Busy as all get out. I'm packing up the Lab and running around getting ready.
Don't look at me. I didn't do it.
One shall stand. One shall fall.
Hrm... that's a surprise.
I managed to get a lot done tonight. I've got my first load of laundry in the wash right now (it'll be done by tomorrow, if all goes according to plan). I'm slowly emptying out my dresser and washing everything, just on general principle. Twelve boxes of stuff have been packed this evening, ten from another bookcase and a fair chunk of the third, and two of action figures and models that I normally keep all over the place. The challenge, I think, will be packing up the model of the Sentinel (from The Matrix) that's on top of Dataline's monitor - it's a little over two feet in length. I'll be able to find a more suitable place for it after it's all said and done. And I've got plans for a diorama for it.... images will be forthcoming.
I brought an armload of empty boxes home from work today. They were originally from some of the new servers, I think, and were being pitched. When I dug them out of the dumpster, I had ideas for what to put in them.. now I have no idea what should go in them. Maybe some of the gear from my entertainment center, maybe clothes, maybe something else. I had a hell of a time getting them home today. Even nested together and held in place with styrofoam peanuts, the largest one is still 3.5 feet on a side, which is very unweildly.. moreso when you're trying to keep it from sliding around and hurting someone during the bus ride home. I think I could curl up in it for a nap if I emptied it out... it's now taking up a huge amount of space in the Lab at the present time. I can't wait until I get my keys.. I'm going to start driving stuff over there, not because I'm in a hurry, but because I'm feeling very claustrophobic at the moment.
T-4 days and counting.
I just heard about the other position, for certain this time.
I didn't get the job.
Dammit.
As if reality hasn't screwed me over enough lately, George Bush's overtime cut bill goes into effect shortly. There goes half my paycheque every week.
Mr. Bush, you've just killed whatever chance you had of my voting for you.
"Your moving out is costing me a lot of money. You would do well to say very little."
T-5 days and counting. That is all I will say on the matter.
I don't know if this guy is a truly gifted psychic, a talented conspiracy theorist, or an utter nutbar. No matter how you cut it, this makes for interesting reading. Look it over for the heck of it.
I discovered earlier tonight just how far six packing crates will go: One full bookcase and perhaps an eighth of another bookcase. I'm attempting to make the best use possible of space in each crate, so in places I've mixed and matched books from two other bookcases to maximise use of space. So, now I've got a commpletely empty bookcase and a big chunk taken out of a second one (the bookcases that flank the staircase, incidentally), with a few gone from the one to the right of my workbench.
I hope I get my keys relatively early in the week, so I can move things a little at a time each night. I'd like to move one bookcase and six crates of books each evening, unpack the boxes as best I can, and then bring the boxes back for the next load the next night. Things probably won't work out that way, though.
I'm going to pack up some of the small stuff around my lab in another crate or two, also. I've got little stuff on top of each bookcase and on the shelves that I'd like to take with me (such as some pottery shards, little toys, and other things like that - details), so I'll probably wrap them in bubble wrap and pack them separately.
I wound up going to the Expomart solo today. No big deal, because the Super Surplus Sale wasn't a big deal, either. If you went there looking for car audio gear (specifically, bass systems powerful enough to make the Washington Monument reverberate), you'd be in heaven. Unfortunately, the three dealers of gear were demonstarting their wares, which meant that hearing anything apart from "BOOMPH BOOMPH BOOMPH RUMMMMMBLE BOM-BOM-BOM-POOM BOMPH..." was not possible. Even with my cellphone screwed to my ear (metaphorically speaking) with the volume all the way up, I still could barely hear Lyssa when she called. There was lots of very pretty metalwork there in the form of knives, swords, and strange implement not seen since the ninja movies of hte 1980's (long live Sho Kosugi!). All very nice stuff, and highly affordable, also. However, aside from ritual use I would not trust any of it to protect me unless it was a life or death situation. The steel's probably cheap enough that one good blow, either landed or blocked, would snap the metal.
I have to admit, though, the katana, wakizashi, and tanto in the wooden stand would have looked good on my altar, but they'd also be terribly impractical at this point in time.
Around that point, I left and headed westward to my usual stomping grounds once again.
First stop, Officemax to price stuff. They've got good prices on one drawer modular filing cabinets (lockable), two drawer filing cabinets (also lockable), and four-drawer (lockable if you spend an extra $15us on the mechanism) filing cabinets. I'm thinking about picking up a few of the stackable one drawer ones just after I move in this weekend. Their bookcases were also nice, but a bit on the pricy side. I think I'll haunt K-Mart for them, because they usually have them for $50us. I didn't feel like paying $79us for a bookcase today. I did purchase a new ink tank module for my printer, something that I'd been putting off for several weeks. They tend to die after six months or so, which renders the printer inoperable. One can switch out the ink tanks all one likes, but the control electronics for heads are in the tank holder module, and those are what die periodically. I got stuck paying $55us for one; if I could find them for less, I would pay less, but as far as I know they don't even show up at computer shows.
After that, I hit up my favourite everything-and-the-kitchen-sink store, Sam's Club, where you can find exactly what you need, in bulk, for a decent price. In a stroke of serendipity, I found a moving kit (fifteen crates, packing tape, and bubble wrap) for $23us. I also picked up a six-pack of packing tape just in case I had to shore up some cardboard boxes. At long last, I bought myself new pillows for my bedroom. I also picked up a few things that are best purchased in bulk, like shampoo, soap, and a first aid kit (the size of a small suitcase for $19us - one never knows). The hard part was wrestling everything into the back of my car. Once I got home, however, it all came out smoothly and it, at this moment, sitting in the garage.
At this point I've been sitting around thinking about how I'm going to get everything packed and when I should start sending out messages to people asking for help. I should probably start doing so tomorrow, just to be sure.
I've decided that after I get settled in, I'm going to rebuild Leandra; I'm tired of Debian's quirks, most of which have to do with old revisions of software. I tried to build the latest revision of GAIM on Kabuki and Leandra last night, and it errored out both times because an argument of a GTK call was wrong, and I don't know enough about GTK to try to fix it. I also haven't been able to get Java working (which has curtailed my wanting to learn ig), and the later revisions of Mozilla and Firefox don't work, either. I never had this problem with Slackware, so that's what I'll be moving Leandra (at first) and Kabuki (later on) back to. I will also be able to use the v2.6 kernel series without having to perform major surgery. Someone's ported APT (the Advanced Packaging Tool - I'm too busy to dig up the link for slapt-get) to Slackware, too, so I can automate updates once again, and not have to compile some packages by hand, either.
 Cor blimey, I taste like Tea.I am a subtle flavour, quiet and polite, gentle, almost ambient. My presence in crowds will often go unnoticed. Best not to spill me on your clothes though, I can leave a nasty stain. What Flavour Are You? |
 I am a Defender-ship.I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You? |
Gods... 'Defender' was my first handle. Wow.
When's summer going to get here?
No, seriously.. when?
For the past three weeks, temperatures have barely broken 70 degrees Farenheit in Pittsburgh. Waking up between 0500 and 0600 EDT, it isn't unusual right now for the temperature to be barely over 50 degrees, not warming up until 0700 EDT or so. Today it's been raining most of the day, finally cutting loose in time for the rush home this evening. And then really cutting loose at dinner time; tornado watches are on until 0400 EDT Saturday. Pittsburgh seems to be safe for the time being, though. Aside from a downpour that's lasted all night, the wind's been low and there's been no thunder or lightning to speak of. At least, as far as I could tell.
One thankfully low-stress week is over.
Tomorrow I'll be going to Hypermart, the yearly super surplus sale, to look for stuff for next weekend.. the move.
I need furniture. Specifically, an easy chair or two, maybe another lamp for the living room (I'd like to get a few of those white LED 'bulbs' - they're as bright as halogen lamps, use less power, and last far, far longer). If I can find another bookcase and perhaps a coffee table, I'll be set.
We'll see what happens.
Hopefully my glasses will be in, soon. If things go the way I think they will, they'll be ready just in time. I should hear back from my landlord this week upcoming about exactly when I can move in; I should get my keys, too.
Mental note: Start enlisting help. I can pack a little each night, but I'll need help to get it all moved into the truck, and moved back out again.
Mental note: Get a moving truck.
Mental note: Get cash to pay for pizza for everyone.
Mental note: Get boxes this weekend to start packing. Big ones. Shipping crates, if possible.
I probably won't be able to sleep there, for a few days, anyway. It will take time to unpack, and time to get everything going again. The bedroom is probably going to take priority. A bed and a dresser - pretty easy. Putting clothes away will probably wait until after I've got the Children set up again, so I can work to music. After that will be the rest of the apartment, which I can do a chunk at a time until it's ready. Maybe a week, tops, if I work on it each night.
It doesn't take me long to get settled in. I just have to work at it.
Let's see... what's happened outside of my egotistical little world today? How about a few ill tidings to balance the hope I've been splashing across this HTML page? No longer the domain of dedicated proponents of fraud, prepacked phishing kits are now available across the Net, so now every Tom, Dick, and Harry can try to scam people out of their identities. No longer do you have to lurk on Bugtraq to find the latest Internet Explorer spoofing vulnerabilities to leverage to make people think they're at a legit site, when in fact they're about to be screwed, blued, and tattooed. The scams-in-a-zipfile come complete with all of the code and HTML necessary to put up a website (on a rooted server) to capture unsuspecting users' credit card or bank account information.
I wonder if the password is still 'CHIBA CITY'...
What else has happened recently? Hmm... the crackers who hit the McMurdo Station (Antarctica) computer network really didn't have the scientists' lives in any danger because the life support system of the research station wasn't actually hooked up to the Net? The FBI might have overstated things just a little to make a point? Naaah.... Keith Lourdeau, head of the FBI's cybercrime unit stated in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee hearing that the environment control system was accessible through the Net, when in fact it wasn't (and still isn't).
There's a word for that. It has eight letters and begins with 'bull'.
Lourdeau, to his credit, never stated that his unit had encountered anything qualifying as 'cyberterrorism', but Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently missed that detail when working on his report to the US Justice Department that justified the USA PATRIOT Act shortly therafter fnord.
Happy 30th birthday, Dungeons and Dragons.
The first security vulnerabilities in Windows XP Service Pack 2 have been discovered. Have a nice day.
Another day, stacked, packed, and racked. Go, me.
I can't wait to get out of here. I've already begun to plan the move, from figuring out how I'm going to move my library and what I'll have room to bring with me (such as my desk and home entertainment centre) to what clothes I'll be bringing first, whether or not I'll wash them before the relocation, and where I'll put them. I'll be able to bring that chest-of-drawers after all, so I'll have someplace to put the clothes that don't have to be hung up (which is all of my t-shirts and shorts). I'll have to time things so that I'll be moving in completely after the utilities and telephone are activated (which implies that the DSL link will have been transferred, also), but that shouldn't be too hard after I get the go-ahead from the manager. I'm excited. I don't yet know where my altar is going to go, most likely in the living room until I can figure out a better place for it. The key factor is how I'm going to set up SAL-9000 when I get there. Maybe that's going to have to wait a bit.
I should sit down and write this stuff down, so I have my ducks in a row.
I need more time to sit and write, in general.
My hands are starting to bother me again. That's not good.
I went to the optometrist tonight to see about getting a new pair of glasses, to replace the ones I'm wearing now that are damaged and listing to one side all the time. Because they're under warranty, I don't have to pay for them, but I do have to wait until they come in, which should be in about a week's time. I can wait. They're not so bad that I'm completely blind.
On 9 August 2004 the Federal Communications Commission began pushing for all Internet protocols to be made less secure to make it easier to monitor them. That's right - they want to add the Net to the CALEA statute. As if they're trying to follow in the footsteps of Canada (see yesterday's entry), they want ISPs to foot the bill for implementing this, which is going to raise the rates of all of us in the States with net.access. This hasn't gone into action yet, but the way they're pushing it's only going to be a matter of time before someone gives (or they find a way to set a legal precedent - the Al Quaida operative they busted with a laptop full of data seems like a good way to go about it, don't you think?)
In other news, the US Central Intelligence Agency is making a move that paranoids have been screaming about for years, and that's permission to act against US citizens inside the United States. Porter Goss, the man G.W.Bush nominated for replacement head of the CIA, introduced legislation that would allow the CIA to do just that. It's being called an 'intelligence reform' bill, and was put forth on 16 June 2004. Just one more reason to worry...
Hard crypto might not be enough to save you, either. Not too long ago (on 13 August 2004 - Friday the Thirteenth, of all days), someone named Pascal Junod announced that he found a way to produce collisions in the SHA-0 algorithm SHA-0 is referred to as a message digest algorithm, which basically takes an arbitrary pile of bits and computes a much shorter, theoretically unique in all the known universe string out of it, called a digest. These digests are the keystone of digital signatures, which can be used to prove that your pile of arbitrary bits really is yours (because it's keyed to your public key) as well as proving that the pile of bits hasn't been altered in any way. The fact that he was able to produce a collision (proven in the message) means that it is now theoretically possible for someone with enough computing power to generate another pile of bits that has the same digest as your pile of bits, and possibly convince other people that it's yours (or that the pile of bits hasn't been tampered with, when in fact it has been). As if that's not enough, rumours are flying around the cryptography community that someone managed to do the same thing to SHA-1, which is the SHA-0 algorithm's stronger brother. Same net result - digital signatures might not be worth the paper they're printed on shortly.
To be fair, it's not going to be easy to exploit this. Yes, it very well could be possible to forge a bitstream that has the same hash as something that everyone would like protected (say, an OS update). That does not mean that an attacker could create a hacked version of that bitstream that has the same signature. One thing about message digest algorithms is that they take into account every bit in the bitstream. The faked bitstream that has the same has might not even be a legal file on any computer. It's one thing to alter a patch or someone's e-mail and have it come out with the same digest. It's another to come up with garbage that has the same digest. An attacker would no doubt want to accomplish the former; the latter isn't any good for a nefarious plan save to distract someone.
For once I went to bed early last night, around 2100 EDT, to try to make up for not getting any REM sleep all weekend. I think it worked; I made it through a day filled with "oh shit" situations, people walking into my office way in the back to put out fires and help consultants. I even made it through my DHCP lease expiring, and all the havoc that is wreaked when everything is restricted by IP address (uh-oh...)
I lived. I adapted.
All that stress began to leak out by the time I got on the bus home, though. By the time I got home I was ready to go off on someone. Anyone. Very nearly did, too, in an uncharacteristic loss of mental coolant.
Maybe reading NRC reports of power plant screw-ups wasn't such a good idea.
I got an e-mail from the guy who interviewed me - he says that he's sorry about the delay, HR is in a holding pattern down there while they figure things out. I can handle that.
This evening I signed the lease on my apartment. I paid the rest of the security deposit and the rent for September. I can start moving in the weekend of the 28th of August. That's the weekend after this one.
I finally did it. I broke free of this place, and now I only have time to plan how I'm going to move before I set off on my own.
After I signed the lease and wrote a few cheques to cover the rest of the security deposit (I paid $100us of it up front to reserve the apartment) and the rent for September, I went back upstairs. The door was still open because the maintenance guy was replacing the locking mechanism on the door (a nice, big steel number - my favourite) due to stickiness and generally being a pain in the butt to open, so I walked back in and looked around. "It's mine," I thought. "I live here. I will live here. This place will be my home." I admit to doing a few twirls in the open space that is the living room, admiring the window, fingering the walls, and walking around, seeing everything again for the first time. Everything's so much larger than I remember it being. The kitchen has a garbage disposal (and the power's on - I was able to hit the switch and activate it briefly). The bedroom and living room get much more light than I remember. The window's much larger. So is the balcony. The carpet is soft, though it could use a once-over with a sweeper.
I can start moving in the weekend after next. I need to get the phone turned on within thirty days of moving in (thus sayeth my lease). I'll probably have to put deposits down on most of the utilities, so I'm going to save up some cash to do so (modulo new glasses tomorrow night).
I've got a line in on a couch for my flat. Anne Marie and Albert, friends of Dataline, offered me their spare couch for nothing. As long as it's not too ratty and doesn't smell, I'll take it.
I start moving in two weeks.
This takes balls the size of truck tires: The Canadian police force wants the telecom companies to levy a surchage of roughly $0.25us for every phone in Canada to cover telephone and Internet surveillance, should it ever become necessary. They don't want to have to pay the cost of wiretapping themselves. This ranks up there with the Chinese government charging the families of executed dissidents for the bullets used.
I think I want a tattoo of the internal schematic of a MOS 6581 chip somewhere on my body. Yep - the SID chip.
Have you ever had the feeling that it's dangerous to disagree with Those In Power?
Screw it.
I'm not getting that job. It doesn't take a Ph.D to figure that one out.
I'm going to be stuck in Pennsylvania until the day I die. Nothing I've tried has gotten me out of here. I can't find a good job to save my lives.
My family really gets under my skin, too. From the condescending question of "So, did you find your way there all right?" to being told directions to get places that I'm reasonably confidant that I can find on my own (such as the local supermarket that I go to two or three times every week) to the simple "What are you looking for?"
Maybe I shouldn't get fed up with this (gods only know, I'm not supposed to get angry or frustrated around here), but there's a simple principle that I live by that they don't seem to understand: I treat others in the same manner that I wish to be treated. I don't want to talk to them; I don't like to talk to them; I don't say anything. I really don't like being cornered by them whenever I happen to go upstairs. That's why I spend all of my time down here. I really don't care about tales of their friends or what they did today or what they plan on doing, and I do not wish to tell them things from my end of things. I also resent being asked what I did, as if I was a thirteen year old who got caught sneaking out late at night, and several of you will no doubt be pleased to hear that pointed inquiries were made with regards to where you, my readers who are no doubt fed up with the angst and frustration that make up the last few entries, live.
Yes, they're now curious about where some of you live. How to get there and landmarks, also.
Why it's any of their business, I do not know. Why they want to know, I have no idea. If any of you are concerned, please contact me privately.
I can see that my body's second adolescence is not going well, for they seem to think that I've returned to the age of fourteen or therabouts.
On the bright side, guess what I'm doing tomorrow night?
Signing the lease on that apartment.
I think that's going to go a long way toward stabilising the internal situation right now. My reserves are completely spent; this weekend's taken the last of my strength, and it takes much right now to keep me from curling up on the floor and bawling my eyes out, because my internal systems have lost almost all of their organisation, and chaos will soon ensue if I am not careful.
I must admit, however, it would be nice to let that pressure go and purge it from my system. Once I'm out of here, fine. Doing so right now would only reinforce being treated as a child in their eyes. It's a sign of weakness.
I don't know. I suppose wanting to be alone to work on things that I feel are important and wanting a little bit of privacy are considered 'juvenile' actions.
Is it any wonder that my dearest wish is to disappear?
Last night Lyssa and I crashed over at John and Lara's. I had hoped that the night would turn into a game night (they're the only folks I know around here who are interested in games of any kind, even a good card game of one sort or another) but it wound up being a night of sitting around drinking and talking. Either way, it was still a good night. Lys and i got up early this morning so I could get her back to the homefront to drive back down to Maryland, and were trapped in the singular hell that is Pittsburgh traffic when PennDOT decides to work on the roadway system. The two main arteries out of Pittsburgh proper, to the west and south, are shut down for maintenance right now (PennDOT engineers were quoted as saying that they were "going to do fifteen years of work in three days" last night, a proclimation that does not instill the listener with any sort of confidence), necessitating detours that add anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes of travel time (worst case scenario, due to traffic congestion). Around 0900 EDT today, the worst case scenario was encountered. Lyssa and I were stuck in traffic far earlier on a Sunday than anyone should be. Due to our sleepy, dazed states, only the dashboard clock kept track of time for us.
Am I the only one who is suddenly reminded of a plotline in the Illuminatus Trilogy? I dearly hope that the end results will not be the same...
Heh heh heh... this does my hearts good. From some of the remarks near the end, however, I'm inclined to think this is a joke.
Three new episodes are available at Utena Thumbnail Theatre!
1745 EDT: Still no word. I think I'm going to give up hope. I left a message for the guy that interviewed me (on his cellphone's voice mail) but I really don't think that I'm going to get a call back.
I'm supposed to sign off on that apartment tomorrow, so either way it'll be a change for the better.
Wish me luck, everyone. Or have a drink for me.
1803 EDT: Still no word.
I'm finally starting to catch up. My chequebook is balanced, my speeding ticket has been paid and will be mailed out tomorrow, and I've finally gotten the bathroom and kitchen floor cleaned. I now know how much cash I've got in the bank, and how much I'll have available to close on that apartment, in the event that I'll be staying in Pittsburgh. Still no word yet on that job down in Maryland; I filled out the webwork (a web application replacing the mounds of paperwork that usually have to be filled out when applying for a position) last night and recieved the confirmation, so that should be squared away. I had to go back a decade to fill out my work history (yep, ten years).. I don't know if that's normal these days or not, but one thing about compulsively keeping records is that when you need that kind of data, it's there. Now Google just has to invent a search engine for all of my binders and file folders...
I'm supposed to find out from my contact by the end of tomorrow whether or not I get the job. I really hope that I do... I know that I keep saying this, but this could be the brass ring. My chance to make something positive of myself.
Even if I don't get the job, I still have that apartment lined up and ready to move into, as of 15 August 2004. Either way, it's a winning situation.
I'd just much rather have that new job....
Lyssa is, at this time, on her way northward to visit her family in Pennsylvania. I'll be driving out to join her tomorrow night and we'll spend the evening kicking around the city having a good time.
My glasses broke today. I discovered that part of the left earpiece that attaches to the len-body is broken - if you imagine a two-pronged fork that fits over a small nub, with an itty-bitty screw (two millimetres, tops) passing through it, you've got a good mental image of what the hinge looks like. Now break the top tine off of the 'fork' and you've got the situation my glasses are in at the present time. The lenses don't sit right on my face; they've a tendency to shift around, which messes with how light is focused into my eyes, which at turns gives me a headache and vertigo. I drove out to America's Best after dinner earlier tonight, hoping to get a new earpiece. Instead, they ordered me a new set of frames. I'm happy to be getting a new set of frames for my spectacles but I was hoping to get them repaired tomorrow. Maybe I'll put up with them as best I can until tomorrow night, and then I'll put my contacts in for the drive.
Earlier today, the left earpiece popped off as I tried to tighten the screw to make it a bit more stable. Inside the bulgey part nearest the lens (my, how technical) was a spring with a little solid metal piece at the end that applied pressure to the rest of the frame and snugged the frames into place on my head. The spring explosively decompressed, shooting the little metal thingy (very much like a tumbler from a very small lock) across the room and into oblivion. It took me a good half hour to get the earpiece back into place, albeit much more loosely than it had been before. The earpiece is also much more wiggly in the vertical axis than it had been before, which is why they keep shifting around all over the place.
Science teacher Roger Bennatti kept a Twinkie for 30 years in his classroom as an ongoing experiment to see what its shelf life was. You mean to tell me that after 30 years the bloody thing hasn't hatched yet?!
Wow - James McGreevey, governor of the state of New Jersey resigned after coming out on CNN.
This is pretty cool - type arbitrary text into this website and an application will sing it for you by piecing the words together out of a library of samples from other songs.
Too much going on in too short a period of time. Bear with me.
Gods, I need sleep. In fact, I'm going right now...
The number of people whose web browsers don't understand the 'ftp://' URI is amazing. The hell of it is, all of them seem to be IE v6.0 on Windows XP (Home Edition, I think).
Curses and a pox upon the asshole who seems to think that taking every word from the Webster's dictionary and trying it as an e-mail address on the Network is a good idea. We've been flooded over here by this guy - over two million messages in twenty-four hours. Two million. I've had to manually rotate Lucien's log files as a result. My network link is flooded with crap and Lucien is straining under the weight of all of the junk that's filled his input queues. Earlier this evening I spent some time working on that with Qhandle to sweep the junkmail out by hand, but he's going to have to do the rest on his own. If anyone Out There is sending mail to one of the users of the Network, please be patient because it's going to take a while to process the crap. It's stuff like this that makes me wish it was legal to LART hosers like him or her.
Times like this make me want to get Fist of the North Star on these idiots. Fuck the Geneva Convention, I want to see spammers' heads explode like watermelons dropped from overpasses and shards of broken bone poking up through lacerated muscle tissue and skin.
By the bye, if any of you Out There will be travelling northward through Pennsylvania, be careful if you'll be driving through Fulton County, just over the Maryland/Pennsylvania border. There are maintenance roads that run parallel to the highways, about thirty feet above the roadway. Police cars position themselves up there and scan the passing traffic with radar guns. If they detect a viable target (someone going faster than 55 mph) they shoot right down the maintenance roads to the highway like it was a launch ramp and hit their lights about halfway down - that's how I got nailed last night on route 79 north. Around 2115 EDT I was busted by a Pennsylvania State Police officer for speeding just over the border. The guy had me dead to rights. I told him, quite honestly, that I was in a hurry to get home because I had to be up for work in a few hours (the gods' honest truth) so he went easy on me. I've got a ticket for $125us.
In case you've never been ticketed in Pennsylvania, traffic citations break down like this.. let's say, for the sake of argument, that you got caught doing 65 MPH in a 55MPH zone:
So.. for going ten miles over the speed limit, a $45us fine balloons to $125us. Ouch.
I'm just going to pay it and move on.
I didn't have a chance to write about my interview yesterday because I got home too late to do so (well after 0000 EDT, due to heeding the speed limits). The interview was probably the hardest I've ever had in my life, and by the time I walked out of the building I felt like a lake trout who'd try to apply to the Ph.D programme at MIT. In other words, like a complete moron.
I wasn't speaking as clearly as I had wanted to. I was so nervous, I even forgot the title of the CISSP book I've been studying from. They asked me about stuff clear back to my days at IUP, such as what kind of show I did at the radio station, what a "Computer Science Ambassador" was (in short, very little), what I did at previous jobs... in total, nearly two hours of good-cop-bad-cop questioning. At the end of it, however, I was told that I was the top candidate for this postition.
I was so nervous, however, that I got lost on my way back to Lyssa's flat.
Badly lost. I found myself driving down a crowded two-lane highway running next to a cornfield ringed by a ten-foot fence with "Property of US Government - no trespassing" signs every twenty feet.
I had no intention of trespassing. I just wanted to turn around and go back to Lyssa's, which I eventually managed.
1141 EDT
Wish me luck, everyone.
1226 EDT
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
My contact at the place I'm interviewing for called me less than 70 seconds before I pulled into the parking lot - an emergency came up at home and he was headed out. The interview's been rescheduled for 1400 EDT.
I was sitting at the traffic light looking at the parking lot when he called.
...
I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear, I will allow it to pass through me and over me. And when the fear has gone, I will turn the inner eye to follow its path. The fear will have gone. Only I will remain.
Deus est coffee.
Lyssa and I got off to late start today, and an early closure last night. We went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Tia's in Virginia, an hour's ride down the beltway, and arrived in plenty of time to miss the Saturday evening rush as people stopped out to eat before going out to do whatever it is that they do on the weekends down here. The food at Tia's isn't terribly expensive, but you do get a lot of it - the pick four platter is well worth the $9.99us, and all of the possible choices are good. Be sure to save room for dessert, namely the fried ice cream. They give it to you on a dish the size of a serving platter, and it's easy to eat too much.
Verdict: Bloody good food for a cheque of $50us. Make sure you stop in there if you'll be in Virginia.
We did get lost on the way home, mostly due to the fact that the highways leaving Tia's are one-way and not marked all that well. Thank the gods that I didn't cancel my net.access account on my cellphone, otherwise we'd have been screwed. By the time we got home, the only thing we could do was go to bed.. and this we did, packing away about ten hours of much needed rest.
Earlier yesterday, Lyssa and I prowled around the local mall looking for some new gear for me. Specifically, I was in search of a new business suit, a sharp number to replace the one that I love to wear, but was a holdover from my last body. It fits, but it hands oddly because it was designed for someone a good bit heavier than my current body is now. We found a small formalwear shoppe in the PGP Mall (no, I'm not kidding) run by some older Indian guys, where I picked up a brand-new number made by a tailorship called Falcon and left it to be altered slightly to fit my unusual frame. The gentleman who actually altered the suit was amazing - by just eyeballing me, he was able to modify the suit to fit perfectly. While he worked his magic, we headed farther down the mall to find a new tie and dress shirt to go with the ensemble. We found one in the form of a pair of sky-blue microfibre shirts and a dark red silk tie, suggested by an older gentleman who probably has more knowledge of fashion and colour coordination in his left ear than I have in my entire body.. officially, I wear a size 'medium' in dress shirts, with a 15 inch collar to accomodate a necktie.
My neck's fourteen inches in circumfrence. I'm officially a pencil neck geek.
I haven't tried the shirts or tie on yet, but I did try on the suit before we left. It fits perfectly.
"But Bryce, why did you suddenly skip out on plans for this weekend to go to Maryland? You and Lyssa spent the entire time kicking around having what sounds like a good time." you're probably saying.
We haven't been having a good time this weekend, at least, not in the way that one would normally think of it. We think it's fun to do these things. However, the reason that I dropped everything and took off for Maryland is because I have a job interview on Monday afternoon.
Wednesday night, I got a call from someone down here about a position that I really hadn't expected... I don't want to say too much about it because I'm terrified that I'll jinx it somehow. This could be the brass ring...
So, I've been a nervous wreck all weekend about it.
Any prayers, energies, good vibes, or good-luck sex with your partner(s) of choice would be appreciated from the bottoms of my hearts, and proof will guarantee you admission to the celebration afterward. <grin>
| Freudian Inventory Results |
| Genital (46%) you appear to be stuck between a progressive and regressive outlook on life. Latency (70%) you may be using learning as an escape from living. Phallic (30%) you appear to have negative issues regarding sexuality and/or have an uncertain sexual identity. Anal (46%) you appear to have a good balance of self control and spontaneity. Oral (43%) you appear to have a good balance of independence and interdependence. |
I still say that Freud needed to get laid.
To jump back to the present time, Lyssa and I met Lauren, a friend of hers from belly dancing class, and Steve (Lauren's significant other) for lunch at a nearby Mediterranean restaurant called the Prince Cafe. Their food is a bit on the expensive side but not terribly so, and their vegetarian fare is some of the best I've had in a long while. The fatoosh was warm but not overly so, not chilled (so it was easy for me to eat), and the bread on top was still warm, because it had been taken from the oven minutes before. The vegetable curry was also excellent, and went well with bismati rice. The piece de resistance was the opportunity to smoke a hookah afterward. No, nothing that would earn a visit from the MIBs was in the three foot long, highly ornate pipe, but a smoking mix called Five Stars, which had a slightly fruity taste and was very easy on both the lungs and sinuses. It went down smoothly, came back up smoothly, and left a pleasant buzz that didn't fade too rapidly. We spent a total of four and one-half hours in there, talking, laughing, swapping stories, and smoking. Frankly, I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon.
Rick James, RIP. You will be missed, oh Super Freak.
This morning I killed a camel cricket the size of a facehugger in Lyssa's closet.
Morpheus preserve me, but what the hell happened last night? Did one of H.R.Giger's dreams escape and go roaming around in the material world? It was at least as long as Lyssa's thumb, if it was a bloody inch, and zigzagged like a mouse on crystal meth with a slotted-off tomcat hot on its heels. Lyssa told me that it was big, the biggest she'd seen yet. I must confess, I only half believed her... but no. She told the absolute truth. I managed to nail the sucker with a baseball bat (she keeps one laying around specifically to remedy situations like this; I'll take pictures of it if you don't believe me), leaving a smear of twitching legs and protein the size of an 180 MB CD-ROM. I've never heard an insect go 'splat!' before. This one did.
Ye flipping pole-vaulting gods, that was disgusting.
Next stop, the International House of Pancakes.
Off to Maryland!
Well, it's Thursday. Today was spent building another system at work, shaking the bugs out of some documentation, and trying to get things set up for the rest of the week. Something's come up unexpectedly, and I must go out of town again this weekend to set some things up.
Don't you hate it when this happens? A lot of stuff's happening at the moment, but it's not a lot of different things, it's one or two big, huge things. About those individual things, however, there isn't much to say (or that you can say) about them... it doesn't make for very good reading, I'm afraid.
I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry about this: Texas police raided a house not too far away from the city of Houston on 27 July 2004 because they thought a hibiscus plant was marijuana. Johnny Law might be many things, but a botanist he is not. They reportedly also wondered if a bamboo plant could also be marijuana, and demanded to know what Blair Davis, the owner of the house, was going to do with a number of watermelon and cantaloupe plants growing in his back yard.
Dennis Leary to the contrary, I don't think that a hollowed out watermelon would make a good bong.
Today was another of those days.. on the up-side of things, around 1100 EDT today I called the manager of the apartment complex back and told her that I was going to take the apartment. I set up a meeting in two weeks' time to sign the papers, hand over the security deposit, and begin planning.
One small step for man, one jaunt across the universe for a a Time Lord.
Earlier this evening I picked up the first volume of Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, after going to the store on a wild hunch. I've been watching it on Leandra, and it's very good. It was released by Manga Video, so the quality is what one would expect from them. The music is excellent, and the animation is crisp and smooth - the dubbing, as blasphemous as it may sound, is also excellent - they appear to have used the VAs who did the original Ghost In the Shell movie. They brought the Fuchikomas (called Tachikoma, in the series) into the story, and they're what you'd remember from the manga: One part goofy, one part oddly disquieting. Oh, and Togusa's mullet has quite a bit of visual appeal, he looks a lot like MacGyver in the first two seasons of the show. <chuckle>
I just found out that the apartment I've fallen in love with is DSL capable. Earlier today, I charted bus routes to and from work for the same physical location.
To quote Dakota King, the hero of a short line of kids' pulp adventure stories from the late 1980's, "I'm outta here, boss!"
Lyssa's okay, too. That's also a relief.
Today, it was back into the breech for another fight with Solaris. This particular battle ended in scorched earth and bulldozing, to clear way for a new playing ground.
That's about the size of what's been going on today. Lots of stuff that I can't write about, and that's really about it. Boring stuff.
This isn't, though. In Oshkosh, WI, after a police officer was shot last Saturday night, police officers went door to door, confiscating all of the guns they could find in every home they went to. Search warrants were issued for only two homes, to seize weapons for forensic analysis, but an unstated number of other homes were searched also. Interestingly enough, this story managed to make it into the national news shortly after. Cooler heads are speaking out, stating that verbal consent is not enough for confiscation, and that what happened was beginning to make residents nervous, and understandbly less trusting of law enforcement (the exact wrong thing, right now). If you search Google News, you can find a lot more on this incident - my wrists hurt.
Remember, way back in the day, when games like Jet Set Willy drove you nuts, because no matter how hard you tried, you could never finish the game? There just had to be an item you missed, or you just weren't hitting the jump button at just the right instant to clear that gap? Guess what? Sometimes it's not you, it's the game. For the heck of it, I looked up the game Jet Set Willy on Google tonight, and came across a page of POKEs (Commodore and Timex/Sinclair BASIC commands to insert values directly into memory locations without having to edit the executables, essentially patching a running binary) that remedy the bugs that render them unfinishable. As it turns out, there were also many more sequels and hacks of the game than I thought at first - at least six, and from what I've stumbled across, there are many more than that.
If 8-bit remixes are your thing, check out the Digital Press Sound Archive, in particular the work done by Seth, a.k.a., 8-bit Weapon. He even did a remix of the victory theme of Interplay's Neuromancer!
It's amazing how much havoc simply moving a single workstation from one office to another can wreak in a Windows domain. It set me back a good two hours at work, and messed iwth most of the rest of my day.
But, what can you do? It's Monday.
..which pretty much describes how today went. It started off hectic as I moved my stuff from one office into another and waited to get into the network to get to work, then helped the new contractor for a while, then rushed around the rest of the day doing Monday morning due diligence-type stuff to catch up. All in all, it was in a blender. By the time the end of the day rolled around I didn't want to see or talk to anyone, I was so tired and frustrated. I didn't want to talk to Dataline on the bus, nor did I really feel like consulting tonight.
Dataline's boss' kids hosed his computer up royally. By the time I got there it was crawling and error windows were popping up every few seconds, probably due to bugs in the spyware itself. Ad-Aware alone wasn't enough; Spybot alone wasn't enough. I eventually had to go through everything with the Windows Task Manager and Regedit and rip stuff out by hand. At the end of it all, I managed to get everything cleaned up, remove the annoying error messages that appeared shortly after login, and even got rid of the annoying System Soap startup window that hijacked everything.
It's gotten to the point where I wish that someone would go vigilante and take out a few designers of spyware... real black ops style action. A few coders (say, the guys behind Gator, WhenU.ClockSync, and maybe Raznew-A) are ambushed outside of their office, and worked over by a couple of guys dressed like ninjas. Maybe their hands get broken, maybe they just get their heads shaved and their asses worked over with blowtorches and vegetable brushes. In the best of all possible worlds, they'd serve as an example to adware, spyware, and all-around muckware development houses - their software is unwanted, and its presence will not be tolerated.
In the best of all possible worlds, of course.
Yes, I'm feeling cold blooded and malevolent right now.
I'm sick of having to fix system after system that's been brought to its knees by a piece of code that thinks it's really neat to insert itself into IE and slow the system by a factor of ten. I'm sick of seeing megabytes of traffic every day from that software as it tries to sneak through the firewall and grab updates to itself, or worse, transmit what the user's been doing all day to someone in another network to analyse. As a security guy, the only way I can really interpret such activity, in light of federal law, is as a hostile act. That's a breach of network security, and must be treated as an incident, no different from someone, for example, compromising a web server. The information sent might be proprietary information, which would most certainly constitute a security incident. As an IT guy, I'm also sick of performing surgery on the workstation of Joe Schmoe in the next office over because his box is crawling like someone who thought they could out-drink Bluto from Animal House, and I'm sick of watching a sizable fraction of the network traffic be requests from muckware and not people doing research.
I'm sick of having to clean up messes of this magnetude with regularity.
This afternoon I spent much of the afternoon wandering around being a consumer whore.
I took advantage of the back-to-school sales at the local strip mall to pick up a carload of new equipment. I bought a small microwave, which would be sufficient to get me through the week, and not take up too much counter space. I also got a good deal on a vacuum cleaner and a crockery set, enough to keep a decently sized space clean and fed without too much trouble. Tumblers are going for cheap at Wal-Mart, everyone's favourite plague upon the strip malls and mom-and-pop corner stores, as are teakettles. Giant Eagle wa running an unannounced sale on cookware also, and I was able to walk away with a cooking knife set for less than twenty dollars American.
But why, you're probably asking yourself, is the good Doctor dropping cash on so much hardware?
Shortly after 1700 EDT yesterday afternoon, I put a deposit down on an apartment.
Last week, I'd spent some time setting up appointments to visit apartments around Pittsburgh, different ones from before. Bright and early, I got up, did the usual routine of basic maintenance-and-breakfast, and started calling around to confirm. My first inkling that things would not be going as smoothly as I'd hoped was that the phone number of the first place had been disconnected. Uh-oh.
Confirmation of this came from getting horribly lost while searching for the place. Badly. Scarily. Somehow, my brain just didn't pick up on the fact that the road is one I travel every day on my way to and from work. By the time I finally found the building, I was over an hour late, though I'd planned for that possibility, in truth. I had the opportunity to see three flats, two studios and a one bedroom apartment. The front door of the building slammed in my face, striking my shoulder hard enough that I could feel the joint separate and pop back into place, which isn't a pleasant sensation when I do it deliberately, either. The deadbolt lock on the first flat jammed, and the key got stuck when it was time to leave. The pad was as small at my college dorm room, and the renter wasn't the best of housekeepers, to say the least.
I was surpised to find a stack of pornographic DVDs piled on top of the desk.Piled in the corner was a bed and toys sized for a toddler, perhaps five or six years of age.
I've got no problems with porn. I do, however, have problems with leaving one's stash within easy reach of a youngling. That hits all the wrong buttons.
Strike one.
The second was larger and cleaner, its tenant was a much better housekeeper. He was also, I was told, not there very often. It was much larger and a much nicer carpet and paint job. I think I heard about the refrigerator on Coast to Coast AM a few years ago. Black mold is hard to get rid of, and grows under only the most harsh of environments, I've discovered over the years. Decided not to take the chance.
While the landlady went off in search of a maintenance guy to extricate the key from the lock, I examined the area a bit more thoroughly. To my chagrin, I noted that the wood around the locks of the first flat was partially missing, and only a cheap brass plate had been bolted over the gap in the wood to mount the locks. Someone, I deduced, had kicked the door in, probably for a quick burglary.
Strike two.
The third flat, two floors up, was even nicer than the second, and even had a decent bathroom. When I looked out the window at the neighborhood, however, I chanced to observe some thuggy looking guys flashing signs at each other as they passed on the street.
"Great. Gang bangers," I thought.
Strike three.
The second place I visited was just down the street. The address I stopped at was the front office for the property management company, and one of the kids (local guy, probably just starting school, if I pegged his age correctly) drove me to two buildings to show me the open apartments. The first was an attic one bedroom apartment, and had a lot of usable floor space... but thei walls followed the shape of the roof, so three feet above the floor, the walls began to taper inward, making it impossible to put anything taller than a kitchen table anyplace. There wasn't even a proper shower in the bathroom, there was only a bathtub and an extensible hose. The second place was a studio apartment across the street from a car dealership. The picture windows let lots of light into the apartment, and the fireplace was recessed and sealed off, which made it a rather attractive ornament. Upon closer examination of the picture windows, I noted two holes punched clear through the perspex, each about the size of a dime, and surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks about the size of an American silver dollar.
I'm no expert, but I think those were bullet holes.
The kid tripped over his tongue when I mentioned them - to his credit, he didn't have an explanation, and didn't pretend to.
Nice place, but I didn't want to take a risk. I might have taken it if no other possibilities had presented themselves. I also pointed out the fact that the mortar around the windows and fireplace was crumbling, the kitchen window couldn't be opened, and the electrical outlets were in bad shape: One was plugged with paint, another was badly broken. We couldn't find the jack for the phone line, either, and we searched for a good half hour or so.
I nearly settled for it. I told them that I'd have to think about it, and I'd let them know later. The guys were nice enough to fill out maintenance reports before the fact, to get them fixed before the next tenant moved in.
The last apartment was a few districts over, in an apartment complex that I've driven past time and again over the years since I returned to Pittsburgh. It's built like the sort of bunker that Thom Felicia would construct if he felt a need to get away and hide out for a while. I got there early and spent some time fumbling around, trying to find a place to park. At one point I made it all the way around the back of the building, only to discover that there was no way out, due to the maintenance truck parked at the end of the alley, and no room to turn around. A cool head and a steady hand backed the car out of the alley and got turned around without any trouble. Because I got there early, I wandered around the structure for a while, looking for the woman I was supposed to meet. I managed to get into the building by sneaking in the maintenance door at the back, and politely knocked on the door of one of the tenants who was having her apartment remodelled. She was rather surprised to find that I'd gotten in, and once I'd made it clear that I was clueless and only searching for the manager, she was kind enough to call the manager to let her know that I'd arrived, and let me sit out front to wait.
I sat on the front steps for about a half hour, and finished my book. Soon after, the manager of the building rounded the corner and asked who I was. I answered truthfully, and she remarked that she'd been looking for me. I didn't know where her office was, so I had been waiting for her. That cleared up, she lead me up to the apartment for rent, and after some initial fumbling with the lock (what is it with apartments I'm looking at and locks that jam?) she let me in to look around.
I found home.
The walls are white plaster and sealed masonary. The carpet is brand new and a soft, even grey colour. The window faces the east, it's one of those thermal models, and there's even a ledge outside that you could put plants on, if you so chose. I'd guess the living room is close to thirty feet on a side, and the kitchen nook is set against the north wall. It's full equipped - there's a gas stove and a brand-new fridge. The sink's even new. The bedroom is about half the size of my Lab, about twenty by twenty feet. It has its own furnace and air conditioning unit, so the climate can be controlled independently of the other flats in the building. It's also about two blocks away from the local telco's CO, so there's a high probability that I can get DSL (I've already contacted the folks at Telerama about doing a line check).
The manager gave me an application and told me that I could leave a deposit on the flat, so that she'd stop showing the apartment to other people. I drove home, dashed off a cheque, and floored it back to the building to drop it off.
There's bus service to downtown Pittsburgh and all points west every fifteen minutes.
I found home.
I returned home, triumphant, and spoke to Lyssa for about an hour, bouncing about my find. Then, I headed back to the building to drop my cheque off with the manager, to make sure that I've got first crack at that flat. It's too much what I need right now. It fits my purposes perfectly. It's mine.
Later in the evening, I drove over to Lupa's to get ready for an evening to celebrate. I touched up my looks a bit (we were going out gender bending last night, and she'd been dying to try out some modifications that she's been making to herself lately) and snapped some photographs of each other (check our respective websites in the near future for them) in the front yard, under the tree and near the archery target. Afterward, we drove out to the local Chinese smorg for dinner, and were treated to a group of members of the ballcap-and-wifebeater crowd and remarks that most lifeforms with one hundred functional neurons and less find amusing. Personally, I found it amusing to switch from a male to a female voice and back again while talking, to mess with their heads.
After they left, I still got up to check on my car. No problems.
We headed back to pick up a CD that she wanted me to listen to and then set out for the South Side, the hotbed of Stuff To Do On A Saturday Night(tm) in Pittsburgh. We poked our heads in a few places to check up on people, left behind a few gifts for people, and stumbled into a Venus In Furs concert at Nick's Fat City. Three bands for $5us? Why not... Lupa is pleased - she was mistaken for a biomale with little trouble. I'm proud of her.
Something weird coloured our time there, though - things weren't adding up. The opening band was having a lot of trouble with their gear, and kept stopping and starting. The people weren't adding up, either. It might have been the fact that a lot of the folks who were showing up were mostly drunk, which messed with the vibe of the place. I was on edge the entire evening, unable to relax, unable to fit in. We wound up leaving after the first opening band left the stage and headed out to B'witche's Tavern to see how the turnout for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was. For a while, we discussed going down to Pegasus to dance for a while and make everyone wonder, but wrote it off as being a bad idea, due to the vibe in the air last night.
The Tavern had the most people in attendance than it has for a long time, including some folks in costume. On the scorecard were two Magenta cosplayers, one Eddie, and three Riff-Raff. They also went to town on Rocky karoke; they were excellent singers, one and all, and had a lot of fun while they were up there. Shanyna, a fixture at the Tavern and staff, is also an amazing singer, even mastering Little Nell's singing voice. The ritual virgin hazing was also held, overseen by Master of Ceremonies and Satanic Mechanic Alexius Pendragon, and the group of seven virgins (including barmistress Saphy) were introduced to the fandom in the finest way possible... by being fucked by the audience. Neophytes take note: Do not take that literally; hit up Google for the RHPS FAQ. The movie began, and at that point all hell broke loose.
Some true Rocky veterans were there last night, people who know the movie so well there is more dialogue in the callbacks than in the entire movie. I wasn't able to keep up because I was laughing too hard at the lines that I'd never heard before. I'm going to be hoarse on Monday. There's serious talk right now of making it a permanant fixture there on the last Saturday of every month. The folks who came last night were cool enough to help clean up, even going so far as to bring a shop-vac ("Dedicated fans bring props; anal rententive fans bring vacuum cleaners," as one of the Riff-Raff cosplayers said). We had the place back in shape inside of a half-hour, at which time everyone parted ways. Lupa and I hung around for another hour or so to take pictures around the outside of the Tavern and then headed back to the Lab to copy the images off of my camera and onto a blank CD.
Leandra refused to burn a workable CD. The rest of the Children are also being uncooperative. In short, they don't like Lupa. Not one bit. Leandra won't burn CDs for her; Lucien keeps 'dropping' messages containing the link to the pictures we took; von Neumann is blocking everyone out; Lain is just.. Lain. Even after Lupa went for a walk to clear her head, they still complained and acted up. We're going to have a talk soon, they and I.
This isn't a promising sign for Bush: Even Reagan's next of kin don't want him in office for another term.
Taking photographs last night, I noticed once again that the skin on my face is a different colour than the rest of me: I'm told it's an orangish colour. So far no one else has mentioned it, though it's unmistakable, and slightly disturbing. It's due to heightened levels of beta carotine in my body's bloodstream, that is for certain. However, my addiction to carrots (I can eat them all day if you let me, they satisfy my sweet tooth like no other) has been a thing of the past for months now. Yet, examining the images, my face is much darker than the rest of me, and the colour is a sickly shade of orange. Dataline pinned it this evening, I think: The beta carotine in my bloodstream is still there; the water I drink every day (between three-quarters and one gallon of water a day) isn't enough to flush it out of my system; because only my face gets any sunlight during the day (due to business clothing), the slight tan that develops heightens the colouration, making it highly noticable.
Either that, or something about cameras makes me look like a mutant.
That, or my visual cortex or self-image are screwed up, and I'm finding anything to make myself feel bad about my appearance. Maybe it's nothing. A few people I've asked haven't said anything about it, and that sort of quirk of appearance tends to draw attention of all kinds.
I just don't know.
I discovered what was wrong.
Leandra is writing CDs just fine. Her primary CD-ROM drive isn't working anymore. The DVD-ROM drive, on the other hand, reads them just fine.
It's the end of yet another week and damn, it didn't come fast enough.
The project at work kept kicking my ass harder and harder, until eventually I found out that the plug had more or less been pulled. Specifically, the decision to bring in someone else had been made earlier in the week, and I think that it would have happened no matter what I'd done (or been able to do). I should probably be angry about this; in fact, I think I should be royally pissed off about this turn of events. I'm not, though. I'm not sure if it's a sign of maturity, or if it's just burn out, or being tired, or what. It just is, and it's out of my hands, now.
It's funny: I almost had plans of making a triumphant entry tonight, about pulling it off in the nick of time and coming home bouncing off the walls. It didn't turn out that way. Not by a long shot.
I'm okay with failing once in a while. I just don't like it when it's a foregone conclusion.
Thankfully, I didn't have a repeat of that dream from yesterday morning, which I'd been hoping to write about...
I was in a garden of some kind, in the back yard of an older looking house, the kind that I dimly remember my great-grandparents living in all those years ago. There were thick bushes, hedges perhaps, encircling the yard. Some of the ground had been torn up, and patches of bare soil could be seen. A small blue bird, about the size of my fist, was racing around the yard, trying to escape the claws of a black cat that was persuing it with all its might. I don't know why the bird didn't try to take wing to escape; it was however, flapping around the yard like mad in a curving, twisted path throug the yard. It disappeared beneath the hedges, with the cat still tearing up the ground after it.
Somehow, the bird found its way into my cupped hands, where I held it tightly. Noting the smears of blood trickling from its beak, I loosened my grip upon it, trying not to hurt it any more than it already was. I could feel someone or something behind me, something very large and very dangerous. I knew with the certainty that accompanies dreams that my life was, quite literally, in its paws (for it was a cat much larger than I, and if my memories of its forelegs and paws are accurate, anthropomorphic). The soft leather pads that rested against my arms and chest would remain there as long as I didn't do anything rash, like try to run. Eventually, the bluebird crouched on my flattened palms, and I could see that the red was more than a few smears, it was all over its neck and breast. I couldn't tell if it was coagulated blood, the remains of partially digested earthworms, or if it was the bird's guts spilling from its mouth, as if it had been crushed by something very heavy or very strong. I could feel fear that I had done that, injured that bird so, which was why I kept loosening my grip until there was none.
The detail with which I could (and still can) see the bluebird was such that I could count its feathers, if I chose. The vision of that mangled bird haunted me most of yesterday, and into today.
In a move that sets an uncomfortable precedent, the federal court of the state of Alabama decided that people don't have a right to privcy in their own bedrooms by deciding that the state "has a right to police the sale of devices that can be sexually stimulating." How does this work? By 'police' they mean that they can monitor the sale of sex toys and presumably track who buys them and who sells them. There are really only two reasons to buy sex toys, and that's either to embarass someone, or give someone a good time (however you define the latter). Frankly, if I buy something at an adult store, it's between the owner of the store and myself, that's it. The state government and/or local police don't have a right to find out unless I tell them, or if I do something illegal with what I buy and I get busted for it.
Where am I going with this? To put not too fine a point on it, I don't like the possibility that this could be used to set a national precendent. I try to look at the big picture at times like this.
The winners of the Big Brother Award have been announced! The top three violators of privacy and confidentiality are.. drumroll please... Margaret Hodge, minister of state for children of the United Kingdom, for supporting a program that would track minors and share the data with other UK government agencies; British Gas, for declaring that privacy rules kept it from saving an elderly couple who froze to death in their home last winter after they cut off their gas without even trying to negotiate; and Lloyd's TSB, because they demand that customers present photo ID or else their accounts will be frozen without a second glance.
I knew that Bill Gates was a bigwig, but geez.. he had the US Department of Homeland Security working security for a dinner party.
I feel eversomuch safer... thanks, guys.
I'm everywhere.
No REM sleep? No problem! The dreams I was having just before awakening this morning were extremely vivid, and scarily detailed. They were so strong that I'm still shaken up by them. I'll write about them when I get home tonight.
Another day, another dollar.
Last night I called another fifteen places about apartments for rent, and got back eight or nine calls throughout today about them. Unfortunately, a lot of them are simply too expensive for what I'm mkaing right now, so I've bowed out as gracefully as I could. I still have a few appointments lined up for this weekend. I think after this weekend I'll make my decision, before they start disappearing, rented by people who are willing to jump in head-first to get a place to live.
It's not easy, balancing everything right now. As it stands, I'm working two jobs, two and a half if you count spinning at B'witche's occasionally, which requires a lot of energy. I'm making serious progress toward finding an apartment and moving out. Last night I found fifteen more apartments around the city, and made some phone calls expressing interest. Of those calls, I eight of them were returned. I had to bow out of five of them because the prices were just too high (not college apartments, either, very up-scale ones that weren't advertised as such, with correspondingly high prices). I could feel lunch curdling in my stomach as I found that some of the prices were in the quadruple digits per month, meeting or exceeding my net pay. I'm also re-opening some connections with old friends, and trying to get out more often. I spend entirely too much time in the Lab, so I've been trying to get out whenever I can, even if it's just for a spin around the block. The summer's a little over half over, and I'm trying to make the time to get out and enjoy it a little.
Yes, right now I'm bouncing around like an old television with no vertical hold.
The guy that wrote this article probably doesn't know about all the other times that this tactic has been tried in the past. In response to the outbreak of the W32@MyDoom.O virus earlier this week (which seems to have burned itself out), reporter Paul Boutin suggests that someone Out There engage in a few IT black ops by writing some virii/worms to crawl around and patch security vulnerabilities. I hate to say it, but this isn't going to work. It's been tried before, and it hasn't been nearly as effective as he seems to think it was. The first one that comes to mind was written by Max Vision of Whitehats fame, which landed him in jail for a while. To do the job before the malevolent code gets there, the white-hat worms will have to propagate at least twice as fast as the nasty stuff, which is going to snarl networks pretty badly, and might even be counterproductive because the increased network traffic will also slow down efforts to get patches in place. The white-hat worms could also destabilise already twitchy systems, possibly knocking out mission critical services, which doesn't do much to endear the designer to the authorities, who would no doubt be after the author... it's always the ones who try to help who get nailed.
Always be careful of what you keep in your peer-to-peer client's upload directories. Some of it you probably don't want getting out.
I've been having a lot of strange dreams lately, with a lot of glue-like or otherwise sticky imagery (spirit gum, adhesives, glues...) and insects (coming out of the places I usually reserve for implants). Weird, weird dreams, that have been taking all the rest out of sleep. Something's going on inside.
Another day, another dollar. More time was spent hacking on the same project, though not much progess was made. I've never worked with fibre channel technology before, so it's taking me time to get up to speed, moreso when it's an OS (Solaris) which doesn't have very good documentation on setting it up at all. They've got software for it (it's Sun Microsystems, of course they've got their own software for it), but what they really need is a good troubleshooting section, something along the lines of "In case your box doesn't detect the card, here's how you go about testing it."
It's maddeningly slow going.
Something wholly unexpected happened today: Two guys who were leaving for Marine boot camp in a few days were attacked by two other guys who wanted their jewelry. When they wouldn't fork over, the guys opened fire at close range on them. One was hit in the arm, the other in the chest (they haven't released anything about his condition yet). This happened at the mall that's about ten minutes from my house; the big one off of 279 that's practically the hub of commerce in my area. Two guys shot that close to home.. this spooks me. This hits all of my 'oh shit, grevious bodily harm' buttons, the very same ones conditioned into my psyche by the public school system.
And this is how fans get treated?!
"Just another manic Monday..." --The Bangles
I wasn't awakened by the alarm clock this morning, but instead by the steady drumming of rain against the windows and roof over my head. A storm had hit earlier this morning and hadn't let up by the time we got up around. It was actually rather pleasant, listening to the rain drum against the house as I got dressed. That doesn't happen to often and the novelty appealed to me. The rain didn't let up until well after I got in to work.
Most of today was more of the usual Monday-morning-catchup-and-duties. Not much worth writing about there, save for making a breakthrough on the latest project I've been working on. A big one. And now on to the next problem to solve...
It's been one of those weekends were I haven't had much of a chance to write about anything, mostly because I haven't had the urge to write. More and more, I want to get out of where I am, and to that end I've been spending a lot more time out and about lately. I've been going out to drive around for the sake of driving, spending early Friday evening and part of Saturday cruising around Pittsburgh, simply because I could. Because I don't get out much anymore. Because I spend so much time in the Lab and not enough driving around, breathing fresh air, listening to music, and seeing the world.
Because summer's half over, and I want to enjoy it.
Last night, I drove over to Lupa's house. The cats, Puppet and Toby, are still there, and still lazing around the house. We hiked back into the woods for a while so she could show me around. I don't see enough green, and I don't mean money when I say that, either. There are trees all over the place, not the carefully manicured lawns that are the trademark of suburbia. There are vines and ferns all over the place, and spiders of all kinds pick their way through the underbrush almost faster than you can walk.
Later, we drove out to Lea's house. As it turns out, she lives with a few folks that I knew way back in the day, when I was actually a part of the Pittsburgh goth scene, or as much as I ever was. It took me a while to get used to being out again, and I've been out of touch with those folks for far too long, but eventually I was able to sit back and relax. We drove down into the South Side for french fries and marvelled at the audacity of yinzerettes, who will literally bitch for blocks because they walked out in front of your car and nearly hit them - nevermind the fact that they were crossing a four-lane throughfare against a red light.
Idiots.
Later in the evening, I drove Lupa and Lea back to Lupa's den, then I headed back to the Lab to crash for the night, and rest up for today, and the week to come.
A long weekend? No. A busy one? Depends on your definition of 'busy'. I spent a lot of it looking at apartments. A fun one? Yes. I got out, and I actually feel relaxed right now.
They're kidding, right? Somehow, picturing the Christ as a kiddiot makes me feel ill...
Now this is a project that is long overdue - constructing your own electroencephalograph and driving it with open source software. Damned cool, I say. As someone whose electronics skills don't quite extend to medical applications, I see an opportunity to build an emminently useful device.. I've been practising biofeedback for years now, but since I'm not instructed in it anymore, I don't have access to the electronic monitors that they used to use, such as pulse meters or skin galvinometers, and the versions I've been able to rig up using spare parts and the odd electronics experimenter's kit haven't been nearly as useful. Radio Shack, as usual, stopped carrying their versions of such devices years ago.
Their warning file is extensive, and tries to cover all the bases to protect them from liability, but I don't think that a lawyer's looked at it yet. Yes, it can be dangerous to experiment with biofeedback, even more so when you are using electronic devices to do so. Electricity is electricity, and if you're not careful you can light yourself up but good. They have some links to places to get dermatrodes, among them The Electode Store, but I strongly suggest looking for local medical supply stores to purchase them at, the prices are much more reasonable. If you can help it, don't use collodion to hold them on, go to a costume store and get spirit gum, or use foam tape, because collodion is nasty stuff. It smells, and it gums up your hair like nobody's business. I had a lot of success with spirit gum, but the insulating effect did dampen the signal somewhat. The absolute worst, though, was saline paste on button dermatrodes. Those usually go under the chin (I did some sleep studies a few years ago), and when that stuff works its way into your pores (beard shadow) it can get itchy, and even if it doesn't it feels icky.
Not a beginner's project by any means, but it would be well worth the time spent developing one's skills.
No updates because I've been running around Outside. I've been feeling the sun on my skin, enjoying the wind, and hiking in the woods. Damn, this feels good.
Unable to sleep any longer this morning, I got up early and read as the sun rose. My excitement wouldn't let me get more than a few hours' rest last night: Today I went out to see a couple of apartments in the Pittsburgh area.
I was so excited, I put on a kettle of water to boil before I took a shower, because I wanted to make some good coffee to wake up to, Arabica roast freshly brewed in my French press. I wish I'd been able to make use of the anniversary present Lyssa had sent me yesterday, an electric coffee grinder. Mental note: Get coffee beans when next I go shopping.
But enough about my coffee addiction.
I really like the first two I've seen so far. They're in quiet places, far removed from where the Lab is right now. The first is kind of plain but there is a lot of wall space, which would be essential for my bookcases. Still, I'm going to have to leave some fraction of them behind when I move, if only for the sake of practicality. I know, on some level, that I can't bring everything with me, not for a long time yet. And yet, I want to uproot myself and change my surroundings.
Oh, well. Leaving some stuff behind will be a good chance to slim down my life somewhat, and figure out what to do with what I have. I've got too much stuff, hands down.
If and when stuff goes up on eBay or out for a garage sale, I'll let everyone know.
The second place is very swanky... it is part of what used to be a mansion that's been diced up into apartments for rent. The walls are covered with beautiful panelling, there are glass-enclosed shelves on one wall, and there is even a (nonfunctional) fireplace on one wall. The floor's hardwood and the kitchen is amazingly done. I fell in love with it immediately.
However, it's also impractical.
The panelling is nice, yes. But it would be poor for bookshelves. The pseudo-fireplace is nice, also, but it take up room that could be used for other things, like a desk or my workbench. The closet is very deep and spacious, but where would I put everything that doesn't hang up (i.e., stuff that would ordinarily go into a dresser, like underwear)?
I'm going to have to pass on that one.
The third and fourth were classic Pittsburgh college town ratholes: Tiny, dark (okay, so that's not necessarily a bad thing), and overpriced. They were scarcely bigger than my Lab is right now, and in fact I was more comfortable in my dorm room at IUP all those years ago.
Guess which ones I'm not going to take?
To be sure, however, I won't be jumping on that one just yet. I've got a few more leads to track down, and one more appointment next weekend. I hope to add two or three more appointments on next weekend, for good measure. I want to keep my options open for a while, and then decide before the end of August.
I don't remember hearing anything about one Brian Walski, former LA Times photographer, getting fired because he submitted a faked picture from Iraq which was subsequently run in the Sunday edition, do you? A sharp-eyed employee of the Hartford Courant was poring over the pictures and found some discrepancies in Walski's, which made the front page (the picture went into syndication in a number of pictures via Newscom, an internal service used to distribute images to various Tribune-owned papers). Walski took a number of images and stitched them together in Photoshop and transmitted them to his home paper. I've captured the altered photograh along with the originals it was assembled from (note: this is an animated .gif file, which will display the images in sequence) for your edification.
"Become the media," indeed. Mr. Biafra's statement cuts both ways. You can become the media, yes, and in fact it is an excellent idea (control the information, control the people that consume the information), but it can also be used to manipulate the people in any direction the media sees fit. Just as the common folk can spread the word about things that the commercial media won't touch with a ten meter logic probe (Indymedia comes immediately to mind), the commercial media can manipulate the opinions and perceptions of the people. When you get right down to it, it's very difficult to present information in a way that doesn't put a spin of any kind on it. Words can be sculpted to make something look better than it really is, or far worse. The same event can be cast any number of ways. Even the tone of voice someone speaks in, the subtlties of inflection, can colour how we process information. The mass media has the advantage: They control most of the broadcast frequencies out there. Their newspapers have circulation in the millions. They've got the raw money to print thousands upon thousands of copies to distribute far and wide, and the manpower to get those papers out there. They've got cable TV networks online 24/7/365 pouring words and carefully crafted and edited images into the optic and auditory nerves of millions every second of every day - not necessarily synthesised images like the one abouve, but carefully edited and timed nonetheless. The line between editing and falsehood is a thin one, to be sure. Their websites and search engines represent gargantuan tracts of the World Wide Web. We've got our own sites, as large as we can afford, find for free, or wherever we can install a server and a few hard drives. We've got weblogs and search engines and instant messenger networks to communicate through. They've got cameras; so do we. Now that digital cameras are affordable, the people aren't beholden to the corner drugstore anymore to get their pictures developed; their images can be copied from the camera's memory store and uploaded to the Net in seconds. And, of course, there are people who pore over each and every image to see if they've been tampered with in any way (what Art Bell used to call "pixel people").
The outcome of this battle (I don't want to call it a 'war' because no one side has formally declared open season on the other, as far as I know) has yet to be determined, and in truth probably never will be. As long as we've got the same access to the Net as they do, and no one finds a way to prevent us from communicating amongst ourselves, there will not be an end.
My opinin of The New Adventures of Cutey Honey ep. 5: Someone call David Icke.
The second volume of Tokyo Babylon is out - pick it up!
The next volume will be out on 7 September 2004, so mark your calendars, or ask your local comic shop to set one aside for you.
A few folks have been stress-testing Windows XP service pack 2 for a while, and they don't like what they've discovered. During testing, three out of five machines that SP2 was installed on broke completley, and had to be rebuilt. Microsoft didn't say why those machines bluescreened, and gave the testers at CRN a hack to get around the loss of what appears to be a critical system binary to get into the box long enough to uninstall the service pack. Even after uninstalling SP2, they had to hack the registry in a few places to completely remove SP1. Which also removed SP1, along with the driver for every device on the system. In short, it hosed the box. Don't install it, at least not yet.
For pete's sake, I thought we left this crap behind when Windows NT 4 was EOL'd...
A further rant on Sun Solaris, if I may:
The packaging system is a royal pain in the ass. It's even more difficult to work with than Redhat's native package format, RPM. RPM might be obtuse and fascistic when it comes to managing dependencies (one package requiring the presence of one to many other packages), but at least its commands make sense after you read the documentation. Installing a package? `rpm -i packagename` Removing a package? `rpm -e packagename`. Solaris' pkgadd isn't so nice. To install a package, you have to use a command which is mostly documented in the manpage, only with a minor difference from what common sense would dictate: `pkgadd -d /path/to/SUNpackage`. The -d switch is for 'directory', i.e., where pkgadd should search for the name of the package you want to install. If you want to install a package from the current directory, wouldn't you put a dot (.) just after the -d switch?Common sense says yes. Sun Microsystems says no, you have to put NOTHING after that switch.
It took two hours to figure this out.
I have to admit, I'm pretty thin in the common sense department, but even I don't think this is correct.
Sheesh.
Just a few days ago, 45 year old Scott Levine of Florida was indicted for cracking into Acxiom, one fo the largest information warehouses in the world. 144 counts of conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and sundry violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are among the offenses he is charged with. Levine is accused of illegally downloading roughly 8.2 gigabytes of personal and financial information pertaining to American citizens, with an estimated value of greater than $7mus. Sandra Cherry, assitant US attorney for the Eatern District of Arkansas, was quoted as saying that "this could be one of the largest computer crime cases ever prosecuted."
Information is not only power, it's worth its weight in gold, depending on what it's about.
In other news, three men living in St. Petersburg, Saratov, and Stavropol, all in Russia, were arrested for blackmailing a number of online gambling casinos. The men are accused of masterminding DDoS attacks against online bookies' websites and extorting large amounts of money from the websites' operators. The idea is that if they didn't cough up, they'd be flooded into the ground; if you can't get to the website to place your bets, the owners will lose money and customers. Another article states that they were demanding between $18kus and $55kus to halt the attacks, followed by warnings stating that the attacks would resume if their demands were not met, this time during times of peak activity.
Gods, I love that movie.
Consulting tonight. No updates.
Well, maybe one or two.
In Toronto, Canada the weekend of 3 December 2004 will be the World of Commodore expo, at which will be celebrated the Toronto PET User Groups' twenty-fifth anniversary. The latest hardware and software for Commodore computers (yes, there are still people out there making stuff for the C=64 and C=128, among other units), Commodore hacks of all kinds will be on display, and SID tunes and remixes will be the dominant form of musical entertainment. It will be held at the Belaire Hotel in Toronto - check the website for more information.
I've decided something about Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system.
First, it earned the nickname 'Slowaris' in spades, when it comes to installation. The system initialisation system takes ages to run. I was able to boot a machine from the distro DVD, walk away, make a cup of coffee, talk to my boss, come back, and it was almost ready to start up. I still had time to sit down, get comfortable, position the keyboard, and open the admin's manual before it ran. That took a good ten minutes or so (I use a French press to make coffee).
Then there's the disk partitioning software. It's almost as much of a pain in the six as Debian's installer makes it out to be, and that's saying a lot. You can expect to screw up at least four times before it finally works the way you want it to. Third, the keyboards on serial terminals just plain suck. It's a miracle if the backspace and delete keys work the way they should, and if you make a single typo you have to go back quite a few screens and start the process over just to retype a single hostname.
As if that weren't enough of a pain, package selection is the pits.
"Pits", as in Art Bell's Sounds From Hell(tm) "pits".
Ideally, you'd cursor through a list of packages, picking out what you want and what you don't want. Each package would have a description of exactly what it contained and what the package, as a whole, did. FreeBSD does this. The many flavours of Linux do this. Hell, even Microsoft Windows explains what optional packages do when you build a box. Solaris doesn't even bother; only rarely is there a description of what a given package does, so a fair amount of (hopefully) educated guesswork is necessary. When everything's said and done, you can easily spend two or three hours wading through a list of packages that returns you to the very top of the list after most every selection, leaving you to scroll downward through the list at 960 characters per second (about five seconds per screen if you count the scrolling effect) several score times to set up your new server.
Usually, by the time you're done with that, it's time to go home. I'll let you know how long it takes to actually install said packages tomorrow, before I leave for my other job.
Yep, I'm working late tomorrow night, so I probably won't be posting until late, if at all.
Still worried about your e-mail at work? Some large companies now hire people to read outgoing e-mail to make sure that no secrets are getting out. According to a survey by Forrester Consulting, 44% of large companies in the US (how they define 'large' isn't stated) have staff members whose sole task is to monitor the flow of outgoing e-mail traffic. A surprising 48% of companies do this on a regular basis.
As an old friend of mine once said, "Shalom Echelon, mah nishmah?"
One of the better Mondays I've had in a while, to be sure. Nothing blew up, at least not so that it couldn't be repaired. Much of the afternoon was spent re-learning why Sun's flagship operating system is often called "Slowaris", especially on the installation end of things. Hopefully tomorrow won't result in a broken back or dislocated shoulders.. those SPARC machines get heavy, especially when you have to raise them higher than your head to mount them in the rack.
I think it's time to unsubscribe from a few mailing lists. I can tell when I don't fit in. One doesn't have to post to them to pick up the traces of what is and is not 'acceptible' among the disenfranchised.
Net result of tonight's efforts: Fifteen apartment management companies called in the Pittsburgh area, thirteen messages left, one promise of a call back some time tomorrow (ideally), one appointment to visit a studio apartment this upcoming Saturday. Tomorrow: Waiting for return calls, more of the same.
I'm getting better at knowing when not to say anything to someone. It's best to let people talk, a lot of the time.
I think I'm going to go back into hiding for a while. I don't want to inflict this upon other people.
Users take note: Verizon has just announced that certain parts of the country will be set up for fibre direct to the house, the service that they're calling Fios. What does this mean? It means that subscribers will be getting the same optical fibre drops from the CO direct to their houses, the same fibre that gets run into office buildings for the T1 and T3 lines that we all enjoy. Fios subscribers will be able to enjoy up to 30 megabits per second, the equivelent of three average Ethernet connections shotgunned together, roughly twenty times as fast as DSL. If you get the triple pack of services (voice, video, and broadband service) at once it'll come in over the same line for much less than it would if you bought the services singly. Links from two to five megabits in speed will cost you $35us if you get phone service from Verizon at the same time; 15 megabit service will run you $45us every month if you get the same deal. No word yet on the full 30 megabit links, though.. I just hope they'll be relaxing their terms of service for these badboys.
I know, I know.. I can dream, can't I?
Just when you thought that the Nigeria-419 scams were passe', out come Nigeria-419 death threats, where the spam consists of tall tales of a murder-for-hire outfit "in 102 countries" who demand $40kus or the recipient of the message will be taken out.
Does this remind anyone of an episode of MacGyver? Maybe I'll get lucky and Murdoc will be sent after my biomechanical ass... he, at least, had style, very unlike the idiots who send out scam-mail like this.
Heh.
There is now an H.P. Lovecraft drinking game. Yes, you too can now get completely hammered reading such fine stories as The Dunwich Horror and The Silver Key.
I'm sorry, this is going too far. Is it now impossible to do anything these days that cannot, in some form, involve incredible amounts of drinking?
Pagan Night at the Tavern last night was a bust - almost no one was there. I drove over to Alexius' early last night to talk with him for a while about what's been going on, but we didn't get a chance to actually talk about what is on my mind.
This isn't actually any different from usual.
Fred left early last night so 'lex, Shayna, and I took turns playing music to the nearly empty bar. A little after midnight I began to feel my attention waver ever so slightly; this was magnified as the pain began to build up behind my eyes. This did not bode well. When I began seeing trails in my visual field, afterimages of people moving around, I knew that I had only a short period of time to get home and get offline, a migraine was on the way.
Parasite, 'lex, and I managed to forestall it for about ninety minutes or so, long enough for me to get back in the car and make haste for the Lab.
I got home and went to bed before I was unable to drive anymore.
I woke up this morning not to pain but the pervasive icky feeling that means that my body's biochemistry is flagging me off for one reason or another. I've got a good idea as to why, too. My reserves are completely tapped, both physically and emotinally.
I spent some time this afternoon doing cost projections, to figure out what kind of apartment I should shoot for on the basis of what I can afford (first) and whether or not it's a rathole (second). The way my finances are right now, I can afford between $400us and $500us per month in rent but not much more than that. My mandatory expenses are roughly $700us every month, and I make between $400us and $515us per week, or between $1600us and $2060us every month. That doesn't leave a whole lot for food, parking, and other bills (because very few apartments include any more than water and electricity, usually).
Unless I find a better job, I don't think that I will be able to afford to move out. If I don't move out, however, my memory log posts will be coming from the IP address of a mental institution's firewall instead of the Lab, however.
I don't think this is workable. I'd have to live in a rathole (and further become a geek sterotype, to say nothing of becoming completely paranoid about site security (i.e., the Children)), and I don't want to do that. I don't think that I can stay at home for much longer. I don't want to get a roommate, though - I've lived with people as long as I can remember, and quite frankly I need time alone for my own stability.
I'm screwed.
Pace, and old, old friend of mine, is getting handfasted on 21 August 2004. I suddenly feel very old.
A Different Drum is holding their Summer Synthpop 2004 festival again, only in Salt Lake City, UT this year. <sigh>
There's a new episode of Utena Thumbnail Theatre online.
My HOPE 2004 pictures are now online. Feel free to peruse them; e-mail me if anything is broken, if you'd like to be edited out of a picture, or if you've got a correction or update to one of the captions.
I'm staying offline today to try to get my head screwed back on straight. Talk to you later.
Another long day. I'm back in the saddle, though - I'm doing what I love the most. Building systems. It's one thing to work on a Linux system, but don't get me wrong. I love Linux. They are so featureful and the tools are a pleasure to work with. However, it's also important to get back to your roots once in a while, and work with systems that don't have the GNU toolchain, with all of its nifty options and amazing arrays of features.
It's like going camping with only a handful of odds and ends in your pockets to serve as a survival kit. You have your wits, perserverance, and ingenuity to serve as your primary tools, and everything else you 'just happen to find'. It keeps you sharp, and teaches you both humility and patience.
I love my job, sometimes.
It does annoy me, however, when multiple versions of the same library are on Kabuki and trying to compile an updated version of GAIM keeps bombing. Please be patient, everyone.
It was only a matter of time before the hardcore, wu-tang ShadowRun-style cracking started and people started trying to turn a profit by selling the spoils of their break-ins. Assuming that this isn't jetwash, of course... a group on the Net calling itself the Source Code Club claims to have stolen copies of the source code to a commercial intrusion detection system called Enterasys Dragon v1.6 as well as the source code to the Napster client and server software. Specifically, the source trees to older versions of these packages are supposed to have been copied. The physical location of the website was a web hosting service somewhere in the Ukraine, which doesn't mean much because one could either crack the provider's network and set up shop or buy service through the Net through any number of means, some more traceable than others. I use the past tense because as of yesterday, the website was shut down, citing redesign of the business model.
When you're selling stolen copies of the source code to commercial software for $16kus a pop, the authorities taking offense at one's practises of industrial espionage has a way of making one change one's mind.
Yes, they were selling purported copies of the source code for $16,000us to whomever would pony up the cash. Whether or not anyone actually paid for copies remains unclear; this wouldn't be something that you'd go around talking about, after all. How this is going to turn out isn't clear, either. I'm keeping my eye on it.
My jetwash airflow-detector keeps flip-flopping on this. A company called Artificial Development claims to have developed a massively parallel supercomputer that they call CCortex, which is supposed to be a functional model of the human brain, composed of twenty billion simulated neurons and twenty trillion interconnections between them. They claim that the model is composed of simulations of the frontal lobes, motor, and somatosensory cortices. That's a fair whack of the human encephalon, I must admit. They're supposed to be training the neural nets that comprise this project by communicating with it and using classical neural network training methods. They are, however, unclear as to exactly what this super-neural net does. Does it attempt to communicate in a meaningful way with a user, like chatterbots do? Does it take in information and try to reason with it, in much the same way that CYC does? The press release isn't clear. It seems to me that they're modelling the chemo-electrical activity of those parts of the brain, and not so much the end result of same, which would be something approximating human consciousness. If you read the company's website, their stated mission is to create a simulation of the human mind of such detail that it can assist in making business decisions at the macro scale (broad decisions as to where to go but not how to go about it at lower levels of scale/higher levels of complexity, I should think). An interesting mission, and if they can pull it off my mirrorshades are off to them.
It seems a bit too advanced for this point in time, though. You'd need an insanely advanced model of the workings of the human mind to pull it off, and without proof I can't say that they've done it.
I'd have to talk to it myself, and verify that it's not a human on the other end of an IRC chat, in other words.
Hrm.. my old civics teacher was right. Read the first sidebar...
They finally caught Bobby Fischer, ex-chess grand master. Back in 1992 he broke United Nations sanctions by travelling to Yugoslavia for a chess tournamen
