are reading it. Heck, I can look at my logs and see hits from inside my company's firewall. So, "Hello!" to Cambridge and India.

This is my last evening in Memphis. I took a long autumn stroll around the area. I really enjoy the way the leaves fall on the ground and produce that crackling and crunching noise as you're trekking through them. It's reminiscent of the crunching of hard snow on a morning up in the mountains.

I'm looking forward to a TCR coffee this weekend. It must be more than four years since I've seen most of those people. It's strange to think that I once had such an ardor for spending time with these people, and yet it all faded away. That may be rekindled, but I'm not expecting it.

Computer Geek (10/15/2003)

I'm a computer geek. There's no debating that fact. This morning, I was reminiscing about my early days entering into this world. There are people out there, quite a few of them, who have early memories of watching their programs spew out onto punch cards, loading those punch cards slowly into a mainframe, and praying that a few hours later it had all gone okay.

I never had quite that level of joy. My days of geekness began on the Apple IIe with Logo. Logo was a wonderful language designed to teach kids procedural programming. I can still clearly remember my flagship program. The turtle drew a spaceship, stars and a rocky moonscape below. Then, the turtle vanished, but was still hard at work moving stars and updating the moonscape to make it appear that the ship was flying over some distant planet.

How could I ever forget my first AppleSoft BASIC program that used a loop to count to ten? No longer did I need to suffer the tedium of counting to ten myself; I had created a program to handle this onerous task for me.

I loved teaching programming at SCU to people. Being a TA for those various classes was awesome. Even now, out here in the job world, a huge percentage of what I do really is still teaching programming to green engineers. They're obviously not as green as the university students, but there's a lot to learn about how to do professional software engineering they never teach you in school. When someone makes the machine do what she wants, even when she doesn't quite understand why it works, it's amazing. Being able to see that sense of wonder, especially in the eyes of a twenty-five year old, is a fabulous thing.

A Friend - by Charles Hanson Towne (10/12/2003)

Around the corner I have a friend
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.

And I never see my old friend's face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
He knows I like him just as well.
As in the days when I rang his bell,
And he rang mine.

We were much younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.
Tired of playing a foolish game,
Tire of trying to make a name.

"Tomorrow," I say, "I will call on Jim"
"Just to show that I'm thinking of him."
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner! - yet miles away,
"Here's a telegram sir" - "Jim died today."
And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

Number One (10/10/2003)

I just notice something on Google today. I did a search for my full name and my website came back as the top ranking. Now, I often to Internet stalking trying to find information about old friends. In fact, one of the reasons I like to mention people with their full name is to help out the Internet stalkers in the world.

I have a few times where said stalkers do a search for one of my friends, and come across a mention of them on my website. It usually pulls back my pictures page. The stalker then e-Mails me asking for information about that person. I never give it out. I also forward the stalkers contact info to my friends instead. But I've a few long lost souls get in touch that way, and it gives me a fuzzy feeling inside.

My friend Debbie was complaining about all the typos and spelling errors. So, I finally got around to installing the spell checker for jEdit. So now I can spell check stuff. Of course, that doesn't correct some of the typos I'll make. Ewe no, when eye use the wrong word.

My friend Dave is slipping. He used to always point out problems with my site. I was just browsing through and discovered two major issues! First, the absolute links in my navigation over on the right (ones that link off of my site) we totally broken on every page except my home page. Second, the Chaos Now! page was all screwed up under IE. As a Mozilla/Firebird user, I never noticed.

Naughty Websites (10/8/2003)

I just nuked the entry I had about a coworker. My friend Dave recently had a bad experience with work related information on his site. I realized that mine was... well... probably not appropriate. So it's gone.

Someone famous once said, Every man is the hero of his own story.

My friend Adam once said, Not me. I'm just a bit part in my story.

Magic Picture (10/6/2003)

My friend Gabe has a couple cool things on his site. Every time you load the page it shows a random picture from his collection. I thought that was pretty damn cool! So I added that to the top of this page. It still has a bit of work left cause it just shows the thumb without linking to the main picture.

I'm proud of it, like my random quote at the bottom of each page, because my site is static. I've got no server side stuff like PHP or Perl making this happen. How do I do it? Pure mental power. I also warm my coffee by staring at it whilst thinking of fire.

Haven't your heard? I've already flown away. (10/5/2003)

Let me try putting it this way. I will not step on a plane for this company for at least the next twelve months.

My job future is somewhat in the air now. I tried to leave this place once a year ago. At the time, a lot of good friends at the company came to my aid and shuffled around what I did to put me in a place where I was suppose to have limited travel. A year later, and my travel hasn't actually decreased any. The travel is killing me. Really! It aggravates my health problems, and I've got no need to be doing that.

I'm not sure how it's going to play out, but I'm not expecting to be employed here in another few months. Ideally, I liked to get laid off with a little bit of severance. It's what this place should have done two years ago when I said I wasn't going to travel anymore. It's what this place should have done one year ago when I said I would rather be laid off than travel. It's what this place should have done with they closed the SF office and told everyone we'd be traveling 100% going forward.

So, I'll see how it all pans out. Technically I could easily qualify for some of the disability protections. God knows how that would complicated the situation if I pulled it out. Yikes!