Thursay, 11. December 2003: "Na na na nana, na na na nana... I wanna be sedated..." Does it make me a terrible person that I caught myself whistling that while driving home from the vet? It's not completely my fault - another of their songs were on the radio when I started the car...

So, I have this theory, which I've probably explained on the site by now, but just in case, I'll do so again. For every one of the major life milestones, there are three phases.

Phase one is "holy crap! Thing X happened? That's so WIERD!"

Phase two is "Oh yeah... Thing X. That happens all the time."

Phase three is "Thing X hasn't happened to you yet? That's wierd... It happens to everyone."

For most of the major milestones, we're deep into phase two - settling down, buying houses, that sort of stuff. I think that actual marriage (as opposed to sinful, sinful cohabitation and fornication), and babies (the inevitable result of said fornication, barring the miracles of modern technology) are the only phase one milestones I can really think of at the moment.

Well, save one. And this is a recent revision in status, though if I had been paying more attention, I would have revised the status earlier. A little over two years ago, a friend's mother lost her partner. Sometime in the last 18 months, a friend of a friend lost her husband (said FoF is about our age, as was her husband). A guy I met at work a little over a year ago lost his partner. I hadn't started the clock on unexpected illness and death, but it was happening; I just wasn't paying attention.

In the last two weeks, a friend of mine had to put her dog down. A little less than an hour ago, I had to put my cat to sleep. She had cancer, and the new treatment we put her on at thanksgiving really helped, but the cancer had already started adapting. You couldn't give the medicine more often than every three weeks (it's hard on the bone marrow), but two weeks in I noticed that she had peaked and started declining again. Not much; just a little. And she wasn't nearly as bad as she was the week before thanksgiving, but she would have gotten there eventually.

Problem was, this time, there was no new drug to try, no hope that we could buy her a big chunk of time. The event horizon was now measured in days, maybe a handful of weeks if we were lucky.

I learned all this yesterday morning, so to everyone that had dinner with me on tuesday, I apologize; I do tend to keep painful secrets for a while, but in this case, I just didn't know yet. I told a couple of people yesterday, so they'd have a chance to say goodbye before, and I'm letting the rest of you know now.

I'll be skipping a birthday party tonight, and I feel really bad for doing so; I gots nothing but love in my heart for all the folks that will be celebrating (both the specific ones we're celebrating, and the folks doing same), but this thing has been eating up my time a lot over the last two months, and there are a couple of folks that I'm separated from by distance and haven't seen at all while this has been going on. I'm going to have dinner with a few of them tonight down in Olympia, and hopefully catch up with the rest in the coming weeks.

So to everyone that's reading this, I'd just like to say that I love you very much. Let's be careful out there; I wouldn't really say that the universe is out to get us, but at the same time, we're all a little older than we think we are and we can't really take things for granted anymore.

Tuesday, 25. November 2003: Fuck me, reverse cowgirl style, with a nun. Too drained, at the moment, to enumerate the reasons why I'm so drained. I will say that the vet appointment tomorrow morning is a big part of it, as is my job.

Monday, 06. October 2003: Almost exactly one year to the day later, I'm off to an eight-thirty appointment in issaquah; Physics has Lymphosarcoma. Nice.

The lyrics of "Ooh La La" (by the faces, for those who don't know) are suprisingly bitter, when one tracks them down and reads them. I cannot get that fucking song out of my head.

Sat Oct 04, 2003 01:17:15 AM PDT: There was this guy who went to lincoln a year or two before me. Half the week, he dressed like a punk straight outta cbgb.

The other half, he wore a suit.

I wonder what the hell ever happened to that guy?

Tue Sep 30, 2003 08:23:42 AM PDT: Another crazy dream. Off in the distance, tyranosaurs the size of cities. I was going on vacation on a hovercraft or hydrofoil that was huge - like many stories high, with some sort of ice rink or soccer field down in the center. Could still move at a good clip, though. Basically, think shield helicarrier on water.

Anyways - we were staying on some island, and we passed several floatingcities to get there. Tashana was there, as was larry. Strangely, so was a baby which I thought of as my brother. [Ed. Note - a new one, not the real one...]

Last thing I remember was rooting about in my luggage for the bag whereI packed diapers. I think i'd forgotten it, thaough, and brought a box of assorted crap from my apartment by accident, instead. I specifically remember the millennium falcon model I gave away at xmas, the crappysoundblaster card I bought, and my dice bag from the d&d game...

It were wierd.

Sun Sep 28, 2003 11:54:49 PM PDT:Had a dream last night. I was driving away from the laddington house. It was rainy, and then everything was coated in ice - like the ice storms we used to have when I was a kid. Was headed downhill and couldn't stop. Crashed throught "road cloased" barriers and the like. Tense, but not exactly scary. Like crisis mode.

Honestly have no idea whether this was work or personal...

Thu Sep 25, 2003 10:52:49 PM PDT: [DRUNK] I find helena bonham carter obscenely hot in fight club. They tell me that the crazier they are, the better they are in bed...

Monday, 01. September 2003: Settling in to the new place, slowly. The civilization and mess come and go like the tides. I get stuff stacked up so I have room to move around in and unpack stuff, putting stuff on shelves and so forth, and eventually, the empty boxes etc end up creating all the chaos I had before and then some.

It's fun though. I enjoy the task of re-creating my own personal space again, getting to put stuff where I want it, arranging things, making the place my own. I've gotten various offers of assistance, which so far I've sorta dithered and obfuscated my way around accepting. I really got into it for a couple of hours last night, and I realized why I'd been guarding it all so jealously - I didn't really feel like I had any control or responsibility in the last place, and I actually like having it. I generally don't mind mess, but when there is mess that bothers me, I want to take responsibility for it and make it not messy. I have a tolerance for mess that's less than some people Iknow, but more than the average population, I'd wager. Anyways, the place is still such a disaster area I don't really want too many guests over, but it's getting better, and I'm enjoying the process a lot. I have no idea, though, if I have way too much stuff for the amount of space I have, or way too little. I waffle endlessly, often while unpacking the same box.

Dammit. I forgot to take the full tray in the robo-litterbox to the dumpster when I left...

Somewhere in all the mess is a notepad I scribbled a note on about a dream I remembered having recently; I'll retroactively add that entry below at some point. In the meantime, wanted to get down the one I had last night before I forget. It was a reunion dream with a friend that I haven't seen in a long time. Probably pushing five years, at this point. Last time I remember seeing her, she drove through Olympia sometime in winter of 99. So I guess four years.

She was wearing red, and I remember hugging her, and it felt really good. Made me remember how much I miss her, and made me acutely aware, today, of all the wierd-ass choices I'm making in my life. I like solitude. I also like being busy. I have a tendancy to do a bit too much of both things, sometimes. Will have to make sure that I continue to keep an eye on that one, even as I binge on control over my surroundings. =)

Also, I absolutely have to go and visit Arizona before too many more months pass. Especially after flaking out on that last post card. So, dear reader from the future; if you're reading this in 2004, please do me the kindness of asking if I've been to the desert recently. If the answer is no, please do me the additional favor of heaping upon me your scorn and derision, for I will have proven myself a bad, bad, bad friend, indeed.

Besides, if I visit my friend who is currently in Hawaii without visiting my friend that tried to get me out there for so many years, she'll just kill me, and I can't have that, now, can I?

Friday, 01. August 2003: A woman singing "memories" in a hair salon, crowd gathered out on the sidewalk to hear her sing, haircuts going on unonterrupted just behind her.

The chef where I work, filling the dance floor of a hole in the wall ethiopian resturant - I want to ask him on monday which he'd leave behind, if he could have only one. Given who he cooks for, I bet i knows the answer.

Saturday, 12. July 2003: Another one of those nights where I have to be up early and just cannot get to sleep at all. Kevin & Sarah leave tomorrow to do the Seattle-to-Portland bike ride thing, and I wanna get up to see them off. Of course, that's at like four thirty in the morning. The ride is one of those things I want to do someday, and I'm really impressed that they're doing it, to be honest. I almost drove down to PDX on sunday just for the hell of it, but in the end, ended up letting rationality take hold. Would have been fun, but pretty impractical.

Trying to lose some more weight again, late night insomnia-induced ice cream snacking non-withstanding. =) We'll see how it goes.

Work is, as always, hard work. Lately, it's been a different kind of work, however. It's still like pushing a large boulder up a steep and slippery hill, but these days, it's like there's actually a bit of momentum working for us, and we're actually taking the time to build pulleys and such, rather than just throwing more bodies underneath the rock for traction. We'll see. Still too soon to tell. If we're lucky, we'll see some results a year from now, right? I do know that I'm less uneasy about the position the company is in, but more uneasy about my ownfinances. Transmission on my car is showing it's age, for one thing. *Sigh*

Fun moment from the fourth of july weekend that bears mentioning. A group of us went on a hike that comically ended up in about 200 yards of bushwhacking through stinging nettles. Totally rediculous. Totally fun. Some folks turned back, a few of us pushed on. At least this time, we had the sense to, you know, pass around long sleeved shirts to those of us who were too dumb to bring them ourselves. In any case, we ended up thrashing through more stupid brambles to the top of a cliff, and then climbing/sliding on our asses down the cliff - which was also covered in brambles, I might add. I distinctly remember thinking "you know, this is the stupidest thing I've done in a long, long time. But hey; going down is easier than going back up, right?"

So, then, when we finally got down, we were right down on the beach. Dirty, scratched up all to hell, tired, thirsty, proud as hell, and with about a mile of walking on sand and up a steep hill before we could shower and rest. It was, while not awful, something I was very, very glad to be done with when we got back. I have never before understood the whole "beer is tastier when you're hot and sweaty" thing. Beer is something you just drink when you're socializing or having a meal, right? Social lubricant. Oh, no, my friends. Let me tell you. Beer is something fine. Beer is yellow, foamy, and very, very comforting. Beer is refreshing. Beer is cold, and very, very wet. Specifically, the one crap-ass Tecate el junko or whatever I had to drink before I started pounding water and took a shower? That is, (And I know I say things like this a lot, but this time I really mean it.) the best beer I have ever drank. Period. End of story. Much like the stupid quantity of ice cream I just consumed. Bad for you, but really tasty. Really, if I were to be sedated from the hours of twelve midnight to six am, I'd be a much thinner person, actually. I must admit it were tasty, though. =)

Tue Jul 1, 20031:07:49 AM US/Pacific: [DRUNK] OK. Twice, I have been to the cha cha cha in the bay area. BEST FOOD EVER. CHEAP SANGRIA.

Now, it is time for sleep. before, we were going to go to the amusement park with the roller coaster. We dropped alex off to get with the nookie, so I doubt that there will be the amusement park.

Instead, the sleeping and the hangover. So impressed with the drunk typing skills am I.

Much love all around. Time now for the sleep, yes?

Kiss, kiss...

Tuesday, 17. June 2003: I called "911" yesterday, for the first time ever. Some guy having what I assume was an epiliptic fit in his car a couple of blocks from the Gym where I work out. It was pretty scary, actually, and I can tell you that as cool as my sidekick is, it really needs a more prominent panic button. I left after the paramedics showed up, so it was fairly anti-climactic. I don't even know if the guy's okay. I hope he is.

Wednesday, 11. June 2003: The thing I really love about my job is the ability to actually have a say in what happens and to actually make a difference.

The part I hate is how I don't have the luxury of not knowing what's going on or knowing the people I work with, and all their insane, flawed, brilliant, fucked-up selves. Luckily, when confronted with fifty-three insolvable problems, I can always answer email, right?

Monday, 12. May 2003: I've decided never to watch live TV any more. Entirely too many shows that are good get cut down way too early. If it's one of the ones that actually makes it, I'll catch up on the show in the inevitable DVD box sets of the first couple seasons. If it's one of the ones that gets axed after one season, I'll watch it in the inevitable DVD box set release without getting all angsty and emotionally involved while the network waffles on whether to keep the show around or not. I'm currently watching my way through "My So-Called Life" and am forced to admit to myself the uncomfortable truth that Claire Danes was infinitely hotter when she was jailbait. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm pretty sure it is not good.

I had a fairly strange dream last night. It involved an army of Terminators, and some sort of weapon-laden superbike that utterly failed to work when I got on it. I remember feeling really dismayed as I putted along at lawn-mower speeds, front shocks completely collapsed and failing to understand the controls. Mercifully, I awoke soon after.

53 weeks ago, I made absolutely no deal at all about my birthday. One week and one day ago, my various social circles participated/collaborated in the hugest multi-day deal I can remember about my birthday. I had a total blast over the last seven days, but I also decided in advance that next year is all about the comfortable middle ground - somewhere about Wednesday last week, I just began to feel like I was truly coming to understand the phrase "an embarrasment of riches". To everyone involved - thank you very, very much.

Tuesday, 31. December 2002 (by exactly 18 whole minutes): [DRUNK] Well, we've discovered that the optimal number of beers necessary for me to get caught up on tech support email in the middle of the night is three. Much less, and I think to myself "Gee... the fact that I have to get up at 6:15 in the morning to walk around Greenlake means I should probably stop writing email now". Much more (like that fourth beer) means that while I'm willing to answer tech support email all night long, I very quickly realize that I'm not entirely in a state where reperesenting the public face of my employer is a good idea.

But, you know, at least I'm *mostly* caught up at this point. I'll finish up tomorrow and then start work on some AppleScript stuff that I'd really like to finish up before MacWorld if at all possible.

Since I have many doubts that I'll be in any shape suitable for posting tomorrow night, I'll just go ahead and type out the stuff that I planned to type on new years' eve for a while now. My official "Last few seconds of 2002" post, should it have happened when it would normally done so would be:

"Thank God. 2002 is over. FUCK 2002. On to better things in 2003."

And now, it's time to finish that last beer that I grabbed from the fridge and go to bed. I'm not sure whether I'll browse the web some more, or just go play "SSX Tricky" on the GameCube I bought myself for christmas. (Yes, it's an old game. Those of you that have played it know how sublime an experience the game really is, and hold me faultless for purchasing a copy over a year after it became available. Note that I have free access to it at work, so buying a console and the game is an act of the truly dedicated and/or stupid...)

Note: We have determined that the cats will last approximately 48 hours without human presence before totally freaking out and demanding attention at every available opportunity; Kevin's down in PDX celebrating his birthday with a crowd of friends that includes, among others, my (supposedly) future wife. Or something. Yeah, I likes the drinky, doesn't I? Too bad that I have not only The Refreshments on the stereo as I type this, I also has a brand-new and unviewed copy of "Cabin Boy" to keep me up till the crack of dawn. Why do I not own a copy of "Very Bad Things"? I dunno, really, but I should, I tell you. Go Me!

Monday, 23. December 2002: I think I need a wireless pda or something so I update this damn page more often. Or, maybe not. Sometimes, it's hard to tell. A refreshing lack of crises lately makes for boring reading, I suppose. Sorry, all.

Thursday, 16. December 2002: I'm totally bummed out - those incredible cock-knockers at fox cancelled Firefly just as it was getting good. I guess I was just spoiled by B5 to the point where I forgot that two smart, funny and well-written shows involving spaceships in one lifetime was too much to ask for.

(anyone who mentions Star Trek at this point will be dragged outside, beaten within an inch of their lives, and dumped at the most incompetent teaching hospital I can find. Aliens are not people with funny bumps on their faces, and space is not an infinite 2-D plane, for god's sake. Shut the hell up.)

I had the most bizarre dream I can remember last (Sunday) night. The really wierd part is where this (literally) old hag, who I think was Satan, appeared. She was wearing a green cloak, and shortly after she appeared, her head rotated 180 degrees, and she turned into a young girl. She then proceeded to piss all overl herself - the stain on the robe looked like a big smiling mouth. She then pissed on me, and I swear to god, whipped out a cock and shook it on someone else. I have NO IDEA what it all means...

Friday, 6. December 2002:I had a really strange dream last night - at one point, I was at something resembling the high school reunion I just attended. I don't remember much except that I ran into the Worst Girlfriend Ever, and I totally gave her the piece of my mind that I never gave her in real life. (On the one hand it seems really lame to be still having dreams about this sort of thing ten years later, but on the other hand, that's what happened, so I'm not going to be coy about it.) As I always suspected, though, delivering the mega-rant wasn't all that satisfying, even in virtual space. She just cried a little, said fuck you, and left me to feel like a jerk for getting mad in the first place. Sigh. I dunno - I'm still not good at the whole getting pissed and enjoying it thing that other people in the world seem to possess.

Digression; next scene was where things get truly disturbing; normally my dreams aren't hugely graphic, but this one was. I was walking somewhere, and came upon the scene of an absolutely horrible car wreck - several cars, people trapped inside, at least one person actually on fire. I don't remember seeing it, but someone mentioned a decapitation. The things I did see, though, were really graphic. Horribly bloody wounds, gore. Not fun. I'm not sure if it was a hangover from glancing at a site I saw on the net lately (www.showmeyourwound.com - look it up yourself if you're interested; it's exactly what it says it is) or what, but it was plenty disgusting to wake up to in the morning.

Oh, and apparently I fondle myself while asleep and have no memory of doing so when I wake up. Interesting the embarrasing things you discover when you start sharing a bed with someone on a regular basis...

Friday, 22. November 2002: From the "Seems like it would have been self-evident" department, apparently some people have not discovered that breaking into your ex's email account, harvesting addresses, and sending harrassing emails to folks in their address book is not, it turns out, an effective strategy for winning said ex back.

Sometimes, you realize that you may have been beating yourself up over something and discover that you're still doing about ten thousand percent better than some other folks. Not sure if that really means anything, but at the very least, it's momentarily gratifying. There are always new depths to be plumbed, I suppose.

Monday, 3. November 2002: Had a dream last night that was very much about powerlessness and being trapped. Just before I woke up, I was scrabbling ineffectually at several locks on a door, waiting for the sun to rise.

Thursday, 31. October 2002: Jam Master Jay is dead. That sucks ass, needless to say. Too many random assorted updates scribbled down on paper all over the place to enter in right now. Sorry.

Thursday, 24. October 2002 : No dreams last night - probably because I kept pleasantly being woken up by the stirrings of the person sleeping next to me. It was funny: when Kevin called @ 6AM on the cell phone and asked "Did ya fall asleep?" I'm pretty sure he meant "at work". Didn't feel like explaining just then, however.

Oh, yeah... Punch-Drunk Love rules!

Wednesday, 23. October 2002: Dream this evening - had to row a boat to Alcatraz island with some folks that I used to work with a couple of companies back. There were no oars in the boat, though, and we got swept up in the current. Paddled as best as we could, but couldn't get the boat to slow down and ended up getting dashed on the rocks. I made it out, at least one of the other folks didn't. mmmm.... cheap symbolism.

Tuesday, 22. October 2002 (Afternoon): I'm really, really tired of being acutely aware of how far down towards the bottom of the learning curve I am on a lot of things. This too, in time, shall pass, I suppose.

Tuesday, 22. October 2002 (Extreme AM): We were on some sort of trip by boat. Boat sank. Tuesday people were there - specifically remember Nora and Kevin. There were life rafts of various sizes. I grabbed one that was basically inner-tube sized and we all started paddling to shore. Strange thing about this dream was that glasses fell off in the sinking of the boat, and vision was appropriately blurred/messed up.

Monday, 21. October 2002: Dreamed that the Laddington house was being torn down/gutted/remodled. There was a giant construction machine parked amongst the wreckage; I had the key, but couldn't figure out where to board the thing or how to turn it on.

Sunday, 20. October 2002: Had this completely bizarre deram that was a combination of Starship Troopers, John' Carpenter's The Thing, and Ender's Game.

Humans were being attacked by these worms that would burrow into your flesh, take you over, and make you do things. In a pinch, the worms could push back out of your body, tentacle-like, and act like limbs - feet, whips, etc. Dozens of these things in a body, acting in concert.

In any case, I was in the Army, and I was still in training. We were learning infantry stuff - ambushes, various weapons, etc. Infantry was gender-integrated, like in S.T. It was my job to run along with my partner (who had a rifle) and keep any aliens who got too close to use the rifle effectively off of us with my uber-tonfa-thing.

Me, my partner, and a couple other soldiers got called to a meeting in the commanders shack, after training.

Of course it was an ambush - I guess we can add aliens to the mix, because it was basically the scene where Newt and Ripley have to fight off the facehugger that's been released while they're sleeping in the medical bay.

In any case, the worms got my partner, a couple members of my unit, and (bizarrely) both of the cats in the house.

They were holding me hostage before they took me over, along with (also bizarrely) Greg Wilkins from the Tuesday people. I sidled over to a bookcase, grabbed something heavy, and clubbed my unit commander into unconsciousness. (She'd been taken over.) Then we all made a break for it.

I remember holding someone and trying to get the worms off her before they could burrow in, but I couldn't stop them.

I remember running past someone and having them scream - bunches of tentacles at the back of their throat.

I remember a soldier throwing the animate corpse of one of the household cats at me. It sorta stumbled along, sprouted a bunch of tentacles, and came scuttling after me. I was running from it when I woke up.

Saturday, 19. October 2002 (Extreme AM): Well, on any Given trip, I always forget one thing. I remembered toothpaste, forgot the toothbrush. Go me.

Random disjointed thoughts, post 10-year reunion:

1. Nobody changed. At all. The ones that were vaguely condescending twits with silver spoons in their mouths were still vaguely condescending twits with silver spoons in their mouths.
2. Everybody's different: the guy that nobody gave the time of day to in high school is now a screenwriter in L.A. with a fairly hot girlfriend. Karmic Balance exists.
3. As far as cool jobs go, being a forensic investigator pretty much wins, hands down. From the guy who surgically removed his date's head and hands to prevent identification of the body. (But left said body in her own apartment), to the three warning signs of an impending visit from a crime scene investigation team (They are: frozen tater tots in the fridge, a glass-topped coffee table, and wood paneling. Apparently, one is safe, two is iffy, and all three guarantees a messy exit from this mortal coil somewhere on the premises.)
   Yeah. The forensic investigator wins.
4. Suprisingly small number of people in attendance. Like 50 or so out of at least 200. I hear that the twenty tends to be much better attended.

Other than that, you mostly just realize how much living fits into ten years, and you gain a real appreciation for how small-scale a lot of the shit you deal with truly is.

Barring some sort of unfortunate accident or tragedy, I'll still be here in the year 2012, writing about how much stranger and unrecognisable everyone is with another ten years under their belts.

So, I guess this is my advice to everyone out there:

People are much more enduring than we give them credit for. Mostly, the men put on a few pounds and lose a little hair, while the women remain discouragingly unaffected by the passage of time.
In the end, the small shit really just comes out in the wash and doesn't matter much. Be safe, have fun, live good lives, and for God's sake, don't take yourself too fucking seriously.

Friday, 18. October 2002 (Extreme AM):

Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you no man ask for
Under pressure
That burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Insanity laughs under pressure we're cracking
Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
Why can't we give love give love give love?
Give love give love give love give love give love?
Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care
For people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure
Under pressure pressure

Tuesday, 15. October 2002: This morning, I got to take some pants out of the "I'm too fat to wear this" box. That was kinda nice, to be honest.

Monday, 14. October 2002: Nothing like finding out that you haven't learned a lesson nearly as well as you thought you have. Mmmmmm... fun.

So, instead of the two pills a day my cat is already sick of having stuffed down her throat, now I get to shove either four or five, depending on the day. This... should be fun.

Saturday, 13. October 2002 (PM): Watched the Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet, as well as "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" tonight. Still really great movies, but the latter was somewhat demoralizing, to be honest.

Saturday, 13. October 2002 (AM): Had a dream last night - it's fading already, so I'll get it down now while I still have a little.

I was some sort of federal agent. There was running, and it was night-time, and there was shooting and a car crash, and some chick running around, inexplicably, in her bra, panties, and a garter belt.

I got a five-minute lecture in a bar last night about how, in many cases, dark circles under the eyes are caused by allergies. It was funny. I really haven't gotten a huge amount of sleep this weeek - figured that might have something to do with it.

I'm looking at myself again... When was this page not navel-gazing central, but really; this is getting excessive. In any case, cowardice and faithlessness are the gremlins I'm currently wrestling with.

The Tuesday people are having an all-day pie and movie-baking fest. Mmmmm.... baking and bad movies. Hooray!

Friday, 11. October 2002: A friend turned me on to Atmosphere, and I've been endlessly listening to "Don't ever fucking question that". Suffice it to say that it kicks serious ass. "Nothing but sunshine" is nothing to scoff at, either.

Sigh. Fuck all this noise. I'm going to scrounge up another drink before everyone stops selling liquor.

10/10/2002:

Well, for best results, one should really watch the clip, but that would require actual work to set up. As an alternative, here's the sound bite. Enjoy. Mmmmm... Tommy Boy.

Waitress: Kitchen's closed.
Tommy: Okay, I'll Just have a sugar packet or two. Hey, whats your name?
Waitress: Helen.
Tommy: That's nice, you look like a Helen... Helen, we're both in sales; let me tell you why I suck as a salesman. Lets say I go into some guy's office and lets say he's even remotely intrested in buyin' something. Well, then I get all excited - I'm like JoJo, the idiot circus boy, with a pretty new pet. The pet... is my possible sale.
Oh, my pretty little pet, I love you.
So, I stroke it, and I pet it, and I massage it. Hehe, I love it, I love my little naughty pet, you're naughty! And then I take my naughty pet and I go (tears dinner roll apart) chhhhhhhh, chhhhhhhhh, OOOOHHHHHHH. I KILLED IT! I KILLED MY SALE! That's when I blow it.

10/09/2002: Hmmm... and the parade of unexpected lifestyle configuration change continues unabated. Borrowed a PC from someone today. Had a chat at a Cheveron station with someone else. Drank beer. Made an effort to contact people that I'd not been doing so previously. At this point, I keep expecting to stop being suprised any day now, but so far it hasn't happened yet. Who knows? Maybe it never will. Wheeeee!

10/7/2002: I was having a conversation with some friends the other day, and one of them said "One of the things I really like about Brian is that, even when what you just said is complete nonsense, he really tries to make sense out of it." I suppose it's a useful skill, but it does have a downside from time to time.

10/5/2002:Dropped physics off for the MRI, then came down th the Hurricane for breakfast and shitloads of coffee. I'd give O a call, but it's barely 9AM, and that just seems cruel.

Woke up stupid-thirty in the morning, spent some time petting and talking to the cat while I waited for the alarm to go off. Bottom line is, if something happens to that cat, me and the almighty, we're going to have some stern words.

I've known Alex, Orion, possibly Raven, Kirsten, and Erin longer than that cat. Nobody else.

I still remember bringing her home from the animal shelter, remember the trips we used to take down to the laundry room. I remember the kink she had in her tail from the time it got caught in the door on the way down. I remember the neighbor down the hall who used to get her stoned, unbeknownst to me.

I remember how she'd still hop into bed with me every night when I came home from school every couple of months.

I remember how bad it felt when she ran away both times, and how good it felt when she got found.

I still remember putting her on a leash and walking her around downtown; I'd take her to a little park across the street from our apartment so she could run around and climb some of the smaller trees. (yes, she was still on a leash in the tree.)

I'm sure she'll be fine, even if it means that something fixable is broken. But if not... There will be words.

10/3/2002: Motherfucking christ, I am bone fucking weary. Gave demos of three applications in less than five minutes to a crowd of over four hundred people today. Actually doing it wasn't hard, but preparing, getting all the gear set up and to the convention show, then manning the booth, just has me exhausted. Want to drink several drinks, sit on a couch, and watch all the TV I've missed this week. Will be doing that shortly. In the end, it's worth it, I guess. And it all turned out well. Wish it was a little easier sometimes, though.

In any case, having dinner with one of my bosses totally improved my demo about 10,000%; he's an incredible pain in the ass to deal with from time to time, but at the same time, we'd be totally fucked without him. He's the guy that drives us to incredibly stupid places where we're working at the exact outer edge of our capabilities, and he makes us just that little bit better than we would actually be otherwise that makes all the difference. It's not comfortable, it's not fun, but it works, and I hate to admit it, but it's worth it.

And now, I think I'll set my alarm just early enough in the morning to make my workout, and proceed to get all fucked up on my drug of choice. Salud!

Flav: Yeah, that's right
This cut goes out to all y'all that's been missin' us fo' mad years. One love, yo.
Yeah, that's right; he got game.
P.E. 1998

Chuck D: If man is the father, the son is the center of the earth,
In the middle of the universe
Then why is this verse comin' six times rehearsed?
I don't freestyle much but I write em like such _{Flav: Word}

Chuck D: Amongst the themes controlled by the screens
What does it all mean, all this shit I'm seein'? _{Flav: Ha-Ha}
Human beings screamin' vocal javelins
Sign of tha local nigga unravelin _{Flav: Uh-Huh}
My wanderin' got my ass wunderin'
Where Christ is in all this crisis
Hatin' Satan never knew what nice is
Check the papers while I bet on Isis
More than your eye can see and ears can hear
Year by year all the sense disappears
Nonsense perseveres prayers laced with fear
Beware 2 triple 0 is near

Chorus: It might feel good
It might sound a little sumpun'
But damn the game if it don't mean nothin',
What is game, who got game,
Where's the game in life behind
The game behind the game, I got game, she's
Got game, we got game, they got game, he
Got game, it might feel good, it might sound a little
Sumpun, but fuck the game if it ain't sayin' nothin'

Chuck D: Damn, was it somethin I said?
Pretend you don't see, so you turn your head
Race scared of it's shadow, does it matter?
Thoughta reparations got em playin wit' the population
Nothing to lose, everything's approved
People used, even murders excused _{Flav: Little kids too, yo.}
White men in suits don't have to jump
Still a 1001 ways to lose wit the shoes
God takes care of ol folks and fools _{Flav: Uh!}
While the devil takes care of makin all the rules
Folks don't even own themselves
Payin' mental rent
To corporate presidents _{Flav: My man, my man}
1 outta 1 million residents
Be a dissident
Who ain't kissin it
The politics of chains and whips
Got the sick missin ships and championships
What's love got to do wit what you got?
Don't let a win get to your head,
Or a loss to your heart _{Flav: Word}
Nonsense perseveres
Prayers laced wit fear
Beware
2 triple O is near

Chorus: It might feel good
It might sound a little sumpun'
But damn the game if it don't mean nothin',
What is game, who got game,
Where's the game in life behind
The game behind the game, I got game, she
Got game, we got game, they got game, he
Got game, it might feel good, it might sound a little
Sumpun, but fuck the game if it ain't sayin' nothin'

Flav: Yeah, that's right, everybody got game
And we just here to let y'all know
That P.E.
Is in full effect
From right now
Until the year two thousand.
Hey yo my man, sing it

Stephen Stills: There is something happening here _{Flav: Yeah, Yeah}
What it is, ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there _{Flav: Yeah that's right, ha-ha}
Tellin' me I got to beware
It's time to stop children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's goin' down

Flav: Hey, yo; I don't think they heard you, Stephen
Kick it to 'em again one more time

Stephen Stills: It's time to stop children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's goin' down

Flav: That's right, boy
P.E. in full effect, boy, until the year two thousand, yo

Chior: Stop, look, what's that sound? _{Flav: C'mon, sing it!}
Everybody knows what's going down _{Flav: Sing it again, yo. C'mon!}
Stop, look _{Flav: Hey!}, what's that sound? _{Flav: Hey-hey!}
Everybody knows what's going down.
Flav: Hey, yo; these are some serious times that we livin' in, G
And a New World Order is about to begin, you know what I'm sayin'?
Now, the question is, are you ready for the real revolution
Which is an evolution of the mind
If you seek, than you shall find that we all come from the divine,
You dig what I'm sayin? Now, if you take heed to the words of wisdom
That are written on the walls of life, then universally, we will stand
And divided, we will fall, because love conquers all, you understand what I'm sayin'?
This is a call
For all you sleeping souls:
Wake up!
And take control of your own cipher
And be on the lookout
For those spirit snipers
Tryin' to steal your life, you know what I'm sayin'?
Look deep inside yourself for peace
Give thanks, live life, and release.
You dig me? You got me?

Chior: Everybody knows what's going down
Stop, look, what's that sound?
Everybody knows what's going down.

9/30/2002: "Sociologists tell us that e-mail does a kind of social leveling that makes people bolder. Sending a flame message to the boss or even to the entire company and the boss, is so easy to do that it seems like there ought to be little consequence. But there is a consequence. As the fallen angel Belial says in Paradise Lost, it embrutes us, making us less sensitive to our own harsh words. At the same time, having expended our energy in self-righteous but poorly aimed bursts of anger, we just don't have any energy left to actually do something about the real issue at hand." -Bob Cringely

So, I was talking with a friend last night, and he said "You're getting a lot vaguer on your web site. You've gone from showing brain to..." <pause>

Yeah, I have. And I don't know how I feel about that. On the one hand, being vague here and using codenames and all the other cutesy crap feels like lying to myself. I am the producer of this page, and I'm the intended consumer. However, I'm not the only consumer, and that does carry a certain responsibility with it. Some people read some stuff here, and it bothered them. All other facts aside, bothering people is not what I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm keeping an off-line journal now; a conitributing factor to recent events was a certain laziness on my part that the quote above sorta speaks to. Blowing off steam in a public forum doesn't actually solve anything, but it can feel like it is. However, at the same time you're actually making things worse, by adding fuel to the fire.

So, yeah, I'm figuring some stuff out, and I'm not posting about it here. Bear with me, and hopefully we'll all get back to the dick and fart jokes before too long.

9/23/2002: Saw Elvis Costello tonight. Good, it was. He did a kick-ass version of "pump it up", and then called it a night with a version of "I want you" that just stopped time, it was so good. Never been to a show with that many standing ovations that actually felt deserved, instead of merely perfunctory. Dunno; maybe that's just a function of how few shows I go to, though. >shrug<

And, as a bonus, there was a theremin. Home now; must take cat for an MRI (well, a neuro consult, actually) in the morning.

9/21/2002: There's only one band in the world that could have written the following, and the fact that the only way to buy their albums on the web was to sign up for a PayPal account really bummed me out. (Fuck PayPal!) Imagine my suprise when I found all three albums at a best buy, of all places. It's pretty good, I gotta say...

9/18/2002: I chopped a bunch of onions for dinner last night, and my hands still smell kinda wierd. My cat might have a brain tumor. This is really turning out to be one of those months, frankly. Bleah.

Okay, I know where I wanna live when I grow up. This freaking rules. World's largest carousel, a seven-up collection, and model airplanes flying through the house. Oh, and did I mention that it has "the world's only mechanically operated symphony orchestra", not to mention "the marvelous Mikado music machine where figures move with amazing realism"?

9/16/2002: Came back from walking around Greenlake this morning, lay down "just for a second", and opened my eyes three hours later. Go me. Had two dreams. In one, I was walking an a narrow wooden skyway up above a coastal forest place. It got narrower and narrower until eventually it wouldn't support my weight any longer and started to slowly flex, creak, and collapse under me. Somewhere around here, I had a couple of moments of "Hey... I'm dreaming!" I ended up clutching this one beam as it fell towards the ground; eventually' I dropped off and started flying, superman-style. Normally, when I have the "I'm Flying" dreams, it's one of those effortless, windless things. This time, though, it was more like being a bullet fired from a gun - much faster, less directional control, and so much wind it made my eyes water. Just before the dream ended, I saw a hurricane off on the horizon, kicking up a huge amount of dust and trashing a trailer park.

The other dream involved a date between me and C***i, the woman I was seeing when I was at Evergreen. Don't remember much about it, actually. I was sorta trying to make out with her, but in that low-key affectionate way, not the "Og need sex now!" manner that most of that type of dream entails. (at least for me.) Only bit I remember clearly is when she said to me "I don't know, Brian... I want a little more romance!" I remember my response in my head basically being "Well, I'm fucked..."

9/15/2002: Sigh. Was at a party tonight, and had another one of those experiences where you see a whole set of behaviors in another person, you feel really bad for that person, and then you realize that you've done the same damn thing yourself. Moments like that cause bouts of regret that actually cause me physical pain. Fun, fun, fun.

I'm really, really tired of self-examination. And I know that I've said it so much lately people are starting to get sick of it, but I'm really tired of being myself. In a lot of ways, I don't even recognize myself any more. Well, that's not exactly true. I feel sort of like those old Bloom County strips where Binkley gets visited by an older, wiser, and fairly pathetic version of himself. I'm a little tired of reinventing myself from scratch every couple of years, to be honest, but it seems to be sorta the way the world works. Color me chagrined, and strap me back onto the big wheel for another go-round.

9/14/2002: "You will soon be crossing the great waters." What the fuck kind of ominous, life-threatening fortune cookie message is that? Best case scenario, if you play the "in bed" game, I or someone sleeping with me is a bedwetter. Wonderful.

9/13/2002: As one of my colleagues said this evening, "Dear lord, my jaw hurts from smiling tonight." Smiling, scheming, and strategizing to make the world a better place. Hopefully, it'll all work out for the best. And some of the people I work for are far more interesting than I ever gave them credit for. Really reminds you whan an incomplete and imperfect comprehension of the world we each have.

9/10/2002: My personal trainer tells me that the walking around greenlake every day is actually going to do more to hurt my fitness right now than help. I'm toying with the idea of walking a two days or so a week and maybe partaking in the falun gong or tai chi groups that are there when Tashana and I show up. I don't want to completely strand her without a fitness buddy, I trust my trainer enough to compromise (but not capitulate) on the fitness front, it keeps me getting up at a reasonable hour in the morning, and there may be other benefits as well.

Something I read in a book at some point in the last year, but probably didn't pay enough attention to at the time, is the thought that performing a compassionate deed for selfish reasons (like recognition, or to ensure reciprocation, for example) is a kindness, but it's the basest, most selfish form of kindness. I think I've been engaged in a lot of that kind of thing lately, and I think it would be good if I tried to stop.

9/9/2002: Had a good visit in Olympia and in Portland this weekend. Both were much needed, for a variety of reasons.

Time and reflection are bringing a better understanding of how things got to where they currently are. I'm still pretty fuzzy on where exactly that is, but the path up to here is getting clearer. Unfortunately, I'm also getting a pretty clear picture in my head of where things are going. If I'm right, I wish there was some other place I could have taken things. Regrettably, I think I missed a few crucial insights until it was too late for them to do much good. Painful? Certainly for me. Is it the right thing to do? I'd hate to say it, but yes. All I can do, at this point, is take responsibility for my mistakes and try to do things differently if I ever find myself in this situation ever again. Cold comfort, but I'll take what I can get.

9/4/2002: Through some strange process I don't completely understand, I seem to have turned into S**h S*****r at some point and not noticed it. This is quite curious, and I'm still sort of adjusting to this fact. Hopefully, I won't start trying to "get to know you better" or start carrying around a small pine tree. If I do, you all have permission to stick a knife in my chest repeatedly.

Also remembered that my 10-year high school reunion is about six weeks away. Something something mumble mumble blah blah blah.

I've had one snippet reverbing through my head today: "Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? It is the sound... of inevitability."

8/25/2002: Tonight was, if nothing else, an excellent object lesson in why it's a good idea not to put all your eggs in one basket. It's a pain in the ass to maintain multiple baskets, but chaos in one area can only damage that one area. And if it's chaos in the largest, most complicated, most important, and most potentially damaging basket, you're going to need someplace else to run to.

I have every intention of sorting these issues out in the coming days, but if anything ever qualified to be posted about, the degree of perturbation I'm experiencing right now certainly did. I'm going to do as much as I can to talk about that aspect of things, and not anything more specific. Please, at least, respect the fact that I am trying to serve my own needs in the manner that satisfies them while causing the least pain for others that are affected.

I have no idea what has happened, I have no idea what is happening, and I have no idea what will happen next. But it should be interesting, no matter what happens.

8/21/2002: When I was in high school, I spent three weeks in Japan. Coming back, due to a layover at Narita that was something like eight hours long, resulted in total travel time that was a little over twenty-four hours long. That was the last time I can remember having that "I'm so incredibly relieved to be HOME" feeling. I took a shower, and I went straight to bed. I have absolutely no recollection of what time it was when this occurred, though I can tell you that the sun was up.

Some period of time later, my girlfriend stuck their head in the door and said my name in that careful-yet-happy "waking someone up" voice that people use. I was still pretty dazed and exhausted, so I responded by calling out the name of this person who babysat for my brother and I when mom was working nights. We shared a laugh about that later, and I'm telling this story in the least interesting manner possible, but I really look fondly back on that moment, and it's one of the things I miss most about my life at the moment.

I'm in the mood, at the moment, to go away on a long road trip. Even longer than the month I spent driving Kevin to college. I want to stick all my stuff in storage and do some sort of dishwasher pete thing. I want to be someplace strange where I don't know anyone until I can't stand it any more, and then come back to something familliar that I haven't seen in so long that I barely recognise it any more. Of course, there's absolutely zero chance of that happening, but if Omni ever goes tit-up.com, it's a whole 'nother story.

8/17/2002:[DRUNK] At the moment, I love my friends more than life itself. At the moment, I can barely focus my eyes. At the moment, I'm drunk as hell. It's all good. *SIGH* What about bob?

Other things worth remembering: that some things are irrefutable, despite your efforts to ignore and deny them. That some things are undeniable, despite how hard you try to deny them. That some things are stupid, now matter how hard you try to justify them. That it's impossible to locate my cell phone at the moment, no matter how hard I try. I love Crarker's "Kerosene hat" album more than almost any album in existance, no matter how much I have to drink beforehand.

8/10/2002: Well, I must say. Remembering that you wanted to go to a superhero-themed Goth party is certainly a good way to have an interesting evening. Other things of note worth noticing: Catholic School Supergirl, the brave soul with a rough approximation of the Bat-symbol tattooed, fist size, at that spot where the breastbone, both breasts, and the cleavage all meet. Camo-pants/tank-top girl. How much folks dug the new tattoo. The shocking number of cars out front. The moment when the chick with facepaint leaned on over and asked, brightly, "Ya wanna make out?".

8/5/2002: sometimes, i spend so much time and energy processing stuff internally and deciding what the right thing to do is, i just don't have any energy left to actually do anything. it is safe to say that i'm really beginning to feel like i'm being either deliberately or accidentally ostracized by some segments of my various circles of friends, and i don't like it. also not sure what to do about it; at the moment, my well of giving a shit is a lot dryer than my well of irritation and enforced apathy.

Okay, it's true that this episode is the most likely trigger for the worst bout of insomnia I've had in a while, but now that I've gotten a little sleep (and done a fair abount of semi-delerious sleep-deplived thinking, to be honest) I've got a slightly better handle on the situation than when the previous was written. What looked like a deliberate pattern of behavior a couple of hours ago now has at least a semi-plausible coincidental explanation in the light of day. Too tired, at the moment, to work on this any further.

8/3/2002: I hate these times when I've done a lot of thinking, and I want to capture it, but typing the whole damn internal dialog up is just too tiring. I'm in that state right now, and it really irks me. Also, listening to "This American Life" instead of just grabbing a cd from the other room is just not going to work. Hang on a second.

There. That's better. Okay, we'll see how long I can sustain the writing binge and get this down. First off: I've been engaging in a pretty hefty burden of self-censorship lately on this page, and I'm just not going to do it any more. I have to acknowledge that posting a personal journal in a public space is going to carry consequences, but this is still a journal that I write primarily for my own benefit. I've toyed recently with a friend's idea to have a journal with logins, so one can tag content based on who it's intended for. Realistically, it's just not worth the effort to me. I'd rather keep the journal on these servers in a private area and not post it than do that, but I really don't even want to do that much. I'd rather trust that the folks that read this page have the emotional maturity to bring any issues they may have with anything they read on this page up with me so we can discuss it.

I haven't always been sure that's the case, and I've tried to work around that by not posting about issues that might set folks off. As a consequence, at least lately, that means that I've been stressed out and unhappy. I need to get these ideas out and organized on a page a lot of the time to really process them. When I think this stuff out only in my head, it just doesn't help much, if any.

So, while I'm not about to tear back into that "piss people off in order to get some sort of reaction, even if it's negative" phase I went through a couple months ago, I have been sorta in the same emotional state that brought that around last time. Stimulus the same, but we're going to try a less destructive response this time around. We'll see how it works.

Okay, I'm going to have to cut this short; we're bumping up against a wedding I'm going to later on tonight. Perhaps I'll get back to it tonight. If not, maybe I'll pick up the thread later...

Too tired to finish this now (it's technically Sunday), but I did think it was worth mentioning that the best man at the wedding was none other than Berke Breathed - the guy that did Bloom County. Sadly, Todd did not introduce me to him, even when we were chatting and BB walked up. I'll forgive him, since it was his wedding, but still, I mourn the chance to have engaged in platonic starfucking with one of the coolest folks on earth.

8/2/2002: You know, maybe there's something to this whole working out thing; I leaned over a little bit today, and you know what? I saw my flaccid schlong. I mean, for fat guys, that doesn't happen without a mirror. Still a lot of ground to cover between me and the, you know, not fat. But still. Progress. I'd say "Baby Steps", but I just don't like the imagry, to be honest. So we'll say "Horse Steps" instead.

I've been doing various insane things like get up at six in the morning to go walk around Greenlake. I wouldn't do it if I didn't know that Tashana would be meeting me there - I'd sleep. It's good to have other folks to give me shit when I slack, and it helps me stay on track for "Project: Get My Shit Together". My trainer also doesn't approve, but even if it does mean that I'll be adding muscle more slowly, I think it's good for me. When I walked in the morning and then lifted yesterday, though, it was definitely harder than usual. So maybe I won't walk and lift the same days. We'll see how Monday goes. Though working out after a five-plus hour drive back up from the beach isn't going to be fun, I'm not missing the workout. Yes, I think I'm becoming an addict.

7/25/2002: Had another completely bizarre dream last night, but when I woke up, I couldn't remember what it was about. Bummer. Side effect of the east coast trip seems to be that I'm still on a fucked-up sleeping schedule, but it's on east coast time, so it's almost reasonable, now. To bed at 1AM (which is really 4 AM east coast), and up at 8:30AM (Which is really 11:30). This is almost cool, I tell you.

Heading down to PDX after I work out, but plan to spend the hours before then working on my room. I've tried to do it in the afternoons, and it's just too damn hot. Right now, it's pretty bearable. Maybe it's just wake-up time, but I'm in a really strange mood right now.

Okay.... yeah. Ummm... Bellydancing? It's pretty cool. I mean, aside from the obvious benefits of going someplace and seeing a dozen or so half-naked women skillfully shake what their mamas gave them, it's just... Interesting. Hard to explain, frankly.

Grrrr... At the moment, there's a lot of stuff I'd like to write about, but here seems not to be the appropriate venue. Perhaps it's time for another letter to Erin.

7/24/2002: Okay, we're now fully into the "itch maddeningly while healing" phase of the post-tattoo experience. AAAAAArgh...

7/23/2002: I dunno; maybe it's some sort of left-brain/right-brain sort of thing, but everyone at work read the tattoo backwards, while everyone at tuesday night dinner seemed to get it the right way. Strange.

7/22/2002: Well, after two hours of anti-fun, I'm just left feeling bitter, frustrated, and cheated by this evening, frankly. And it's not like an apology would do any good - in fact, that would just piss me off even more, for reasons I find somewhat hard to express. In the future when I find myself in this situation, I'll just stab myself repeatedly in the heart until the misery stops. I feel like I was wandering through a peaceful mountain valley, minding my own business, when I accidentally stepped on a landmine of dissatisfaction and pointless bitching. Maybe it's just my current quest to try to eliminate purposeless whining from my life, but I'm really insensitive when I encounter it in other folks right now. (Though apparently, I'm very good at passive-aggressively sniping at people I know in a public forum, rather than expressing my anger to their face. Hooray for me.)

If you don't like something about your life, you should get off your ass and change it. Bottom line: nobody is helpless to effect change in their life, barring physical duress or handicap. Example: I'm now going to clean off my desk in the basement computer room - I can't finish cleaning my room tonight, because kevin and sarah are asleep in their room right next door at this hour. Doing SOMETHING productive, even if it's not what I really want to be doing, is the only option I have at the moment.

7/20/2002: I'll retroactively add the New York entries below; managed to forget the notebook I used to take down the entries at work. Short version: lots of fun, incredibly exhausting.

In other news, I got a wild hair up my ass today and took a day trip to Olympia to finally get that olympia tattoo. I walked in with a particular design in mind, but the tattoo guy that I was working with pointed out a couple of problems with my idea. We ended up negotiating a completely different design that I like a lot. I'll post images once we're out of the whole "Scabbed over, ugly, and healing" stage. I can tell you that it'll immediately put an end to the "But I didn't know you had a tattoo!" comments I get from time to time; it stretches three-quarters of the way around my left wrist, which is currently slathered with vaseline and wrapped in saran wrap for the evening.

I'm pretty proud of what we ended up with; the tattoo guy, Curtis, commented multiple times during the process on how cool it was, and he ended up taking a couple of pictures when we were finished to include it in his sample book. Various other folks that worked in the shop were impressed as well. Yeah, I'm the big tattoo stud, I am.

Tomorrow: actually start unpacking my shit, now that we've signed a 12-month lease. At least until next August, me no move. Actually make house a home now, if I can only remember how...

Oh, and since it's not in the entries that will eventually follow this one, I'll take the time to describe to you the horrible, horrible time we had making it back from New York to Seattle. The trade show was over at 4 PM, and our flight left from JFK at 6:45. We didn't know this at the time, but two hours is just barely enough time to make it from our hotel to JFK. Unfortunately, we had scheduled the van to pick us up at Javits Center, then take us to the hotel, and then to the airport. Fine, except that we had to break down the booth and stuff, so we had the van arrive at 5 PM. And there was some confusion about where the van would pick us up, so we didn't get in until about 5:30. So, tired from three days of running the booth, sweaty from breaking down the booth and from waiting on a hot New York sidewalk on the wrong side of the street, hungry and thirsty since I hadn't had time (or made time, since the food at Javitz is so bad) to eat anything beyond a bran muffin and a couple of bottles of water that day, we got in the van. I was still wearing the pants I'd accidentally soiled by kneeling on the cruftalicious concrete floor of the convention hall after the teamsters stripped up the carpeting while we were breaking down the booth.

We didn't realize how screwed we were until we'd grabbed our bags from the hotel - the cabbie casually asked "So, when's your flight?" We told him, and he proceeded to tell us that we were completely insane to have scheduled things like that. At that point, he stopped talking completely, and just proceeded to whip out every insane cabbie driving stunt in the book. Dropping off the freeway to speed through the offramp/onramp combo and gain a dozen or so carlengths, since traffic was crawling, etc. I was massively impressed.

Through some black art or time/space warping effect, the van hit the airport at 6:20 - leaving us twenty minutes to check in, check bags, locate our gate, get through security, and somehow board the plane. Some time was wasted trying to get our bags checked at the curb, even though it was so close to the departure time (bribery was involved, though it was a wasted gesture in the end). Bags in hand, we ran off to our gate, which was approximately one building and nine miles away (it seemed).

Stood in line for the security check after some near-panic related to where everybody's tickets were - we'd handed them to the curb-check guys, and when I took them back, all but one had been torn out from their booklets; when I didn't see the one that was missing floating loose, I assumed that it was back at the curb. Thank god for Scott on that one - he was quick-witted enough to suggest checking the booklet before someone took off running, which I was about one second from doing.

So, in any case, we finally made it onto the plane, and then the ordeal truly began. We boarded the plane, took our seats (scattered throughout the plane, since we were the last couple of folks to board), and sat there, awaiting departure. And then we sat there. And sat there. The flight was scheduled to leave at 7:15, by the time we'd made it to the gate.

Delays included the following:

• a thunderstorm
• a "loose door found on the exterior of the plane. We're going to have to fix that and do some paperwork before we can depart, I'm afraid. Please bear with us." Ummmmmm... yeah.
• the departure of one third of the cabin crew, due to FAA regulations about length of time they could be on duty. "Luckily, though, we still have four cabin crew, which doesn't prevent us from leaving."

They also slapped on a "delay tape" consisting of taped "Everybody loves Raymond" episodes - of course, one of them was the one episode I'd actually seen before. other than that, there was just sitting, dozing, and occasionally waking up, confused that the rocking of the plane caused by the wind blowing outside was actually us leaving the damn gate. We actually pulled away from the gate at 10:10. That's right... we sat in the plane for three hours before even leaving the gate. And maybe I was just grumpy, but it seemed to me that we spent at least a half-hour taxiing before we took off.

Of course, once we took off, the baby three rows ahead of us started crying. Normally, I try to be tolerant of that kind of thing, but the kid spent at least seventy percent of a five-hours-and-change flight actively crying at the top of his lungs. Somewhere just before we landed, I remember the phrase "dash his brains out against a rock" passing through my mind at least once. I don't sleep well on planes as it is, and between the kid, the old chinese lady one row behind me with some weird lung issue that caused her to make that really awful old-person-clearing-phlegm-from-their-lungs noise every three to five minutes, and the flickering of the TV screens they were showing the in-flight movies on during the flight, I don't think I got more than a half-hour of sleep.

Trust me, it sucked more than words can properly express.

7/18/2002: Well, fuck. Too much stuff to relate today and get any decent amount of sleep tonight.

after the show, we were all just dead fucking tired and cranky, one and all. Got the concierge to recommend a restaurant so we could at least eat all eat one meal together. It was kinda sketchy @ first - tiny, cramped, rude waiter, grumpy folks eating. By the time we left, three hours later, I pretty much worshiped the the place - waiter included. I had grouper with red roasted potatoes, plus spinach. Best fucking caesar salad ever. Several beers, several dessert wines.

Next, we walked back to the hotel and asked that same doorman from the night before where to go for drinks, but it had to be ina different neighborhood.

He advised us to "the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, in the village. you'll find whatever it is you're looking for, over there."

It also turned out that the doorman is a Saab freak - so a ten (or more) minute conversation ensued with Molly. They even exchanged email addresses to swap spare parts.)

Anyways - We took two cabs over to the neighborhood, and the scottish doorman at the mexican joint we hit first recommended that we go to the hip-hop club across the street. I was skeptical. (The joint was cool, but I couldn't see Ken or Linda having a good time there. Boy, was I wrong.) "I've been there hundreds of times" he assured us, so off we went.

Music was good, but the DJ could not cross fade two songs to save his damn life! Once the Coke and Stoli started flowing, however, all was good. (Yeah, I broke my coke products ban in this case. I also drank Minute Maid brand orange juice when I was on the plane coming back, because that was all they had. I make exceptions. Sue Me.)

Molly and linda started dancing, and to my complete surprise, KEN started. This is ken, for the love of god. No caffeine, no alcohol, nicest guy I have ever met, and he's busting a groove to Biggie Smalls. Soon, there was much dancing. Much, much dancing. It's been a while, and I forgot how much fun it could be, to be honest.

There was one moment when a girl began to freak me, however, and I just straight-up froze solid in complete confusion. Just stood there like a dork. Proof positive that I need to work on getting my damn act together, I tell you. The old me, while no Joey Buttafuco, would at least be able to freak properly.

In general, this was another evening where I got to hang out with the folks I work with who I always suspected were cool, but who don't always get a chance to prove it very often, since we, you know, do still work in an office together, no matter how untraditional.

I dunno... no good reason why we don't get to act more honestly in general, but it's just not the easiest thing ever to do. Thank god for road trips to strange places with cool folks you don't know well enough. Thank god for friendly doormen, and thank god for new york.

Oh, yeah, and I even hugged Ken, while I was pretty much sober, so I don't even have liquor as an excuse. Anybody got a problem with that? I didn't think so, punks!

7/17/2002: Holy Fucking Shit. Worn the fuck out, and loved every single second of it. [Ed. Note - not actually true, in retrospect. The feet hurting part sucked ass.]

Up on my feet all day working the booth. Setting shit up was a major -league hassle, but it all turned out O.k. in the end.

Customers were a little less gushingly in love with us this year, but a bunch of folks bought products after hearing the reasons why it's worth buying, instead of out of some endearing but misguided gesture of "fight the man" solidarity; in the end, that's differently and actually a bit more rewarding.

Post the show, rush back to hotel to drop bags and change clothes, then head off to a MacAddict magazine boat cruise. Food line was too damn long, and there was no place to actually sit down and eat, so most of us just treated it as an opportunity to stand on the front of the boat, soaking up the view and the free booze in equal quantities.

Linda and I briefly chatted with a guy who knows another guy that's a whiz at getting small software publishers into retail with their souls and wallets intact. He said he'd stop by the booth tomorrow and check us out. That would be good.

Also saw the statue of liberty from the boat, as well as what we suspect, given that the population on the observation deck doubled while discussion volume halved, was Ground Zero.

It just seemed like too little space to cram two buildings as big as they always seemed to be into. There were a lot of really big american flags, though, and it was really well-lit (artificial, not natural) @ sundown, so I can only assume that's what it was. I'll look @ a map at some point and confirm. [Ed. Note: after looking at a map of the island back on the hotel, it was indeed.]

Getting sidetracked here, but there are a couple of things worth mentioning that I'll remember about New York from the trip:

1. I really wonder what it takes to make the folks that live here go "Damn; it's HOT!" It's not the oppressive, awful, stifling heat and humidity I associate with the midwest; it's more like a really hot, moist blanket that sorta enfolds you. It's damn hot, and you notice that it's damn hot, and you notice that it's damn moist, but you don't really mind it, at least not after a few minutes. For someone who likes it cold, dark, and dank, it's really strange. Then, there are the vents in the sidewalk that blast air as hot and as dry as put out by any hair dryer ever made. Random.
2. It's really surprising to see all the fire stations here; it seems like there is one every three minutes or so when you're riding in a cab. It's also really sad to see all of them with black bunting stretched out front, and signs in the window with the pictures of the people from that firehouse that are still missing. I'm not sure what it is about that phrase that makes it so sad, but it's something about the way the phrase both admits, evades, and rejects the fact that these people had their lives taken away from them. "Still missing" just says that a body has not been found. It doesn't say anything about the state of that body. I don't use the word "poignant" very often, but that's the only one that fits.
3. holy shit, mother fucking god, this city generates three million metric assloads of garbage. Garbage is just omnipresent here. You smell it, you see conical piles of it three feet wide, three feet tall, and half a block long, and you see it every evening, on every block. It's in fucking sane how much garbage is here. And the smell, like the heat, is just vivid, and huge, and amazing on a scale that's hard to describe. Some blocks smell like fast food grease, some smell like rotting vegetables and household crap, and some blocks just literally smell like shit. If you took a big pot of human waste and then steamed it gently, then spread it around a block, so thick you could spread it like butter, that would approximate the smell. Once again, it's something so big you're momentarily irked, but you accept it like a forest fire, or an earthquake, or anything completely natural, random, and uncontrollable.

So, after chatting it up, schmoozing it up, and boozing it up on the boat, we got directions to a hip-hop bar "between 42nd and 43rd on ninth". A guy told us it was too close to bother taking us in his cab, so we walked it.

Unfortunately, this bar, called "Revolutions" seems, like puerto rican resturaunts along Aurora in Seattle, to not actually exist.

So, we ended up asking this parking lot attendant what was good in that area, and he pointed to a spot down the block that a lot of people went to - he'd never been though. "It's too expensive to party here; I just work in this neighborhood."

Anyway - it was called the "Soul Cafe", and it fucking RULED. Packed with black people and a few white tourists lucky and/or confused enough to have wandered in my mistake. No cover, but there was a band and three ladies singing soul. There was one Ray Charles tune, but a song I totally did not know. There was also a song all about leaving the singer alone when she's drinking her gin, lest she kick your ass.

And the food... my god... the food. One person had a vegetarian pot pie, one person had fried chicken, one had grilled catfish, and I had this pecan-encrusted trout that was just amazing. I have about the farthest thing from a refined palette; mostly, I enjoy eating out for the company of the people that I go out to eat with, not for the food itself. In this case, however, you could distinctly taste the pecans and the trout as two separate flavors, all wrapped together. There was also some garbanzo and cous-cous laid on top of a bed of grilled spinach, and they brought us a basket of corn bread that was just monstrously tasty.

We ordered, the music finished, and then we got a cab to the hotel. Still seemed sinful to go to bed @ midnight, so we asked the doorman to recommend a bar within walking distance.

The bar was kind of lame, but actually, it was a cool bar with a lousy clientele and staff too used to serving tourists to bother hiding their disdain or bother getting drink orders correct.

So we sat, and we had a drink, and we talked - about work, about music, about stuff. I hate to say it, but it was the bonding moment that just capped off an incredible evening. I love this job, I love this industry, I love this company, I love these people, and I love this week in this city.

It's 2 AM - things are perfect, and I'm going to take a quick shower to walk off the sweat and the smell of garbage. Hopefully, tomorrow will rule just as hard as today did.

7/16/2002: First day in New York - complete insanity. Get up @ 5:30 am pacific (3 hours, 20 min sleep). Get on a plane. Have breakfast. Drowse, watch movie, read. BAM! it's dinnertime, and you're in New York. Don't have dinner, though. Take a cab to your hotel - right on Times Square, (there's a giant stock ticker just outside the window - "DJ: Toys 'R Us amends shareholder rights plan"), then change clothes, go see "Rent" on Broadway. Get done 11 PM new york time, eat dinner. Go to bed @ 12:30, up @ 6:15 (which is really 3:15, i might add) to go set up the booth and do the macworld thing.

Luckily, 3:20 of sleep means no trouble getting to sleep now...

Quick Note: Want new tattoo. Phrase "Think, Then Act" down inside left forearm. [Ed. Note: that's not what the tattoo ended up being, or even the design that I wrote about above, just the original idea. Message is still the same, though. Just differently expressed.]

Times Square has more neon than god himself. Oddly, there is a nineteen-story ad for Univ. Oregon football across the street (kitty-corner). This is one of the more subtle forms of advertising I've seen.

I have no problems, at this point, imagining the rest of the world turning out like Transmetropolitan.

Still doing a lot of internal processing on any of the many issues I'm processing internally at any given moment, when I'm not busy being completely tired, overwhelmed, and overstimulated...

In short: it's been fun, but in retrospect, I should have ironed my pants before we left.

7/15/2002: Okay, didn't mention the concert much last time - seems worthy of some commentary this time. It was The Breeders, and I have to say that it was one of the best shows I've been to. It had a couple of things going for it, though; it had a bunch of fun people to go to it with, it was at the Crystal Ballroom. It was just a fun, spontaneous sort of show - didn't seem all that rehearsed. Seemed to be a bit of fucking around up on stage trying to decide what to play next, and in what is one of those shockingly simple things that I couldn't believe I hadn't seen done before, the entire band, drummer included, was all lined up next to each other at the front end of the stage. None of this "I'm the guitarist, I get to be in front" sort of stuff. It was cooler than it sounds.

Oh, and don't let me forget to tell Jo that they played the theme song to "Buffy". He'll get a kick out of that.

Had a completely random and unexpected moment today involving apple fritters. Encountered a girl I went out with in High School working in a bakery not far from Orion's mom's house. This is a girl that I just treated incredibly shabbily. One of those things that causes me to wince in actual physical pain when I think about it almost ten years later. She was a freshman; I was a junior. I actually met her the summer before she came to my high school, and we hooked up then. We went out for most of the year, but in springtime, a girl I'd had a crush on literally since the first day of my freshman year began to show some interest in me.

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In any case, by the time the junior prom rolled around, I wanted to go with this other girl. Well, not actually with her, since she was going with her boyfriend, but I didn't want to take this girl with me, since Girl #2 and I were pretty close to having something going on on the side by that point. So I told her that i wasn't taking her. And wasn't speaking to her. Told her this the day before the prom. Despite the fact that her grandmother had hand-made her dress for the evening. I also then proceeded to behave like a complete idiot for the next year or two. Treating her rudely whenever we happend to meet, since we still had friends in common, etcetera.

So, anyway... I wanted a donut, and instead, got a little trip into the past, and examined how, exactly, the you that you are now apologizes for the you that you were over ten years ago. The answer, of course, being "by getting confused, mumbling a little bit, and walking out of the store as fast as you can."

At the moment, I'm a little tired of my psyche, and could really go for some serious personality reprogramming. Just for a little while, I'd really like to be someone else with a slightly less self-aware and self-deprecating personality. And, on that cheerful note, I retire to bed, now with brand-new sheets and pillowy goodness. A small, baby-sized step towards the first stage of "Fix your goddamn life, for once, instead of just whining about it all the damn time!"

7/14/2002: Two dreams last night, neither of them particuarly pleasant. In one, myself and a bunch of other people were leaving for some sort of trip. We got a late start because I couldn't find my shoes. And then, at some point, we made a pit stop, and I'd lost my shoes in the minivan. (or they'd fallen out of the van, or something.) Everybody else got out and started walking, but I couldn't; it was raining pretty hard, and I didn't want to get my socks wet.

Second dream involved rain, as well, but much more apocalyptically. (Okay, not really.) Anyway. I lived with a couple of other people. (I cannot remember if they were real-life people, or if they were made-up dream people.) Our house was kind of strange - it was a normal house downstairs, but the second floor, where I lived, was more of a lean-to, and kind of exposed to the elements. It was raining... hard. Like "Perfect Storm" hard. Howling wind, pounding rain, the whole nine yards. In any case, I didn't want the stuff in my room to get wet, so I ran upstairs and was trying to re-arrange things to keep the rain out. It was pretty futile, though: I was soaked from head to toe before too long, as was everything else. I don't remember how the dream ended, but I do remember one rather odd image very vividly. I remember finding these two playing cards in amongst my stuff. They were obviously meant to be used while cheating @ cards, because they weren't normal cards. There was one red one, and one black one, but i can't remember the exact suits. They had face cards on both sides. I want to say that they had queens on one side and kings on the other, but I'm not actually sure on that, and the symbolism there would be just a bit too tidy, I think.

So, I'm sure you've noticed the whole recurring motif of "trying to keep dry/safe/away from something wet" in these dreams. If the first, the "keep the water out of my hotel room" dream I had months ago was all about sex, like one of my spooky therapist friends claims, I shudder to think what he would make of these ones. Not to mention the vastly increased frequency of said aquatic dreams.

C****n, S**a, A***n, and P** were all down in PDX yesterday for a concert, and I was all excited to show them cool portland stuff. Increasingly, I really pine for the town. Unfortunately, if I moved back, I'd see all the downsides, rather than the one weekend every four to six weeks where I just hit all the good stuff. So, love it though I do, I have to keep it at a distance.

In the last week, I've watched "American Beauty" and "The Iron Giant" - these are both movies on a list of "Movies I Really, Really Like, Which I Can't Watch, Ever". I don't want to memorize these movies. I want to forget about scenes until they happen, I want to be surprised by them, and I want to have them provoke a genuine emotional reaction. This means I must be exposed to them as rarely as possible, lest familiarity leach all the color out of them. Clearly, denying yourself the things you love most is a strategy for-long term success and happiness. Well, actually, in a way, it is. It's all about maximizing the highs you get when you get a fix, or something. I dunno; most of the time, I think it's worth it, but I also get the impression, it kinda drives the people around me a little bit nuts. Because I tend to whine a lot, and do it pretty loudly. I'm sure it gets more than a little tiresome.

7/12/2002: I've spent a lot of time recently working very hard to keep up appearances. To manage other people's perception of me - present facts as I wanted them to be seen, and conceal the things that I didn't. It's really, really hard to be honest with yourself, and to trust other people enough to be honest with them, as well. When other people enter the equation, it's just gets infinitely more complicated and difficult, because now there's at least twice as many people who could potentially misunderstand or misreport the facts. All in all, it's pretty easy to forget that it's the only thing you can do, in the long run. Maintaining the lie just eats up so much time and energy and attention that could be put to much better use in other ways. In the end, though, it's almost worth it when you do remember how stupid it is, give up, and just be your damn self again. If you're lucky, you turn out to be right - people *are* more resilient than we think they are.

There are a lot of people who are going to read this post, and who are going to think they know "what it's really about". And they're probably partially correct. But only partially. And I really couldn't say how big a part.

7/9/2002: More troublesome dreams. Walking around the old laddington house having polite conversation with an ex-girlfriend (a fictional one, not any of the real ones). I was looking for a handgun which I'd misplaced. I was really worried that if she found it first, she'd kill me and/or my family.

7/8/2002: This time, Kevin and I were trying to find these three young brothers that had either run away from their parents or had gotten kicked out or something.

For some reason, we didn't have a car, so we had to take the bus everywhere. It was out in the country, and I think we spent most of our time wandering around in the most squalid orphanage you can imagine.

There was a room up at the top where some sick kids were being quarantined, and one of them had a pet sewer rat that was all dirty and blood-encrusted...

In short, it was awful.

7/6/2002: Had a real doozy of a wierd dream last night. Involved a wierd ghostbusters/x-files-like mystery in a hotel. Can't remember all the details.

There was this one room on an upper floor where this watery/greasy pink stuff was pouring out of three small holes in the wall of a room - almost like a urinal had been removed.

The deal was, though, that Kevin and I were the only ones who could see it. Don't remember the whole dream, but I do remember that we found this one room that was mostly full of the stuff - it must have been a multi-story room and we walked in to a balcony or something, because it was deep enough that we had to swim, but nothing spilled out into the hall - we either had to dive or were pulled in.

In any case, the toxic sludge (I think it was psychic-style toxic, instead of physically toxic), got kevin. We were floundering around in the stuff, and in that semi-cheesy horror movie way, Kevin told me to escape and leave him behind to die. We couldn't beat this thing. I was supposed to learn more about it and prepare better - apparently, even if I died of old age or something before I was ready, I'd just be reincarnated with all the info I'd accumulated. So I did the escape thing, and he died.

There were some other disjointed images- I came back to the hotel a second time, and the floor the sludge was on was all fetid and crufty, but in a "only I can see it, mostly" sort of way. One woman on the elevator could smell it but not see it, and there was another woman who'd collapsed in the open doorway of her room.

Not a real person (I mean, she was a person, but not a waking life real person.) She had short blonde hair, she was wearing a dark purplish-red shade of lipstick, and I remember being surprised by the feeling of actual weight and substance when I picked her up off the floor. (I think I was beginning to understand that I was dreaming by this point, in other words.) I was conversing with her about something when I woke up, but I can't remember exactly what it was.

Last time I had a dream involving family members, a hotel, and large quantities of fluid, one of my therapist friends told me (and I quote) "God, Brian, you need to get laid. That dream was totally about sex." I sorta want to tell him about this one, but then again, maybe I don't.

7/2/2002: Another U.T.I.D. (Uncomfortably Topical and Inappropriate Dream) last night.

7/1/2002: Another weekend with enough fun to push me into recovery mode this morning. Ahhhh... I loves the fun, even when it hurts me later. Plenty of stuff going on in my head, but it's getting increasingly difficult to post about it in an opaque manner, so I'll probably just avoid posting for a little while. With any luck, the status quo'll be less static soon. Either that, or I'll just go live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, write angry manifestos to myself, and not bother anyone ever again. 'Cause, you know... it worked so well for Snake-Eyes, at least until COBRA tried to kill him...

Oh, yeah. I gave Corwin a wicked hickey last night.

6/30/2002 (very freaking early): Just got back from the Gorge Amphitheater, and I'm now killing a couple of hours (okay, one and a half) before the last game of the world cup starts. A couple of Kirsten and Ingrid's friends are coming over to watch it live at Omni. (it starts at 4AM). So, yeah... I don't think I'll be making the pride parade today, to be honest. I'll be surprised if I end up hanging out with Ralph, either.

Kirsten's crashed out on a couch in the dining room upstairs. It is pretty funny that, pulling up to the office at two-thirty in the morning on a Saturday night, there were no less than four employees still in the office. What an interesting and unique corporate culture we have created for ourselves here. =)

Okay... the concert. While I was quite pleased with the show that David Lee Roth put on, I must admit that he was outshone by Sammy Hagar's set. That said, it warms the cockles of my heart to know that, no matter how much we may evolve as a species and a culture, there's still a place in the world for topless men to run around on stage in turquoise metallic lace-up-in-the-front bell bottom pants. It's also good to know that the fine art of the video vixen is still practiced to this day. (No matter how badly they may be imitated by the memebers of the audience.) It's also a good thing to know that one can still douse an attractive woman in the front row with a bottle of Jack Daniels held suggestively to one's crotch. It's good to know that you can still have a giant pinata of your personal brand of tequila descend from the top of the stage, and when you hit it, a small effigy worm will pop out, into whose mouth you will proceed to pour a corona. It's good to know that it's still okay to get drunk on stage, and to have attractive young women, scantily clad, deliver you each and every drink. It's good to know that you can still go to a concert wearing bleached-white levis with the american flag overprinted on 'em. It's good to know that there is indeed, only one way to rock. It's good to know that we are still collectively unable to drive fifty-five or fewer miles per hour. It's good to know that, should we need something to keep us cool, David Lee Roth will be happy to do so. It's also good to know that prick Eddie Van Halen isn't making a freaking cent off this tour. In short, it's good to know that somewhere in America, it'll always be 1987.

It is not, however, a good thing to pay thirty-two freaking dollars for a concert shirt. I also felt bad for the sparrow that had obviously been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and spent the entirety of David Lee Roth's set trying to find refuge from the noise and the lights by seeking shelter in and around the sound booth. It was particularly sad when it would just give up on the whole drunken fluttering thing and settle down on one of the little bendy-light things the sound guy was using to illuminate his hands on the mixing board, only to be chased off when the guy needed to adjust something. Also felt bad for the guy who tripped and broke his leg before Hagar even came on.

In other matters of import, those of the mind and of the heart, I'm still gathering my thoughts, considering, and otherwise going around and around in circles with myself. As normal. Plans are beginning to emerge from a fog of uncertainty, but the outlook is still, at this point, unclear.

6/26/2002: Wierd pet dream week continues. Don't remember the entire dream, but I do remember that I was walking around downtown Seattle at some point, and I looked back behind me to see Physics walking along the monorail tracks above me. I was quite concerned.

6/25/2002: Last night, I dreamt of pet hamsters.

6/23/2002: Two seperate parties this evening, both enjoyable. I am surrounded with women that I'd hit on, were I thirty to fifty pounds less encased in obesity. Tune in this time next year...

6/17/2002: Another wierd dream this morning. kevin, Sarah, and I were all on some sort of road trip, and we decided to stop at this submarine construction facility that was out in the countryside. (Landlocked, I should add.) In any case, we found that it was making amphibicars, instead of nuclear submarines. They had a jaguar amphibicar, for instance. Anyways, we took a tour along with a bunch of other tourists, and they served us dinner. Somehow, I managed to get a big chunk of food glued to one lens of my glasses, and I was stumbling around trying to get it off when I heard a really funny song on the radio.

It was not unlike the "If I were a <foo>, I'd..." song by fishbone, but it was called "If i were america, I'd be worried about..." So you'd have a verse, and then the music would pause, and the singer would say, in this kinda funy faux-redneck voice, something he thought america should worry about. The only one I remember, at this point, is "if I were america, I'd be worried about... how big we are, and how we're all kinduh related."

Trust me. It's a lot funnier when I do it in person.

In other nows, mom got a phone call from a friend I haven't spoken to in five years, and they asked for my mailing address, so now I'm expecting a wedding invitation. Though it did just occur to me that it could concievably be an unexpected death or something. The "funeral for one of your peers, unexpectedly" is one of the only "Big Milestones in life" that I'm still in phase one on...

Just in case I haven't explained it here before, I believe that there are a couple of different big happenings in your adult life (it used to be four, but the number keeps going up as I discover more events), and they all have three stages, which are

• "Wow! You did that? That's really surprising!"
• "Oh. You did that? Well, that happens all the time..."
• "You haven't done that yet? What the hell is wrong with you?"

So, as far as I can tell, here are where we are with most of the milestones i've thought of. Folks are free to suggest more, if they can think of any that I've missed. Also, I'm stating that all of the stages are for entertainment purposes only, and I will not take any responsibility for massive, life-altering decisions based on the lame rantings of me on this website.

The original four were:

• Sex - definitely into phase three with this one
• First Child - an early stage two, I'd have to say.
• Marriage - this is a solid phase two phenomenon, with some folks (my mother, for instance) beginning to advocate for phase three status.
• Unexpected death of a peer: one of the only the only stage ones left. Can you say "Waiting for the other shoe to drop?"

Program note: I did edit one of the previous entries, but only to add the self-imposed chemical abuse warning tag before the entry.

6/15/2002: Holy crap, am I hung over. Tired, tired, tired. Dehydrated. The fun was worth it, though. I just need to rest up a bit before I have any more fun. Somebody described me last night as "someone with really terrible small-scale impulse control, but fucking amazing large-scale impulse control." There is truth here, I think. I just wish some of the large scale impulse control had a little more purpose sometimes. I don't have a whole lot of trouble seeing myself as one of those idiots that's just wound so damn tight that they completely lose it when they do finally freak out.

Also sent out the usual batch of really drunk "I love you" emails, with the usual aftermath of vague embarassment the next day, since some of it was inappropriate to one degree or another. But isn't that always the case? As always, apologies to everyonee I may have offended and/or embarrased.

There was this point in the drinking where I turned into the "I love you too, Carl..." guy from "Wayne's World". I swear, I must have hugged everybody at the party at least nine times. I remember being really, really wounded when everybody I tried to hug just reflexively flinched and/or cringed away. I mean, it sorta made sense that the three-hundred-pound vodka swilling maniac that I was last night would be somewhat intimidating as I bounded across the room towards any given person, but I was still kinda hurt that everybody was hiding from the love. Don't hide from the love, just scream "gentle! Gentle!" as I run up...

Another thing that's really good about friends is that they often know you far better than you know yourself. Doesn't mean it doesn't sting when somebody catches you off guard and slips a dead-on accurate piece of truth past your defenses, though. Brian does, indeed, need more hugs, but I was pretty happy with the illusion that I was the only one who noticed, frankly. Sigh... so much for my "Bruce Wayne, man of mystery" act.

6/14/2002: [DRUNK] Drinking makes you honest. Drinking makes you sad. I love my friends, and I miss them when they are not here. I'm going to sleep now, but only because it is easier than it is to cry. If I take this down tomorrow, I am a fucking pussy.

6/7/2002: I have this vague urge to do some sort of socio-economic/political philosophy rant, but I'm too tired, and too distracted by last minute changes to one of our flagship applications. Go stuff!

What really, really worries me is when good people get burned out from trying to be completely good and eventually stop trying altogether, when they realize that their goals aren't achievable. That's part of what I meant when I said "you can't help everyone."

No matter what we do, some people will get cancer. Some of those people will die. We cannot stop it. That is not to say that we should not try to find cures for cancer, or to punish people that pollute, or that we shouldn't care about suffering. But if your goal is to eliminate suffering, you need to understand that you will never win.

I believe that two countries that trade with each other a lot are less likely to go to war. I believe it's actually better if I know how to make shoes, and you don't. I believe it's better if you know how to make hats, and I don't. I can probably make shoes more quickly, more cheaply, and can make better shoes for us both if all I do is make shoes. I think the same thing happens when you make only hats. One thing to note is that this system hinges on the two of us being dependent on each other. If I sell you everything, and you only buy, then I can probably abuse you pretty badly and get away with it. That's explicitly outside of the system that I'm describing as the one we should try for.

I don't think that saying "do the people in this country grow their own food, or do they buy it from some other country?" is a meaningful question. What matters is whether or not the people in the world can afford to buy more food today than they could yesterday. If we can make food and ship it to a country for less than they can grow it at home, we should grow the food and ship it. If I make some money by selling you something for less than you could make it yourself, we both benefit. You have more food than you would have otherwise, and I have money. Some of which I spend on research to make food even cheaper, and some of which I keep for myself.

Now, that's not to say that selling mothers in Africa baby formula that's less nutritious than breast milk is a good thing; it's not. And abuses like that will happen in a capitalist economy. It's easier to cheat someone out of their money than it is to earn it, and some folks will take that route. I don't think they're in the majority, though. I really don't. Because most folks that are smart enough to run a company realize that cheating works for a while, but not forever. And the folks that don't understand that do hurt people before they go out of business, but they will go out of business eventually.

I'm sorta losing the thread here, because I'm tired, and it's a complex issue. I think, though, that you might find this interview interesting. It's an interview with a Peruvian economist who's investigating why capitalism, so far, has failed to pull the third world out of poverty the way it did the united states.

I'll probably end up purchasing his book when it comes out in paperback. Yeah, capitalism hasn't worked everywhere. And maybe it won't work everywhere. But I can tell you that I think that places where capitalism has been allowed to work are, for the most part, better off than the places where it has not.

Now, when I say "places where capitalism has been allowed to work", I don't mean where capitalism ran roughshod over a continent - Africa and South America being two classic examples of places where it did a whole hell of a lot of damage. But I don't think that the fact that something caused a problem inherently means that it can't repair some of the damage later on.

I get the impression that you feel like my position is cruel and/or callous. Maybe it is - but what really, really worries me is when good people get burned out from trying really really hard to be completely good and eventually stop trying altogether, when they realize that their goals aren't achievable. That's part of what I meant when I said "you can't help everyone." You shouldn't try to do that, because it's impossible, and failure is always demoralizing.

I don't try to be really, really, perfectly good. I try to think about the things that I do, and to make good choices. I try to take care of myself, and to take care of people that are important to me. I try not to hurt people. I try to eat as little meat as possible. I don't buy products from companies that do things I don't approve of. I always, always, always vote. I listen to NPR.

Which is not to say that I'm not a complete bastard and waste of oxygen some days, just like all the people that I spend so much time feeling smug about not being. I'm just as bad as those idiots a good chunk of the time. The only way to stay sane, though, is to take the times that I'm not as bad as they are, and to think of those moments as victories. If I thought about the other 70% of the time as a failure, I'd probably get pissed and quit trying altogether, and that's a damn shame. Because tomorrow, I might only be a bastard 69% of the time.

6/1/2002: This, I shall say. I went to a party. Property is cheaper in the suburbs. Once again, Orion is off penetrating a woman with his member instead of having hash browns with me, so you all get a post instead. Somehow, this seemed appropriate...

5/29/2002: Quest for simplicity an absolute failure, at this point. Had another uncomfortably topical dream last night.

Also managed to completely hose my sleep schedule by setting milestones for myself @ work again. "I'll go home, just as soon as I clear out this one mailbox." I should know better than to do that...

I should watch the Invader Zim disk I was lent.

5/28/2002: Frankly, I am in a bad mood. I need breakfast, a nap, a vacation, and a hug, in that order.

Dunno... at the moment, I feel like I'm trying to create the appearance of something to compensate for the fact that it's not really there.

There are moments, and now is one of them, when I feel like my family has been selected for extinction. Both grandfathers died before I knew them. Father dead from cancer. Mother being eaten alive by MS.

It's not like we have the best genes to pass on, but still. it seems really, quite incredibly humorous that several billion years of effort - scrounging for food, fighting for survival, trying to make ends meet, all comes down to me and my brother.

Unless we have sons, the covey bloodline ends with us. actually, it all comes down to sons. Butchers had plenty of daughters, but only one son, and his kids won't speak to him or use his name.

Dad has a brother, but he's either colossally uninterested in women, or deep, deep in the closet like only a southern gentleman can be.

I think Kevin will do okay - maybe he just had the benefit of learning from my mistakes as a kid, but he's always been a little bit smarter than mem, a little bit more sure of himself, a little bit more confident, and a little bit more successful.

There are times when I want to try really hard to be a normal human being, to be accepted, to feel valuable, and just be happy. Other times, like right now, it all just seems really stupid, because in the end, the best you can hope for is to not suffer too much.

I just really feel bad for mom. She's got her visits from us every couple of weeks, she's got the daily newspaper, Television, and a constant struggle to put up with a body that just won't work.

My mom had a sister who got hit by MS a lot harder than she did. Mom is one of five sisters, and out of them all, mom's the second worst off. At least four of them have it now. Maybe all five. Anyway- when I was a kid, visiting this sister used to scare the crap out of me.

She lived in a hospital bed, she couldn't talk, she just lay there. That's going to be my mom someday, and it scares the crap out of me. And it makes me tired, and it makes me sad, and i just sorta wonder when it's all going to stop.

And while I'd like to be able to think that I understand how she feels, I really don't.

5/25/2002: Okay, so I swore I'd never post on this topic ever again, but it's just too funny not to.

I'm crashing at a house while I'm in PDX, and I gave the homeowner a ride out to the airport this morning. I was out fairly late last night, and the flight was fairly early this morning. When we talked last night, I asked the ride-getter to wake me up "in time for me to suck down a cup of coffee before we leave."

I was totally expecting to make my own cup of coffee, but this person kindly prepared it for me - which was great, but when they called upstairs to wake me, I just sorta grunted, sat up, and began the long and slow process of coming back to the land of the waking.

In any case, when the person brought in the cup of joe, thirty seconds after the shout, i was sitting, cross-legged, in boxer shorts, on the bed.

I just sorta groggily grabbed the cup, and was a little confused. Later, when the caffeine had kicked it, I realized that there's a non-zero chance that I was showing brain when they walked in.

In fact, in my two test trials I just performed, both resulted in brain showage. The first test actually showed both balls and the shaft, while the second test only showed pube and a hint of ball.

I think, just to be on the safe side, I should get in the habit of wearing pajama bottoms when i'm visiting anyone from now on.

Note to self: Keep monitoring the "Mom's health" issue and keep collecting information. It's very much an open question, at the moment. Also: don't forget Orion's cake tomorrow.

5/24/2002, v2.0: One thing I hate is how, once a decision has been made, you really can't help but start to act on it, or start lending extra weight to events which, in other circumstances, would seem completely innocuous.

So, whenever I think I see evidence, I'm going to assume that it's my fevered imagination chasing shadows. Nothing means anything until I'm told otherwise.

I had something like a dozen "God, I miss Portland" moments tonight. Dot's cheese fries. Andy & Bax's. Whatever the hell that much less skanky-looking business that took over Starry Night's space on Burnside. The tattoo parlors where I got my first and second tattoos.

5/24/2002: Clarification time. Since the wooage post generated some email, I'll state for the record that it's nothing to get excited about just yet. The person in question hasn't exactly indicated interest, and they aren't likely to really be accessible for several months at least.

I'm also not entirely sure what I'm looking for here, or what my goals are. I spent some rather large chunk of the last two years in "Well, if something comes along, great, but I'm sure not going to chase it, I tell you." mode. (Previously, I was in "Homey don't need that kind of magic" mode, so it was a step in the right direction. Yes, indeedy, I do have issues.) In any case, I've just gotten tired of... something... lately. I don't know quite how to put it. Been Irked. Annoyed with myself. Frustrated. It just felt like it getting back into the game, however ineptly that may be, was still better than taking my emotional toys and going home, to vigorously mix metaphors.

But I'm still highly skeptical of the whole damn thing, and may decide to retreat back to pretending I'm capable of asexual reproduction for a few more years. (I almost typed "eunuch" there, but I wasn't confident that I could spell it correctly, and really, that's just an image of myself I do not need.)

There are some things, though, that I would like to be able to do on a regular basis, and which would seem to require me to spend some energy in this area of my lifestyle. Among them are the following:

• Snuggle. At this point, the not-me person that touches me the most is the company massage therapist, and that is a poor substitute, I tell you.
• Rent a video and watch it with my arm around someone.
• Miss someone when they're not around. My cat does not count.

There's other stuff, too, but that's all I can think of at the moment. This all also comes with the caveat that I'm not terribly tolerant of lifestyle disruption, and am highly inclined towards indecision, waffling, and general mismanagement of things woo-related, so don't expect much.

And yes, we have just proven that the likelihood of me posting about something is inversely proportional to the frequency of my visits to Beth's with Orion. Therapy takes many forms; some of them just involve hashbrowns.

5/23/2002: Words for today: much ado about nothing. Spent some time doing some coincidence design, which turned out not to be all that pointful in the end. It is interesting to observe the degree of effort the coincidence put forth trying to make things work out, though. Not sure if that's significant, or if I just want it to be. I suppose time will tell, yes?

5/18/2002: Hmmmm.... what to say, what to tell. I had a really strange dream this morning. Made out with someone unexpected, and shot a family member but didn't kill them. In real life, I went to the opera, I watched a marina burn from across lake washington, and I saw a really good movie. Now I'm trying to decide if going to bed now, since I have to be up reasonably early tomorrow, or staying up an hour for fresh donuts at winchell's sounds better.

I also decided that it's time to begin laying the foundation for an active effort to woo, but that's a matter for another post, methinks...

4/15/2002: This has been a really confusing and draining sort of day. Just a constant stream of confusing surprises and unexpected weirdness. We let someone go today, and they took it really hard. It was sort of even more awful because they were let go for not being able to do something other than what we hired them to do, so I really feel like we screwed up and caused them a whole lot of extra pain. I also interviewed one person I was expecting to interview, and interviewed another person I wasn't even aware had applied to the company - someone I used to go to school with, so there was this whole other layer of unexpectedness to the whole thing. I got back from the latter interview, and my machine had crashed, failing to save everything I was working on (including this post), so I get to start it all over again. Yay!

So, I've decided that having the word "Manager" attached to your name is really an incredibly mixed blessing; for the first time in my career, I'm the guy wandering around the office telling folks that people are being let go, not the person that's all shocked, surprised, angry, and relieved, sitting at a desk. I'm not the guy who goes home and rants about it on his website, I'm the guy who has to have "if by saying we "Screwed up", am I opening Omni up to some sort of lawsuit?" debates with himself.

So, yeah, it's ten-thirty, I'm really tired, kinda depressed, way behind on what I wanted to get done today, and I still have to email that guy that we may need to come in for an interview, modify the company website to reflect the day's events, do builds of two of our products, and finish the documentation of the new builds process we're using. And I have absolutely ZERO motivation at the moment. Only reason I'm still at my desk is because I seem to have left both my newton and cell phone at home, so I don't have Orion's phone number to call for a post-work Beth's run. Maybe I'll look the club he's working tonight up in the yellow pages...

3/26/2002: Well, I'm sure this is a surprise to no one reading this, but it's still really weird when folks from former places of employment find you in a completely different arena via a simple search engine query. Yup. Great to have distinguished ex-colleagues reading about your testicles, instead of the usual motley crew that partakes of this page.

Another strangeness; if you follow that link immediately above, you'll see that my page has a Description in its entry; most of the pages I see when I get results from google don't have one. This means, I assume, that some person or persons actually viewed the page and added that tag to the google database, as opposed to the usual spider programs that harvest most of their links.

Hmmmm... maybe I need to finally get off my ass all these years later and actually run my own web server so I can at least have an inkling of who reads this thing. In other news, the keyboard I use at work, the very first keyboard I bought when I got my first machine, waay back in '93 or '94 or so, seems to be dying. The shift key is somewhat less than reliable, and the 'm' key has this nasty habit of producing either 0,2, or 3 'm' characters about half the time I press it. I'll try ripping off the key caps and cleaning it out before I give up on the thing entirely, though.

3/25/2002: As Corwin so kindly pointed out, apparently, I now rule 2% of the United States. They even used my color scheme, bless their little peon hearts...

Been really tired lately. Not sure if it's really bad allergies, weird sleeping schedules, the workouts, or all of the above. Don't feel horrible enough to do anything about it, except for whine a little bit. I've sorta given up, for the most part, on ever getting caught up an anything ever again. I'm even pathetically behind on my personal email to the point where I don't want to look at it anymore. SIGH.

2/28/2002: So, Wil is paying for a couple of us to get a personal trainer at the gym where he works out. Remind me to tell you more later, but suffice it to say that I could hardly work the clutch in my car when I left the gym. Also, my arms were a little shaky when I turned the steering wheel. I have power steering. Wacky.

2/11/2002: Something very strange is up with my ear this evening. It's bright red, it feels really warm, and I can clearly see a big vein standing out in it. This has happened within the last two hours, and it's quite disconcerting. Only the left ear, though. Like I said. Disconcerting.

2/2/2002: I had a very, very strange dream this morning; the closest thing I've had to a nightmare in recent memory. Myself and someone else, I cannot remember who, assisted this person I know incredibly trivially in ending their own life with a shotgun. I wasn't there when it happened, but the dream was still pointlessly graphic. I remember wiping blood spots and scorch marks off the cover of a book I own; I remember thinking "wow... individual shot pellets made their own scorch marks..." I remember dream cops showing up and arresting dream me in the dream and thinking "Wow; my life is really fucked now." In any case, strange in the extreme. I'm now up, several hours earlier than I planned, but at least I got an early start on the laundry I was planning to do today...

1/24/2002: Today, I'd like to talk about some things that are very near and dear to me... I'd like to talk about my balls. No particular reason I'd like to talk about them, but I think they're worth discussing. I mean, my balls have been everywhere with me, and if I ever lost my balls, I just do not know what I'd do. They're a source of great comfort to me, and I try to treat them with the respect they deserve.

Take the urinal, for instance. It sorta depends on the urinal setup in any given place, but ever since I was a little kid, I'm only really comfortable taking a leak when my balls have been hoisted out over the elastic band of my drawers. I think it's a residual side effect of the whole "little kid wearing some random sleepwear with no front-opening thing to pee through" situation. That, and I never really figured out that opening thing on the front of the tighty-whities that I had for underwear as a kid. I mean, that thing was just creepy as hell. I did not like it one bit. So, even to this day, when I'm fully switched over to the land of Boxers with the button-up fly, I really have to think about what I'm doing when I take a leak. The first instinct is still to hoist the balls over the top.

Which, I'm sure, has freaked out many a guy standing next to me at the urinal over the years. It was some point a few months ago, I don't remember exactly where, when I thought to myself "Heyyy... when I take a leak, people can totally see my balls! I'm showing brain! Oh crap. That's really probably a strange experience for them. I mean, sure... they shouldn't be looking, but it happens from time to time, and I bet that's the first time they've ever seen some guy taking a piss with his balls out. Shit. I better not try to do that any more."

So, now, when I'm taking a leak in public, I usually try to do so in what I've come to understand is the commonly-accepted manner, but it still seems a little weird, to be honest. It's a learning process. I'm sure that in a couple of years, I'll have it down, and it won't seem strange at all to urinate with my balls clothed. If you're one of those people out there that has accidentally seen my balls, then I humbly apologize; I once saw this one guy's balls by accident; he was lying down on a couch and wearing shorts, and it was really rather odd to see his balls, so I sorta know how you felt when you saw my balls. But, just like this guy did not realize that I was seeing his balls, I did not realize that you were seeing my balls. I'm sorry. I should also probably not wander around the apartment wearing boxers so much, but dammit, it's my natural state, and just because Kevin's girlfriend lives with us now, does it really mean that I have to wear pants all the time? I mean, really; first thing saturday morning, if I'm forced to don pants just because someone might accidentally see my balls, it's not going to be a good day.

In any case, I'm glad we had this little chat about my balls, and if you ever want to talk about them again, just let me know. I'm always happy to discuss them, as they're quite dear to me.

1/12/2002: Ooof. Back from MacWorld, which was a blast. I just slept for 12 hours, and the whole thing was still a bit experientially dense for me to communicate it to you at this point. I can tell you that we sold an assload of software, handed out a metric buttload of demo disks, shook uncounted hands, got treated like minor-league geek rock stars, and stayed in the wierdest hotel ever. Remind me to tell you about Phil, Magn0lia, the guy from iD, the guy from The Register, the scary bowling event, and Grand Master Flash. Now, I'm going to play around with the drive utility I bought and the new game I got. Go me.

1/7/2002: Fuckit-fuckity-fuck-fuck. 4:35am, I'm going to be watching the MacWorld keynote at nine-a-m, then getting on a plane and flying to california pretty much immediately after, and I cannot sleep, for NO GOOD REASON. Also can't find the one book I feel like reading at the moment. This is just like back when I was a little kid, and I would not be able to sleep the night before school. Stupid anticipation. I think I'll play some Aliens Vs. Predator, then go to Beth's at seven or so and get some breakfast. Also need to return videos to scarecrow and get some plain white t-shirts; the ones that work has are too small for my meaty-veal-like-torso. I'd be like an OmniSausage or something. Obstacle number one between me and ever getting laid ever again; complete inability to behave in a manner even vaguely befitting a normal human being. Homo Sapient Freakizus, specimen number one.

1/5/2002: You know, I never mean to do this shit. I'm always like "Today is the day I go home at a reasonable hour, and behave like a reasonable human being, and don't stay at work for like sixteen hours straight or some such nonsense." And it never freaking happens. It's eight-o-three AM, and I've been at work for twenty hours now. What the hell am I thinking? It's not like I slack off all that much, but at the same time, I'm never making any progress and anything I'm supposed to be getting done, either. There was this massive pile of crap that needed to get done for the trade show that we're going to next week, and I'm still not even keeping up with the email that's inbound on a day to day basis, and here I go taking a week to go to this trade show. Sure, it helps the company, and it'll be fun, but the fucking email is not getting answered, and that's the goddamn reason they hired me in the first place. Dunno. Maybe I should be more cavalier about the whole thing; everybody else is. But shit; where I come from, you do your job. And yeah; I know the job they hired me to do is impossible for one person, or two, or probably three people to do. Hell; it would probably take six people. But you do your best. And you know what? It pisses me off to no end when people blow it off. "God Brian; all you do is work... Let it go... It's ridiculous..." Yeah. That's probably true. But there's work to be done, and I'm not going to be the person who drives this fucking company into the ground like every other one I've worked for since I stopped having a job and started having a career. I mean it. This is my last goddamn stand. Welcome to the Alamo. I'll have time to have a life when I can be reasonably sure that I'm not a few months away from unemployment, and this time with absolutely no options whatsoever. I've really pretty much bet the farm on this place, professionally, financially, and when it comes down to it, personally. Maybe showers of money will fall down from out of the skies someday, like folks around here seem to think (that's an exaggeration, but not by much), but i'll only believe it when I see it. I think I read too many Batman comics when I was a kid or something.

In any case, at this point, I can't afford to go to bed now and have my sleep patterns all screwed up this close to the trade show, so I'll be pulling another thirty-six-straight-hours-of-awake so I can go to bed at eight or nine tonight and be human on sunday. But we've pretty much shot all my chances to get any work done this weekend to hell, at this point. I'll be grabbing breakfast with Orion around noon, and the remainder of my day will be quiet but stimulating activities like laundry and TV. Mmmm... sweet TV. No thinky. Are the shows all still reruns at this point, or did we go back to real episodes? I should check. I haven't had time to watch lately. Sigh...

12/17/2001v2: Yup, it's official. I work for the coolest company ever. Though, after wresting with some strange incompatibility between my machine and the iPod (and this was after the first iPod was dead in the box), it's clear that Apple has some quality control issues to be dealt with. Now, if it just had an equalizer, it would be the ultimate. This week has just been lootariffic, I tell you.

12/17/2001: Ok... no more catching up on sleep... ever. I just dreamed that I got in an argument with Mary-Kate and Ashley (those two kids from "Full House")'s mom about whether "Mary-Kate and Ashley's Magic Mall Shopping Game" was a terrible, terrible product. What is wrong with me?

12/16/2001: I got more social activity today than I get in the average week, and I'm just too damn happy and tired to recount it all at the moment. So, I'll Summarize. Did some Christmas shopping in the morning, then ran into corwin on the way to the Holiday Gift Exchange-Thing at Tashana's from 10:30 until 3. Movie in between. (Spy Game; it was good, but not great. B-. Had some annoying continuity errors that cost it some points.) Short stop at home. Birthday party for Greg from seven-thirty till about 11:30. Only regret was that I didn't get the stuffed batdog at the white elephant exchange, though the guy that got it ended up getting me a free copy of Microsoft Word for Mac OS X (go employee discount!) and a pair of walkie-talkies.

Also: Figured out that my discomfort with drinking wine has more to do with my nose and the glass than anything to do with wine. Gave sack lunches and coffee to two homeless guys, gave two bucks to a kid trying to get a spot in a youth hostel. Managed to feel guilty about all three transactions. Listened to two people talk about this guy they knew who had a traumatic experience with a woman. He "never fully processed". Guy "May Never Do So". Etc. Felt smile melt slowly off face, discomfort set in, as they talked. Chastised self for feeling sorry for one's self. Think I had some other moments of self-revelation, but cannot remember them at the time. Dunno. Ready now for a nap.

12/14/2001: Jo's birthday tonight. Drinks at the Elysium, and then dancing (80's night) at Neighbor's; of all the gay nightclubs I've been to in my life, which is not a lot, but more than some of you would expect, this has to have been, well... not the best. The scary sailor-themed one next door to Panorama in PDX was probably worse, but not a huge amount. Actually, it was more the crowd that was weird. Just...off.

In any case, it was still fun. First time I'd been dancing in several years, actually. As we were getting ready to go there from the elysium, though, I witnessed raw, naked terror in the eyes of a young woman. Jo, to friend, in order to persuade her to come along dancing: "You have to come! Someone will give you a ride! Brian; Will you give her a ride?"

Me: "Sure."

Her: "How late are you going to stay out?"

Me: (Fatal misstep) "I guarantee I'll be up long after you go to bed. I have a geek job. I sleep at weird hours."

Her: (To Friend) "You have to come dancing and give me a ride."

Yup, good to know that I haven't lost the ability to terrify most women unintentionally within mere seconds of meeting them. I gotz skillz.

On to other matters; not much has been going on lately; things are just sorta chugging along on an even keel. I think I figured something important out about one of my bosses this week; he's constantly bitchy and near-abusive to his employees because he feels underappreciated and feels that he gets no respect. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the fact that he's constantly bitchy and near-abusive to his employees. I sorta feel like I should say something to him, but it's not the easiest thing to bring up with your boss.

Other matters. Cleaned half of my bedroom last weekend, and unearthed some retro treasures that will require me to figure out some means of storing some more stuff online, but which could be very cool when I get them up.

One of them, which would have been far cooler had I posted it nearer to the time it was all happening, is the following poem-thing. First, some background; back at LizardTech (Or "Just another stupid idea dot com", as the CEO was so smugly calling his competition right before the place imploded), there was one stall in the men's room that had a truly awesome collection of the poetry refrigerator magnet things. I used to take the occasional extra shit just to see what folks had posted.

Anyway, during the weeks between the "If things don't turn around soon, you're all going to be fired" company meeting and the company meeting where we all were told exactly how we were going to be fired, the usual potty and sex humor that was usually up on there was slowly set aside as various folks added to the tale of woe and grief which follows. This was never something anyone mentioned, but it was just cool to see one or two new lines a day appear over a period of two weeks. I think I contributed a line or two myself, but at this point, I cannot remember which.

Oh, yeah, and I had a weird dream a couple of nights ago where me and John Constantine, this character from a horror comic book, were having some sort of crazy mystical duel that consisted of the two of us carving all sorts of crazy shit into each other. I mean, in this dream, I was like stabbing knives and stuff into his exposed organs, rearranging things, and he was doing the same thing to me. It was nuts. I don't remember it hurting or anything, but I do have a memory of being pretty freaked out by things and thinking that it was really time for this to stop. If it was indeed a nightmare, it was the first one that I can remember having in several years.

12/3/2001: Overheard this evening's at Beth's: "In the riot at Ground Zero, three firefighters got arrested. Twelve cops got sent to the hospital. Go Team Red! Drag your fuckin' ass out of a burning house and bitch-slap a cop on the way out! <sound of entire restaurant applauding> Strangest sentiment ever. God, I love that place.

Other thoughts; I really should have typed in the Thanksgiving entry, but it's still sitting folded up on my desk at home, and my machine is still over at Larry's after Geek Weekend Three. It doesn't feel like winter at all, much less December or the "Holiday Season." One week from today, I must call my mother. Suspicion sucks, because even if it's completely unfounded, baseless, and unsupported by evidence of any kind, nothing other than having it confirmed will satisfy you. Reconciling paranoia and reality can be a difficult task. LA LA LA LA LA.

Still Other Thoughts: Corwin needs to stop burping so loud now that there's a woman in the office on a regular basis; I'm sympathetically embarrassed for him every time he does. The president of the company needs to stop wandering through the office randomly firing up power tools and banging on walls with a hammer in the middle of the work day. It's just plain weird. I want a stuffed Bill the Cat for christmas. I don't know what to get my brother's girlfriend or my mother for christmas. I got a christmas card from one of my co-workers the other day. I never play computer games any more. All work and no play means that I'll be a bitter(er), angry(er), spinster uncle in five to ten years, but I'm not sure I care at the moment. If this place goes down the tubes and lays me off, I won't be able to afford to go on unemployment, so they better not. I'll need to spend those six subsidized months re-learning how to code. I was described by the other "Head Honcho in charge guy" here at work (to the aforementioned new female employee) as "Brian; the insanely paranoid guy who thinks we're all going to fail". Which is, at best, an oversimplification; I just think that we need to admit that there's a possibility that we could fail, lest we get all big-heady and hubris-y. I don't think that "hubris-y" is a word.

11/11/2001: During the summer between Eighth Grade and high school, I used to wait for my mom to fall asleep on friday and saturday nights and go hang out with two girls who were best friends. I had a serious thing for one of them, but the other one ended up being the first girl I kissed. The first crush I ever had was in the sixth grade; the girl and I had shop class together. I took yearbook in the eighth grade, and nestled in the back of the yearbook, among the ads for pizza parlors and comic book companies, is a half-page "In Memory" thing for her. She died of leukemia. I don't think I went to her funeral, but I did send a letter to her family, and got one in return from her mother.

It's really weird, the things you remember, later on in life. Talking to mom today, I realized that I'm almost as old as Dad was when he met Mom. That's another odd little factoid that I don't quite know what to do with.

So, anyways: to those of you who've asked over the last couple of days. Yeah, I went to a party the friday before halloween, and I thought that maybe someone and me had hit it off. Couple days later, I was thinking that maybe I was just completely confused and/or mistaken. Upon further reflection, I'm thinking that I may have read the signs correctly - in the times I've interacted with this person, there have been definite indicators of interest. That said, there may have been a moment that has now passed and which shall never return, or there may have been a moment, and in the future, there may be other moments. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes and ears open, and my mouth shut. I'll keep you all abreast of any developments that may be of interest. =)

11/2/2001: Yeaah. Tired. Up too late. Up too early. That said, whaddaya going to do? Anyways; I decided that I have good strategic instincts, but by tactics are TERRIBLE. No view of how to get from point A to point B by a small sequence of deliberate actions resulting in a desired outcome. Oftentimes, I think my random thrashing around ("If I can just get things moving, some percentage of the time, they'll be moving in my direction! Yeah!") is not the best plan. This echoes across pretty much my entire lifestyle. Interesting.

10/27/2001:

Henceforth, this shall be the law of the land:

NO POSTING UNLESS DRUNK, HIGH, or BOTH.

Hear me?

Henceforth, all messages titled with

[DRUNK]

[HIGH]

or

[BOTH!!!] (bonus points awarded).

SHUT UP!

It was a good party.

Anyone that calls this censorship, says I, can not tell the difference between censorship and reducing legal liability.

SO THERE!

Sigh.... I miss the mind-altering substances, I really do.

Part of me misses my hair, but the rest of me enjoys massaging my scalp, which makes it easier.

And let's not get me started on the chasing tail thing. Sweet, sweet ass. I miss it so.

Now I'm off to wolf down dinner. If I could drive, I'd be at Beth's, but instead, I shall have either two bunless morningstar farms veggie patties, or a bowl of cereal.

I bought a two dollar and fifty-four cent hat today. Sweet hat. Many hats in my life now, since no hair.

Sweet scalp. Endorphins overriding embarrassment.

Ohhhh... I had beelzebub tell me that, to really score with the ladies, I should wear black shoes, and wear a sheet over me with about three times twelve times too many eye holes cut in it for the first half of the party, and then take it off to reveal my charlie brown-ness underneath. See, to get tail with the costume, tells me beelzebub, one must select a costume that:

1) allows the woman to see your unadorned face. Women trust not the full facial makeup.

2) costume subject advertises harmlessness. Satan bad choice for costume, if chasing tail is your goal! Charlie brown good, says silly beelzebub-man.

"I've seen 'the fury', and that way lies spooky carnival death..."

Sleepy now. Bye-Bye.

10/23/2001: Today's lesson - Tolerate assholes. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Repeat ten thousand times as needed.

10/17/2001: A little more apocalyptic today. Entire world flooded with water. I was scrambling from building to building, trying to make it... somewhere. I'd just escaped from a parking garage that was sinking in a big-ass whirlpool. Me, and old person couple, and some young punk with his baseball cap on backwards were all hand-over-handing along a wall, trying to make it to a warship that was floating and firing cannons at god-knows-what just a ways off. It was really, really vivid. I remember standing on top of this one building, and just seeing oases of fucked-up buildings sticking out of the water, some knocked over onto others. Crazy.

10/16/2001: Another wacky one: was a guard in some sort of mental institution. Some sort of low rent Hannibal Lecter holding facility. This guy I knew from Evergreen, Aaron Braeckel, got captured by the bad guy, and was forced to hide inside the prisoner's jumpsuit thingy. And then the prisoner shit himself. Man, I dream some weird stuff.

10/15/2001: Still another weird one. Cleaning red and green cat poop of truly enormous proportions from the rug of a rental house occupied by myself, my brother, and Guido the killer pimp. Strange enough on that basis, but the house was identical to 440 NE Laddington Ct.

10/12/2001: Another weird dream last night. I was visiting Grandma, with my new kid (It was a son, I think, but I'm not sure) in tow. Sometimes, I think the strangest dreams are the ones that are more "The Straight Story" than "Lost Highway".

I'm going through one of those moods again. Not a bad mood, but not a happy one. Realized that I've worked for pretty much five straight years to end up where I am today, and while it's not quite what I envisioned it to be, I do think it's worth all the work, and I'll try to protect that as best I can.

Had a thought recently that there exist times in your life where you're all about expanding the horizons - making new things possible, accumulating stuff and experience, doing things you haven't done before, etc. And there also exist periods where it's all about consolidation, fortification, and protecting the things you have.

I think you're officially old when you spend more time doing the latter than the former. This isn't really self-directed; I'm so far from "old" that it's not even worth talking about, no matter what my position may be relative to the people I'm hanging out with at any moment. But that moment will be out there some day, waiting for me.

I'm not sure how that will feel. Will I be sad that my universe has become closed, and now the best I can hope for is to slow or temporarily halt the decline? Or will it be a sense of relief, because knowing what you have, what you've done, and what you will be removes a lot of the uncertainty from life, which as we all know, is one of the things I hate most about it?

I really don't know.

Expanding on two unrelated conversations from my short-range past: I think that a lot of the changes in the way I conduct myself around people has to do with the new job.

When you're confronted with someone that's supposedly fragile, you have two options; assume they're fragile, treat them with kid gloves, and never test the limits of what they can take. Tolerate their fictions that they use to protect themselves, never push them, and generally, waste a whole lot of time trying to read subtext and figure out what the hell is really going on so you can properly mediate your actions to avoid breaking them.

Fuck That. People are not Ming Vases, tissue paper, or otherwise irreparable objects. They're flesh and blood. They hurt, but they heal. I ask my friends to call me on my bullshit, and I'll do the same for them. And if you're not willing to do that, it frustrates me mightily. Don't waste my time, and I won't waste yours. And we'll both be better off.

This situation was presented to me when I assumed the new job, and I hit on a strategy for dealing with that person. I think that when I adopted it universally, it surprised people. Sorry about that. I didn't really understand what was going on myself until a day or two ago.

Besides; if you don't like something that I'm doing, JUST SAY SO. Tell me why you want me to stop, and I'll stop doing it; I respect the feelings of the people that I'm surrounded by, and I will accommodate them once I'm made aware of them. But don't put the burden on my shoulders to figure out what's going on in your head; I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a mind-reader, and I will not attempt to do so on your behalf. It's not like I'm some bull let loose in the interpersonal china shop, wrecking things without regards to consequence. But I will not respect silence as a means of dealing with people, and I will not waste my time.Everyone's an adult here, and we should be able to interact as such.

If you don't trust me enough to speak truthfully to me, then screw you. Not speaking is just barely better, but it's the difference between an F and a D. At least you're not lying to me, but you're sure not sharing with me, and that means that you're wasting time I could be spending on something more meaningful. So I get frustrated, and the rude-o-meter gets cranked up a notch, in an effort to provoke some sort of meaningful communication.

While a positive outcome is always the most desirable outcome, an honest negative reaction is better than nothing at all. It's a feedback loop, but I've explained how it works, and how to stop it. I'm done; I wash my hands of the whole affair. At this point, though, it's more likely that this is the equivalent of shutting the barn once the cows are gone, which is a bad thing if you never have any cows again ever, but I don't think that's the case here. There will be more cows; oh, yes, there will be more cows. Or something.

10/11/2001: Had a weird dream last night: I remember waking up in my dream, putting on some flip-flops (which I do not own in TRW), and a thin bathrobe-thingy. Under this, I was wearing the t-shirt that I'd worn to bed the night before, and no boxers. Then decided that I should take a bus, clothed as above, to this Comic Book Store that I used to work at way out it Milwaukee.

Got out there, decided "This is stupid. What was I thinking? I should catch a bus home." Except it was a sunday, and I didn't know what bus would get me there, or when it was running, and I couldn't find a schedule. And my fleshy naughty bits kept poking out from under the robe at inopportune times.

And I ran into a not inconsiderably attractive person from the office back when I worked at LizardTech.

Like I said... Odd.

10/3/2001: I'm beginning to get a bit weary of the September 11th story, as well, but say what you will, it has certainly made for some strange and interesting television. I'm taping "The West Wing" this evening, as well.

10/2/2001: Things I Hate, in no particular order:

<rant>

1) rude folks who think sitting behind a keyboard means that they can make insane proclamations like "you MUST do X, or I won't pay for your product" and "I doubt you even can or will be able to do Y" or "You haven't implemented technology Z? You must be a drunken hydrocephalic infant" or some such crap. You'd think the fact that we let people use it essentially for free as long as they want, forever, would mean that people would either be tight-fisted and shut up about the shortcomings while we fix them (because it's FREE), or that they'd realize that no one made them pay for the damn thing, and if they regret their choice, well, then they made a poor choice and should not do so in the future.

All I ask is that they not get all offensive over it. But no. All day long, it's the angry people who haven't bought the damn thing, and the folks that don't think they're getting their money's worth. Did we twist your arm? No. We simply ask that, if you want to use our software, you click one button a week that says "I don't want to pay just yet."

If I could say one thing to everyone in the world that might someday use our products, it would be this: "Don't send anyone thirty dollars of your money without being sure you'll be happy with what you get in return. Ever."

That goes twice for any product sold by a company I work for, because I'll be the guy reading the email... and I am Tired Of Your Rants (TM). complaints are fine, as long as they are phrased politely. Rants will be met with home deliveries of napalm and a box of matches. Please apply liberally, lather, and then light. Repeat as needed.

2) People that order items in restaurants by saying "I will have." Man that bugs the crap out of me. What if they're out of item X? Will you go harvest the necessary ingredients and whip up a batch yourself? While it is true that between now and the time of your death you will most likely consume a given dish at least one more time, can we all just pledge to use the oh-so-much-more-bearable "I'd like" or "May I have" variants? I actually have a long standing policy to assign penalty points to any mate/partner candidate that uses such behavior on a regular basis.

3) the fact that sometime in the last week a british spelling bit got thrown in my head, and I'm now incapable of typing the word behavior up without including the 'u' at the end. "Behavior". And now, no matter what I do, the word just looks like it's spelled wrong either way. It's only a matter of time before I start spelling those round things that the car rolls on with a 'y'... Tyres. Yup; my car rolls on Tyres, not Tires. With a Y. More cultured, don't you think, old boy?

4) The fact that I have not, as of yet, seen "Zoolander". Ben Stiller is, in fact, a god.

5) The fact that no less than three times since watching the Enterprise premier, I've had a mental image of Scott Bakula's blue boxer-clad package pop into my skull unbidden. Arrrrrrgh....

...make that four.

6) The fact that, as I was hanging out with some friends yesterday or the day before, someone asked me what I did for fun. A friend sighed, and answered for me:

"Brian? He works a lot. And he has dinner with us on tuesday, and on Sunday, he plays D&D."

7) Strike that. I don't hate that it was said; I hate that it was correct and that I was forced to agree with them.

8) Oh yeah, and wall-to-wall-carpeted bathrooms. Worst idea ever.

</rant>

9/14/2001: So, two days ago, I woke up with a headache. Or, more specifically, an earache. Didn't go away, and the next day, was more of a "I have an earache, and it feels like my ear is filled with water" sort of thing. Went to the doctor. Ear infection. Put me on antibiotics. Woke up early this morning with an even more piercing pain, which I dosed up with an extra helping of ibuprofin.

Well, I'm sitting here at work, and I realize that while the headache is still there, it's definitely lessened. And what do you know? There's this clear ooze coming out of that ear, which is sorta crusty and weird. It's great, I tell you. I think something burst. I may never hear again, or something, except I still can. Now I don't want to use my almost-charged-up wireless headphones for fear of crustifying them with my precious bodily fluids. Now go eat dinner.

9/13/2001: Cheesy image? Yes. But I'm a little in the mood for cheesy, frankly.

Saw my first jet fly over this evening. I actually stopped and did a double-take. It was odd. Humorous and odd. I mean, in Seattle, there is ALWAYS a plane flying overhead. Except for the last 48 hours, that is.

And now, it's time to eat some crow. After reading story after story etc about "trapped person found after placing cell phone call" and especially after hearing about the passengers on the flight that crashed in pennsylvania (rumor has it that the reason they stormed the cockpit was that they'd heard what had happened on the previous flights via cell phone), I hereby retract my opposition to cell phones.

Their everyday use, in many cases, is still bound to be a constant annoyance to me, and I'll no doubt still rant from time to time. When I do, just sigh and gently remind me that I promised in public to shut the fuck up. Or at least restrict the ranting to muttering under my breath.

And who sells you wireless headphones with built-in rechargable batteries that need to be charged for 24 hours before they can be used? I mean, really; these people know nothing about instant gratification. It'll be like Friday evening, 7pm by then! TERRIBLE.

9/11/2001: The phone rang this morning, and I answered it, thinking I was late for work or something - despite the fact that there isn't really anything like "late for work" where I work. It was Kevin's Girlfriend's mother. "Have you heard?" "No...heard what?" "Oh, god."

At this point, I'm thinking that my mother is dead. I really thought she was, for a good chunk of a full minute. Of course, she was fine. It would make NO SENSE for this person to be telling me that, but I hadn't figured that out yet.

Someone crashed two hijacked jetliners into the world trade center. Someone crashed a hijacked jetliner into the Pentagon. Someone attempted to crash a hijacked jetliner into camp david. Someone set off a car bomb outside the state department. ANY ONE of these things sounds like the plot of a bad action movie, but they all happened today. It's just inconceivable.

"I'd rather be dealing with the injured than with the press right now. Our jet fighters are up guarding the airspace over new york right now."

This is just insane. There are some people out there that really, really hate us to a degree that I can't conceive of. They're celebrating on the streets in the West Bank. How the hell do you communicate that I think that the American and Israeli governments have screwed up in handling that issue time and time again, but this is still nothing to celebrate? That this is a terrible, terrible act, but on some level, I agree with the sentiment that we, as a nation, take illogical positions that make sense when you're gathering domestic votes, but which... I don't know; I'm not saying anything that makes any sense here, and I'm just sorta inarticulately ranting to the choir. Be nice to each other out there. That's something we can all agree on for the moment.

The world is a stupid, stupid place.

9/8/2001: That was creepy for a variety of reasons. I went to Scarecrow and rented one of the movies that's supposed to have been a precursor to the Blair Witch Project. (Which, I actually thought was a really effective and interesting film, though I haven't bothered to see the sequel.) Anyways - it was a bad, bad, bad idea. I really just don't know what the hell I was thinking, and sort of feel like a bad person to have even watched this thing. Even creepier is the fact that there was one "User comment" on IMDB.com for this movie, dated about a week ago, and the guy has the same last name as I do.

Needless to say, I'm in an ever weirder mood now than I was at the beginning of the day. Which is saying a lot. Increasingly feeling like a passenger in my own life, and not able to articulate why that would be the case, what to do about it, etc.

I guess it's sorta like Bill Murray during the "trying to date Andi McDowell" sequence of groundhog day, towards the end of the "ice sculpture and snowball fight" sequence. Just sorta twitchy, and freaked out, and seeing that things are spiraling more and more out of control and that your efforts are only making it worse.

O.K. Go read something else now. I'm tired of talking to you all.

9/4/2001: Nothing like having a morbidly obese woman wink at you conspiratorially and say "Another late-night snacker, eh?" as you're going into Safeway at 1AM to make you really, really hate the world for a moment. Actually, I was getting a goddamn flea collar and some hydrocortizone cream.

Yup; just us fat folks. All in this together. Grrr. Wouldn't have been half as irritating as it was if not for two facts. An incorrect assumption on her part, yes; but circumstantial evidence still leads towards that conclusion,. (In other words - it's only annoying because it's plausibly true.) And the equally morbidly obese guy sitting in the Toyota minivan waiting for her means that it is now true that everyone in the world gets laid more often than I do. Mmmmm; internalize the rage. Tastes good.

9/2/2001: I don't know what to tell you. I really don't. I like it here, but it's the same as it ever was. Well, at least at the core. And in some ways, it feels like it did a couple of years ago, when I was both angrier and friendlier. I miss those days, sometimes. I really do. And right now, at this very moment, I sorta feel like I lost something very very important. Not sure I know what it is, where or when I lost it, but I can feel it's absence, and that frightens me in a way that's hard to describe.

I was in Portland for a few hours not too long ago. Strange how you can miss something, even though the things you miss have been obliterated and can't be recovered. Don't think that I'm nearly as irrational as I think I'm perceived to be, and I'm tired of trying to correct people's misconceptions.

Understand this: inarticulate is not the same thing as ill-conceived. And if you're not going to listen, well, then, why talk? Not worth the bother.

The first sentence on this page depresses the hell out of me.

8/25/2001: The thing about change is, no matter what else it is, it's always painful. And things are definitely changing, and at a far more rapid pace and in more unpredictable ways that I'm used to. And given the events of the last two years, that's saying a lot. While I know that I'm up for it, and I'll be better at the end of it, I'm still really tired of it all. Just... want... things... to... slow... down.

Need some stability. Peace. Quiet. Those things I used to take for granted.

Went to the greasiest spoon I've ever seen last night, and had the best talk I can really remember a long fucking time. One could not have crafted a better experience, both in terms of substance and of setting. It was like that deep, relaxing breath that I needed - despite the fact that it was exactly what I'd said I didn't want earlier in the evening. It was like Quality Pie, or Bannings, or Jubitz, except about twelve million times less family oriented. It's good to have friends that know you well enough to see through the noise and get at what really matters.

I sorta don't feel like I live in my own skin, anymore. I like who I am now, but it's so different from who I remember being that it just feels really really weird. And I don't know what to think about that, in any way at all. Which, needless to say, is pretty freaking strange.

8/21/2001: The crap you find when you boot into nine. I mean, really. Next, I'll unearth my Nisus Writer serial number and regale you with all of those old atrocities.

8/20/2000: It simply amazes me how thin the tasty candy coating of adulthood is over the dark bitter core of whiny two year old in my psychic makeup. Really, it's astounding. I'm off to issue edicts and have my citizens arrested before they can run off to the hills and join the rebellion. Ta Ta.

8/16/2001: Why, oh why, did I bother with the design, and the writing, and the telling about stuff that's going on? I should have done this.

8/14/2001: Well, I just got the word. The team that I used to work on at LizardTech? All laid off. Every last one. Sometimes, the universe, she does take care of fools such as I. That said, I think I may have to go running out and get "Another Dumb Idea Dot Com" embroidered on the polar fleece they gave us. You know; to "Increase Brand Awareness."

Note to self: Never work for a company of more than twenty people EVER AGAIN. Own company? Fine. Work for small company? Fine. Work for some godless corporation? Hell no.

Oh yeah, and never go see a Tim Burton Movie just because it's a Tim Burton Movie ever again either. See the ones that it looks like he actually had some interest in making? Sure. But the "I gotta make this movie their way or they won't let me make movies anymore" movies are just damn frustrating.

This actually has me worried that "Spider-Man" is going to suck. If there's no yellow car in Spider-Man, I guarantee it will suck.

8/10/2001: FOULEST MOOD EVER. Behind at work, room's a mess, other stuff too.

It's a pile of shit in your sugar shack
And I'm gonna step on in when I'm visiting
So I can drag it more all across the floor

It's a pile of shit in the White House
And I'm gonna step on in when I'm visiting
So I can drag it more all across the flag

So don't take it personally. And to think, just mere days ago, people were commenting on how the change in my demeanor was like "Night and Day". At the time, it probably was. But everybody has relapses. Everybody backslides.

8/7/2001: I... am surrounded... by baggage. This... does not... please me. Unfortunately... there... is nothing... to be done. Unless... one has... a Peter Pan complex. Of... immense... and unrealistic... proportions.

7/28/2001: SO... "celebrated" my last day @ LIzardTech by going to see Sir Mixalot at the showbox. Terrible, terrible show. First off, if the headliner isn't going to hit the stage until 11 PM, don't advertise that the doors open at eight. Even if some no-name DJ is going to badly mix records for three hours. I showed up an hour "late" and I was still BORED AS HELL.

Second of all, when you hit the stage, it's a good idea to assume that the audience paid money to see you perform each song, not see you trade off with the members of your entourage, no matter how large it may be. Ok. Maybe you can let them have one or two songs. Not every other song. Trust me.

Additionally, let me say one thing about Seattle; wherever SMAL was when he wrote "baby got back", it was most emphatically not seattle, at least judging from the crowd tonight. He must have been on tour. Of the 30+ females that volunteered to get on stage when that song got played, about five of them were non-caucasian, and strangely, the same number could actually have been legitimate subjects referred to by the lyrics. I don't care how good your moves are... the song is about having a large ass. Petite women need not apply. Are we clear on that?

Remember that scene in the "Charlie's Angels", with Cameron Diaz on-stage at soul train? It was like that, except with an army of them, and less funny. I swear... I had a better claim to be up on that stage embarrassing myself than some of these women. It was like a picket fence up there - rows and rows of white flatness.

I could go on, but something tells me I should not, as inserting my foot in my mouth any further would require surgery. Ranty Ranty rant rant, etcetera.

7/25/2001: Oh... no more massage at LizardTech. I have a new job, which starts on Monday. More News at Eleven, once I tell my boss I'm quitting.

7/23/2001, v2.0: Warning: Extreme hippie crap dead ahead and approaching fast.

So I just had my first massage, and I must say I'm freaking impressed. Despite the fact that people are jumping ship like you wouldn't believe, the HR department is making an effort to keep us all here and in our cubicles. And, I gotta say, I'm glad. I carry around enough stress on a regular day to stun a team of horses, and with recent events, it's been even worse.

Anyways. It was really, really a pleasant experience, though one feels a little silly walking straight out of the conference room they use and into the middle of engineering. I'm sure I had a vaguely goofy grin and looked about as dazed as I felt, but it was quite nice, all told.

Anyways, I signed up for one of the fifteen minute sessions, and I'm thinking next time, I may do a full half hour. It was really relaxing, but less than ten minutes after it was over, and I'm feeling the shoulders reassume their customary state - all tightened up and hunched. Go me.

Oh, and did I tell you all that I bought vegetarian shoes made from hemp and which came with a free pair of hemp socks? I tell you, any day now, I'm going to realize what a damn hippie I've become and really do something rash like join the NRA and start voting for tax cuts.

7/23/2001:This hasn't happened in a while, but we're back to the old "wake up inexplicably early and still kinda tired" gig. It's 4:58 AM, and I've been up for half an hour or so. After going to bed at 11:30. What am I thinking?

Failed, through poor planning on my part, to get my Olympia tattoo. Succeeded, through poor planning in the D&D game, to unleash an army of the undead on a continent and provide them with a general to lead them about with the killing and the making of more undead. This was not the expected outcome. Oops.

Oh, yeah, and "Tony Hawk Pro Skater" is, in fact, the best game ever, though it has inflicted a terrible toll upon my left thumb. Damn console game thumb...

Went to a party on saturday. This one girl, whom I'd date in a second flat, was there. With her new boyfriend. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Spent a good chunk of the party explaining over and over again why I'm less and less interested in dating this other girl who is available.

Like they say, you can't always get what you want. And never has that been made so annoyingly clear.

7/20/2001: So, there are things I *could* be doing, but I can't do them right now. Our internal bug-tracking database is down, and we've been told not to do any more work on the codebase other than bugfixes until the folks over in sales put together a business case for the product I work on.

So, I'm sitting here... Idle. I'm reminded of a day one of my friends had about two years ago, when he had nothing to do. Put on a helmet, and began wandering the halls, hitting his head on thins and moaning, out of sheer boredom.

I'm not there yet, but I'm close.

So. Big company meeting yesterday. Four options presented, with one more implied.

A) Leave now, with four week's severance pay.
B) Take up to two unpaid days per month.
C) Take a voluntary pay cut.
D) Switch over to part time employment.

implied was, of course, to do nothing.

A. insulates you from further layoffs, for obvious reasons.

B, C, and D all involve a degree of personal sacrifice and are good for the group as a whole, by making it more likely that future layoffs will be less deep to one degree or another, but don't do anything to ensure that you personally will not be laid off.

Classic prisoners' dilemma, essentially. Maximize personal benefits in the worst case, thereby making that worst case more likely, or sacrifice benefits to self to assist a group you have no assurance of being in?

I'm leaning towards taking the two unpaid days off, and taking a 15% cut from my base salary. Total of those two actions combine into something just fractionally under 25% less take home pay. I get some incremental benefit from the additional days off, and hopefully the group gets some benefit as well. I don't know if that's enough to make a difference, or if I'm the only guy doing this, but I know that if no one does, that many more people get laid off in a month. We all hang together, or we all hang separately.

Oh, yeah, and the biography link to the left and above will take you to an updated copy of my resume. Commentary and suggestions welcome...

7/9/2001: So. How's morale, a friend asked me recently?

Answer: completely unstable.

Sunday, I thought I'd be fired on Tuesday.

Monday, I thought I'd be fired in October.

Today, I think I'll be fired on Thursday.

Needless to say, stress levels are high and rising. Bottom line is, even when you plan for it, it comes along and whacks you in the head before you're really ready.

Paid off the Aeron out of the paycheck that arrived on monday. Have a doctor's appointment on friday. I'm fairly sure my teeth are in good shape, or I'd make a dentists' appointment.

I so do love the high-tech industry.

Soon, I will be gloriously coding in my boxers, which is the upside. Plenty of free time, and I should be able to complete at least one game in that amount of time.

In the end, though, who knows? One plans as best as one can, and one stays flexible. Right now, options are the holy grail.

7/9/2001: I was presented with an interesting philosophical dilemma today.

Sometime last week, I was happily browsing websites where one pledges to spend the Bush tax refund by donating to a charitable cause, or otherwise not spending it on a new toaster or some other form of conspicuous consumption.

I'd just finished browsing a couple of articles on Salon.com. Book reviews, actually, on responses to the actions of the supreme court in last year's Florida election fiasco. I'd decided to give the entire tax refund to the Democratic party. Not sure what, if anything, the refund will amount to, but I know the maximum that you get back is $300. Seemed like a nice, round number, so in my head, I had this picture of myself writing a check out to the dems for $300.

Today, I got an e-mail from a coworker who's collecting pledges, riding across the state of Iowa, and donating the money generated to Multiple Sclerosis research. I wanted to pledge, but I couldn't swing the dollar a mile his e-mail suggested (the ride is over 500 miles long, you see).

So, I'm sitting there at my desk, crafting the response mail, and trying to decide how much to contribute. I settled on a flat donation of $150, and was typing up the response when I realized what that meant.

For some reason, the fact that I'm willing to donate twice as much money to elect a guy to a job that pays over $100K a year, a guy who's undoubtedly already a fairly wealthy individual, than I am to research a cure to a disease that's afflicting members of my own family seems really screwed up.

Now, there are several factors here. First off, I'm a terrible person, but there's a higher likelihood that I'm going to be directly affected by the policies of a republican administration in office than there is that I'll be stricken with MS. There's a higher likelihood that the money I donate to one of the causes will have measurably positive results than if I donate to the other cause. Third, I'm not sure that I'll actually *get* a sum from the feds that exceeds $150 dollars, but the fact that I was willing to give that much away if I did still counts against me. I was whittling one sum down, and didn't even think about the other contribution. True, there's a difference between giving away extra money that doesn't affect your daily
budget and giving away money that is budgeted for something...

I don't know. Anyways. I upped my contribution to the bike riding guy, but I was still annoyed with myself, and I'm still not sure I did the right thing. It's all weird and annoying, trying to do the right thing.

6/30/2001: I had a really strange dream friday night/saturday morning. I was participating in consecrating a Jewish temple. Don't ask me how I knew that it was jewish; I really don't know. Especially since I was standing around a hole in the floor with some other people, and we were tossing these... well, if you were catholic as a kid, there were these... things... that the altar boys carried around during mass. You know, these big staff-y things. Anyways, the whole thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because I was tossing in a crucifix into the hole in the ground.

Like I said, it was weird. I woke up after it, and I almost got up and posted about it right then, but I was still insanely tired, so I didn't. I went back to sleep.

But I remembered later.

And I'm sure the movie it was attached to was as awful as I assumed it was, but the ZZ Top cover of "Viva Las Vegas" does indeed kick serious buttrock ass. As does ZZ Top, actually. MMmmm... ZZ Top.

There's a movie marathon for you: "Movies with ZZ Top Songs in them". Didn't they do the theme song for one of the Back To the Future sequels?

6/27/2001: This is what it's come to.

For months, I was good. Coffee only when out for a meal at a restaurant. Cutting back on the cola, as well. While I'm not willing to cut caffeine out entirely, just because, well, have I ever done anything "entirely", I was noticing that I was drinking a lot, and frankly, a lot of the time, it didn't even taste good... at all.

I mean, you get that dry mouth thing going on, and it's got that aftertaste, and it's just all freaky. Not to mention expensive.

But then, things at work started getting busy. And then past busy, and on into frantic. And then, we broke through frantic, and settled down on a nice bed of white-hot soul-sapping morale-busting overwork.

So, this morning, when I awoke and finally dragged my ass out of bed after hitting the snooze bar three times, showered, and then went back to bed for twenty minutes, and finally made it in to work, I just... wanted... to... DIE.

I made it an hour and a half.

Last week, I was smarter, and more motivated.

Went across the street and got a big, vitamin-packed fruit smoothie from the independently owned small business. Today, I was lazy.

Down the elevator to the first floor I went. Into the giant not-quite-starbucks stand did I go.

"Venti White Chocolate Mocha, Iced. With an extra shot."

$4.81, with tax.

Christ, that was a tall wagon to fall off of. It stings. And it still tastes kinda weird. But it's got what I need, and right now, I need it bad.

6/24/2001: I just got out of a Public Enemy show at the EMP. Like oh, so many things I talk shit about, I end up eating that same shit a little later on. Partially because it's funded by Microsoft money, and partially just because it's unbelievably ugly as hell, I denounced the EMP. It's still unbelievably ugly. However, seeing P.E. there was the best $24 I've spent in a long, long time. Everything, including the Flavor Flav drum solo, and the Sly and the Family Stone and John Lee Hooker covers, just kicked ass, and as much as it bugs me to say so, it has as much to do with the venue as it did with the performers. That damn microsoft money bought one hell of a good sound system, and some amazing lighting equipment.

Yeah. So I'm a big freaking sellout. Are any of you really all that surprised?

Anyways; Orion flies in sometime in the next twelve hours, and we're going to hang out for a good chunk of the 23 hours that he's in town. Mmmmm.... Original Pancake House.... If he tries to drag me to cinerama, though, I don't know what I'm going to do; Tomb Raider is playing there, and it just looks so unbelievably awful.

So, as I was driving to work (yes, work. It's 12:39 on a sunday morning, and I came in to work. I have work I want to get done by monday, and I'm not going to have a chance to get it done tomorrow. So I came in tonight. Shut up.), and I realized that it's sometime in the last week or so that I was officially living in Seattle for two years. Scary. So much shit has happened in those two years, it's not even funny. It's scary, actually. That also means that I've been keeping this journal thing for something like a year and a half. Shit. Whoda thunk?

6/20/2001: It is not, generally speaking, a sign of a healthy development process to have the VP of products bring you into his office, close the door, and say "I need you to know that I don't know if I can trust XXXXXXX [a team member I'm working with]. I need you to tell me if you start to get pulled off to work on side projects that'll make you miss your deadline on friday. Let me know right away." My job is becoming more dilbertesque every day.

6/17/2001: Returned from the beach trip with the chock-full-of-therapists group. Cats seem to have survived their forty-eight hours and change with no adult supervision. Trip was more fun than I expected. Sadly, though, it's over now, and I'm left with only the seven pounds of sand I think I brought home in my pants cuffs and/or bodily crevices, and a heightened, rather than lessened, desire to not be employed any more. Man, am I starting to hate my job. Not hating the paycheck, though, so I won't do anything rash.

Anyone know where to get a good salad around this place? And my damn shoulders are killing me. Methinks I may need to requisition a neck massage.

6/13/2001: A random assortment of links and stuff resulting from my latest futile attempt to work through the sedimentary layers of crap in my inbox. Enjoy. Oh, and the code review went fine. Got my drawers in a bunch over nothing, really...

"The peculiar, vomitorious genius of modern capitalism is its ability to betray our senses with one class of products or services and then sell us another to cope with the damage so that we can go back to consuming more of what caused the problem in the first place.

"Forces of Habit"
By David Courtwright

Mmmmm.... Euro-Dance Bastard is my king, and I shall serve him well.

So, I'm browsing around waiting for a huge file transfer to finish, and I come across this Mac/Windows/Linux application framework. Which is all well and good, until i see that it includes things like TCP/IP support, cross platform windowing, the ability to determine the orbital position of various planets, and...

huh?

that's right. The orbital position of various planets. He used to work for JPL, I guess, and decided to include that stuff.

I declare funny.

And this is for when I get *really* paranoid.

A little pretentious, but I miss his show. *Sigh*

Who'd a thunk that someone who supports NPR would also support the little people so handsomely?

6/10/2001: So, today was not a good day to be playing the rogue. They used to be called thieves, by the way, but I think they changed the name both in an attempt to placate some of the people out there that subscribe to ideas like this one, but also to sorta broaden the horizons of what...

anyways. I'm digressing into high-level geekery, and I'm not sure many of you will care. Suffice it to say, there is a class of player character called "Rogue", and I play one in my weekly D&D game. I've touched on this stuff before, and I'm sorta walking a fine line between being tired and wanting to blather about something interesting, so I'll just move things along here.

Anyways. All night tonight was one big, long, four-and-a-half hour long battle. Me and the other three players started the evening with me unlocking a door and making a crack about how "if when we open this door, there's a bunch of bad guys hiding behind an overturned table with crossbows and poison arrows, you're all going in first." (The week before, we had found just such a thing, and my character had gotten shot so full of poison arrows, he couldn't move without some spells and stuff propping his ass up. It was sad. Luckily, it was annoying paralysis poison, and not "*URK* ...you're dead" poison.)

Well, as soon as those words came out of my mouth, the GM chuckled, and said "well, I guess they're going in first." and drew an overturned table on the map, and set out a couple of miniatures for bad guys. Skipping to the relevant bits, in the initial skirmish parts of the fight, I, without really thinking, decided to fire my crossbow at this bad guy magic user - I was worried she might pop off one of these really annoying blindness spells the GM (Game Master) has been using against us lately.

Beginning my tradition of really, really, really awful die rolls for the evening, I missed the bad guy, but did manage to hit one of my friends, who I'd inexplicably decided to fire through on the way to the bad guy, square in the back. Luckily (or so I thought at the time) I only did 3 points of damage to her. Somewhere between a nick and a nasty bruise. To give you an indicator of how poorly I was rolling that evening, this nick I inflicted on one of the other characters would constitute over 50% of the damage I did all evening, and it was to my own side of the fight.

And so, the fight progressed. Things were going less than well for the good guys, as, among other things, our own spellcaster guy couldn't whip out the really big mean spells because the rest of us, myself included, were all mixed in the middle of the bad guys and, like hand grenades, a lot of his spells just affected a certain area. To get the bad guys, he'd get us.

Anyways, we slowly figured out that we were in the process of getting our asses kicked, and the best thing we could do was all try to crowd over along one edge of the room we were fighting in momentarily, let the magic-user cast a big fireball spell on the bad guys, and then wade in again.

Things were going well. That is, until they all suddenly went to shit. We'd almost all gotten out of the way, but then, when the character I'd shot accidentally was jumping over this table to get across the room, one of the bad guys got in a really good hit on her. A *really* good hit. Specifically, enough damage, by one point, to knock her unconscious. In the middle of the bad guys.

Under no circumstances could this be considered a good thing. It was actually a lot worse, though, than it appears. On the one hand, her character wasn't actually dead yet. You're not dead until you drop down to -10 hit points. She was at -1. Let me point out that, had I not shot her in the ass, though, she'd be at 2 hit points, would be conscious, and most importantly, would not have fallen down to the ground in a spot on the map where the magic user-guy couldn't see her.

See, these games have rules, well not rules, really , but it's considered a sign of good playing/good breeding/good manners if your character, with a subset of the information you as a player sitting looking at a map on a table with stacks of paper and books have, does what they would most likely do in a given situation, even if it's not in your character's best interests. Or, in this case, in the interests of a character played by your wife, who got shot in the ass by this other guy.

So... he cast his fireball spell, even though one of our own folks would get caught in it. My character had shouted out a sorta ambiguous warning, and he interpreted it as "someone's down, things are bad, whip out the whoop-ass" as opposed to "someone's down... abort!" So, that did something like another twelve points of damage to the already unconscious character. Which took his wife's character from "badly wounded and bleeding to death" straight to "thoroughly, totally, completely dead." It's exactly like that scene in those action movies where the one guy dives for the radio or the shutoff switch of the big death ray, or tries to get away from the bomb under the toilet, doing so just in time to fail miserably and get totally fried by the equivalent of friendly fire.

So, while there was an element of chance and coincidence in the whole affair, it's fair to say that, had I thought a little bit more, she wouldn't have spent the rest of the night rolling up a new character. Which, who knows... maybe she doesn't mind. She's gamed a whole lot more than I have, and maybe it's no big deal. Though, so far, she's the only person who's had to roll up a new character, and she's had to do it twice. And, this time, it's my fault.

I mean, if my character dies, I'm going to be a little upset. Which sounds silly, but it's true, so why make it out to be no big deal. I guess I'd explain it as being similar to if someone took a jigsaw puzzle, or chess game, or some little project that was only meaningful to you, and wrecked it somehow. Not permanently, since you could concievably do it all over again, but irreprably. You'd get over it, but you'd be upset.

That's sorta how it is. Anyways.... it's just a game, but it's also a story, and stories are only cool if you actually identify with the characters to a degree. And while this in no way relates to the "I hate it when thoughtless people do thoughtless things" posting back there that got you all so worried, I guess it's in spitting distance thematically.

So, anyway, go out there, do good things, have fun, be young, drink pepsi, and most of all, be excellent to one another. This is sandblaster twelve, tired, a little guilty, a little silly, and signing off.

6/3/2001: Several separate threads in my life lately have almost seemed to be operating in a separate but coordinated manner, all conspiring to get me to confront the question of whether I live my life the way I do because I choose to have it so, and because I want things to be the way they are, or whether I live my life the way I do because I cannot envision any other way to live it.

It's a hard question to answer. I'm thinking about it, though, and taking some experimental steps to test my responses to various stimuli - sorta get a look at things from a different angle and see what's what. No conclusions as of yet. I'll keep you posted.

One note. I am hereby never again allowed to both drink any non-trivial quantity of beer and eat Taco Bell within the same 24 hour period. Both sorta do a minor number on my G.I. track, but the sum of the two is embarrasingly greater than either alone. Probably more information than you all wanted to know.

At the very least, it's a reminder why I generally tend to do my drinkin' from distilled spirits, though. It's both more efficient, and less disturbing to the body. Or something.

6/1/2001: One thing that really, really freaks me out about coding is how you can spin your wheels almost indefinitely on a problem, and then, almost like a switch got thrown in your head, just suddenly make huge huge quantities of progress all at once. Or maybe that's just something that happens to me.

I'm going to see the Red Elvises tonight; I only know their stuff from this one movie of theirs that I have, but it should be fun nonetheless. At least, I hope. I'm in the mood for some fishbone-style zaniness...

So, all my credit cards are paid off. I got paid yesterday. It's time to start seriously piling the cash into paying off school debt, but I sorta feel like I've hit a milestone, and I sorta want a treat. (Insert picante-style "I want a treat..."; she never says that anymore, but I still find it amusing.)

Things I have promised myself to do for at least two years and have not done yet: get at least two different posters framed. Get four pages of comic art reframed, since the frames they're in are not archival. Get some body repairs done on my car and get the thing repainted. Get my current tattoos touched up, and get two more.

That said, I'll most likely just do something boring, like pile cash away in the bank, since current scuttlebutt is that the plan is for the board members to put the company on the block late this year or early next year. Anyways, until my employment situation is more resolved, it just does not make sense for me to treat self like I deserve to be treated. Or something. I'll probably just settle for checking out the new menu at the 5 spot and call it good.

I'm almost looking forward to being unemployed again. Wait; I *am* looking forward to being unemployed again. Who am I kidding? The closer I can get to being debtless, the longer I can afford to be on the dole. Mmmm... sweet, sweet social safety net.... sleeping in till noon... it has been far, far too long.

Depending on what happens, I'm just wanting to spend a couple months working on my own damn code, and then who knows? Maybe I'll go look for a job again, maybe I'll go teach, or perhaps I'll just walk the earth, solving problems and having adventures.

Damn concert was sold out. Grrr. I guess I'll catch them at bumbershoot.

5/23/2001: I am so fucking sick of idiots who don't know what the hell they're talking about doing shit on the spur of the moment without thinking for an instant about the consequences of their actions for the people around them. That goes double for me.

5/20/2001: Doing things you're not supposed to is often a bad thing, but quite thrilling at the moment. This is the first time that I've gone to bed after the stupid birds started chirping. The only bad thing about doing things you're not supposed to do is that you simultaneously enjoy yourself, set yourself up to deal with the unpleasant consequences, and make it more likely that you'll misbehave in the future. Terribleosity, as I'm wont to say...

5/9/2001: So, today was the day I moved from fear and into anger. I don't know what it is, exactly, that set me off. But I can say the following:

The day after you announce you're firing 33 people, you shouldn't have a corporate meeting in your opulently-appointed executive boardroom, complete with faux-futuristic woven steel wire wall coverings, sliding sunshades, and stupid-ass 15-foot-long table with the jagged edges and the inlaid glass lightning bolt. It's nice to know that you decided to attempt fiscal responsibility only after laying off my friends and going shopping at the Power Rangers outlet store.

I mean, the really annoying thing is, up until monday, I actually *liked* my job. I was annoyed that the management style was somewhat less attentive than it should be, and somewhat more prone to overcompensatory bouts of panic than it should be, but things were basically OK. It was interesting work, and the fact that it was mostly on the windows side was annoying, but I could tell myself that it was really platform-independant code that just happened to be written on windows, and I got to add Visual Studio experience to my resume.

Now, though, I'm forced to conclude that the management team is simply completely insane and/or morons. I mean, they should have fired my ass right quick. Seriously. I do mac stuff. If you're trying to make money fast, you don't give a shit about the Mac. I have less experience with the code base than the people that they let go. True, I have a comp sci degree and at least two of them didn't, but does that really mean *anything*? I don't think so.

I'm forced to consider that my continued employment here means one of four things, none of which are really particularly all that complimentary.

1) My quality of work is approximately equal to the work that the people that were let go were doing, but I'm paid less. That's fine if it's true, but it's relatively annoying to know that you were selected for survival on the basis of being the lowest bidder.

2) They plan to do something with regards to the mac in the future. I suppose that's a possibility. The other main Mac programmer here (well, the one that doesn't fly in from Montana every month) didn't get laid off either. That's heartening if it's true, but I don't see how they can possibly expect me to actually make any progress on mac compatibility, since they've simultaneously publicly stated that the future of the company now rests (in large part) on the SDK that my team produces and reduced the size of the team that produces that sdk, through layoffs and transfers, by 50%.

3) I have a comp sci degree. Ok. I don't think that really matters much in terms of being an objective measurement of ability; I know people more talented than me that didn't get a degree, and people less talented than I am that did get one. That said, this company still very much has it's roots in academia, and I can see that making the difference. Stupidly making the difference, but making a difference.

I dunno. They say that it was better to lay some people off now and have enough cash to make it 12 months than it was to not make it at all. I still think I haven't seen anything other than the same people that have mismanaged projects in the past be kept, and the people that actually do the work get canned. I still haven't heard a coherent product strategy. I know we have some cool technology, but nobody knows what should be done with it. They're saying there's a plan, then having meetings that are essentially content-free to announce that the plan is still coming, any day now. Meanwhile, they've let go just about everyone with a clue.

In short, I'm expecting this place to tank. It may not, and I'd like to see it not, but I'm expecting this place to tank. And, at that point, if the market for tech workers here in town hasn't improved, I'll just say fuck it. I'm not going to waste my time and effort, no matter how well compensated, working in places that will fail, doing things that won't get out the door and matter at all. It's just not fucking worth it. I'll go stack boxes at UPS or something before I'll waste any more time working for a failure in progress. At least then, I'll be getting some exercise out of the deal.

5/7/2001: Had the strangest dream I've had in a long time this morning.

A woman I haven't seen in several years, (and haven't known in still several more) was the proprietor of a small retail shop. I want to say that she sold beads or something, but that's probably just me retroactively filling in details.

Anyways- I remember that one of her relatives died, but not which one. Which is really creepy, now that I think of it - another friend is dealing with the loss of a family member... too creepy for words, as you'll all soon see.

So. I basically set out to seduce this woman, employing the oh-so-despicable, oh-so-popular-in-the-media "Oh, of course I'w just being a good friend during this terrible tragedy" ruse.

There is some additional embroidery I can regale you with - the shop was being closed because of this death. She inherited a huge but run down house on a hill, and lived in another house further up the hill. An additional odd detail of the trashed house was that she showed me a door that was barricaded with what was clearly the mattress and box springs from my childhood bed.

And her mother, who I've met only once, on a New Year's Eve, was there when we first kissed.

The first kiss wasn't bad. A nice, gentle, "hey, we've never kissed before" sorta kiss. It was a good kiss. Unfortunately, it was followed by another one. Which was this ackward, self-conscious, tounge-and-grinding-teeth sorta thing. And then I woke up.

First off, are you all just a little disturbed by what you just read? A little creeped out? Grimacing, maybe, at the very thought of it? Well, I certainly am. And this happens I'd say...between three and six times a day. Not that I have wierd dreams like this one (I don't get enough sleep for that), but that I remember something (a lie I told, a mistake I made, getting handcuffed to a garbage can in high school) that the mere memory of whatever it is causes me actual physical pain. Bleah. Welcome to my world.

Anyways- what does it say that, even in my own unconscious mind, I'm completely hopeless when it comes to women? I have not the foggiest idea. But I'm sure it's not good. At the very least, my lizard brain, after spending yeterday in active contemplation of my abundant physical shortcomings and defects, decided to even up the score by chalking in a few mental defects, as well.

Happy freaking birthday to me.

4/30/2001: HAH! Not only does your year assign you an animal, you get an element, as well. I'm tiger-wood. Nike owes me a bunch of freaking cash.

random thoughts and observations...

1) when I toweled myself off this morning, my towel smelled strangely like Chinese food.

2) I really want the web cam back up and running, but I don't know quite where to put it in the new apartment. I don't really want it in the bedroom, for I don't feel a need to show my naked ass on the internet on a daily basis, and I don't think my audience wants to see it. I dunno. Maybe I'll just point it out the window or something most of the time. I also don't want a full-fledged computer running 24-7, in the middle of a power crisis. I totally want this thing, but I had no idea that it was that big, and cannot justify the expense AT ALL. I'll probably settle for one of these at some point.

Last night, I had a really strange dream. I woke up in a room that was laid out pretty much like my bedroom, but larger. There was also a portion of the floor that slid away; water was underneath. I noticed that the water was threatening to overflow into the room, so I got down on my hands and knees to try to shut the floor. It was stuck, though.

At that point, I noticed a really big container ship that was approaching. I was worried that it might crash into the building, since it seemed to be coming fairly quickly. So I started trying to close the floor again. It wouldn't close, but then I looked up and saw that the container ship had turned, and wouln't crash into the building. I also saw a second ship passing by.

At some point in the dream, either before or after this episode, I remember something about one of the guys here at work being my roommate, and an elephant sitting on his red sports car, cracking an axle.

4/22/2001: Earlier today, I thought I'd have perfect rant material all worked up, but it turns out that I don't. I also have other things I've been thinking about lately, loosely inspired by that cognitive dissonance thing from earlier, but I'm not sure that I wanna post it all up here right now. Might be misconstrued and/or offensive, frankly. For a long, long time, I operated this thing as if I was just typing to myself, and you all just happened to read it. Sadly, though, that polite fiction has fallen completely by the wayside, and may never be recovered.

I think it's fairly odd, though, how much of a textual exhibitionist I really have become. One day, when it was a bad day, I wrote the now classic Restech Motto on the little whiteboard built in to my cube. It's too small to be used for any sort of real thinking, so I just wrote on it to make myself feel better. And people read it, and got confused, and a new tradition got started. I live right by the "Throw your paper in this box to have it securely shredded and disposed of" box, so it's mildly high traffic. And the whiteboard has become a sorta community project, at this point. I write something, and someone or someones else will scribble, modify, etecetera. It's sorta cool, in that sorta pathetic sorta way.

Yup. I work in a cube. I have, though don't wear, a nametag. I work more on the windows platform than I do on the Mac. I wear my corporate-logo polar fleece in public. And I either don't mind it, or I've convinced myself that I don't. I'm either a big sellout, or I'm a good imitation of one. GO ME!

4/16/2001: I'm suffering from the worst case of cognitive dissonance I've had in a long time. Maybe I'll tell you all about it, someday.

4/6/2001: Hmmmm.... I swear that I've updated this thing since the 28th, I wonder if it's some sort of file synchronization thing on Apple's servers, or if I've really been slacking off that long? If it's a server synch thing, it's clearly a sign that I need to switch my hosting arrangements over to the friendly folks at buyolympia.com...

Anyways, I just had dinner with my team and part of the Research group; aparently, they do this sort of thing once a quarter. Hard to believe it, but I've been here a little longer than a quarter at this point. I'm really starting to like it; there are the occasional annoyances here @ LizardTech, even if they do make us wear polar fleece long after it's too warm to really need it.

At dinner tonight, one of the guys on the team, who I've always assumed would have the least positive opinion of me for no particuarly good reason, actually passed me sorta a compliment. Apparently, "I'm pretty useful, for being a new guy." That actually meant a fair amount to me, since he's crazy crazy smart-like.

I don't know if it's a trait I always had which Evergreen just drew my attention to, or if it's just something I picked up once I was actually in an environment where I couldn't just assume that I was the smartest guy in the room, most times, but I generally assume that my performance in any given task at any given moment is just slightly better than completely disasteous. Which, I know is not the case, but I started doing as a way to be sure my ego was in check, and I still do, for reasons that may or may not make sense any more. I dunno. I don't think it's a bad thing, really. In any case, it was nice to have a compliment come from someone who actually deals with me and my code on a daily basis. I had my first performance review this week, but my supervisor doesn't have as much perspective on my work as this guy.

In other news, I've started spending Tuesday evenings with a group of folks that's somewhere between a formal "dinner group" and a slightly overgrown high school clique, and apparently, they have a fairly formal set of procedures in place for dealing with holiday gifts. Arriving in my email box this week was a proposal that the "ScooB Gang Men" (apparently, I'm one) will be getting the "ScooB Gang Women"

Well, I just realized that my once-an-hour bus from downtown will be here in a few minutes, and I don't want to wait till !) to catch the next one. There's also a chance that, between now and this december, one of the gift recipients may end up reading this page, so I better not say here. Suffice it to say, if it happens, you'll all laugh your asses off, and I'll be fairly surprised at myself, as I suspect many of you will be. That said, I have a bus to catch. I'll update more once the cable modem gets installed.

3/28/2001: So, I've always been pretty proud of my ability to just roll out of bed and go when the alarm goes off, but today, it really bit me in the ass. Alarm went off, and even though I was concerned with missing my new bus, like I did yesterday, I inulged myself and hit the snooze button.

Ahhh... sweet indulgence. Anyways, grateful for the extra sleep, I hit the shower, with a few minuted of dazedly sitting there, eyes closed, on the toilet waiting for the water to warm up. Not quite dozing, but almost. Anyways, showered, dried off, lay down for a few more minutes, then got dressed.

As I was putting on my shoes, Kevin wandered out and, with a puzzled look on his face, asked "What time is it?!?" I told him it was just after seven. He checked his clock, then compared that to the clock on the stove, which both claimed it was just after SIX.

Once we flipped the TV on, it was confirmed. My clock was an hour ahead. Bleah. So, here it is, just after seven, and I'm already at the office. There is something seriously wrong with the world, if you ask me.

So, at least I updated the page a bit. Like I said before, it's been far too busy lately for me to get up to my usual pedantic ramblings, and for that I'll apologfize yet again. That said, I can say that I'm almost out of the old house, which is kinda wierd. Just some cleaning to do at this point. I had a friend come in from out of town last weekend, and I've got another coming in this weekend. New house is still a huge pile of packed boxes, though, as most of the attention and energy is being directed to the old place.

And the cat comes back from two days at the vet today. Comes back radioactive, I must add. Her thyroid is hyperactive, and since it grew back from when we got it cut out last time, she's lost about a third to half of her body weight. Just skin and bones. So, they injected her with radioactive iodine that'll kill her thyroid completely, but in the month it'll take to work it's way through her body, we're supposed to keep our exposure to her down to a bare minimum. We also have to dispose of her pee right away, since it's radioactive. Apparently, if we keep our exposure to the cat down to an hour a day, we'll only get as much radiation as you'd get by flying from coast to coast. I wonder what the house guests will think of that, eh?

3/22/2001: Some of the indignities that I face in a given day astonish even me. I just got back from the bathroom. I should mention at this point, that the head of the IS department and his main assistant-guy were both there, as well. I was washing my hands, and as I'm drying them, I see, sitting there on top of a pile of used paper towels, someone's discarded coke can. Now, this seems pretty stupid. There are recycling bins EVERYWHERE. Why would some idiot not recycle the damn thing?

So, the pile of towels it's sitting on looks relatively clean & dry, so I fish the can out, and take it with me. Intending to just drop it in a bin, and be done with my good deed of the day.

And, in a perfect world, that's exactly what would have happened. Sadly,this world is not perfect.

Who's standing just outside the bathroom, apparently waiting for someone else to finish up? The two IT guys that were just in there. Washing their hands. Seeing the coke can. That I'm now carrying out of the bathroom. Yeah. There were wierd looks, and there was some mumbling on my part. Henceforth, in at least one department of the company, I'm sure I'm going to be known as "that dumpster-diving guy". I applaud me. I swear; henceforth, I'm only being a good person when there's no one around.

3/21/2001: So, yeah. It's been sparse lately. I've been busy, and well, I feel sorta lame when I post without spending the requisite blocks of time navel-gazing and blathering to myself. I can tell you this, though. I'm almost completely moved, and I'll finish it up this weekend. I'm still employed, but don't know for how long. That said, I just had a really positive performance review. I don't call my mother enough, and I haven't really accomplished anything "meaningful" in months. The stack of video games I've purchased and not finished grows ever higher. I'm still working for the canadians, but only a couple of hours a week, if that. I had a really bad cold that's almost gone away, but not completely. I do a lot of reading, but it's almost all on the bus. I had a wierd dream the other night that involved me trying to switch off some defibrilator paddles with one hand without getting shocked. My alarm went off two days ago, and I was deep into the middle of R.E.M. sleep. It messed up my whole day like a hangover.

I think I want to go camping, some weekend relatively soon. Or to the beach. It's been a long time since I've been to the beach, but that's nothing compared to how long it's been since I've been camping. Or to the mountains. Maybe I just want to get away from it all, or maybe I just want something different. And I bought a country album last week.

3/19/2001: Yeah, it's over two weeks after the fact. But I'm finally typing in the stuff that I jotted into the newton on the way home from work on the day of the earthquake. So, let'l jump in the way-back machine to fabulous Feburary 28, 2001.

Well; that was a first... 6.something earthquake, centered in Olympia. Hope aaron, sasa, pat, and jon are OK. At first, I thought they were doing construction on the floor above, then that a truck hit the building, and finally someone shouted "Earthquake!"

Me and Dave, hde guy that works behind me, ended up clutching the same support post when the second shock hit, and it was, I must confess, rather scary. Everything was just shaking; not so hard that you couldn't stand up or anything, but strong enough that I wasn't ok with being on the 13th floor of a building constructed back in the thirties.

I remember thinking, not completely in the abstract, that yeah... we could die. And that woulda been a pretty stupid way to go. Besides, if I'm gonna die looking into someone's eyes, I'd rather it be a leggy supermodel, and not, well dave. I mean, he's a nice enough guy, but not really my type.

So, after the shaking stopped, there was generalized confusion in the office, as to whether we shouli

3/13/2001: I'm so lazy, I should not be allowed to live

.

3/8/2001: I will sleep with anyone that can explain to me why the intrinsic impedance of free space is an integer multiple of pi. That's just creepy, I tell you.

But, it looks like kevin and I have a new place, which I can only regard as a good thing. It's not as nice as the place that we're in now, but it's insanely cheap. It's a hundred bucks more than the one bedroom place that I got when I first moved up here, and it's much bigger, with a tiny but better kitchen, too. Bedroom that I'm taking is freaking huge, too. After sharing a room with kevin for this long, I'm not sure I'm going to know what to do with all that space, at least not at first...

Something tells me that I'll fill it up with my crap soon enough. iMacQuarium, anyone? =)

It's pretty funny, because kevin and I had already made an appointment to look at another place this evening, and we sorta went out of a feeling of obligation, more than anything else. We hadn't signed on the new place yet, so we just said "If it's really, really impressive, we'll think about it."

Well, it was really, really impressive. Close to Lake union. Close enough to the U to make kevin's commute basically insignifigant. Far enough away to be insulated from the frat boys and their idiocy. In a crowded neighborhood, but with off-street parking.

Did I mention the really nice interior paint and the really, really nice hardwood floors? Or the deck that you would have a really nice view of 4th of july fireworks from? Yeah. We were sorely tempted, but we didn't take it. Deciding factor was that we just weren't worthy.

We basically decided "Yeah, it's really, really nice, especially with her tastefully chosen wall hangings and leather couches and such. Which, I must point out, we don't have. And couldn't afford, even if the rent wasn't 150% of what it was at the other place we were looking at. I don't know if our one chair and other crappy bachelor furnature will have quite the same effect."

It was soo...pretty...though. I want to be worthy of such a place someday. I will either have to marry wisely, or hire personal shopper wisely, though. =)

3/6/2001: Oh, they still know how to push my buttons. Yes, they do. Never before have so many of my favorite things all been tied into such a neat little bundle. When I saw it, I did a little dance. A happy little jig. A full-bore geek freak out. Even got a little bit of spit on my glasses, my grin was so wide.

I am so, very, very pathetic.

3/5/2001: Dog freaking tired today. Many, many things I could be doing, none of which I actually am doing. Just staring at the screen, making some half-assed attempts to track down a compile problem on the Mac, and adding some documentation to some of the code that I've written over the last week. In other words, completely mindless activity which is well suited to my current levels of mental activity and acuity. I want a nap. Instead, I think I'll go get a cup of coffee, which I supposedly stopped drinking at work a while ago. This, however, constitutes an emergency.

3/1/2001: Jeremy Piven was on Will and Grace this evening. I didn't watch it, though, because after watching this frontline episode all about marketing youth culture, and about how the escalation of sex and violence in our pop culture has to do with the fragmenting viewerships at the bottom, and consolidation of ownership at the top, I just have even less respect for any form of media that's overtly about attracting me via those methods.

Which isn't to say that they don't work at all. I just get disgusted when I notice that's what's attracting me to what it is that I'm watching. I pretty much only watch The West Wing and Ed these days, and while there is sexual content, and while I know the content of those shows has more to do with marketing to a slightly different demographic than shows like friends or what have you, I at least get to feel better about the demographic I'm placing myself into.

Which whould probably be "Smug, self important, over-intellectualizing white males, 25-30."

I wrote some stuff about the earthquake into the newton as it was all happening, and I keep meaning to post it, but events seem to be conspiring to keep me from doing so. I'll get around to it, but most of you that read this are up on events as it is.

Orion may or may not have flown out today; I'm not sure. I'm taking care of orion's car until I can get it down to PDX and his mom's house. He was supposed to call to tell me where to pick it up. He didn't. I don't know if that means that he didn'l leave, or if he ran out of time to call me before he went, or if he made other arrangements, or what.

Like so many things in my life right now, we won't really know until whatever is going to happen does so. I'll just have to wait.

And on that note, we will close tonight's episode of "Doogie Howser, Md."

2/27/2001: "You know, I've always thought that the United States presidency would be so much more effective if the President had the powers to communicate with and control the animals."

"Well, that's one thing that Prez proves; it's that there's nothing the president couldn't solve with two fists, an indian companion, and a small army of birds and elephants."

2/26/2001: Another "Brian goes to bed early, Brian wakes up early," update, so I may not be all that coherent. Sorry.

Came back from Portland, where I went to a not-a-baby-shower (It wasn't a baby shower because men don't go to baby showers. I went, and I'd like to remain a man, at least in the vaguest sense. So; not a baby shower. Just a party where one of the attendees was getting presents and having a C-section tomorrow. So there.)

While in Portland, I stopped by the Red Wagon coffee shop to pick up some spiced cider mix for mom. They still have the Sweeny Special on the menu board. He still stops by almost every day. I feel old.

I also found out that they closed my favorite movie theater in PDX and second most favorite movie theater in the world as of yesterday. I'm bummed. I'm almost beginning to believe that there is a recession coming on. Not sure I like the prospect of working for a not-yet-profitable tech startup if there is a downturn coming on, but I'm not worried enough to jump ship just yet.

If another damn company folds out from under me, I might say to hell with the tech industry altogether and go work in a barnes and noble or something, or I might just bail on seattle and go work for Raven or something. Who knows? It's annoying, but the truth of the matter is that part of the reason wages are higher than average in this sector is that you have zero security. I'm beginning to realize what that really means. It means get out of all forms of debt as fast as you freaking can.

Speaking of getting out of debt, once I have it last year's new computer off the plastic, I'm seriously considering going to one of those "Jenny craig/Weight watchers/Fat people give us money not to be" places. Weighed myself for the first time in multiple years yesterday. Closer to 250 than 300, but not by a whole hell of a lot. I'd really like that to not be the case 12 months from now, even if it means getting someone to hit me in the face with a ball peen hammer so they have to wire my damn jaw shut.

It's sorta lame to be considering going to one of those places, but dropping the kind of weight that I'd like to drop, quite frankly, requires more dedication than I can maintain for sustained periods. Most success I've had was several years ago, and that involved two hours a day of exercise, five days a week.

It's one thing to set aside three hours or so of your day (with getting to and from the gym, and showering, and all that stuff) when you're a broke community college student that's only in class four hours a day, and the gym is open 24 hours. It's another thing entirely to set aside those blocks of time when you have a nine-to-five (eight-to-five, really) job, plus an hour and change a day spent commuting, etc.

I mean, it's possible, but it's not fun. And even under those circumstances I was describing earlier, I only managed to keep it up for three or four months before I got bored and stopped going. I dunno. Maybe I just need to stop whining about how little sleep I'm getting and give up on sleep entirely for a while. It wouldn't help my chances of remaining gainfully employed in the long term, but if there is anything the last 12 months has taught me, it's that sometimes, nothing does. =)

Let's see... what else? My cat has laryingitis. It's massively pathetic in that endearing sort of way. She can purr, but when she tries to meow, all that happens is that the purring is interrupted, and she makes this little burping noise. She had a cold last week which seems to be over, but this has me thinking that I should belatedly take her to the vet.

Other things to remember, and maybe write about: why I hate AM/PM and the Coca-cola corporation. Why I need to get my scanner hooked up again.

2/22/2001: It's either the perfect nexus of fad and commerce, or it's just a sign that I'm always last on the bandwagon.

2/15/2001: So far today, I've listened to a former labor secretary relate to us the ways that the economy is both more efficient in the macro sense and less stable and navigable for the individual worker, I've listened to a consumer advocate describing how the credit card industry is manipulating me into a "lifestyle of maximally profitable rolling debt", I've listened to a guy describe nearly lopping his head off with a chainsaw while trying to build his dream house, and I've heard a story about how, despite the fact that 4-6 million minority citizens were undercounted in the just completed census, the newly appointed Secretary of Commerce has stripped the Census Bureau of the authority to decide whether or not to correct for this fact.

I'm telling you: it's a good thing that I'm not paranoid. If I were, I might think that they're out to get me. And I'd probably be freaked out when one of my coworkers called me over to their desk today and said "How was your dinner at the 5 Spot the other night? You had the Gumbo." Yup. It sure is a good thing that I'm not paranoid.

2/20/2001: Two nights in a row, I have stayed out too late, and consumed too much. Two nights in a row, I've caught a strange bus and walked home in the snow. Two nights in a row, I've huffed and puffed. Two nights in a row, I've had myself a good think. Each night was a little different. Last night was all about the soft snow, and quiet, and a little damp. This night was about a frozen crust on top of the snow, and crunching through, and about the frozen runoff of the night before. Different details, but pretty much similar from a macro perspective; as always, need to get out of established thinking patterns, and ruts, and break some preconcieved notions down. Need to build something new.

To answer an unanswered question from the night before; it becomes a problem when you do something so much, that not doing it for a change gives you the feeling of novelty and unfamilliarity that got you started doing it in the first place. Any good idea, once taken too far, ceases to be a good idea.

And, you know what? Unless an MP3 is encoded just right, it really sounds like shit. Just a thought. That said, I left both my Elvis Costello albums at work, but I brought the MP3's home with me, so I can still listen to them this weekend. This is a good thing.

Another think; my cat is sick again. I can't remember when she'd ever been sick before the last 12 months, and now it's happened twice. Don't know what that means, but I doubt that it's good.

2/14/2001: This is insanity. There's like a FOOT of snow on the ground. There's no "stay home, people" message on the weather hotline at work, but I suspect that this is because the flesh eating mastodons and sabretooth tigers ate all of the messengers they sent out. The transit folks have a posting on their website that basically reads "we know when the bus is scheduled. have you noticed that there's a foot of snow on the ground? Don't call us; we're working on it. In the meantime, wait on a flat area of the bus route, and work on inventing fire, the wheel, or perhaps bronze while you wait to keep warm." Best part? Kevin needs to get to the airport. He's gonna try to fly in this stuff.

2/14/2001: "Libya had been just great, everything he expected and more. Except - and he knew this now - he was never going to care about a woman that much again. He could still go through with sex, but the motive force was slacking off. He would never bang his head that hard again; at the best he would shave, dress up, hold out a wad of money, and wait. If they came, they came; and if they didn't come, they didn't come. Big Deal. Anything remotely like romance was farther and farther behind him now. Sex would never have a meaning that he couldn't control, there was no danger of it's having any genuine consequence for him. In the secret depths of his blood and bone there was no future."

2/10/2001: Despite containing such things as techno-y music and interpretive dance, I went and saw a... performance art piece... this evening that was surprisingly good. Better than I expected.

Generally speaking, I have a hard time taking "watch the creator wrestle with issue X" art, just because it seems so damn self-indulgent. But then again, I tend to paint with an unreasonably wide brush when it comes to that. Yet another expression of my compulsion to overcompensate.

It's finally been cold enough the last few days to really feel like winter; there was even snow on the ground when I headed off to work one day this week. It's good to know that waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and seeing snow can still bring a smile to my face. I mean, when you don't think that's cool any more, then you are officially all grown up and much for the worse.

I'm in one of those inarticulate periods where I'm sure there are plenty of things going on that I'd consider worthy of posting about, but I can't keep the thought in my head long enough for me to get to the keyboard. Attention span or motivation; I'm not sure which is lacking, but the results are pretty much the same.

That said, I'll post a couple of retro journal entries tonight, just so I can get that much closer to being done with the damn things. Been sitting on my desk forever.

Ok. I only finished a couple of entries before I got disgusted and stopped. Next time I point my finger at someone and call them self-indulgent, I want you all to come and kick me in the head. Bleah.

2/6/2001: Ahhh, sweet sleep. Merciful sleep. Seems like all I ever post about is sleep anymore, but it's really really rare, and thus special. For instance: for the last two weekends, Aaron & Sasa have driven up to Seattle, and I've basically behaved like a real jerk, simply because Friday night is the night when my sleep deprivation is at it's highest.

And take yesterday, for instance. On the way home from work, I stopped off at Safeway to get the ingredients for some recipies I wanted to try out. Kevin is in the process of turning into one of those guys that can, you know, actually cook, while I seem to be slipping ever deeper into the realm of male kitchen incompetence. Pat, of all people, had been bragging about some cooking he'd been doing in the recent past, and you know you need to be scared when Pat cooks more than you do.

Anyway; went shopping. Like many plans in my life, it was well-intentioned, mildly competently executed, and ran way over budget. See, I didn't bother coming home, checking what ingredients we already had, and then set out to purchase those items we needed to complete the recipes; I wasn't confident that the level of motivation that I had achieved would hold up that long. So I just got off the bus, went to the store, and bought everything. We now have more chili powder in this house than we will ever use, and I'm sure that there's other duplicates as well, simply due to the fact that the two meals that I was going to be making involved way, way too many little bottles of spices and sauces for there not to be duplication.

Anyways; I had everything I needed, but by the time I got home, aforementioned motivation was fading. Was sorta waiting around for Kevin to get back from school, since I knew there would be too much food for me to eat, and I'm not all that thrilled with the idea of leftovers, in most cases. Mostly, though, I was just suffering from my usual combination of exhaustion and laziness.

See, the sunday-night game had run on later than usual, and I needed to buy cat litter on the way home, and I needed toget some laundry into the dryer before I could safely go to bed, so I didn't get to bed that night till well after midnight. I can distinctly remember bragging about only needing five hours of sleep a night when I was living in Eugene, and, while that is distinctly no longer the case, I have held on to my ability to get up in the morning, no matter how little sleep I may have gotten the night before. ?(In most cases; there are exceptions.)

So, anyways; I lay down for a little nap sometime between seven and nine PM, with predictable results. Sadly, since there were people in the front room, I lay down on my bed, instead of on the couch. Which is a factor, since kevin and I are sharing a room in the house. I presume that, despite protestations to the contrary, he and his girlfriend would rather have some privacy than inconvenience me, since they apparently chose to sleep on the floor in our largely unheated basement rather than in the room, or to wake me up and kick my ass out of the room. Frankly, they shoulda done the latter.

Well, as always happens when I go to bed early, I ended up just waking up early. Thank god for Corwin's iBook and AirPort. I'll probably spend a few minutes catching up on yesterday's email and being amused by the quietly snoring cat beside me, and then the alarm should go off. I hope I left my shoes and such in the living room, and not the basement.

Was going to rant a bit about this book I'm reading, but I didn't. Maybe next time.

1/30/2001, V2.0: Ahh, to lead the life of a teen pop queen. Truly, it is hard. Musicians that will not vamp. Pants that will not fit. Oh, I weep. Loop this, and feel the misery.

1/30/2001: "Them Sireens, they done loved 'im up and turned him to a HORNY TOAD!"

So, since I've been asked about it twice in less than six hours, let me clear the air. Several years ago, my roommate and I threw this housewarming party. At that housewarming party, one of my friends (Probably second most responsible for leading me down this primrose path of an industry I find myself working in these many years later...) met a woman. A really attractive woman. With an honest assessment of the situation, probably a woman that was just a little bit out of his league.

Nevertheless, they started spending a lot of time together. Whole days, in fact, and on a fairly regular basis. At this time, the woman in question was also in the process of getting together with another one of my friends. So, at some point, (I don't remember if I did this independently, or whether I was elected by some sort of impromptu committee), I/we checked in with friend number one to be sure that, well, that he was fully aware of what was goin' on.

"Yeah," he said. "I know nothing's going to happen. I just like to hang out with her, because I'd forgotten how nice it is to walk around with an attractive woman."

At the time, I thought that was a really, really sad thing to say. I swore never to say it. A couple of years later, it makes more sense. And, yeah, it is kinda sad. And while the circumstances are similar, they're different, too. Less a question of leagues, and more a question of it just not making sense.

So, roughly estimated, it's been one year, ten months, and maybe three weeks since I last got laid. To say that this doesn't bother me would be inaccurate. To say that I'm not going to consider it, that the thought never enters my mind in any way, shape, or form, when I spend a substantial block of time with a member of the female gender, would also not be accurate. To say that I'm likely to do much of anything about it, though, would also be pretty inaccurate.

What would be accurate, though, would be to say this: at some point, I'll get frustrated enough, or desperate enough, or self-confident enough, or whatever adjective fits in to your own, personal framework of views of what motivates and regulates interpersonal relationships, to do something about it. Who will then, at that point, end up on the receiving end of that attention is, at this point, an open question.

You don't know them. I don't know them. But I'll tell you this little secret: I already feel a little bit sorry for her. Because she's really going to have her work cut out for her.

1/25/2001: I am a broken, confused, and shattered husk of a programmer today. One of the first couple of tasks I was assigned when I got here was to make a widget that opens up two image files and compares the contents, throwing up a report of the differences that it finds. I put together a program that does this for our image format. Not too hard, but a good tour of the codebase that we distribute.

Then, I was tasked with coming up with a widget that does this for our image format, TIFF files, JPEG files, and a bunch of other formats. That, too, wasn't too bad. Then I got stupid.

I said to myself "You know what would be nice? If the program took the two files, and used them to produce a third image; one that showed the differences between the two. (So, if you took the difference between two identical images, you'd get a completely black image. If you take the difference of two non-identical images, say one that's all green and another that's all yellow, the resulting image would be one that's some shade of blue.)

Now, this isn't a terribly hard problem. Getting a buffer of the pixel values was trivial. Only problem is, that data's freaking useless unless I a) draw it to the screen myself, or b) write it to a data format that Photoshop or some other image editor can open up and store. The first option is probably easier, but it's pretty much useless; so it's got to be the second option. Sadly, though, most image formats aren't just a big list of pixel values - they have sections of the file that contains other information, like how wide the image is, how tall, whether the image data is stored in 8-bit numbers or 16-bit numbers, and on and on.

We support a bunch of these data formats, but the people that wrote the code that reads and writes them have moved on. And it's not terribly well documented. So, I'm paging through REAMS of code, trying to figure out where the hell that code lives, so I can not just reinvent the wheel. And now it's 3:45, and my brain is beginning to shut the hell down. And now, I'm updating the web page, instead of working. Go me.

The really funny part is, when I got here this morning, I set aside the other tasks I need to be working on, thinking "Well, I've already checked in this code, but it's not quite cool enough. I'll polish it a bit, and then be done with it forever. Should be done by lunch." Well, I'm not done. Annoyed, but not done.

I guess I can console myself with the fact that I'm apparently the fourth person to work on this widget. Where others have tried and failed, I shall triumph, or some such crap. Stupid crap. I kill you now!

1/22/2001: Today, I am tired of republicans. I'm tired of NPR, too. I'm tired of romance, and comic books, and Six String Samurai. I'm tired of kermit the frog, and the iron giant, and the smurfs. I'm tired of Chow Yun Fat. I'm tired of the transformers, they're more than meets the eye. I'm tired of cross-marketing, and I'm tired of recycling. I'm tired of polite fictions, and I'm tired of public transit. I'm annoyed by one-stop shopping, and public libraries, and the Gutenberg bible. I'm also tired of the miniskirt, the sphagetti strap, and the 100% cotton tube sock.

The black plague? Passe. Basically, I want god to construct a giant transistor radio, not to be less than one mile on a side. I want it to be atomic powered, and it shall be constructed on the moon. When complete, He will commence work on the extension cord. When that is complete, the giant radio shall be switched on and launched from the moon, its trajectory timed thus that, when they hit that one really, really great note in "Go ask Alice", it'll plunge into the pacific ocean, ending life as we know it.

Of course, in the end, it'll just turn out to be a grapefruit that someone threw really hard.

1/19/2001: So, I'm sitting here at work, and my right testicle is basically poking out of my pants like some sort of demented flannel-clad hernia. I'm not happy about this, but it's my own fault, and it was the best option I had available to me at the time. See, I spent a little too much time this morning checking my email, so by the time I had noticed that the pair of pants I had put on this morning had a hole in the crotch, I would have missed my bus if I tried to change. Thankfully, my cubicle is enclosed on the crotchward corner, and I didn't have any meetings today. I'm hoping that the rip, and the boxer poking out, hasn't been too noticable, but if it was, what the hell are they doing looking at my crotch, anyways?. As Pat would say... "Goddamn Pants!" It's been OK, so far, though. A few less trips to the water cooler to minimize public walking, that's all. There was this one chick who I see here all the time that but had never spoken to before who finally said "Hi" today. Hmmm... maybe she saw, and maybe she liked. Yeah, that's it. I'm sure.

Ok. Now I'm just being silly. I'm going to go home, and I'm going to try to remember to sit like a girl on the bus. Almost there. I can do this...

1/16/2001: It's 5:20 in the morning. I've been up for at least 45 minutes, if not longer. This is the second day in a row this has happened. Going to bed early doesn't seem to help. This bites.

Work isn't turning out to be as much fun as I thought it would be. Pay's good, but that's about all it has going for it, at least in the short term. I'm learning stuff that is undoubtedly going to do me some good later on in my career, but it's still boring and not quite what I want it to be. I sorta miss the whole small educational software company thing, frankly. That, and being one developer out of 20 or more is a lot less fun than being one developer out of two.

Yeah. In general, just not terribly happy with work, not terribly happy with the current atmosphere around the house, just not terribly happy at all.

Clearly, the only answer is to burn it all down to the ground an start over. If only I had that luxury.

mid-day update: I am literally so tired, I can't focus my eyes. Terrible. That said, I did get some entries added to the Retro Journal Project. And if that isn't enough for you, try this on for size.

mid-day update, mk.2: Many cups of tea later, I'm feeling much more awake. Though, I think I may stick to water for the next couple of hours, so I can take a freaking nap when I get home. Once again, going to bed early has prove itself a miserable failure, so it's time to whip out the big guns, as it were.

1/14/2001: Very Strange. Very Odd. And just about what I expected.

1/13/2001: So I went and saw "13 Days" last night. I actually wanted to see the movie, but a bunch of people were just there to see the "Lord of the Rings" trailer. Which, I suppose, was OK but not great. But, if those books were your whole life or something, I can see how you might get excited. Me, I've tried to read them multiple times, but I just get so bogged down in all of the useless and excess verbosity that I just stop caring. I mean, it's like that chapter in Moby Dick where Melville just goes on and on and on and on and on about the exact color of the whale.Bleah. Shut up an commence lopping off of the heads.

Which makes me continue to wonder: is "lop" onomonopia? I have no idea if I spelled that right. Anyway; the funiest part of the movie, by far (aside from Orion invoking childhood literary figures in completely inappropriate moments, that is) is when they realize that, in additon to the missiles that could hit washington, the russians are putting missles that could "hit the entire country...except Seattle."

Whole audience started cheering and clapping. It was amusing. In general, not a bad movie. And, for the record, I don't rant about every movie I see. For instance; I didn't mention "Traffic" at all. I think.

The other day, I bought 20 shares of Apple, and 25 shares of 3Com. Once apple announces the current quarter's financial results, I may buy a few more shares, if the price drops below what I bought at last time. Other than that, I'm leaving the investing to the people who know what the hell they're doing. Like that trained chimp. Mmmm... trained chimps.

1/9/2001: So, I'm holding you all accountable for the fact that this page has claimed to be written in the year "200" for two days now. Clearly, I need to put the web cam back up and start prancing around naked or something.

Anyways; this amuses me. Don't believe the hype or something.

Oh, and I'm probably getting another tattoo in a week or three. Stupid, stupid me. I'll make sure that pictures end up here at some point. Which reminds me; I need to get the roll of film with my head on fire developed.

1/7/2001: So, I was going to post about some damn thing this evening, having to do with the fact that women find some hobbies cool (cooking, making beer, and music all come to mind), and other hobbies repellant (most being hobbies I myself practice...). But, I just got all distracted.

See, I store this web page on some space that Apple has set aside on their servers for schmucks like me to use. I log on to the service, and this window pops up with a bunch of folders that are set aside for various purposes. There's one named "Sites" that this page lives in, and a couple others that I use to varying lesser degrees. One's named "Pictures", another's named "Movies", etc.

Well, I log on tonight, and there's a new folder there. This has never happened before. I find it a little odd that as of 12:42 AM sunday morning, there's this new folder there that I've never seen before. But, I can tell you this. Steve Jobs is giving a big speech on Tuesday. If all goes as planned, I'm buying shares of Apple on monday.

Mostly, I'm just wondering if I'm supposed to be seeing what I'm seeing, or if it's an accident, and someone's getting fired.

1/3/2001: I really sort of have nothing to say. Work continues apace, proceeding acceptably but not fantastically. I'm still sleep deprived, but not enough to prevent me from staying up till midnight every night this week. I've gotten my poor brother addicted to Alpha Centauri, so all of the Covey Clan, local 440, are wasting time in serious quantites.

I did see "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for the second time tonight, and I think it's going to get put on the "don't watch again for a few years" list. I hate it when movies that I really really like get too familliar and I don't like them any more. You gotta give yourself enough time to forget some of the details between viewings if you want it to still be interesting.

I saw "Groundhog Day" on the first of the year, and I just want to reiterate my belief that the character that Bill Murray plays is, in fact, the luckiest man alive. And not because of Andi McDowell, either. She was fun in "Hudson Hawk", and pretty good in "Four Weddings and a Funeral", but ever since I saw her all lumberjacked out in that conservation commercial, she's kinda creeped me out.

And I never had my lumber jacked till my chain saw you. Best lyrics ever, I tell you.

Or, maybe I'm just way, way into pointless self-denial. Which reminds me; I finally shaved. Did a crappy job with the clippers one evening, planning to do a better one with the razor after my shower in the morning. So, of course, I overslept that morning, and didn't have time to do the decent job. And now I've got that "post shaving off the grizzly bear beard open the facial oil spigots and get a couple of zits" thing going on under the stubble that remains, so I can't shave the stubble off, since it's basically acting like camoflauge netting for Mt. Pus.

And that's all the icky personal details I really feel like sharing this evening, thank you very much.

12/30/2000: Why the hell am I unable to get caught up on sleep? I've been sleep deprived for WEEKS, but even on the rare occasion that I have a chance to sleep in, I fucking wake up after about six hours and can't get back to sleep. It's almost noon on saturday, the house is quiet, I have nothing I really need to do today, but am I asleep? Blissfully drooling on my pillow, restoring my ability to function on a vaguely human basis? Of course not. Don't be silly. AARGH.

12/29/2000: So, I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. And, Even though I know he isn't going to read this untill tomorrow, happy damn birthday, little brother. Since it is your birthday, you don't have to toss my salad for at least a week.

Oh, lord. I'm sitting here at work, and they sent out another "you can go home early today, if you want" email (since, apparently, the fact that we get monday off isn't enough slack time forus). And I'm trying not to weep openly. Ow. Oh, it hurts. Here; listen. Starts around the 39 minute mark. I hate TAL; I'd go home a lot earlier if they didn't make it available on the web. And, when I say unto thee, "Do not listen to the Ira Glass," thou shalt not listen to the Ira Glass, for my wrath is terrible, and I shall make thee unto a pillar of salt, except of play-doh. Thus spake I.

12/28/2000: Yeah. Why is it that alcohol improves my attitude so much? Just not healthy, I tell you. And why is it that my attitude needs improving? I just don't know. Sadly, I have nothing less cryptic for you. The webcam has been moved to the living room of the house, since the basement is pretty boring lately. Some of the roommates are less than thrilled by this, however, so expect to find it disabled on a fairly regular basis.

Other than that, I completely forgot that today was the day that the housecleaner came, so he got to clean up a big heap of finger and toenail clippings that I left on the bedroom floor. When the brother's away, the cleaning habits go straight out the door. We don't tip that guy NEARLY enough.

12/26/2000: You know, goddamn truthdevelopment has become the Friction Free that I maintain in my spare time. It's almost as if someone were sitting back, collecting the random stupid crap that flies off of my keyboard, and posting it out of context so *they* don't have to do any real work to maintain their site. So much potential, so little actual content. And the webcam doesn't even work any more. How the mighty have fallen.

That rant out of the way, PDX won't have "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" playing for another two weeks, so my careful aviodance of seeing on friday came around and bit me in the ass. Speaking of getting bitten in the ass, I've learned once again, never to give a fucking dime to charity. Except this time, I didn't lose my wallet; I got pulled over for a busted headlight (Not my fault. Some fucker shot at it with a BB gun, and now when rain or anything blows in to the housing, it blows the halogen bulb. I'll seal it with crazy glue and replace the bulb again ASAP). Not a big deal, except for the fact that I had about 11,000 expired insurance forms in the car, and the valid one was sitting on a shelf at home. So, I've got a $480 ticket that, the cop assures me, will evaporate once I mail in a copy of the valid form. I can drive to Ohio and back with a broken headlight, but pull off the freeway for five minutes to get a fresh supply of the best apple juice ever, and you get raped by the man.

And what's up with Washington's lame-ass drivers licenses? I mean, the Oregon ones are so clearly from the future, that who wouldn't hold on to it? And isn't that whole "put part of the car registration into your car to show the cop, but not the other part, or someone can steal your car" thing a good reason to not have it in your car at all?

The cop didn't think those were good reasons, either. But, I should look on the bright side. I didn't pull a 180 on a bridge. The cop didn't say "fuck" even once. And I wasn't clinging to the roof of a corolla for dear life.

HA HA HA HA HA. Best thing ever.

This, however? This is most assuredly "not OK". Worst thing ever.

12/22/2000:Hmmm. What to say, what to say? I'm really, really tired, and the house is a mess. I'm going to try to clean up my sections of it before I leave for portland tomorrow, but god only knows how much I'll actually get done. Not going to stress too terribly much, though. No energy for it.

12/13/2000: You know what I just remembered? I was in a band. It was called "Good Dog Bad Dog" and we practiced maybe twice. I played bass.

12/13/2000: Too much free time and a copy of photoshop and what do you get? A poor loser, that's what...

12/12/2000: So. I had a bunch of things I was going to type about today, but this particular instant, I'm a bit pissed at the Supreme Court. I'm no constitutional law scholar, so I look forward to reading articles in the next couple of days that explain how they can possibly bar a recount on the basis of equal protection under the law while accounting for the fact that there are punch cards ballots out there, there are optical-scan ballots, there are voting machines out there. Different forms of balloting, with different error rates, all supposedly that are supposed to be treated equally under the law.

Fucking Idiots. Fuck Scalia, Fuck Bush, Fuck Michael Moore, and Fuck Nader. But, while we're at it, Fuck Gore for not running in '96 and Fuck Clinton *for* running in 96. Idiot. I want it noted that I never voted for that underqualitied cock-knocker. Here's to another four years of me feeling smug and self-righteous.

I had this whole schpiel all worked out for you all, but the plan has been derailed. In case I'm feeling motivated a day or two from now, I'll paraphrase so I can come back. I was going to talk about how it's increasingly difficult to really write anything substantive on the page, since a higher and higher percentage of the people that I interact with are inevitably reading it. It's harder to write something when you know it'll be reveiewed by interested parties.

Additionally, I was going to write about getting an email from a completely unexpected individual today, and about how I went about unwittingly screwing up a friendship with that person a couple of years back. I was going to write about being young and being really confused. I was going to write about making poor choices for even worse reasons, and about having regrets about it years and years later. I was going to write about being unsure what to do about it this much later.

I was going to write about how busy this year really has been, and about how I'm kinda glad to see it almost over. I was going to write about how it was a good year, but also an incredibly exhausting one. I was going to write about the new album I bought today, and about how I didn't get quite as much done at work today as I wanted to. I was going to write about needing to get out of the house more, and about getting to bed earlier. I was going to talk about how I need to spend more time with my family and with my friends. I was going to write about how I need to try to make some more friends, just on general principal.

I was going to write about how things are going in the house, and about how I think they'll go in the future. I was going to write about getting on the treadmill in a few minutes, and about getting off the treadmill in a few years. I was going to write about how I haven't quite fufilled my New Years' resolutions from last year, that I still might pull it off, and about what I think they'll be for next year. I was going to write about how I need to go christmas shopping.

I was going to write about all that stuff, and probably some other stuff, too. But that's all I can remember right now.

12/9/2000: So here's the thing; unless you cut yourself off entirely from the very possibility of a woman, you expose yourself to all of them. I mean, two years of carefully constructed apathy and disinterest, and what happens? Some chick at a housewarming party shows up, shows the slightest bit of interest, and it all just goes swirling down the drain. Annoying as fuck, I tell you.

I mean, whatever happened to having some strength of character, some convictions, some damn backbone? I'm a hell of a lot better off now than I was a week ago, but it's still damn annoying.

I was doing really, really well, I tell you. I had pretty much managed to get to the point where it just really didn't matter. I was above it. I was better than that. I'd worry about all that stuff later on, when I was more established in a variety of ways. Not something I needed to concern myself with for the time being. I had fairly well managed to condition myself to not even...

You know, when I said that I wanted to anesthetize the part of my brain that found women attractive, I meant it.

For the last week, though, that's all been fucked to hell, and I'm sick of it. I'm working on getting back to where I was before, though, and I'll be more careful next time.

Damn canadians. Damn stuff. So there.

12/5/2000: Hmmm... what to say? Superficially, things are fine. I'm a little distracted right now, but that may or may not be a good thing. Apple announced they aren't going to be profitable this quarter, and their stock is taking a beating at the moment.

I'm probably going to sink some cash into them as soon as I can; right now, the stock price is hovering just barely above the amount you'd get if you took the cash they had on hand and divvied it up on a per-share basis. That's strictly the cash; not counting the investments, the buildings, etc. So, methinks it's time to buy.

Today's magic word is "Piqued". Or maybe "Petard"; I'm not sure.

12/4/2000: An irksome can of worms seems to have been opened, and it'll probably be a few days before I get them all rounded up and safely tucked away for some other time. Once again, Canada is irking me. At the very least, though, it's been a surprisingly interesting diversion and intellectual exercise. Master of the flip-flop, that's me...

12/2/2000: So, I was at a party tonight. There were people there from the present, the future, and the past. It was both interesting and kinda disturbing, for a variety of reasons. More than that, I've decided not to say, to protect both the guilty and the innocent.

Probably becouse I've been drinkin', I'm gonna update the Retro Journal Project page. It's not nearly as much fun as it was in the beginning, but I said I'd do it, so I will. Go martyr-me.

11/27/2000: New job continues to be cool. Someone there seems to have been an idiot, so I get to look smart by finding lots of obviously stupid mistakes in the codebase. Either that, or nobody wanted to mess with those portions of the code, and I'm dumb enough to attempt to fix it.

Anyways; it's good, so far. I also upgraded the webcam to a new version of the software that it uses. Not that I've done anything with the new features. I'm also amazed by how goddamn huge that thing makes me look. I mean, I know I'm huge, but we're talking "Stomping on lilliputians" huge. Godzilla huge. Gimungous! Hugantic! Out of proportion with his surroundings!

I'm tired.

11/25/2000: So the thanksgiving holiday is behind us, and it wasn't as bad as I feared it would be. The first week of the new job is also behind me, and it also went better than I was braced for. I haven't had a chance to update the page much lately, but I'll try to be better about it. I'm also not enjoying the RJP nearly as much as I was at first, but I'll still keep posting stuff occasionally as the spirit moves me. Ummm... other than that...nothing.

11/15/2000: So, 32 months of effort by people way smarter than me went into it, but Netscape 6 is quite possibly the most annoying software I've ever used. I especially like how, when I click on "Reply to this message" in my ISP's webmail, it takes me to the mail login screen. There's also the way it mysteriously refuses to render the graphic at the top of Google's front page, and the way it brings spam to your desktop by cramming more widgets into every window than I could possibly imagine. Bleah.

In an ironic twist for those of you who remember my angsty ranting about Bungie selling themselves to Microsoft a while back, Ambrosia, the "other cool company" that I mentioned, just announced their first Windows product. Sigh. So hard to be a one-trick pony in this world...

Speaking of tricks...what?

11/13/2000: So here was a slight surprise. Opened my official, in writing, job offer letter thingy this evening, and the salary on the letter is one kilobuck smaller, on an anual basis, than was quoted to me over the phone. Now, I've got to decide for myself if it's worth mentioning to them. That's something like $20.66 a week. I suppose a five minute conversation that nets me a grand or more is worth it, no matter how annoying it might be to have it...

11/11/2000, v2.0:Well, I sprained my ankle today helping a friend move, which sucks, but at least I got some work done, since I'm immobile. Silver linings...

11/11/2000: I learned a few things today. First of all, one should never eat an entire pack of "Sour Patch Kids" at the movies without some kind of beverage. Second of all, if one does, one should not order the Thai Pizza (Better than it sounds, trust me...). Third, if one does that, one should order it at less than your usual "one down from the most spicy" level of spiciness. Ouch. My tounge is one unhappy little piece of flesh.

11/10/2000: At this point, the only way this election could get more confused and random was if someone nuked the state of Florida.Then again, it was a pretty random day front to back. Interviewed at Omni today, among other things.

OK, so that's the last time I update the page from the iBook. In a brief fit of rampant stupidity, I let FrontPage touch the site, and now, it's all been subtly slimed with evil. Things have moved, they've changed color, it's all nuts. I'll fix it tomorrow. Like I said, random.

11/8/2000: As I write this, it's 1:30 in the morning the day after the presidential election. At this point, it's down to a couple thousand voters in Florida. And Ralph Nader. Whichever way this goes, I put the blame squarely on the heads of the Green Party leadership. It was one thing when they were promising to go for their five percent and stay out of the swing states. Sadly, though, that went right out the window as soon as it looked like they might have a shot at the mark with the swing state voters, and definately not without them. The only difference in this case is the percentage of the vote the party in question is selling themselves for. Say anything, do anything, get the votes, consequences be damned.

I was braced for a Bush landslide. I was hoping for a Gore technical win. This is exactly what I was afraid of.

So, in this specific case, I'm pissed at the Greens. On a larger scale, though, I think it's time to look into Approval Voting, or some other system that makes room for third parties, and more accurately feflects the wishes of the voters. For those of you who objected to the whole "Nader-Trading" thing, the approval voting system puts the kibosh on that, as well.

So, that's either two or three times (conservatively) in 24 hours that I've gotten WAY, WAY too preachy for my own good. To knock myself off my high horse, I'll post a couple more pieces of the Retro Journal Project.

11/7/2000: I'm continually amazed at my own inconsistancy. But, then again, for someone whose primary philosophy is "don't rock the boat; go with the flow", maybe that's not so odd after all. Additionally, once I make a decision, I really, really hate revisiting them. Put it in the past. Move on. Sunk cost. Waffle all you want, but once you settle on a plan, stick with it.

Dealing with the repercussions of a poor choice is trivial next to the discomfort of endlessly weighing options and playing scenarios off against each other. So, if I'm in a situation where I have the choice of going with a low-risk, low payoff situation or a high-payoff situation with higher risk, I'm most likely going to pick the former. My lifestyle tends to be more about minimizing risk than it is about maximizing the ROI.

So, based on the information I had, I made a choice. I'm not sure that it was the best choice, and I'm not sure if I'll regret it in the long run. That's certainly a risk I'm going to have to accept. So, in the end, maybe I didn't reduce my risks all that much. But I'm going to stick with it, at least for the time being. And if it turns out that I've hosed myself badly, then I'll deal with that fact once it becomes apparent that it's the case.

Right now, the information I'd be making decisions on the basis of is sketchy as best. Throwing out the current plan, being someplace where I don't know what the hell I'm doing at least half the time and where I don't have the luxury of being apathetic about being there is just a bit too much to deal with.

I'm not articulating this all very well, but it's a start.

11/5/2000: Proving once and for all that the more trivial and useless something may be, the more attention I'm willing to pay to it. Also proving that everybody steals from unix geeks...

The following strings were entered, in quotes, on Google, Go.com, Altavista, and Excite:

"[Candidate's Name] sucks"

"[Candidate's Name] rocks"

"[Candidate's Name] rules"

George W. Bush had his middle initial used, to differentiate pages on the current George Bush from those dedicated to his father. We also needed the middle initial to cut down somewhat on the "Bush Rocks" phrase's tendancy to return gardening links.

Totals: (in "name:sucks:rocks:rules" format, followed by my completely unscientific "sucks-to-rocksrules" ratio, which was calculated by the formula
"-s/(r₁+r₂)" )

Al Gore:161:18:60:-2.0641

George W. Bush:67:6:23:-2.31034

Ralph Nader:14:42:3:-0.311111

Based on these numbers, I predict that I will be drinking myself silly on the seventh, until this madness all ends.

11/4/2000: We are over the hump. Let us never speak of this again.

11/1/2000: Had another strange dream last night; don't remember it too terribly well, but I was in this big indoor/outdoor complex, and someone that I knew had had a kid, and they bailed, and it was my responsibility to decide whether I would take the kid and raise it myself, or give it up to the robed people wandering around picking up babies. So odd, I just don't know what to say. Cast stretched pretty far back in personal history. Farther than the retro journals... Strange and stranger.

10/31/2000: Halloween was suprisingly fun. A fair number o little kids, and a couple that were clearly way, way too old for trick or treating. Not even in costumes. But hey; who cares? Not like there's a candy shortage or anything...

Funniest moment, by far, is when Melissa's dog clocked a toddler standing too close to the screen door. Chaddy just decided that it was more interesting to be outside than in, and went for it. I'm not sure what happened next, as Kevin and I were too busy rolling around on the floor and laughing. Poor little butterfly just wanted some candy, and it was brutally assaulted by our house. I'm still chuckling.

In other news, my mother's mother passed away today. I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing that I should really be posting here, but I'll probably want to remember it in a couple of years, so what the heck.

10/28/2000: Ahhh... it's 1:42 in the morning on a saturday, and I spent the evening playing video games, writing code, and drinking Stolichnaya Vanil and Coke. And I wonder why I don't get laid more often. =)

There's this problem that many attempts to generate Artificial Intelligence have run into. Once you start encoding information into a system, you immediately get nailed by the fact that any given piece of human knowledge requires several pieces of contextual information to make sense. Any given fact means that you need to provide several more facts to make sense of it. Each of those facts, in turn, require a couple of facts, and so on, and so forth. There's an infinite regression of facts that you get stuck in.

In a lot of ways, (for me at least), writing code is the same way. I'm not terribly good at finishing projects, simply because the simplest little things often require what seems to be an inordinate amount of effort to accomplish. Take the current thing that I'm working on, for instance. It's going to be a program that does one thing: the user picks an image file, and the program replaces the (presumably generic) icon for the file with a little thumbnail of what the image looks like.

Simple, huh? Well, in theory, yes. In fact, it could be accomplished in exactly five lines of code. There's a set of nice, neat little toolbox calls (the toolbox is essentially a huge bunch of code that Apple has written for developers to use in making programs), exactly 5 in number, that accomplishes this task.

However, these five lines of code don't work right under the new version of the Mac OS, which is still in the process of being put together. Works right on the current version (Mac OS 9.0.4, if you're anal like me), doesn't work right on the next version. Which would be OK, except the people I'm writing the code for don't have any products that run on Mac OS 9. It's a long story. Suffice it to say that these guys are all about the future. For them, Mac OS X (as in roman numeral "10") is the only game in town.

Now, presumably, I could just present them with the five lines of code that doesn't work yet, and say "When Apple fixes the OS, these five lines will do what you want." Except there are products running on Mac OS X that are already doing what the five lines of code would do. Which means that their code doesn't depend on those toolbox calls; they wrote their own code to do the same thing. Which means that another solution exists. Which means that I could write the same thing, and have a program that does it now, rather than when Apple gets around to fixing things, too.

So that's what I've been doing. Reinventing the wheel. So far, I'm on the high side of 200 lines of code to replace the five I mentioned before, and I'm not done yet. And while it's a big pain in the ass, it also feels, for just about the first time, like a project that I could actually finish. Instead of concentrating on how big the forest is, I'm just looking ahead to the next tree. (If that makes any sense.)

I've written code that takes input from the user, using Navigation Services. I've written code that opens up the image file, using QuickDraw. I've written code, also using QuickDraw, that reads the image data in from the file, and scales it down so that the longer of the vertical and horizontal axis is no more than 32 pixels. (the current size of a Mac OS icon. I'm assuminng that, when Apple fixes the five lines of code I mentioned, it'll support the new, larger icons in OS X, and we'll replace my code with Apple's) I've written code that scales the other dimension of the picture down propartionally, as well. (It's not completely an accurate reduction of the image however; if the scaled-down image would have an axis that's less than five pixels deep, I set it to five pixels. This is supposed to be an icon, in the end, and an icon you can't click on isn't terribly useful.) Currently, I show the scaled-down image in a little window I created to check the scaling.

I'm working on converting the image file from whatever format that it's in to another format that can be used to create the icon. Another area that I know nothing about. It's a lot of work, for a ridiculously small payoff. Except that, dammit, for once I want to have a finished widget to put under that "things I have made" header that's been sitting over there for freaking ever. I could actually put Grade Machine under there, since some of that code is mine, after all, but I want at least one thing there that's ALL ME.

So, it may not make sense. But I'm going to do it, anyways. For once, I'm going to finish what I goddamn started. It's a learning process. If you don't do, you don't learn. I've gotta finish converting the image, I've gotta assign the icon, and then, once it runs correctly under MacOS 9, I'm going to take the code over to X and correct whatever it is that's causing it to crash like a Kennedy at Chappaquiddick under X now. (Oops; The Coolest Man In Olympia is from Boston. If a) he still reads this site, and b) drunk driving senator jokes are considered offensive to Bostonians, I do hereby apologize.)

Just because I want to finish something. ANYTHING. FINISHED. DONE. WANT TO FINISH PROJECT.

See what I mean? I wanted to post a quick update before I went to bed, and look; we have the longest post in a long time, if not ever. Stop looking at the forest. Look at the trees.

While I'm at it, I want to put all of my friends on notice; henceforth, I do hereby humbly request that you all pipe up when I do something lame or obnoxious. None of that "let it go, it's not that big a deal" sort of thing. Say something lame? Tell me. Do something dumb? Tell me. Have some nasty-ass piece of food stuck between my two front teeth? Tell me. No matter how embarrased I may be at the time, I'm going to be one hell of a lot more embarrased when I figure it out for myself. Or, even worse, I may *never* figure it out for myself.

Example from this very day; I walked to the local grocery store and back today. Then I figured out that my fly had been down for some or all of the trip. I must have passed somewhere between 10 and 20 people on the entire 12-block round trip. Odds are, one or more of them noticed. Did they say anything? NO.

Not their responsibilty to spare me from embarrasing myself, of course. They were all complete strangers. However, y'all are my friends, and I hold you to a higher standard.

Example from the distant past; unearthed by the Retro Journal Project; I know that friends of mine have been to lunch. They have discussed me and matters directly related to me. They have decided "We better not tell him; he won't believe us, and it'll only hurt our relationship with him." At the time, that was a completely valid decision, and I respect it. I was a messed-up, stupid kid with an acute lack of perspctive and fundamental disconnection from reality.

I'd like to think that I've grown as a person. I'd like to think that, should events ever provoke a similar discussion, my friends would be able to trust me not to lash out at people presenting me with unpleasant truths. However, if I do blow it, and shoot the bearer of bad news, I can provide them with a failsafe. All they need to do is say the following:

"Remember Rangar."

Mmmm. 2:36. Still drinkin'. Still writin'. Moved from mildly drunk to pleasantly toasted. I'm gonna do a couple of retro entries, and then hit the sack. I have a "flaming Abe Lincoln working in a 7-11" costume to put together for tommorow.

10/26/2000: Finally got some real work done for the Canadians. Unfortunately, that's all I did today. Oh, and unless kevin comes home in the next 46 minutes, I'm actually a better person than he is, today. That's ok, though, since he's been a better person than me twice. So he's still one up on me.

10/24/2000: Ok. I've got the graphic file all scaled down properly and displayed in a little window. I wanted to check that I was using quicktime properly to scale everything down, and it appears that I did. Go me. Annoyingly, it took all night to get that working. One good thing about contract working out of your home. In theory, no one minds if you sleep in till noon. I should probably check with the canadians, though, just to be sure. =)

Anyways; I'm about an inch away from segregating the retro journals out into a page of their own, but it's too late to do such a thing right now. I'll type in an entry or two, though.

10/23/2000: Note to self: when testing your "import this image" code on an image file, it's a good idea to make sure the file you're selecting to test the code on is, in fact, readable. I just spent an hour trying to figure out why my code was passing back an error code that it turns out is completely reasonable for it to return, since there's actually no data in the file. Funny, that. Add to the list of mysteries in the world the reasons why iCab, my admittedly wonky browser of choice, chooses to place zero-byte image files in its cache folder...

Chamomile tea, while quite hard to spell, is really very tasty. Was reintroduced to someone today that I haven't seen since my days in Eugene. Works at a chemical weapons depot in eastern Oregon. That was pretty interesting.

It's amazing what will inspire you to give money to worthy causes.

Other than that, it was a slackarific sort of weekend. I saw too many movies to count, both on video and in theaters, I went to a free concert that wasn't nearly as awful as I feared it would be, and even got a teensy bit of work done.

Starting tomorrow, I return to the land of employment, at least temporarily. I also have a phone interview with some people who make some sort of software for non-profit organizations. Hey; wasn't the last place where I worked a non-profit organization?

I still owe Erin a letter. Dammit.

Oh, yeah, and the "Download" link now points to something you can, well, download. It even has some code by me kicking around in it somewhere. I'm too lazy to add an actual page to the site until there's more than one thing out there with me in it.

10/21/2000: Woke up WAY, WAY too early this morning. I miss saturday morning cartoons. So, as usual when it's an odd hour of the day and I have nothing to do, I wandered down to the computer and started aggressively wasting time. Specifically, at punchbaby.com.

And, you know what? You can see anything on the internet. It can be quite educational. For instance, people will put cameras on just about anything. Especially NASA. [1] [2] [3]

I also know that it's not fair to make fun of these people, but damn I think they're funny. [1] [2]

These clips, however, are just not funny at all. Nope. Anything that hurts that much certainly isn't funny. [1] [2]

Ejector seats are good, if they keep you from dying. [1]

No ejector seats here. A computer was flying the plane, which was empty. Good choice. [1]

And, on the subject of jets, don't tow anything behind them. [1]

10/16/2000: Well. just had a doozy of a dream, and I wanted to get it down before I went back to bed, which I have every intention of doing. Have fun, you freudians out there, because I'm sure there is plenty for you all to work with. I've already lost parts of it, but here's what I can remember.

It started off with me looking for my senior year locker in my old high school. It wasn't there, though, because that hall had been remodeled into a class room. In the middle of the dream, though, I was thinking that I was actually in the Junior hall. (So, in reality, my senior locker *was* gone, but I thought the junior year one was the senior locker, and it was still there, even though I mistakenly thought it was the senior one. but it wasn't.)

ANYWAY: somehow, at that point, it was now-me wandering around my high school. There was a football game in the courtyard where the fountain was that I got thrown in for my birthday, I got tackled walking across. Rangar was there, following me, but she didn't get tackled.

I can only attribute her presence to the fact that, during my last trip to PDX, a mutual friend told me that she had gotten married recently. That's another story that I'll go into later, though, because it's irrelevant to the task at hand, which is documenting my fucked up subconscious.

Anyway; I was wandering the halls of my old high school, irritated and trying to escape Rangar. My favorite teacher from high school was there, and the journalism class that he taught had two blue and white G3s. This made me happy.

Then, me, Rangar, my brother, and my mother were all sitting in an apartment of some sort, chatting. I was really, really, angry/uncomfortable, and didn't want to be there. In typical fashion, though, I wasn't articulating that. I was just sitting there seething.

Rangar was talking, a lot, and it was invariably something that pissed me off. She didn't like Will Eisner's "The Spirit". The guy she was with preferred (and was supposedly really good at) Doom. It should be pointed out that Unreal Tournament is my preference, and is obviously far superior. As if it matters. There were several other intensely irritating (in a "non-rational, geekish dream state, talking with hated nemesis" situation, at least) things I can't really remember.

Then for the insanely fucked-up part. This sorta ties in with an earlier episode of the dream, but I can't remember it, so I've neglected to mention it before now. When we hopped on this little description, I'd say we were already 40% into the entirety of the dream. A bunch of stuff had already gone on. I just can't remember it very well, so I didn't mention it.

Anyway. There was blood all over the bathroom, and I had to clean it up. It was from a friend of mine, and even though there were three other people in the apartment we were all sitting in, they wouldn't come out and help me clean it up. I'm pretty sure "my friend" (I'm not sure who it was, beyond that) was dead at that point. That all happened in the earlier stuff that I couldn't remember.

It was primarily all on the counters, and I was really, really concerned that it would get on the carpet, which was a light color, and would obviously stain. The blood was a deep maroon color, and it was mostly congealed and sorta crusty, (think tacky, almost dry paint.) so it cleaned up pretty good, at first. I had just picked up a big book that was sitting on the counter and discovered that the crusty blood was actually just on top, and there was a lot of the liquid stuff beneath that was spliilng over, getting all over the cabinets, and heading for the carpet.

I was on my knees, calling for help before the blood dripped on the carpet and rinsing the big book off in the sink when I realized it was the C++ textbook that we used back in evergreen. Then I woke up.

So, yeah. That was my sorta dream, sorta nightmare. All you armchair dream analysts out there go ahead and figure stuff out, but keep it to yourself. I'm pretty sure that, whatever it means, it don't say *good* things about my subconscous, and I knew that much already. In the meantime, I'm gonna go bach to bed.

10/13/2000: Today was the day that I actually got around to applying for unemployment. I think mom figured things out yesterday or so (she sent email to my work address, and it understandably bounced. Kevin tried to cover for me, but mom's smart. I'll tell her tomorrow; I'm not into actively lying to her. Sins of omission are one thing; comission quite another.)

Anyway. Today was also the day I decided that being unemployed does, actually kinda suck. But, then again, I haven't done anything other than just sit on my ass all week.

I have every intention of changing that tomorrow. Time to start working on some stuff. If I don't, you should all come and beat my ass with sticks.

It's now 10:35 PM, and as far as I know, my brother has not been seen since seven this morning or so. Very strange, and not terribly pleasant. I can't imagine how anal I'm going to be when I have kids.

10/6/2000: One month and one day later, I'm laid off, along with about a billion other folks. Ok; more like 200 other people. Anyways, I learned a couple interesting things today;

1) People that are announcing that a company is being shut down generally don't have a really good response when you raise your hand in the middle of the meeting and say "I'm sorry; but I was hired a month ago; was there some deal or something that you were planning on that fell through? Because, well, it just strikes me as odd, in a tragically comic sort of way..."

2) There is no "unemployment line" to go stand in; YOU JUST CALL A PHONE NUMBER. If I'd known that, I'd have spent my whole LIFE on unemployment. (I actually haven't signed up yet, and may not even be eligible; I'm told you need to have 18 continuous months of employment. Starting with commencement at evergreen, that wouldn't have been until december or january.)

I'm more amused than anything else; recrutiers are generally a pretty worthless lot, but enough of them seem to be calling to make me think the shotgun effect may work in my favor this time around. Of course, it may not. And as the movie says, "there's always work at the post office".

I'll be in portland this weekend; I don't plan to tell my mother about it, because she'll just worry (needlessly, at this point).

10/5/2000: Well, today is the day the wheels really came off the wagon. We're all just standing around, discussing rumors and really not caring. I went home from work early yesterday, to start the process of posting my resume online, and may very well do so again in a few minutes. Rumor has it that there will be an additional 40 layoffs tomorrow, and I'm 99% positive we'll be among them. So, that's two companies in a row that I've left as shattered, smoking husks in my wake. If that tally makes it to three, I'm going to really have some serious guilt to work through. =)

9/29/2000: Holy shit.

On the drive to work this morning, there was an announcement by three different companies around town, (all with ".com" in the name) that were announcing layoffs of signifigant portions of their staffs. The place where I work was not one of them.

Not everything that happens gets announced in advance, though. By the end of the day, the number of firms had risen by at least one. Me and another guy in the mac development group were just getting back from lunch (because we took a late, rather than long, lunch I feel compelled to point out...) and a nerf gun shopping expedition. Every friday, there has been an inter-floor nerf war which the mac team had not participated in. We decidet to join in. Well, not today. At 3pm, about a third of the company was let go. I wasn't among them, strangely. But the guy in the cube next to me was. (The brother of one of the other mac developers, to boot. I get hired, and a month later, his brother gets laid off. That oughta be fun. I'd be pissed. I'd know it was unreasonable, but I'd still be pissed.)

It was just like all the horror stories you hear about. No advance warning. People crying in the halls. HR people marching around with cardboard boxes and escorting people from the office. There's nothing like asking for a pair of scissors to open your nerf gun with, and then finding out that the person you're talking to is in the process of cleaning out their desk, to make you feel like a real ass. An incredible ass.

I'm told there'll be a meeting on monday in the hotel next door to explain what just happened; I suspect it's really to allow the people who got laid off time to come back and collect their stuff without the remaining employees around.

Can't say I didn't see it coming. But it's still wierd when something you expect to happen actually does, since what you expect is quite different than what you actualy experience. In the meantime, I'm doing my work and keeping my resume up to date.

In the meantime, I don't think I'm going to get any meaningful work done today, but I feel wierd leaving early. Really wierd. I also had planned to do some work over the weekend on the project, just because there's a tiny damn screen on the iMac they gave me to work with here, and it's like building a ship in a bottle; possible, but a whole lot harder than it needs to be.

But now, I'm just going to feel silly, for reasons I'm not able to articulate or explain. I can also add that the inevitable "Survivor" jokes have begun. Stupid, stupid, us creatures...

9/28/2000: Had another strange dream last night. I don't remember much of it, but it involved filming a movie, and visiting a high school(?) for a wrestling match. Part of that was comprehensible, since I watched the olympics last night to see the USA guy beat a russian guy that hadn't lost a match in 13 years. Then again, I was also flipping over to PBS for a thing on Clint Eastwood, so I guess that makes sense, too. It was, nonetheless, quite yardcore.

9/26/2000: Night before last, I dreamed that I was Cyclops from the X-Men. Or at least, I had the "shoot beams from eyes" power. Don't really remember a whole lot more than that.

Work is ...OK. I think my "the company is going to fold any moment now"-o-meter is hovering around the 40% mark. Which, in many ways, is normal, given the last couple of months.

Visited mom again this weekend. I don't think I was as friendly as I could have been, frankly. As much as this whole process is like fingernails on blackboards for me, I'm sure it's a million times worse for everyone else involved.

Hung out with Alex and Orion concurrently last night. It was quite nice, if somewhat mortifying. Then again, a lot of stuff that's good for you can be mortifying.

9/22/2000: Had the strangest dream last night. I can't remember it terribly well at this point, but it involved canada, a bunch of people I don't think I've ever met before, and two blind dates. Oh, yeah, and moving people. I had to pack stuff, etc. Surprising how many of my dreams have involved that kind of thing the last couple of months.

9/19/2000: I've been really, really tired the last two days, but only when I'm at a computer for long periods of time. I'm still trying to figure out if it's the new glasses, or if I'm just staying up too late. I really need to break this habit I seem to have developed of waking up too early, falling back to sleep, and then having my alarm go off in the middle of REM sleep.

Will be heading down to PDX this weekend. Will attempt to hang out with the appropriate people. Settling in to freeI a bit more. Cashing the first paycheck helped, frankly. Made it feel a bit less virtual, somehow.

Ooohhh... today's TUESDAY. The best show ever is on. Ok; Maybe second best. Or third. Or not. And that's not counting really great shows that aren't being produced any more, of which there are many.

And some people thought memepool was bad.

9/12/2000: Work at freeI continues apace. Started learning (attempting to learn, actually) about the Carbon's file management; Apple's documentation just goes to prove that good reference materials make poor instructional manuals.

Additionally, the neck of the corporate world I seem to have traipsed into seems a bit sketchy at times; I'll have to wait for a bit more perspective to see if this kind of thing is normal in the land of dot-com startups, or another case of "Brian doesn't know exactly how abnormal what he's witnessing really is, so he doesn't worry about it as much as he should." Whatever... like I told some people earlier today - "I'm sure it'll be interesting."

9/7/2000: Not the first day at the new job any more, but the first day working from home. Which is strange, at this point, and I really don't know how I feel about it.

I was more comfortable; this is true. I also worked at a slower pace through the day; while I got about the same amount of stuff done, I was at my computer way more than eight hours. We'll see what happens.

9/5/2000: First day at the new job. They didn't direct deposit my last check at the old job. A minor inconvenience, at this point. It's hard to tell how the new place will work out, frankly.

There is potential here for both good and evil. I'll learn a bunch and try not to embarrass myself too badly right off the bat. It could be cool, though...

Spent most of the evening catching up on correspondence, both physical and virtual. Writing with a pen/pencil/whatever is incredibly time consuming.

9/4/2000: Oh, christ, has it been a while. Sorry, folks. Wish I had a good excuse, and I guess I sorta do, but who cares? I'm back. Or something.

This will be of some interest to my brother, and of little or no interest to anyone else.

This is from MC KAOS. We both have new jobs. Based on this, I'd say his is better than mine.

This simply struck me as funny.

On other topics, I finished my stint in Canada, and at Misty City. I spent the weekend moving mom into her apartment, which would have been a lot stranger had I not been so tired the whole time. I'm shocked and dismayed at the size and color of the dark circles under my eyes right now.

Funniest portion of the weekend was without a doubt discovering the skankiest baggie of pot I've ever seen in my life in a drawer while we were moving my furniture out of the upstairs. As far as I can tell, it's from my 7-11 days. Long, long ago.

Called some people I meant to see in PDX; managed to hook up with none of them. Not worried, though... I'm not sure if I'd have managed to be terribly interesting company.

Feel like I've been slacking off on a variety of responsibilities to myself and others, lately. I should try to be more motivated.

I want to read "Kitchen Confidential", and the new Coupland book. Don't let me forget. I get new glasses at some point this week. They're really tiny. Thus the concern over the dark circles.

There's nothing like going glasses shopping with friends to make you fully aware of how ridiculous your day-to-day appearance really is. That much staring into mirrors and having people make odd faces at you will give *anyone* a complex, I tell you. "I like the shape, but gunmetal is the wrong color."

Other stuff... start a new job in 30 hours, here. Wish me luck.

8/25/2000: Well. Had a tooth yanked this morning, and so far at least, it's been thoroughly anticlimactic. No geysers of blood, no screams of terror, no laughing gas. It was kinda odd and cool to have some guy wrenching around in my mouth, with me just kinda feeling my skull...flex. Sigh. I expected so much more.

If my brother weren't visiting, I probably would have gone in to work. Only moderately amusing part so far was when I hucked the little box containing my newly-extracted bit 'o wisdom across the waiting room to my brother (badly, I might add), and the boxy thing opened up, flinging mr. tooth under a chair. Scrabbling around looking for it was great. I'll keep you posted as things progress. Go vicodan!

8/23/2000: Finishing up another (mercifully short) trip to Canada in a few minutes, and while I was wallowing in my own boredom to an unusually high degree, I made a decision. I need a favorite bar. Since I left Portland some silly number of years ago, I haven't really had one. There was a candidate, but I was only there once, and it's closed now. So. My friends. I beseech you; in Oly or Seattle, send me your dives, your bars, your watering holes. Impress me.

8/20/2000: Back to Canada tomorrow. Another nail in one of my tires, I discovered. Les Schwab is taking it in the ass on the tires he sold me, I tell you. He's replaced three of the four in a little less than a year. More news as it occurs to me.

8/16/2000: Rare International Update! So, I decided last night not to believe in an afterlife any more. Simply because, I've conclusively proven that staying in a hotel room for two straight weeks is the pinnacle of boredom, and the activities I resorted to last night to pass the time were, quite simply, insane. The thought that some omnipotent being, much less dead relatives or complete strangers, could have observed them causes me physical pain.

The previous record holder was rolling down the window and screaming out the window of my car for an hour while driving all the way across Kansas and Colorado in a single day. I was sick of all the CDs I had brought, and then the FM stations died. So I switched to AM, until they died. Then I started screaming. This was worse.

I took a new job yesterday. It's a "dot-com". I'll flagellate myself for rampant hypocracy later.

Did you know that it's illegal to sell a non-cola or coffee-based beverage with caffeine in Canada? There was an entire newspaper page devoted to "Should Pepsico be allowed to caffeinate Mountain Dew?" the other day. Strange cultural difference. (I say yes; there are only two reasons to drink the foulest beverage on earth; caffeine and selfishness. Without Caffeine, canadians have only a deep bitter unwillingness to share to justify drinking MD.)

8/12/2000: Well, back briefly from Canada. Seems that I've been handed a "prodemotion" which is a word I've coined for when someone hands you an opportunity that they think is a promotion, but you regard a bit less favorably. I'm responsible for a project now, but it's a crap deal because there's no code involved. Arrogant prick that I am, no project that doesn't involve code to one degree or another is good enough. Silly, cause my "Side project" has been dragging on for over a year now. Lazy and self-important; I was born to work in the tech industry. =)

The footsoldiers I'm training to replace me on active customer support are depressingly enthusiastic and bright. I'm resisting telling all of my "I'm a bitter weary veteran, disillusioned with the world and feeling sorry for myself" stories. There's one guy and one girl that have the appropriate level of "I'm a tech person" apathy. The other two were teachers, and it shows. One of them was going to come in today AND tomorrow to "practice" grade machine so they'd be ready to take calls on Monday. Everyone I talked to; the web developers, the support people, the person that's going to be training me on their customer management package; they just want to do well so badly in a way I'm no longer capable of relating to. Except for one of the support people, and the VB guy. They could give a damn, thank god.

Anyway, I spent several hours today posting my resume on a buttload of online job boards. I'm up in Canada again next week, and then the search begins in earnest. In the meantime, I'm going to spend the next week going over my old C++ book, and some more I borrowed from Stereolab.

Accomplishment for the last week was watching a whole bunch of "The West Wing" on Canadian television (not as odd as the A-Team in japanese, but still pretty wierd), and reading "Timeline" by Crichton. Better than Airframe, but bore a more than passing similarity to Jurassic Park, and had the most abrupt and (slightly disturbing) ending I've read in a long time. I won't spoil it, but let's just say that one of the "bad guys" got a little more than I thought they deserved.

Can anyone tell me why "Barry Lyndon" isn't the most boring movie ever? Oh wait; there's still "Eat Drink Man Woman". I forgot about that one. And the new "Lost In Space," but let's not start that argument all over again.

8/3/2000: A few notes. The first time I ever saw cracker was also the first time I had ever heard them; they were opening for the grateful dead in eugene. I saw them either once or twice at la Luna in portland. I know I saw them once there with on-again-off-again-mid-nineties-girl. (We have a new record for the longest codename in the log.)

I saw them again tonight, and it was freaking incredible. There was no real playlist; they were just having fun and winging it. From now on, when I hear "Get on this" I'll have to replace all the "na na na"s with "Fuck the slice, we want the pie." I found that both amusing and pertinent, frankly. I'm happy that they can play a three hour set and still have good songs left over that I didn't get to hear, but I'm bitter that I didn't see the show in portland last night. Stereolab and I both got to hear our favorite cracker songs...EVER. That was a good thing.

Oh, and work sucks to the point of unbelievability, but that's status quo, at this point.

8/2/2000:Two notes. One; anyone who uses the now-functional "Biography" link at left will see that I'm now referring to my job at Misty City in the past tense. This is a bit premature, but I can tell you that I'm going to be late to work tomorrow, and I need to have a pair of jeans in the car, because if I show up in slacks, they'll immediately know what's up. Wish me luck.

8/1/2000:Another strange dream last night. This one involved playing a bongo, and it involved going somewhere (work? shopping? a party? I'm not sure.) dressed in a bedsheet. I wasn't the only one wearing a bedsheet, either. I was a little confused when I woke up.

7/29/2000:Clarification of the earlier post. If I stick around until November 31, I get a bonus in the mid four figures. However; between then and now, development will not be my primary focus, and unless I'm willing to move to Canada (it looks like), I wouldn't be doing it at all afterwards. Then again, this might not be the case. Damn canadians still don't know what the hell they're doing with the company.

As I told Wendell yesterday; "I don't want to leave, but I know the deal they're offering works really well for Misty City. And for Chancery. I'm just not so sure it works for me."

So, I'm gonna start putting out feelers, and see what's out there. I'd be an idiot not to.

7/27/2000:Well, I'm not out of a job, which is good. But, I think I'm going to start looking for a new one.

I can remember a time, back when I was living in Eugene, when I was sitting on the floor of a friend's house, moaning "what have I done?" and wearing a cardboard box on my head. It was (and still is) really quite soothing. These days, though, I think I might try one of these instead.

7/25/2000, v2.0: The stinkymeat project was amusing and sick. The stinkyfeet diaries, on the other hand, are just sick and horrifying. And amusing, in a sick horrifying sort of way.

7/25/2000 (preemptively): I realized something tonight, as I was (unsucessfully, as always) trying to take a nap. When I started having sex, I told myself that I wanted to average one partner per year until I got married or whatever. Currently, I think I'm in the neighborhood of one double-amputee per year. I think I should do something about that at some point, but I can't say that I have the foggiest idea what.

7/24/2000:Of the many things I was going to do this weekend, I did two. Of the many things I was going to do today, I did one. Strangely, I'm OK with that. There's always tomorrow. efilnikcufecin.

7/22/2000:Yesterday was a pretty good day. Things at work are still shaky as hell, but looking up slightly. We'll see. Too much stuff to get done this weekend to get it all done. Prioritize, I guess.

7/20/2000:I was reminded of something today. To get anything at all done, I need to be under stress. The more stress, the more producitve. Not terribly healthy in the long run, but in short bursts, it works.

7/19/2000:So, I had the number of tasks I have to complete before we ship the next version cut by a factor of 2.5 today. Which would be fine, except I had the amount of time I had to complete them in cut by a factor of 9. The remainder of this month is going to be incredibly painful, frankly. That's it. I want a raise, and I want it now.

7/15/2000: Stupid mistakes really annoy me, especially when I make them. 256 is less than 32,000.

7/13/2000: Well, the cat wasn't at the shelter because she was hanging out in some guy's tool shed. He called last night, as well as a bunch of other people that saw the signs. I'm, as MC Kaos put it, "A happy boy".

I made someone's day today. And gave $20 to a professional tree hugger. And wrote a letter. These were all discrete, but connected, actions. Now I'm just being completely pretentious.

Because I haven't linked to anything in a while, here's a plug from the shameless commerce department. Enjoy. I like Comics.

7/12/2000:There are a few things I don't like about doing this web page. I've mentioned it before, but now feels like a good time to sorta expand on why. When you do something like this, you start to pay...maybe not more attention to your life, but different attention. Stuff you wouldn't have given much thought to otherwise becomes a candidate for an update, so you pay more attention while it's happening. How does this feel? What do I think? Will anyone else find this interesting?

Then, once it's happened, you rehash it all as you're typing stuff up, you go over it again, in an even more detached mode. Where before, it was a sorta third-party feeling, now it's a total third party feeling. Don't get me wrong, though; I get a pretty big amount of enjoyment sometimes out of reading this stuff when a few months have gone by. Sometimes, though, it's just weird.

For instance; I know that my friends read this, but it's not as if I write it "for" them. It's mostly for myself, in the way that a journal is supposed to be; it just happens to be posted in a very public place. And it's fun to get emails from people asking "Is that codename me?". To have questions come at me from way out of left field, until I realize that it's in relation to something I wrote about since whoever I'm talking to last read the page. It's a completely sensical question, from their perspective. I had just forgotten that I had "already talked with them about it." It's kinda fun.

Right now, though, maybe not so much so. Someone pointed out that this page seems to be less fun than it was a few months ago. That person was right. It's still valuable for me, though. It gives me a way of venting things that I otherwise probably wouldn't vent. Lord knows that, if there's anything I'm good at, it's "gunnysacking," as mom calls it. Just stuffing stuff that you don't wanna deal with WAY, WAY down and not dealing with it. I think this page has become a bit of a way to deal with that sort of thing. I'm sure, when things are a little more comfortable, I'll go back to posting more of the usual stuff. My life's pretty unusual right now.

I sorta don't like talking about the non-fun stuff here, because, well, I just don't. I feel like an idiot in more ways than one. If that's the case, put up with it, don't tell me, and forgive me, OK? Thanks. =)

I was going to write about something, but I kinda got off on a tangent, and now I don't really want to. Which, I think, was maybe part of the objective. I may update again tonight, when I get home from work.

That was, without a doubt, the most horrible experience in recent memory. There was a cat on the Seattle Animal Control hotline that could have been Physics. Female adult grey and black tabby. Found a little over a mile from here. No tags. DOA.

I left work an hour early to drive to the shelter. They showed me the body, and I can only conclude that there are two possibilities. (OK... Three.)

1) The seattle animal control officer that picked up the cat uses crack on the job.

2) The seattle animal control officer that picked up the cat is colorblind.

3) They showed me the wrong cat, either accidentally or deliberately. (I didn't think of this one till I was driving home, unfortunately. The former is by far the most likely, of course. The latter is offered to the reader as an example of how irrational and paranoid I really am.)

It was black and brown. There is no possible way that cat could be described as "grey and black". THERE WAS NO GREY. None. I'm making light of it now, but the whole experience was too frightening to describe. Hands Shaking. Weak in the Knees. The whole nine yards. I'm wondering what to do next. How do I figure out if that was the right cat? What if they DID show me the wrong one?

Well, they're closed now. I'll keep you posted.

7/11/2000:When I was in the sixth grade, I used to push thumbtacks into the soles of my shoes so I could slide on lineolium floors in the halls of my school. I used a lot more tacks than the other kids.

Another completely bizarre dream last night. It involved Guido the Killer Pimp and M.C. Kaos living in the most random apartment buildings ever. Fights with siblings. (GKP's, not mine.) Trying to see one movie, but ending up seeing another. Wandering around in public in my underwear. And of course, finding my stupid cat. The real icing was the bit where I was trying to escape a torpedoed ship or submarine with the Happiest Couple on Earth. No more world war two documentaries before bed.

7/10/2000:I can't begin to tell you how annoyed I am with myself right now.

We were bailing out of this import filter early. I wanted to be sure it wasn't happening because we'd tried to bring in more items than the class file can hold. Checked the text file I was importing from.

Yes, indeedy; more items than we can import were in the file. SO...I deleted one and went to re-run the filter. Still bailed. In the exact same spot. So I'm poring over the code for literally half of the day. Over it, and over it again. We pull in the last item, and then we pull in one more. Did I forget to pull the item out of the text file? No, don't see it there. Good thing I still had the document open...

I think to myself "That's really strange. One of my indexes must be off, or I'm not catching the error somewhere..." I'm looking EVERYWHERE. For HOURS. This makes no sense.

Finally, I take one last look at the text file. Sitting there, in the upper right hand corner, is the "you haven't saved the file yet" icon. Which means that what I'm seeing on the screen is not what the import is reading off of the disk.

So I save the file.

And run the import.

Works fine.

Stupid extra item.

AAAAARGH.

Useful lesson from all this? Look for horses before you look for zebras. Nonexistant bugs are the hardest ones to fix. And you can always blame the user.

7/8/2000:I remember one time, many years ago, when someone once told me that my body was completely pure. I think they were wrong. I think what they meant was that I still had my innocence.

7/5/2000:So, I just finished watching "The Shining". If that movie teaches us anything, it's that keeping things under control is, like any other good idea, a bad idea when taken a step too far. I mean, at the start of the movie, you can just tell that old Jack is wound tighter than a... well, figure out your own metaphor. Anyway; in the spirit of that fine, fine movie, I shall now vent my spleen.

I'll start off with the small stuff, and work my way up. This keyboard. Half the time I type a goddamn "h", I get anywhere from two to six of the damn things. I already sent it back to the people that make it, and they tell me that there isn't anything wrong with it. Not that they can find, anyway.

Next: Work. After five this evening, Robert and I sat around discussing the "mysterious events" that I alluded to earlier. The cat is pretty much out of the bag at this point, so I can bring everyone up to speed. The canadians that bought the company I work at have expressed an interest in moving all of our product development up to Vancouver BC. Whether this is a temporary move, one that only affects the Windows product, these and many other specifics remain to be spelled out. The fact that there haven't been any protestations to the contrary, though, lead me to think that they're wanting to move it up there permanently.

Robert, our windows developer, has been offered an opportunity to move up there. No mention has been made of me. Which causes me to, of course, assume the worst; as soon as 6.9.0 is in the can, if not earlier, I can start looking for another job. At this point, I'm assuming that I have no more than three to six months of employment there.

Then, I get home after the long 4th of july weekend (I drove up from PDX this morning, and went straight to work.) and there's a "Where's brian's cat" message on our communal whiteboard. Seems that at some point in the last 24 hours, the cat got out. On the fourth of july. With fireworks going off.

At this point, I'm basically assuming that I'll never see the cat again. She's gotten out before, but for some reason, this time feels different. I'm mad at the stupid cat for getting out, I'm mad at whoever left the fucking door open, I'm mad at my roomates for bickering about whose fault it is in front of me, but mostly I'm mad at myself for not going with that hunch that thought another four/five days was too long to be gone when I've been away so much the last two months.

And now, I'm disappointed that I couldn't even work up a more entertaining rant.

6/30/2000:(late in the PM) Ok. Had far too much to drink this evening. BUT: I fixed the worst bug ever today. Took me two weeks of rewriting our file IO code. Now, when I've drank too many beers to celebrate, and watched "Indiana Jones and the last Crusade"; I can say this much.

I've had too mutch to drink tonight and it's time too pass out. I remember seeing "Indiana Jones and the last Crusade" with my aunt Mary Grace (my dad's sister) many, many years ago in the theater. And, last of all but not least; I miss my dad. Things would be alot different if he were still around. Stupid me; I shut up now.

6/30/2000:Ugh. Had the strangest dream last night; it involved Rangar, the sanity-eater, which is passing strange and on into downright aggresively weird. Anyways, it involved a snowstorm, and driving around town in the cab of a big rig, which was Rangar's house, complete with hardwwod floors, furnishings, and a housecat. I think I was borrowing it or something. Like I said. Strange.

6/29/2000:Hmmm. I'm going to have to be a bit mysterious with this one, because nothing is final yet, and nothing may come of anything at this point. I can say this much. Plans are afoot at work, and things are happening. I'll know more in a week or two. And I may start using instant messaging, but not for the reasons anyone would expect. More when I know more, y'all.

6/28/2000:Son of a fucking bitch. I'm rewriting the hell out of our filter import code for the last two weeks, getting sick of it, but getting close to being done. Then, today, at 4:45 or so, I start getting memory exceptions from a COMPLETELY unrelated piece of the code that I haven't been touching. I've probably got an index off somewhere or I'm running past the end of one of my string buffers, and it's trashing something, but who the hell knows where? It's sorta like I'm quietly working away hammering down carpet tacks in one corner of the room, and then, just as I'm finishing, a hand grenade goes off in another corner that blows a big hole in the wall. Aaargh. Fun fun fun.

Other than that, no life to speak of. Come home, do housework, go to bed. Get up. Go to work. Work. Repeat.

In the interest of full disclosure:I have, on at least one occasion that I can think of, left the house with a door standing open. I have, on several occasions, not done my own dishes. I have, on countless occasions, depended on my roommates to feed my pet. None of my roommates have aired household business in a public forum, though. I may be irrational right now, but...

6/22/2000:So, I've gotten a fair amount of mail on this whole Bungie thing, and I also saw Chicken Run tonight. (Go see that damn movie) Anyway; it got me thinking.

Feature-length claymation movies have never been commercially successful. Short films, yes, but not features. Additionally, it's a form of animation that's incredibly painstaking to produce, impossible to accelerate with advances in technology, and just basically ludicrous when you stop and think about it. 24 photos per second, for an hour and a half, all by hand. You'd have to be insane to do it, right?

PC games are commercially successful, but not to the degree that console games are. You develop a console game, you sell more copies, you make more money, you hear fewer complaints, you don't have to deal with things like changes in other people's code messing up yours, you don't have to deal with bitchy gamers flaming you...

Given the choice, it just makes more sense to develop for the simpler platform that makes you more money. In that light, Bungie jumping ship to the x-box makes sense. And making Chicken Run doesn't.

You know what? Chicken Run is a damn good movie. And the two guys who were in charge of making it? They have a really good attitude about it. "Well, it was cool to make a movie, and we're glad we did, but it was an insane amount of work. If it's successful, great. If not, we got to make it, some of our fans will like it, and we get to go back to making commercials."

Work hard, have fun, but don't think it's the end of the world or anything. Don't do dumb stuff like tell the same story but in CGI because it's cheaper and because "Toy Story 2" was hot. Know your media, know what you're good at, and do that. Be modest.

There are plenty of good game companies out there that make games and release them as shareware. A lot of work, less of a financial reward, but less pressure. No need to sell out. No need to fight for shelf space in retail shops, no need to bribe the catalog sales companies. Just let people download your stuff, and if they like it, they pay for it. Lower expectations, more pleasant suprises.

Ambrosia, Delta Tao, Freeverse. Those guys rock. Bungie? Eh. Whatever.

6/21/2000:Well, the webcam hasn't updated in three days, so I'm guessing that the 8500 locked up at some point since wednesday, and I didn't notice. A sad consequence of it now living headless in a tiny room away from the rest of the world, but whatever. The fact that nobody pointed that fact out, though, reinforces my suspicion that I've been slacking off on updating lately. Whoops; sorry. Ummm... let's see.

Remind me to always take Kevin's advice when it comes to driving. A day after returning from visiting him an mom, I was on my way home from work, I got impatient, tried to take a shortcut, and banged my car up a bit more by being careless. Luckily, though, the damage is all on the same side with the primer/gunk/whatever spots, and may just inspire me to finally get the damn thing repainted. (And yes, I realize exactly how far I'm stretching for that particular silver lining. )

Other than that, the major event in my life has been (Oh, my god. So pathetic) the aquisition of Bungie, this video game company, by Microsoft. It sounds a little better when I explain that they wrote the game that obsessed me enough to go "Hey; computers are cool. I wanna know how they work, and I bet I can make a living with them." They wrote good games, they wrote them for Windows and Macs, they released them at the same time on both platforms. They were basically who I wanted to be in a few years.

Last Friday, they released this trailer for one of their upcoming games that I've been obsessing on forever, and I was so hyped. I came back from portland on Sunday, and there were rumors about the buyout. I didn't believe them; Bungie was way too independant, and just wouldn't do that. It was silly, really. Unfortunately, by Monday morning, they weren't rumors anymore.

Microsoft is making a video game system that's supposed to compete with the Dreamcast, and the Playstation 2, etc. They want the big Bungie project to be the "Killer App" that everybody buys the hardware just to play. Sadly, it way well work. *SIGH*

As someone I read on the net put it "The really frustrating part is, now we have to figure out what building Bungie's in on the campus when the revolution comes. And not blow that one up. Before, we could torch them all."

Trust me; if you're a geek, that's depressing.

6/15/2000:Woo-Haah! Corwin got in at Omni, and we went for a late snack last night to celebrate. Conseqences were, of course, that I got too little sleep again. Strangely enough, though, this has been the most satisfyingly productive day I've had at work in like three weeks. (Mind you, I've been gone for two of those three weeks, so that's not as bad as it sounds.)

Anyway, in something like half a day of work, I've gotten pretty damn close to solving the mother of all bugs in Grade Machine that's been harassing me for a long while; basically, I think one of the changes that got made a few months back to speed up some file i/o stuff isn't setting the buffer size properly, or isn't moving the pointer correctly, or something.

Sadly, though, caffeine has failed me in the last half hour or so. Can't really generate the level of focus I need to get any further right now, and if I dose up further, I'll impair my ability to take a much needed nap when I get home. Thus, I update the web page, and fritter away the hour or so before I head home. =)

6/13/2000:Well, *that* backfired horribly. To bed at 8 for a nap, and here it is, 4am, and I just woke up. Go me.

Ok... let's see. Oh, yeah. I think, over the last year or so, I've become a lot more prone to stereotyping and making grossly inaccurate assumptions about people on the basis of little or no evidince. I'm not sure, but I have fairly strong suspicions that has much to do with my increasingly negative opinions of people in general.

This is really hard to explain, especially when I'm still a bit groggy and my sleep schedules are all whacked out. Basically, though, the trip to visit Carleton was, without a doubt, the most concentrated "meeting new people" experience I've had in recent memory. It just made me realize that a) I don't know nearly as many people as I used to, b) those I do know fall within an incredibly narrow spectrum of humanity.

The really funny part is, I actually used to think that I was moderately hot shit with dealing with people from randomly different backgrounds than my own; it was a side effect (possibly one of the only positive ones, mind you) of working at McDonald's back in high school. Well, that was almost 10 years ago, and it's certainly no longer the case.

6/12/2000: I owe you guys an update, and I have some stuff to blather about, but I'm still incredibly tired. I'm gonna take a nap, and hopefully update later on this evening. If not, tomorrow for sure. Zzzzznk...Zzzznk...Zzznk...

6/7/2000: Off to see kevin graduate in a few hours. President of the USA will be there too. Remind me to rant loudly, twitch a lot, and not bathe.

6/6/2000:Today, I basically spent freaking out, to one degree or another, in PDX. Got back to the house, and mom was home. It seems that she discharged herself A.M.A. (Against Medical Advice).

I can understand, to a degree. Apparently, the foster home was populated with a bunch of 90+ year-old women, some with psych issues. One bath a week, and hair washed every other week. It's not like I would have stayed there...

It just seems really unfair, though, to everyone involved. What was the one thing mom wanted, after being in a hospital for three straight weeks? She wanted fast food. French Fries. Mom's world has constricted to the point where McDonald's is basically an unattainable goal. Viewed from that angle, sleeping in your own bed doesn't seem like a whole lot to ask.

On the other hand, though, there is a degree of danger here. Not to mention disrespect for thhe people that busted their asses to find that foster home and get her in there. She does need help, but so long as she doesn't run a fever or anything...

I can't really organize my thoughts right now.

6/1/2000-Early AM:Well, I guess mom's sick again. Not to the point where I need to be really worried, I've been told, but it may delay her getting released on Friday. This sucks, frankly. I just feel really bad for her.

5/30/2000:AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. The only thing about today that could possibly be described as an upside is that it was horrible enough to inspire my fat ass to get on the treadmill for the first time in months. Maybe I'll tell you all about it someday.

5/29/2000:Well, the "checking up on mom in the hospital" trip was pretty anti-climactic. I mean, yeah; she's in the hospital, which is never a good thing. But she was grumpy, and frustrated, and foul-mouthed, and upset. But I'd be more worried if she wasn't, because then I'd know that something was REALLY REALLY wrong.

I guess I'll have to do my freaking out when we start emptying out the house and moving her into a facility, which sucks to no end. I mean, it's one thing when your mom downsizes houses, and you don't have a room dedicated to just you any more; it's quite another when she moves into the equivalent of a studio apartment where it's just not feasable for you to sleep when you visit. I'm gonna have to get a hotel room to visit my mom. That's stranger than words can possibly express, frankly.

5/28/2000:First of all, every Red Hot Chili Peppers song sounds like every other Red Hot Chili Peppers song to one degree or another. Second of all, it was still fun. Third of all, I fell down the basement stairs this morning, and now my ass is either terribly bruised or rug burned. I can't tell which, at this point. I'll be sure to clarify this point in a later post.

Since I have tomorrow off, I think I'm going to drive down to Portland and check up on mom, run a few errands for her, etc.

5/27/2000: A rare morning update. Going off to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters today. Normally, I wouldn't be doing this, but my friend flew in from arizona, and the Gorge is pretty. Besides: she's driving.

Anyway; I remember reading this interview with Tom Petty many moons ago. (It should be mentioned that, while I do like tom petty, I do listen to other music. I just post about him a lot. It's strange.) SO... he was mentioning that one of the bad things about being a songwriter and making your living off of it was that you were constantly thinking "can I turn this into a song? How about this?" and so on.

I don't really mind that factor, as long as everything is either happy-go-lucky cheerful, or if it only involves me. Once it starts being at all negative and involving other people, though, it gets real complicated, real fast, and posting it makes me pretty uncomfortable. Should I ever date again, they're either going to have to be web-illiterate, or we're going to fight a lot.

5/26/2000: I hate shampoo. So, when we went to Canada, I forgot to bring shampoo. So I bought some. I thought I put it in my carry-on bag when I went down to California, but it wasn't there when I got there, so I must have lost it. In the meantime, I ran out of my big bottle that I keep at home. I stopped at albertson's today and bought some more. Then I went to the pet store for cat litter. I get home, and I have litter, but no shampoo. I think I left it on the counter. I'm growing dreadlocks.

5/24/2000: I want your donuts, and not in a friendly way.

5/23/2000: I'm back. Mom's going to be in rehab until June 2nd, and then? Who knows.

On a lighter note, last night, the Five Spot had a celebration of their tenth anniversary, and everything on the menu was $5. It was a lot of fun, but I think the four of us impressed/frightened the wait staff with the quantity of food and drink that was consumed. Even with the five dollar coffees, we still came out way ahead.

On another darker note: In the mail today was a notice that my entire 6-month auto insurance payment is due by the end of the month, in full, or they cancel my policy. There goes all semblance of my budget for the remainder of this month. I SWEAR to GOD, I never saw the inital "send us some money" notice. It was NEVER HERE. This sucks, frankly. But, it could be worse. I could be this guy. I suppose.

5/19/2000: Convention burnout is beginning. No. It's fully set in, actually. Brian wants a nap. I'm tired of hearing about how much work carbonizing Grade Machine is going to be. I want to kick someone in the head. Basically, I haven't paid this much attention to so many things at once since I left school, and my brain hurts.

5/18/2000: Witnessed an amusing level of developer rage this afternoon over the lack of skinning/kaliedoscope/themes support in OS X. People even got to the point where they were arguing that apple was enforcing some sort of stalinist purge. Funniest thing I've seen all day...

5/17/2000:Guido's mom called last night. Mom got an infection, which dehydrated her. She fell down, and ended up having the fire department come. She's fine, I'm told, but in the hospital nonetheless.

Guido's mom was pushing the idea that, now, rather than later, would be a good time for mom to move into an assisted living facility. It's hard to disagree with her right now, but I still don't like it. I guess those shots she's been getting haven't done much after all. Or have they? How much of this is just aging, slathered on top of the MS? Fuck.

Anyways- I have to call Kevin and let him know what's up, but the guy behind the counter at the 7-11 I stopped at sold me a prepaid GTE wireless card instead of a long distance card. I was too busy paying attention to his "you can't bring it back" rant to notice. I hope it works. All this before breakfast. Now I'm just whining.

Spoke with mom; she sounds stressed out, but otherwise OK.

I'm a bad person, it suddenly occurs to me. 30 minutes after bitching about getting "ripped off" on the phone card, I stuck a $5 bill into a phone card vending machine, which, instead of waiting for another bill, promptly spat out a $10 phone card. Did I tell the owner of the shack-stand-y thing at the train station? Of course not. *Sigh*

5/16/2000:The baby wasn't too bad. Jake is Good. Sharon is good. Guido is good. There's no better way to get in the mood to hang out with Apple developers for a week than to spend a night reinstalling Windows.

Commuter rail is good. Free shuttle busses good. Free shuttle busses with Tom Petty are downright excellent. I'm in the door of the convention w/out any hitches. My student badge, though, is conspicuously missing mention of what what school I'm representing. Is it just random chance, or ARE THEY ON TO ME?

In the convention bag: "WebObjects 4.5 Movies" CD. Runs on Windows NT and MacOS X; ups the liklihood of us getting a demo disk this week, no? I wish I hadn't forgotten the newton's charger; I'm without a clock/watch, dammit!

Grabbed a spot waiting by the side door to the keynote hall. Means (hopefully) a better seat, but less chance of running into Mike, unfortunately. There are AirPort base stations hanging from the celing! Cool! Saw a bunch of folks from Omni Development while I'm waiting; they're all wandering around with walkie-talkies that have secret service earphones.

I just met a guy whose job it is to render, in 3-d, assembled millimeter thick slices of an executed prisoner who donated his body to science. They froze him, sawed him, and he's on display at a museum. I'm not sure I want either of those jobs.

Best nametag I've seen: "George Lawrence Storm: Expensive and Available."

5/15/2000: Murderous Mormon Mother's Day. I'm chalking some of my ire up to residual sleep deprivation. Corwin hauled ass to get me to the airport in time for my flight to SLC, which was uneventful, if a bit cramped. Clouds were broken out into very flat, wery distinct, layers as we ascended, which, of course, caused me to think "wow; that looks like a texture map." Such a geek.

On descent, we flew over the Great Salt Lake, and I must say that sure ain't my idea of thhe promised land... Felt a bit guilty at that thought, but, once I touched down, all guilt evaporated.

I was a bit irked at having a 2 hour layover on what should by all rights be a direct flight; Priceline.com certainly won't get me back to them anytime soon, as my ticket was exactly $10 cheaper than undiscounted direct flights to San Jose on other airlines.

It gets better, though. Due to "delays" at SFO, My connecting flight has been rerouted to Oakland, and we'll be bussed to San Fransisco. In trying to notify Guido of this little fact, I encountered pay phones that "accept all major credit cards" but DON'T accept visa. WTF?

Boarding just started. More rants soon.

Onboard plane now. Black mood blackening. So 2 pay long distance calls at 4.80 each (that's a LOT of quarters, by the way) and I'm STILL not exactly sure where I'll be picked up. WAAH! I want a nap, and the heads of the CEOs of PL.C, Delta, and AT&T on pikes. Bonus points. There's a baby next to me.

5/14/2000:Ok; it's entirely too late to be doing this, so this update is a whole lot briefer than I'd planned. I went to Aaron's 21er tonight, and one drink turned into two drinks, which turned into last call. It was fun, but now it's 4 AM and I have to be up in 4 hours to get to the airport and fly to WWDC. Fun, but hellish at the same time.

Anyway; today is mother's day. Call your mother and thank her for being alive.

5/9/2000:Fixed a bug today, but we need to distribute a build of the current version of the program, as opposed to the still-unreleased version of the project that I'm used to working on. I've wasted the remainder of the day wrestling with ancient versions of CodeWarrior and trying to get the damn thing to compile. That is, when I'm not updating my website. I'm such a good employee, I should be flogged.

5/7/2000:Best trip ever. Best food ever. Best country ever. Best birthday ever.

5/4/2000:Today, the topic is "Internet Rants Triggerd by Friendly Emails".

First target: Internet Chat. This is a form of irritation (I honestly meant to type "communication" there, but we'll leave it alone for Freudian reasons), that for some reason, really gets under my damn skin, and it wasn't until today that I really could figure it out; chat programs are the cell phones of the internet.

Annoying, intrusive, and fundamentally impossible to ignore. The whole point of these things, apparently, is that you can know instantly when someone else using the service is online, and chat with them. The only problem with this scheme is that 66% of the time, the person you're chatting with is within the same damn area code as you are.

Make a phone call.

If it's long distance, fine; using ICQ is cheaper than a phone call, and more immediate than an email. Fine. But people do this for HOURS ON END. It's moved from being an adjunct to some other activity (presumably productive), to a activity all of it's own. If you wanna have a social life, get up from your desk and go do something social. If you wanna surf the net, surf the damn net. If you wanna "chat", then chat, but don't confuse it with either of the previous activities.

Next: Internet Business Naming Conventions. Amazon.com. A business that lets you shop over the internet. Takes your money over the internet. And then drops your merchandise in the mail. UPS brings it to you. Your interaction with the company is all over the internet. In that context, naming your business "somethingsomething.com" is not annoying. It's desirable that you have the balls to leave the ".com" off, like CDNow does, but we'll let it slide.

Then, we have Barnes & Noble. A big-ass corporation that sells books in lots of stores named "Barnes & Noble". The corporation has a division devoted to selling books on the internet. It's either referred to as barnesandnoble.com or bn.com. Once again, the interaction, at least with that particular division, is all over the internet. So, we have a clear division between real and virtual space. I'm Ok with this.

Now, we have Homegrocer.com. (And, now that I think of it, Kozmo.com). A business that lets you shop over the internet, takes your money over the internet, and then puts it in a fucking van that says "homegrocer.com" on it, and drives it to your house. In person. With a hat. That says "homegrocer.com" on it. Probably with your merchandise in bags or boxes that say "homegrocer.com" on them.

BZZZZZZT! WRONG! Serious Atrocity! Ten years of economic sanctions! If I interact with you in person, take that damn ".com" off your business name unless you have something with an IP address jammed up your bunghole! You can put "Home Grocer, Inc." or its equivalent anywhere you like; on the van, on your hat, tattooed on your inner thigh! I don't care! If you show up on my porch, you are not an internet business; you are in the real world. Not the internet. And I will kick your ass!

But wait, you say! It's advertising! It helps people find the website where the orders come from in the first place! Well, then, put the damn "www." on the front, and print the web address under the company's real name! You are a company; that company has a website. They are not the same thing! WHAT IS THIS AMBIGUOUS CRAP?

5/3/2000:So the birthday issue has been resolved; we're going to Canada for the weekend to enjoy the delights of canadian whiskey, socialized medicine and...maple leaves? Oh, hell. It's canada. That's enough for me.

I've also made serious inroads into collecting the NPR 100 in Mp3 format. (the tracks that are practical, that is; ain't no way I'm storing an entire musical on my hard drive. Moral? In the future, the concept albums will still sell.)

Between that and the bit of coding I got done tonight, I'm pretty happy with my productivity today. Which is good, because that's it until monday. You'd almost think I have a life or something...

5/1/2000:Today, I officially became a horrible person. After this big discussion last weekend over whether or not MP3's would destroy the music industry as we know it, I downloaded Macster today and proved that I was wrong. Completely wrong. Everything known to man and recorded is available, INSTANTLY. The only hope the music industry has is to hide the one song that I wasn't able to find. The Ray Charles version of "It's not easy being green". Other than that, they are totally screwed.

Other than that, not much going on, except for the fact that EVERYONE is doing something this weekend. My birthday is on sunday, and I wanted to head down to Olympia and see everyone. (OK; the two people that came up here just about every weekend, and the two that don't.) Only thing is, the programmer that recently left work is having his big Cinco De Mayo party on the Sixth, inexplicably, and another person is having a big birthday party since her birthday is that day, too.

I'm really not sure what I'm gonna do. As usual, I'm torn between what I want to do and what I feel like I should do. We'll see.

Bought one of the plane tickets I need to see kevin graduate; didn't buy the other because the flight there was a special fare and coming home would have cost twice as much as the flight there. I'm going to see if they have the special fare going the other way this wednesday; if they don't, I'll buy the full fare. Whatever, says me.

4/29/2000:So, when I was a kid, my favorite comic book hero was this guy named Longshot. His superpower was that, if he was doing something for unselfish reasons, he was unbelievably lucky. Eventually, though, it he figured out that all that extra luck was sucked away from the people around him; (at least, that's what his incredibly depressed sidekick accused him of, one issue.)

Anyway, it turned out that, for him to be lucky, somebody else had to be unlucky, so he went off on this incredibly hokey "what a terrible person I am" trip, and the book just generaly turned lame at that point. Point being... at some point last week, one of my coworkers accused me af having the most screwed up attitudes towards money and success that she'd ever seen. I sorta tend to think of money and success as sorta the same as luck worked for longshot; the more I have, the less everyone else has, right?

Now, don't get me wrong... I'm certainly not advocating that we should all sell our belongings and move to a ranch out in the middle of the desert, but I do tend to think that things get pretty ridiculous pretty quickly, once your basic needs are taken care of. You know; basic stuff like impossibly large stacks of consumer electronics, computer widgets...

I know I was going somewhere with this when I started, but now I've gone all Doogie Howser on your ass.

4/27/2000:Grrr... I really hate learning. Or, I really hate something, but I'm not sure what. I definitely hate it, though. I love the days when I'm disgusted with myself in a generalized and inarticulate way.

4/25/2000:I got a lot of positive feedback on the last two updates, and I wish I could say that I had something equally worth your time today, but I don't. I saw the most intense rainbow I've ever seen driving up from Portland on Sunday, and I want this monitor. That's it.

4/20/2000:Suddenly, I understand why there was a story on Cheech and Chong on TV tonight, and it makes me angry. Anyway; that's not what I wanted to talk about tonight. It's sorta like the story I told a few months back about coworkers and sympathy-face, but only sorta. It's also sorta like the story where the president of the company called me into his office, but only kinda. In those cases, the bitter ranting was justified. Today, it isn't.

So, I got called on something shameful today at work. Something not ok. Something you keep hidden, if at all possible. But it didn't work. I was told that some people "just have that look", and apparently, I'm one of them. Dammit. My secret's out. When I admitted it to the "new guy" at work, he crowed "I was right! I told my wife that there's this one guy at work... I was RIGHT!" He was pretty stoked.

What's my shameful secret? Well...I've played Role Playing Games. When I started, it was in middle school; mostly my friends and I spent a lot of time rolling dice and making characters, and very little time actually playing. The sad thing is, they were all a lot more into it than I was, and I mostly just tagged along.

That is, until Car Wars. Which sorta doesn't count, but sorta does; it was more of a boardgame than a role playing game, but that's really just splitting hairs; it was funny shaped bits of cardboard, and big-ass paper maps, and dice, and a whole lot of notebook paper. That was pretty much the latter part of elementary school, and all of middle school, and freshman year of high school.

For a while there, I was pretty much OK, I think. Yeah, the last part of high school, and the first couple years of community college, I think I almost had a normal, functional social life. Experimenting with alcohol, as close as I've ever managed to sitcom-style dating... Ahhh... Those were the days.

Then I got sucked back in, by a friend of mine that was not only a role player, he played a LARP. (Live Action Role Playing; I'm not sure where the "G" went. Think costumes instead of little bits of cardboard, houses instead of maps, and rock/paper/scissors instead of dice. Scary, huh?) I'm not sure why I went that first time, but I did. And you know what? I liked it. I even drove from Eugene to Portland a couple of times to do it.

Once again, though, I shook it off. Moved back to portland, lost touch with the friend that was really into it, and basically resembled a normal human again for a while.

Till I went back to school. Then, it was all over. Hadn't done the "live at school" thing before, and I was too old to do the "Drink till I pass out, then wake up, skip class, and repeat." sthick. So I started gaming. Hardcore. Every friday night for most of that first year.

I don't know why it made me so bitter to be asked about it at work today; I really don't. I mean, I'm a guy who really wants to write video games for a living, and still has a shelf reserved for him at a comic book store, and what the hell do you expect?

I'm reading a book right now; it's by the guy that wrote the book that got turned into that John Cusack movie that two people asked me about today, and it's autobiographical. It's about him, and his obsession with football. (British football, I must point out.) He recounts pretty much his whole life in relation to his Team; "This was the year we won the Cup. This was the day we lost the game by one point in the last minute. If my girlfriend fainted during a match, I really don't know if I'd drag her away for some air, or thank the guy who did so I could keep watching."

I guess... and I'm WAAAY exaggerating here... that I wished, if I had to be obsessed with things, they didn't have to be so damn infantile. Why can't I be into indy rock, or foreign cars, or foreign cinema... or ANYTHING that the vast majority of the human race didn't regard as just this side of dog poo, socially speaking. Or maybe it's the fact that so many of the associations that people have with the subject are deserved, and so much of it is so crappy, and even though you know that not all of it is, you know that everyone's going to think it is....

Dammit, I wanna be a jock. Barring that, I just wanna be kevin smith. Help us, kevin smith; you're our only hope! This whole thing? It was a lot funnier in my head.

Well, I'm gonna set up the web cam again, and then I'm gonna play some Escape Velocity before I go to bed. You see, the Babylon 5 plugin came out again, and I ran across it last night. I almost have enough credits to sell the shuttlecraft and buy something with more cargo space.

Hopeless, isn't it? =)

4/15/2000: I'm feeling a little confessional tonight, so I'l tell a little story from my youth. It's sort of a question of whether I tell you about the worst thing I've ever done, in my opinion, or wether it's something... else. Frankly, the worst thing I've ever done doesn't make for a very interesting story, so we'll tell you about the first girl I ever had a crush on.

Which, upon reflection, also doesn't make for a very interesting story, but what the hell. No. Wait. Now I remember what I wanted to write about. It's a much better story; however, I now feel the need to listen to music, and my disks are all upstairs. Dammit. I'll be right back.

Tom Petty. Full Moon Fever. It's well synchronized. Anyway; Back in high school, I had this friend. Rather, we had this friend, my girlfriend and I. I don't remember exactly how we met Joleen*, but I think she was dating my best friend. Which was really, really odd if you knew the two of them. Note to self: never again make Fettuchini Alfredo and tarts for tarts. (I couldn't resist.)

*I'm using her real name, since the chances of her ever reading this are exactly nil. (Other people in this story are nameless because they just will remain so.)

After the two of them broke up, my girlfriend and I ended up in the same work group as Joleen in an advanced Biology class. I'm not sure whether it was Junior or Senior year. Senior, I think. We schemed to take the class together. Anyway, Joleen took an interest in our relationship, which at the time, I didn't think much of, but which has seemed stranger and stranger as the years go by.

She would do stuff for the two of us; whenever her parents were out of town, she would have the two of us over to spend the night at her house, but not in any sort of social way; she would pretty much disappear the entire time we were there, leaving the two of us alone to do whatever for most of a 24 hour period.

Then there was this one Friday, right around this time of year. Spring was getting rolling, but not fully, just yet. Joleen had moved to Portland from out of town; originally she was from Corvalis, I think. Anyway, my girlfriend and I were going to drive down there with her to meet all of her other friends who were still down there. We skipped school, and drove to the beach.

While we were all lounging about on the sand, Joleen said she was going to go fetch lunch, and took off for a while. Eventually, she came back with some sandwiches. By the time we had finished them, we realized that we had a lot of driving to do if we were going to make it to Corvalis on schedule, so we started packing stuff up and hit the road.

On the way out of town, for some reason, my girlfriend and I started bickering in that couple-y way. Joleen freaked; that's the only way to describe what happened. We were pulling onto the coast highway, on the way out of whatever random town we were in, and she just went nuts. Slammed on the brakes, screeched to a halt, and demanded that we get out of the car right there on the shoulder.

Even with a more normal person behind the wheel, this would have been pretty shocking, but you have to understand, Joleen was the kind of person that you'd think only existed in movies and on TV untill you met her. We're talking about a girl who was as likely to start referring to you as "Grumpy Frog" rather than your given name, or a person who once, in the middle of a French class, exclamed rather loudly "LOOK! JoLEEN thinks her DESK is a MOTORCYCYE!"

However, this was not someone that I think I ever saw get truly angry; at least, not like this. Speechless, we got our stuff together, made some weak protests, and got out of the car, thinking that we'd have a better chance of talking her down if we didn't provoke her.

Before any of that had a chance to happen, though, she threw something at us and peeled out.

Lying there, in the dirt, was a key on a keyring that had a diagonal tag attached. The sun was beginning to set. Joleen's red station wagon was receeding into the distance. Across the highway from us, there was a very "Bates hotel" bungalow hotel thing.

We found the cabin that matched the key, and tried it. It worked. Inside, we found a fridge prestocked with supplies, and a note telling us that Joleen would return at 4 on Sunday to pick us up. We'd been had.

The entire experience of that weekend is something that I still remember very vividly. I remember the faint cigarette smell in the room, I remember buying peppermint ice cream at the convenience store next to the hotel.

I still have a coloring book that she gave me for christmas or my birthday or something. Inside the front cover, she wrote "Don't forget about me," among other things that I can't recall.

She was a year behind us in school, and she visited our apartment once or twice the next year. I even think we spent the night at her house one more time, just for old time's sake. But, predictably, everyone moved on and lost touch for various reasons.

She was never one of those people that friends of friends I'd bump into knew about, but I always sort of wondered. I ran into a close friend of hers at a bar three or four years later, and he gave me her email address at college. It was the summer, though when I emailed her, and I never got a response.

There are lots more examples of that in my life; people that were cool, and unique, and who I wonder how things have worked out for. It makes me sad, though what really makes me sad is that now, when I meet cool people, generally, I don't expect them to be around all that long, and am suprised when they are.

A lot of the time, we really just don't realize how cool things are until later. I'm thinking that this web page is a good way to fight that phenomenon. If only because it's not something that I can stuff in a drawer and neglect, because there's (oddly enough) an audience out there that reads it, and expects me to update.

It's also not some *thing*; I can't really lose it, because it's stored in at least three, and soon to be four, places. At least two of which are theoretically accessible from anywhere in the world.

Another thing I'm toying with is including transcriptions of older journals that I still have and can find. I'll compile, date, and order them as accurately as possible, and just include them at the bottom of the second journal page when I get around to it. Just like the rest of those pseudolinks above. Real Soon Now.

Tomorrow, the ponies, and a wedding. Go us. Be excellent to one another.

PS. Note to self: roommates good with tools; good thing to have.

4/9/2000, Part 2:Without further ado: Three Geeks in a Drunken Canoe.

4/9/2000:First rule of web publishing: never use people's real names on your site. Even if it's tissue-paper thin, that element of pseudo-anonymity is needed. Second rule of web publishing: hook a brethalyzer to your keyboard. Third rule of web publishing: getting laid on a regular basis will go a long way to prevent one from making incoherent comments towards other people's romances, which is generally not a good idea. Fourth and final rule of web publishing: you can always edit stuff for content. Even when you say you won't.

So, with those things in mind, and all apologies to Mr. C: "it's a long story, and I'm asking you not to ask me about it."

Amusingly, when I re-read the above for spelling errors, I'd typed "ruse" instead of "rule" 50% of the time. Draw what conclusions you will.

4/8/2000: I'm a little drunk right now, having had more thhan my fair share of margaritas tonight. I'll have to be sure to make spelling, but not content, corrections, tomorrow. There are a couple of things about my lifestyle that I really hate. One: in a lot of ways, I'm very isolated from thhe wold around me. Small circle of freinds, fairly widely geographically separated from me here. Somewhat overly "classic geek" in terms of social interaction and alignment. Things I do like: those friends and aquaintences I do have are immensely valuable to me, and I interact with them, when I have the opportinity, on a level that I'd like to think is more signifigant than the averaage across the general population.

Other random news and thoughts, before I pass out: "The Sixth Sense" is an incredibly satisfying movie. I really love my cat. I really envy Happy Couples on a fairly deep level. I'm starting not to feel like I might be fired from my job at any minuite for gross incompetence. I need to get more sleep. I miss my brother. That will be all.

4/3/2000:Sorry for the lack of updates; this weekend was really quite busy, and between planning for the party and playing with new toys, I didn't get anything done at all. The party went really, really well. Much better than I expected; several pretty widely incompatible groups of people showed up, but all played well with each other, had a good time, and didn't cause the cops to show.

The webcam is down for repairs, unfortunately. Other than that, the only thing going on is that I, in theory at least, fixed my first solo bug today. A minor milestone, I suppose, but a milestone nonetheless.

3/31/2000:Today was an exceedingly frustrating day, and the eneving continues to be a similar affair. Let's hope that tomorrow is a different matter.

3/30/2000:At work today, we had another meeting for this big project that the company is involved in; we're setting up this big XML framework so that applications that are in use at schools can trade data easily and in realtime. I think it's funny that I, Mr. "Make it up as I go along and hope" is setting standards for every gradebook that wants to be compatible. The standard-setter is a guy who still hasn't had a chance to read more than five minutes of XML stuff. Hell-O,shoddy standard!

3/29/2000:I promised a... no. I just can't make that joke. Anyway; recipe for disaster. Eat some baked beans the night before spending three hours working with your direct supervior at work. Spend entire three hours sounding like the second eruption of pompeii is occurring somewhere in your small intestine. Coming home and finding my roommate's copy of "the gas we pass" was just icing on the cake. That was my day; XML and flatulence. Go me.

3/28/2000:We're having a party. Other than that, just some random stuff to update with tonight. Read this last week, and while it makes me never want to set foot on a plane ever again, it's a damn entertaining read. Another fun spot to visit is here: I love this stuff. Sorry I don't have anything more entertaining to say lately, but I haven't really had a whole lot of time to think lately. I could mention the reason why I decided girls are lame last week, but instead, I think I'll just be mysterious and say that I don't think so (as much) anymore.

3/26/2000:I'm tired. Damn tired. And the colors on my monitors don't match. The new one is looking kinda vashed-out today. I'll fiddle with it some other night, though. Right now, it's time for bed. Tomorrow's a big day, or something...

3/24/2000:The Webcam is officially a big hit. Even with the occasional bare naked ass that gets flashed onscreen. Saw Aaron, Pat, and Sasa yesterday, but missed the boat with some other friends who were up here. Irritating. Bracing myself to take up the mantle over in programming, and trying to figure out something entertaining to do with Kevin tonight. Oh, look; everyone's back from lunch, and that means my food is here. Gotta Go.

3/20/2000:Reminder: there are other joints that do this thing a whole lot better than I do. Like here and here. One's run by a friend, the other recommended by one. While we're at it, go here and buy something. Maybe someday they'll give me a bumper sticker if I send them some sales; asking nicely sure hasn't worked...

At work today, there was a big sale in LA that was supposedly hinging on this INCREDIBLY trivial feature. It's impossible for me to describe how trivial this feature would be, and, to be perfectly honest, doing it would have touched so many other parts of the code that I would be more worried that I'd break something in the process than anything else. I told my supervisor that I didn't think it was a good idea for these reasons. His response was "Are you saying you can't DO it?"

To this, I said "There is no technical reason why that wouldn't be possible; however, I don't think it's useful, and I refuse to make any predictions as to when I'd get it working."

I think I was tested, and frankly, I don't think I passed. I should have mentioned that anything I did get set up would need to be re-implemented in the Windows version. That's true, and it would have sounded less like I was ducking.

Last time I wiped my drive, I forgot to preserve my fonts; the only place I can find the font I used to make the site graphics before is on this lame semi-literate sales site that wants me to submit my email address, and then they'll forward it on to me. Yeah, Right. I guess I needed to do a redesign anyway.

First, though, I have to clean this damn basement. I cleaned the upstairs today, but when you have a webcam, there's only one room in the house that really matters...

3/18/2000:As Aaron pointed out, one cannot "implement binary tree as linked list," since they're different things. He's right, too; binary tree has some features in common with linked lists, but they are different. Sometimes, I think that I speak a language that no one else does. It's called "no-attention-ese."

3/17/2000:One cool thing about my job: Guinness, Harps, and Bailey's at lunch on St. Patrick's day. Mmmm... Tasty beverages at my desk, with the full sanction of upper management. MOST Excellent.
It's friday night, and I'm staying in town instead of going down to pdx so as to gear up for the job. I'm doing homework again. I didn't really want to spend friday night coding, though. So I set up the webcam, finally. Go me.

3/13/2000: This Pascal stuff ain't too hard. At least, not yet. Other than that, nothing else is going on. I did remember a funny story, though, from when I was in kindergarten. You see, I was a BIG fan of "Happy Days," and one day I told one of the girls in the class that she should run up to me and "do that Fonzie thing" whenever I snapped my fingers, "even if you're in another room." I was really disappointed when she refused. I really liked that show. Kindergarten was just sorta weird all the way around. I mean, there was this one kid who peed on the playground by accident and didn't get in trouble, but when I did it on purpose, I did. That never really made sense to me at the time. In retrospect, I just figure that I was a really strange kid.

3/13/2000: To quickly bring everything up to speed; I got a promotion. I'm now something that bears a scary resemblance to a "real" programmer. Mom's doing pretty well, but she doesn't always tell kevin and I everything that's going on, which bothers me like you can't possibly believe. The next two weeks are going to be insanely packed full of stuff to do. Crazy packed. And this is a good thing.

3/8/2000: Two crises averted today. After much wrangling, my machine is now functional again. I was literally INCHES away from slapping down the plastic and bringing home a new one. The cat was also recovered after one of the roommates left the back door WIDE OPEN when they left the house. Grrrr. All's well that ends well...

3/7/2000:A few years back, I had my boss say something to me that, I think, is as true now as it ever was. It was "You know, Brian, if you just paid a little bit more attention, you could save yourself a whole lot of grief." In general, I just sort of feel that I need to get my act together, though I'm not really able to describe why, or what act. I'm just sort of vaguely dissatisfied with myself right now, for no particular reason. I also, it must be said, can't remember a time when I didn't feel this way.

3/6/2000 (Early AM): Tonight, at long last, I heard those words that everyone waits their whole life to hear:

"It's sunday, and that's the night I give away liquor."

Something wicked this way comes, dressed in nasty leather. Something wicked this way comes, please protect your wallet.

3/2/2000:I am sick as a damn dog (unexpected side of increased numbers of cohabitants -- more germ exposure), and I'm also too stupid to stay home, so I'm sitting here updating the page to generate keyboard activity and cover up the fact that I really do not feel well at all. Productivity has been exactly zero for the last two hours. Thankfully it's the end of the day, and I can go home soon. Lord only knows how I'll manage to get any coding done in this condition (I can tell that I'm running a fever; I've got that goofy sorta lightheaded feeling I always get when I have one), but that's my intention. (To get some coding done, that is.) I also find it vaguely amusing that today is the day everyone decides to call and see if I can come out and play.

3/1/2000: Had a "Click!" moment tonight. I finally managed to get Sidereal back to the state it was in before I tore it apart, and incorporated MADE, this cheap and cool app framework I bought a few weeks back. (A mere $20!)

So, the app is back up and running as well as it was a while back, with the extremely minor bonus of handling keyboard shortcuts for menu items now. (I got that for free when I adapted the code for MADE.) I still need to re-do the preferences dialog, as it's scrubbing out the contents of any windows that it passes over while open. I'm not handing off update events to the OS, or something.

Other coolness... With a little help from my friends, I accomplished the emminently geeky feat of wireless DVD last weekend and forgot to mention it. Lastly, check out Parsec. These guys are doing what I want to be doing five years from now. It's the future.

2/27/2000:Don't really have a whole lot to say, but it's been a while since I updated, so I feel like I should. Got a little bit accomplished this weekend. Not much, but more than in weekends past, so that's a start. Springtime is almost here, and I'm a bit disappointed in the winter we had, frankly. Need a little more cold, grey rainy nastiness than we got to really be satisfied...

2/22/2000:FUCK compilers. That will be all.

2/19/2000: We filled the basement with choking clouds of smoke last night. Stupid wood stove! At least we seem to have navigated the first real crisis of this household moderately competently. I'm just really glad I was too lazy to have set up the webcam earlier in the night like I planned to. That would have been a little too ridiculous, even for me. Look; there's Brian coughing. See Brian choke and gasp. See Brian stand and watch in mute amazement. Oh, look; you can't see Brian any more! All I have to say is, thank god for Corwin's assortment of household fans.

2/15/2000:Oh, my god. I'm gonna kill someone.Spent half the night staring an incomprehensible Open Transport references, and the other half dusting off Sidesaver three weeks later. Lots of wheelspinning, but ZERO progress. Crap.

2/14/2000:Reading the second novel by the guy that wrote "Fight Club", and I must say that it's damn good. Damn good; and not just because he's from PDX. In other news, I had this scary moment today when I thought a coworker was hitting on me in a conversation that included a discussion of her wedding invitations. Luckily, I'm merely the most paranoid person ever. She was offering to set me up with some unidentified third party. That's two coworkers in a week that have inquired about my love life, then gotten sympathy-face. I'm just gonna stop answering those questions.

2/12/2000:Watched "Trekkies" with a couple of friends tonight; unsuprisingly, it's a documentary about Star Trek fans. What was more than a little suprising was that I actually found the movie to be a little...inspiring. Not in the "I wanna dress up like a klingon, have my teeth cleaned at the Starbase Dental, and recite Hamlet in a fictional language" way, but in a "This guy thought up some stories about space, and 30 years later, people still like them" sort of way.

I mean, in a lot of ways, if you tell someone a good story, you have a demonstrably positive effect on their life. You can entertain them, you can educate them, and you can just plain make them happy. Of course, if your stories keep someone from dealing with reality on it's own terms, or if they take it to far, etc etc etc that's a bad thing. But still; telling stories is a good thing, methinks, and a worthy vocation. Now I just have to think some up.

2/10/2000:Liking the house more and more, and I found out today that Kevin probably got accepted into UW. This is a Good Thing. He's also visiting tomorrow. As Corwin would say, "ROWDY!!!"

2/5/2000:Hmmm. I just recieved an invitation to go to a club, which was retracted when it was revealed that I own not a stitch of black clothing. Gee. Darn. Shucks. On these grounds, I officially retract my post of the 27th.

2/3/2000:So, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I suddenly remembered something from way way back. It was mom's 40th birthday, so I was...11, I think. Anyway, it was a year, maybe two at most since dad died. Anyway, I was in that phase where you are starting to realize that things like birthdays are important to moms, and that kids need to make a big deal, right?

Anyway, I decide to have a suprise party for mom. And I run out and buy all this "turning 40" stuff that, in retrospect, just wasn't funny at all. It was actually kinda cheap and insulting. "Old Buzzard Awards" and the like. So, my brother and I have this "party" and it's just really obvious that mom didn't like it at all, but she tried to hide it. I'm just sort of in awe of what it takes to be a parent right now.

2/1/2000:OK... Well, after hauling ass like a madman all week, running my car into a minivan, and generally existing in a state of near panic, I seem to have moved into the new house with all of my possessions (well, except for the licence plate frame on my front bumper, that is...) pretty much intact. Now: if I can just find the soda bottle I put the screws that hold my bed together in so I can put it together, my life will be complete.

Never mind. Corwin and I just traded emails, and we're IN THE SAME ROOM. I'm moving back to the apartment. Stupid geeks. Stupid us.

1/27/2000:I need to work on being less immature.

1/25/2000:Well; work seems to have settled itself somewhat, and the move is progressing, but I think I'm having a delayed reaction to it all. My landlord wants to start showing the place, which is good; means that I may concievably not waste an entire month's rent here. What is bad is the fact that multiple trips to PDX, generalized slovenliness, etcetera have rendered it, to paraphrase a friend, "messier than I've ever seen it." Hmmm. To sleep or to clean: that is the question. When it rains, it pours, or something.

Oh yeah; I was beginning to get upset with myself for pushing the nine-month mark, and then I had dinner tonight with someone whose personal record was three years. Suddenly, I feel like such a novice.

1/21/2000: Where do I begin? Let's see. Day before yesterday, a promotion to programmer was semi-dangled in front of me. Yesterday, I signed a 15-month lease on a house. (This is a good, if somewhat intimidating, thing.) Today, I find out in this order, that due to my assumption that verbal notification of intent to vacate was sufficient (I know, I know) I get to pay rent on my current apartment AND the house next month. One of the happier, more pleasant people at my work got fired today -- get this; FOR BEING DEPRESSED. A little down from the post college move to a new town? The new job? The stress of being promised a better position in the company, and then having it retracted? Well, we're so concerned for your well being, WE'LL FIRE YOU. I want to like the people that employ me, but goddamit, that's the LAMEST THING EVER. Fucking crap. Then there was lunch. I wish I was kidding. I just made it to lunch.

At lunch, I find out that a temper tantrum I almost threw last month over their last wierd-ass pointless authoritarian move may have resulted in myself and two of my coworkers getting a raise. Unh? So I'm suddenly like one part posterboy to the upper echelons and leader of the rebel alliance? I'm just about hitting overload at this point. After a day where I'm just dog fucking tired, bone weary, we had an "unoficcial" going away party for ANOTHER employee. That was actually really nice, but this employment thing is really starting to get strange on me, I tell you. For every step forward, a step back. Sometimes, that's all you can do. Right now, I want a nap.

1/18/2000:Tonight, we play "Two Questions". Question #1. What am I supposed to think when a friend sends me this? I think I'm being called predictable. Question #2: Is it normal to not eat dinner before 9pm? I don't really mind, but it seems wierd.

1/2/2000: Well, I must say that it was, indeed, the best New Year's I can remember. Rowdy and drunken, but never quite teetered into the vomitous wretchedness that I feared might result. Piercing questions were asked, terrible labors undertaken, and unfortunate explosives were used. Apologies to the elevator.

Today finds me at the center of a maddening vortex of productivity. One tip; never update your pseudosite in the middle of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Crap; gotta go. My buns are smokin'.

12/30/99: Man, I'm feeling verbose this week.

Anyway, I was here (listening to this) and the second segment was about this woman who ran into an old boyfriend with her husband and two kids at, of all places, a yogurt shop. Anyways, before long, she's obsessed with this guy, who's going after her with both barrels despite the small matter of, well, the rest of her life.

So the wife reaches the point where she goes to the husband, confesses the whole thing: her infatuation, the appeal of this other guy's attention, her indecision, everything.

Actually, the end just sounds lame typed out here. Sorry; if you're even half interested, listen to the program. Let me just say that I hope I handle this half as well should I ever find myself in a similar situation.

You'll all be spared this sort of thing for the next few days, at least, since I plan to be too thoroughly blotto for much in the way of semi-revealing crypticisims. Besides, there are others that do it much, much better. (And the site's better-looking, too.)

12/27/99: How come in sci-fi movies nobody wears clothes with logos on them? It's like everybody woke up one day and decided that advertising wouldn't work anymore, so they all suddenly started shopping in generic-land. Bet tommy hilfiger was disappointed.

12/23/99: Ok... it's official. I am no longer capable of getting more than six hours' sleep at a stretch. No use going to bed early if you're just going to wake up at 4:30 in the morning. On a paid holiday, no less! *Ugh* Even my cat seems a bit disgusted with me for being awake.

Well, latest news is that Corwin and I may be getting a house, tho the deal's still a bit iffy at this point. Enh... We'll see...

Strikes me that this content should be moved to an interior page, and the front page needs more useless graphics stuff. It's a bit visually underwhelming at this point.

12/16/99: Just added the quote at the top of the page. In general, I think I wish I was a scientist. However, if I ever turn out to be anything at all, I'm pretty sure that it'll be an engineer. A scientist is in it for the love of learning; it's all about the process of discovery.

For me, all this geeky stuff I'm into all day long is more about the things I can do and make with the skills. It's more about achievement; I'm ok with creating something that's been done a million times before if I need to do it to get where I want to go.

I'm not sure if that's a bad thing, but it's certainly a less noble thing. Go me.

11/13/99: Yes, it's been a while. But, since this only exists on my one-machine intranet so far, I'm not feeling too guilty. The luxury of vanity publishing. Anyway, when you inexplicably wake up at 4am with a craving for Pierogies, you discover a few things. One of them is that the BBC's "Wacky Morning DJ" guy is as irritating as our domestic brand. So much for the british being more cultured...

10/18/99: Ever since I graduated, I've been asking myself a question. "where has all my testosterone gone?" I feel like an intellectual eunuch sometimes.

Subject: Important Year 2000 Information
From: "Microsoft" <Microsoft_015912@newswire.microsoft.com>

Dear Microsoft Customer:

The year 2000 is rapidly approaching, and there are simple steps you can take to get your hardware, software and data ready. We at Microsoft want to make sure you have the information you need to make this transition as easy as possible.

...(Blah, Blah, Blah. Y2K, Website, Microsoft.com)...

Thanks for using Microsoft products. We look forward to continuing to provide you with the best products to meet your computing needs.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft Product Groups

Important Customer Notification: We've sent this message to inform all Microsoft customers of critical information relating to year 2000 issues and our products. If you are subscribed to newsletters from microsoft.com, they will still be delivered. If you don't have any newsletter subscriptions, or have requested not to receive e-mail, be assured that critical notifications such as this are sent infrequently, and only as a customer service.

9/30/99: A friend had the rug yanked out from under him today, in a manner which is depressingly commonplace in quantity and in method. Then I find out that we crashed $125 million into Mars because NASA didn't check their math, and the Army admits, after 50 years of denials, that a scared group of soldiers opened fire on hundreds of Korean civilians taking cover from strafing attacks under a bridge because they'd been attacked by a similar mob the day before. Today's magic words? "Senseless Tragedy".

Look; three updates and already I'm getting pretentious. I'm a web publisher now, I tell you.

On the upside, Mom called to make sure that I read an article about Wizards of the Coast; she thought I'd find it "inspirational". Moms are cool, I must admit.

9/27/99: Crap. It's a good thing this site exists only on my hard drive at the moment, because my "updates" have been far less frequent than they should be, dammit. Anyway, it's 2:38 AM, insomnia bites, and I'm going to be dragging ass all day tomorrow. *SIGH* Major accomplishments this weekend? Spent all day Saturday waiting for my car to be finished worked on (baby got new brakes and a new rear axle), and then spent today "working" with Corwin. The quotation marks are entirely my own damn fault. Gotta be more disciplined.

9/18/99: Well, the first draft of the page is ready. Not much yet, but it's a start, at least. I'll spend tonight (?) and tomorrow (for sure) working on Sidereal, so at some point referring to myself as a coder won't be a total farce. Now all I need is DSL and a machine to host this on...