Did you know stuff happened today while you weren't watching?

So I've been trying to do a lot the past couple days. Unfortunatly, I've only minorly succeeded. But, I did get TCP kinda working on the RIM. Obviously the key word is 'kinda'. It only does passive opens, it doesn't do retransmission in a compliant way, it doesn't have an API for external applications to use, it fragments RAM very badly (and I think leaks a bit, too), and the sequencing code has major bugs that cause random stalls and/or byte loss and/or duplication. But it generally works. Kinda.

You can see the code here. Read at your own risk. Its rather ugly.

So. That was sort of fun ('sort of' is better than 'kinda'). I guess I should go clean it up or something. Maybe someone wants to submit it to slashdot or something. (Maybe I'll do freshmeat.)

I would give you a link directly to the pager but I'm not going to for several reasons. The best reason being that the IP address is an address on the network at the office, which is behind at least two firewalls. It is at the office because thats where the X.25 Mobitex host line terminates. Other reasons include that it doesn't work well, you could crash my pager, cause heap fragmentation badly enough to make my mail start bouncing, or at the very least, drastically decrease my battery life. I don't like any of those outcomes. (Especially if slashdot is involved.)

A few days ago, The Company PG&E sent me this power usage survey to fill out. Its sixteen pages long. I've been using it to kill flies. I think its a poetic use. I just haven't figured out what kind of poetry yet.

Now theres an abundence of dead flies in my apartment. I wish they would just fly away instead of annoying me and forcing me to kill them.

I think PG&E has a conspiracy going with the paper companies to send out long superfluous surveys for people to use for insect termination in a grand plot to put Clorox out of the pest control business.

As a side note, check out the date on that page!

Yes, I know you wouldn't use that crap to kill flies. But how do you kill flies. I guess we used to use fly strips. But hasn't something more modern been invented? Something that doesn't look quite so disgusting and generally vile?

I don't care. I don't care, I'm never at home anyway.

Can you guess what 192.168.10.250 is in this case? Yep. A RIM 957 handheld.

After thinking about it, and starting to implement it, WAP started to sound increasingly stupid. And yesterday I read this, and a few other sites, I decided to give up.

Instead, I'm going to do what makes sense. Implement a small IP stack on the RIM. Which is now functional enough to reply to pings. Very slowly.

I really didn't start working on the stack until today. The last few days were needed to get the simulator doing enough stuff so I could emulate the network, making use of ethertap. The IP stack is fully testable on the simulator now, if you're not into GUI's. Or, really, any output whatsoever besides basic printfs. Needless to say, this makes the user experience when you load the app onto the pager rather much a let-down. You just get a blank screen. But damnit, you can ping it!

I'm guessing my frustration with WAP is fairly anecdotal... Its a lot of stuff to implement, with very little in terms of testability. I mean, I would need to implement both ends in the WAP case, where in the IP case, I just needed to use ethertap to get the packets to/from the kernel on the host side.

And having to demonstrate using wapping is slightly less credible than demonstrating with real ping.

It was a lovely little test. I managed to write a drastically undersized, grandiloquent, and generally awful essay. But it was littered with Classic Adam Fritzler Style Annoying Rhetoric. And I enjoyed wasting the hour to write it. I'm sure I'll fail. But who cares. (And I dearly hope that was the first and the last time I will have been forced to use the phrase "communal digestion".)

Funny people are not supposed to be mortal.

Hum.

I need to decide who's pen I'm going to steel to use for that test.

Oh, look. There's one on my desk. Amazing. It even works.

Today was awful. For no good reason. I could've made it better, but I didn't. I really had no reason to do that, either. So I sat around and stared at the walls for most of it. Then went to dinner. This was followed by a rather accidental three hour nap, and a shower, and I wandered back to the office. I have spent the past [many] hours sitting here doing semi-random google searches. Nothing real exciting. (I hate the web.)

I do not seem to be demonstrating an adequate level of writing proficiency for someone of my age. This is not a very good sample.

Tomorrow is going to go well. Yes.

I have yet to make the decision as to whether to fall asleep again today or not. If I can only make it... just six more hours... Ugh. Have I mentioned that I don't want to do that test tomorrow?

I... I have nothing else to say.

Let's dance with chipmunks, on a clear night, under a blue moon, on the way to next week.

I need to find a pen. With dark ink.

Its been one of those days, where I arbitrarily add gratuitous commas, to sentences that are meaningless. Which is fundamentally identical to every other day of my life.

Except for the commas.

My credit history was approved for that apartment. Hum. Nervousness, sets in.

Life is real. I really am moving, and going to Berkeley in a few months.

Or at least, as real as my life has ever seemed. Which is not much.

I feel obligated to write something... I don't know why.

midendian has been logged in over 277 hours. Nearly one million seconds. I'm not so much surpised at mfaim as I am at my DSL. That means PacBell hasn't gone down for more than a few minutes in nearly two weeks... Amazing.

Yesterday was "bitter-sweet", one might say. I slept until noon, followed by going up to Emeryville to apply for an apartment. Hopefully I'm approved and don't have to put any more effort into finding a place to live. The rent is more than I would like, but it is only a six month lease. I'll most definitly have to move again after that, either to another complex or merely to a different apartment. (The rent on this one will go up to a level I really don't want to pay after this lease ends.) I can move in on the eigth of June. The complex is less than a mile from the bay shore, which offers a lovely view of The City and the golden gate across the bay. Hopefully the apartment I'm getting will be on the upper floors on the bay side. Its a nice area up there. Emeryville is a bit yuppyish, but it should be tolerable. And hopefully the bus route to the univeristy isn't a major hassle. (I really don't want to drive every day unless I have to. For the possibly not so obvious reason that I probably won't be able to park anywhere once I got there. Cheaply, that is. I could pay the 3$/hour for public parking. Hah.)

And after I felt bad for actually making a sort-of-commitment-on-a-whim, I just got back on I-80 and kept going. Across the Richmond bridge, and onto Sir Francis Drake Blvd, to Highway 1. (That drive is extremely relaxing. It goes through the coastal hills and pastoral areas, that are always perfectly green and beautiful. There is rarely anyone else on the road, which although winding, does so in a calming way (unlike most of Highway 1, which keeps your attention at every second even after you've driven it a dozen times). I continued onto One, and up to the rest of Sir Francis Drake, onto the Point Reyes Penninsula. And on to the Abbott's Lagoon trailhead.

There I found a wholly relaxing experience. The "hike" (just over two miles, I think) to the Lagoon(s) is nice; continuing on to the actual beach requires a bit more effort, because of the sand. I sat on the beach for a while, most of the time being the only human for a mile or two in all directions. (There was a woman there who always seemed to be following me, however she was entirely too self-involved to even notice I existed each time we crossed paths.) Left the beach about 7pm and started back over the dunes. (This time, I was smarter: it is easier in bare feet, which led to a comment from the aforementioned self-involved woman. She spoke with esteem of my aparent ability to survive pain to the foot. I told her that you can not feel it unless you want to, and she responded with a smile and continued onward. With no hello and no goodbye, we connected and departed.)

The drive home is about three hours. I didn't mind, of course. Its a nice drive. (Although next time I end up that far north at nightfall and have no other way to get home than One, I'll just sleep the night in the car. Yeep. Everyone thinks they deserve to use their brights.) It was late enough for most of the switchbacks that the fog was starting to encroach onto the road, and you could see forward just fine, but the water was invisible, giving the sensation of driving through clouds, with lighthouses following you, flashing, wanting you to go faster and get out of the way. Well its not my fault, damnit! That jeep in front of me refuses to go faster than 15! Ahh! Fine, I'll let you go around, then you can get mad at him instead. Driving through san fran gets less and less painful every time I do it; I'm actually starting to enjoy it. Its the only city in my mind that comes even close to being classifiable as 'beautiful', a word which I normally reserve for items of natural construct. The hour south on 280 is when it started feeling tedious. No traffic, just four lanes of cement, reflectors, and white paint. I didn't feel like driving fast; I was too relaxed to go anything but the speed limit. NPR shows were starting to repeat themselves. (I enjoy days when I've listened to NPR long enough to start listening to repeats.) And I was just bored.

I came home, uploaded the pictures, tried to get the windblown beachscum feeling off my body, and went to bed.

After yesterday, I have no idea why I felt so awful today. Probably because it wasn't yesterday.

I got out of bed sooner than I felt like. For some reason it just felt like I had something I desperatly needed to do today. Took a shower, went to the office and faxed a couple pay stubs as proof of employment (thats probably what I was subconsciously anxious to do). Spent a few hours there, doing nothing. Came home. Ordered pizza. Ate some. My chair broke (bah!). Felt generally disgusted with everything, including TV, for no reason. I managed to sit there without screaming through the simpsons.

The apartment was starting to feel too warm for me to keep from sweating, so I left. (It really wasn't that hot, but my mood excited my blood and mind enough to push it over the edge of habitable.) So I went back to the office and did nothing some more. But it was quiet, and cool. (Its only warm during the day when P gets in there and starts running around.) A few hours later, I went outside, laughed maniacally in the parking lot for a few minutes and drove home.

In my insanity, I picked up a "mr pibb" from the refrigerator. Its vile stuff, and I knew that when I opened it. But I drank it anyway. I am a very dumb human being. (I hate the stuff. And not in the oh-drpepper-is-better kind of way. I hate that even more. Not in the diet-mountain-dew?-whats-the-point? kind of way, either. Just the this-is-vile kind of way.)

My arachnaphobia has gotten substantially worse in the past month. I'm starting to see things that don't exist; get distracted by random glints of darkness in my vision. Its not really that I'm afraid of spiders, either. Thats just one manifestation of the problem: I'm deathly afraid of fast-moving objects. I don't mind spiders, even crawling across my foot, if I can see them every moment they're doing it. [Just now, for instance, I jumped at the shadow of a housefly.] I can't tell whether its severe paranoia, a specific expression of schizophrenia, or if I'm just having a bad few weeks.

It really doesn't matter.

In any case, I don't know why I'm in this mood today. I just feel... bored, and frustrated that I don't have the energy to change that. So I'll just go to bed, and wake up tomorrow to start another useless week.

One million, one thousand, three hundred, four seconds. I wish something would happen.

Why is it that I can't type as well when I know I'm going to have to hit ctrl-backspace instead of backspace? Any slight deviation from my normal habits makes me anxious to fail.

I've spent the last few hours watching Simpsons and wandering around a google search for 'glen canyon dam'. It is Eliza's fault. I've mostly been just staring at pictures. I do that a lot.

I posted an "announcement" for my linux version of the RIM blackberry sdk I uploaded tonight. I also sent an email to RIM. We'll see if I have their attention yet.

I never got g++ generating good code, but C code works just great. I'll probably rewrite the AB RIM app to not use any C++ code. This will be the excuse I've been looking for. I also want to work on the simulator more, basically because I want to implement a basic OS and doing the simulator will basically be doing that.

My obsession yesterday was this thought. When you first meet someone, you form an initial opinion of them. As you spend more time with them, your opinion changes. Your opinion never stops changing. However, how do you recognize an actual change in the person? My postulation being that there is no way to prove that a person's personality and/or being can change because there is no way to measure such a change; there would be no method for seperating a change in person from a change in perception. (The obvious solution being self-diagnosis, but I would say that your perception of yourself constantly changes -- which in itself may prove the whole problem: the person is changing because their self-perception is changing and that is part of them. Such is science versus philosophy, I suppose. Logically you have proven that something must occur, but is experimentally unfounded.)

That was rather trite. You'll have to excuse me.

(Some time after I first thought about it, mandies brought up something similar and it was odd. So I felt the need to mention it again.)

I thought of something to say earlier today. But its gone. You wouldn't want to know anyway. Hearing it would've lowered your IQ, I'm sure.

The last few days have been filled with an overly lucid mood. I have no explanation. Just ignore it, it will be gone soon enough.

I am never satisfied.

My eyes are yawning, but my mouth is shut.

I realized today what it is that I've been feeling at work. I realized that I've been procrastinating by accident. I cannot recall ever doing that before.

But I've been doing it for a while now. Say, two months. It feels like I have this deadline; an impossible deadline that is so near that I can't possibly forget it. But there is no deadline. I have projects that are just to be done whenever I'm done with them. I know that there is no deadline, that procrastinating will do no good. And yet I do it anyway.

Too many years of training.

I was actually able to concentrate tonight. Put aside the concept of time I seem to have acquired lately, and actually get something done. I can't work when I know what time it is. Concentration is just that, transcending your linear environment to promote something non-linear. Thought.

ActiveBuddy has gotten a lot of press the past few days. A few people have ended up here, after searching for more information on the company and what we do. I'm happy to talk to you if I'm not busy, but keep in mind that I get busy quickly and that I'm an engineer, not a marketroid. If you want to talk protocols and general hacking-stuff, IM me. If you want to talk about anything else, email the address on the website.

And, as is the general rule, if I'm rude to you, its not my fault.

My mind enjoys attaching scenery to vague images or concepts.

For some reason tonight, the Star Trek: Voyager episode where The Doctor meets his Creator came to mind, seemingly out of context. As soon as that thought departed, a narrative moment flashed into my mind to replace it: standing near the large boulders to the side of my grandparents house, watching a large bee fly around. It was a warm day, excruciatingly sunny. I was standing on one of the gravel pathways leading up towards the side of the house, and the bee was just meandering through the trees as I watched it, having nothing better to do at the time. The image faded.

And then I realized it. I have always attached that moment to that episode of Star Trek:Voyager. It makes little sense. It was an enjoyable moment, a detached moment. You could say a moment of zen. It was years ago, long before ST:V was created. And, I hate ST:V. And I hate that episode.

I am often maddened by so few dreams I remember in the mornings. But then I realize that I'm dreaming constantly. It never ends. The subconcious randomness that is the dreamworld fills my every thought.

And then I woke up.

Hum. I should probably rotate this eventually.

The drone of the test pattern buzz is soothing and incredibly aggitating.

It actually works. I can't believe it.

AOL decided they needed to point out a bug in libfaim today. I'm so happy I have such a captive audience when it comes to code releases. They demonstrated that libfaim could not handle the case where it was asked to MD5 exactly zero bytes. That was easy enough to fix. And guess what. You don't need AIM binaries to run libfaim anymore, since the MD5 hash of zero is obviously constant.

I need to decide where I'm going to live next year. I'm tempted to just give up and live in a dorm, but... this is kind of sad to admit... I can't stand the lack of a private bathroom. I could probably manage living with someone okay. But having only a semi-public bathroom would really get to me. In any case, living in a dorm would cost me nearly 1000$/mo anyway. I might as well get an apartment and get as much quiettime as I need.

I'm glad I looked at the prices finally. For a week I've been battling in my mind, Can I really afford my own place? The answer is still "No", but now at least I have no way to avoid it. I can either pay it to the school or I can pay it to a landlord.

So, at least 25k$/year. Hrmph. I'll need a job sometime, or I'll never make it past the second year.

Oh, and I decided on Berkeley. (I should probably send in the paper sometime. Argh. Why can't I remember to do these things?)

Anyone in the Bay area want to take care of a 32in Wega for me? I'll even let you watch it... The condition being that you have to help relocate it.

I've been thinking about giving up on libfaim. I've got better things to do with my mind and time. Anyone want it? And AIM in general. Its not all that great and doesn't provide anything more than IRC would. Why bother? Besides, email works just fine anyway.

I've spent the last two days playing with freebsd. Its growing on me. So much different stuff to learn. But its nice to not know what you're doing occasionally.

Or often.

Started working with kqueue on bsd. Promptly got distracted, of course. And then again. And then again. And then again a few more dozen times today.

Argh.

Hmmm

Ohh, a free 25in color TV with the purchase of a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed...

And British Reggae...

It's time for bed.

Ho hum.

So I get that acceptance envelope from UCSC a few weeks back. I get nothing from anyone else for a long while. A few days ago I get the rejection letter from Santa Barbara. I figured, hell, if it takes them this long to send me rejections and I get acceptance packages right away, then I must've not gotten into Berkeley and they haven't gotten around to sending me the piece of paper yet.

And I think, well, that makes my life easier. I don't have to decide. I'll just go to UCSC and be done with it all.

And then this evening. When I find a rather large envelope stuffed in my tiny mailbox, along with a small white card.

Aparently some kid is missing, and their parents are grieving.

They accepted me. I can't believe they're this mean to me. Damn Berkeley.

The most important location in the AIM 4.1.2010 memory space is 0x1218c71c, which gets hit some time immediatly after the MD5 routine is called. At this point, EAX contains the address of the input data terminated by 0x80, and EDI contains the address to the hash that was generated. Other useful locations are 0x1218d03d, 0x1218c704, 0x1218d07d, 0x110854d2, and 0x11085523. You didn't get those from me.

I do not know. Why bother?

I saved the universe, one more time. I can pretend. Pretending can be fun. Especially when you have no idea what is going on in your mind.

It is all irrelevent, in any case. Just a distraction. All of it.

I had something to write about here, once.

I forgot what it was.

I... Something. Something that starts with 'I'.

Yipee. Or not. Earthlink (new owners of OneMain, who provide my BlackBerry/RIM email) decided to send me a webcam for no reason. It is shit. But it exists. So I can not complain. I also lie.

I will complain anyway.

Eh. Maybe some other day.

Today, I took out some trash.

I also opened the curtains.

Soon, I am going to bed, after a long, arduous day.

Oohh. emacs can open and save files directly off FTP sites. Thats amazing and just generally nifty. (It bails too early when using a kerberos-enabled ftp, however. That was easy to fix.)

deepthought is officially gone. I copied the last of the files over (my 8gb home directory) by sticking the disk into earth for a few minutes (ruining earth's 127day uptime in the process). A couple of small spiders flew out of deepthought to greet me when I took the lid off. That was comforting.

I'm going to take that 25gb drive and put it into deceptive, which is currently exclusively Win2k (I only use it for putty and RIM developement anyway). I decided I need a desktop linux machine here at the apartment. Maybe that will help me concentrate. IBM keyboards help me concentrate.

Remind me to merge ActiveBuddy libfaim with cvs libfaim tomorrow. I did two things today. First, I made aim_send_im() and incoming_middle UNICODE-capable. Which basically amounts to adding msglen parameters to the functions and never doing strlen(). ActiveBuddy is now UNICODE-capable. I did all that so that they could send the (tm) sign, which is, much to my surprise, not defined by either ASCII or ISO-8859-1. Its in the weird region of the PC character set between 127 (end of ASCII) and 160 (start of ISO-8859-1). So I added static mappings in both directions to make WinAIM happy by giving it UNICODE.

The UNICODE integration in Win2k is incredible, by the way. Theres nothing left of ASCII. Even charmap is all UNICODE, and gives the duples in the corner instead of the ASCII codes. And the basic fonts are huge now. Arial contains at least several hundred characters, from every popular language from Slav to Hebrew.

The other thing I did was implement aim_send_icon(). Which sends a buddy icon. I'd pretty much always assumed that they were done using FT, so I always refused to look to see how they were really done. After a hint from this (which I came upon from uh random googling), I decided to look. And indeed, they're just a normal ICBM. So thats done. And one less reason for me to do FT.

Remind me to kick the habit of doing C-x C-s after every paragraph. (I nearly did it there! Be proud, I kept myself from hitting it and from the gratutious FTP transfer.)

The drone of Pat Robertson is getting annoying. Goodbye.

Life can change in a day.

But mail servers can not.

Tuesday. 0200. I decide I should start copying stuff onto earth from deepthought. I start transfering and then remember that dt is still using that old 3c509 (EISA version) because I was having trouble with the tulip when I installed a new kernel. So I decided to try the tulip again to get the transfer rates up. But that kernel really didnt like it. So decided to reboot it into the prior kernel. Okay, yeah, that worked. I put dt's keyboard down and start to move on when I find that sendmail never started back up on dt. Try to start manually. Can't open /etc/aliases.db: "Invalid argument". Remove that file. Invalid argument. strace. No syscall is returning EINVAL. Attempt to debug for two hours. Start cursing. Give up.

So I went to register.com and changed the MX for zigamorph.net to cq.zigamorph.net instead of dt, and to lwh.mousetrout.org for mousetrout.org. Well and good, but DNS takes forever to change. (The default SOA for register.com domains lets everyone cache the entries for up to a week.)

I set up fetchmail and all that, got it working the best I could test with an incorrect MX. And then I started transfering files again.

I suppose the most angering part of all is that switching to the other ethernet card didn't help the transfer rates at all.

And so I finally went to bed at 5am. (It would have been earlier but I discovered some Simpsons episodes that mandies' never bothered to mention the existance of (okay, she told me...but that was a very long time ago). So I had to watch a couple.)

Got up at 1304. Err. Oops. I needed to keep my plan of going to pick up that DMV form, so I did do that, even though it would put me at work later than I wanted. I went into the place and looked at the lines. I had made an appointment for Thursday, mid-day. On one side of the room is a line for appointmentees, and the other side of the room is a line for others. The line for people with appointments was tremendous. The line for others had five people in it.

I decided to forgo the appointment and just stand in the express lane. (Its like that Simpsons episode where Apu is taking Marge around the superstore and points at the 'single males' aisle and....)

I am now a Californian. Or at least I will be five to seven days when they decide to mail me my shiny good-for-one-year-only California Class C Driver's License. (Thats one thing I'm going to miss... In Arizona, you don't have to start renewing your drivers license until your sixtieth birthday. Mine expired in 2042, for example. More importantly I'm going to miss the number 2042.) She took my Arizona license away. Sigh. Until they mail my real one, the only thing I have to prove I'm me is this little piece of paper that says I paid the State of California the total of twelve dollars in cash for the privilege of having my picture taken, my thumbprint recorded, and my lack of knowledge about driving scored.

I missed five on the test. If you miss more than six, you fail. If you've had a California license before, you can only miss three. I'm scared.

Damnit of the Moment Number One: The reason everything was trasnfering so slowly was that I tagged my usual -C onto scp. That makes no sense when you're going between two slow machines on ethernet.

Damnit of the Moment Number Two: Theres a rather large and nasty looking insect flying around down here.

I should've done the drivers license thing months ago. And I had the forms before. But the first time I went in to get the form, the people were so damn rude to me that I just took the form and walked out. And I've avoided it ever since.

I was feeling confident today, I suppose. Or apathetic. I get quite brave when I'm apathetic.

So all day I've been getting mad at sendmail. And rightfully so. But I don't want to think about that. More annoyingly, all my mail getting procmail'd to my RIM has been failing. deepthought could connect to any of creole/gator/gumbo/etouffee/jambalaya.blackberry.net RIM servers. earth could not. This puzzled me all day until I got out tcpdump and had a 'doh' moment when I realized ECN was turned on on earth. Turned that off. RIM gets mail. Amazing.

I think that was the last major issue.

You can now ssh to earth via here. Lovely, isn't it? (Not really.)

Hmmm... I was just thinking back. I started this log thingy the same week I got my first drivers license. Oh, the memories.

I've had an awful time concentrating the past few weeks. I'm all over the place. Bad places. Not good bad places, either. Annoying, tedious bad places.

I will survive.

I should just give up on dating these things. It really doesn't serve any purpose. I can date everything I write down to the week without help, anyway.

But sadly (for you), I'm not the only one who reads this.

And besides, it gives me a chance to make this keyboard clack just a wee bit more before I go to bed. Someday I'll learn to type loud enough to wake up the neighbors. Or maybe I already have.

I've always wandered what my neighbors think of me. I don't really know anything about them. I rarely see any of them. I know a single woman in the later years of her life lives in the unit immediatly next to me on the same door-side. I hear her sweeping the cobwebs out of her entryway occasionally. Hers is immaculate, mine is slighlty (ahem) more natural looking. (I frequently come home and end up with web in my mouth because some presumptuous spider has decided I was never going to open my door again anyway, so why not cover it over and make better use of it than I was.) I have no idea who is in the two units to the rear (the complex I live in is made up of a dozen or so buildings, each divided into quadrants or in halves, depending on if its rented as one-bedroom or two-bedroom). They're not on the path to anywhere, so I never go back there. I do hear rumblings from the other adjacent unit occasionally. It sounds like someone is moving their refrigerator back and forth across the apartment.

I've long wanted to peek inside one of the other apartments here, just to see what other people have done with the same floorplan, turned 90degrees. I half expect to see a refrigerator sitting in the middle of the one next door. Or a collection of brooms idolized in the old woman's place.

Its just a tendency to personify whatever trait of these people you can experience, and assume that that trait embodies their whole existance.

I don't know what they'd think of me. Perhaps they think theres spider webs drooping from the cieling (which, I admit, there are), and I host some ritualistic spider breeding facility in my living room.

Which, I suppose, I do. But I didn't intend to. Its just a byproduct of not having the will to clean up after ones self.

And the little garden area that my Huge Windows open into is awash with insects of every native specie that lives in the region, I'm sure. I haven't dared go back there in several months, fearing death wielded by my unknown sublet-ors.

I wish they'd help me pay the rent.

And.

The word 'and' can be everything one needs to say, for a day, for a week.

And.

And I did nothing more today than I have done any other day of my life. Most likely, less.

And.

I'm the only one here dumb enough to keep my windows wide open in the middle of winter. This means that no one suspects that there is a crazed loner laying in bed listening to their every word as they mingle outside. Most people cannot be understood from the distance of my window to them. But it doesn't matter. Its voyeurism, whether you can understand them or not. And...its calming.

Not that I think the world would normally halt all its operations whenever I laid down to take a nap. But still. Its calming to know that you didn't destroy the universe that day.

And...

So I was driving to the office tonight, for no reason other than boredom. I took El Camino down (a longer, more painful route than I would usually go) hoping to spend the drive time figuring out why I was going to work. I stopped at this stop light, and a man j-walked in front of where I had stopped. As he was walking the last couple feet of my hood, he turned and looked at me, and said something while he kept walking.

I was deeply entraced by whatever was on NPR at the moment, and I had the heater blowing which was rather loud. I didn't hear what he said, and he didn't particularly look angry. Perhaps annoyed. Mostly indifferent. I don't know the motive of what he was trying to communicate, but of course I assumed it was mean. I instantly hated this stranger, for no reasonable cause.

I've always done things like that, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Its just that recently I've gotten more sensitive to the fact that I do it.

I get very paranoid in public places. I don't have any reason to be. They're all strangers, they don't care about my agorophobic tendencies. Which I suppose is the most ironic part of agorophobia... you're scared of a public that doesn't care if you're scared and therefore the whole foundation of your fear is unjustified. But I have a very similar issue. I can instantly hate people because I sense that they hate me. It makes very little sense.

Of course, all my years in school didn't help; there they really were all out to get me.

I hate cops too, but I think I have a justification for that. I especially hate cops who drive behind you with their brights on. Or who use their turn signal less than I do. Or... I just want one of them to pull me over so I can curse their idiocy. (Sigh. I just enjoy mocking authority figures, I suppose. The look the woman in Wickenburg gave me when I questioned her choice in testing procedure was one of those images I'll remember forever. And her kind of studder when she asked me to repeat my question, in disbelief that I was questioning her. Its the little things I find thrilling. And its the little things that will probably land me in jail some day...)

(Its still sad that when we sit at lunch and have a conversation about tickets and cops, someone can speak up and say "Yes, but only one of us at this table has been accused of DUI..." and everyone looks at me. I'll never get rid of that experience, unfortunatly.)

I did nothing for the forty minutes or so I sat at the office. By the time I got most of the way there, I had to continue and enter the office, just out of principle. (I do a lot of things out of "principle". I'll get over that someday I suppose, after I admit that I had nothing better to do anyway.) I then left the office, because I was bored there too.

So I drove home, which included getting cut off a few times and being generally annoyed with a certain other driver who enjoyed tailgating. So I forced them to pass and then did the same thing to them.

Did I mention my nack for arbitrary hatred?

I spent all morning laying in bed listening to NPR. Thisamericanlife is becoming my favorite show. Todays was especially entertaining, particularly the armadillo story in act3.

I also worked on taxes today! YAY! It looks like I owe 1311$ to the federal IRS. Next I get to do two state (CA and AZ) forms...

Maybe I'll find something more useful to do with tomorrow. Like take a shower. That could be the peak of my weekly productivity metric...

gaim is neat. And they use libfaim. And Eric is an impressive coder. And he helps me find lots of bugs in libfaim.

Hum.

So you should be reading this from zigamorph.net's new home at cqhost.com. Its thrilling to see your pages load immediately even when you're not sitting on the same LAN as the server. (Luckily I use Mozilla so I never have to deal with pages loading immediately.)

Sigh... I haven't relied on other people's servers for hosting since I first brought delphi (delphid.ml.org) online in 1997 (I think it was)... At first only connected from midnight to five AM, dialed and disconnected to Primenet via a cron job. Then we got that second phone line and it was connected all the time, except when Primenet decided it didn't need to be.

Anyway. That was a very long time ago. Long enough to forget. So lets all forget.

I spent this evening convincing PerlMagick and ids to work on cqhost. This was quite a trick since aparently I don't have access to a shell on the web server, let alone the ability to install perl packages. I determined the server was a rh6.2 box, so I compiled imagemagick and everything on there with the right --prefix's and uploaded the binaries. After random minor tweakings, it works. You can now browse my vast (ahem) photo gallery much faster and, more importantly, without drowning my DSL while you do it.

I really haven't done any actual work this week. Which is sad. But when I look at it, I spent the four weeks prior madly hacking at a single code base. Which is now working nearly perfectly. (But...after a rather important meeting last week, it was demonstrated that I really have no reason to spend that much time on that project...and I was getting tired of working on it anyway. Working on one thing for that long gets tedious when you realize what you've been doing. (Its not the work thats tedious, its the mindset after the realization of what you've done that makes it tedious. If that makes any sense.))

Someday all these photos will be uploaded.

You know, you can't spend like you're rich unless you want to keep spending like you're rich. You buy an expensive camera, you pay even more in disk space. You buy an expensive car, you pay even more in gas and other expenses. It just never ends.

Oh well. I finally rotated. In case you hadn't noticed.

Reading ancient entries really only demonstrates one thing to me: Every other year, my style of writing changed quite drastically from the year prior. But the last year, my writing style has been quite consistent. I haven't decided whether its because its actually stabilised or if if its just because I don't do it as much any more and therefore the likelyhood of changing is not as great.

Not that it matters.

So what to do now...