Today is:

New style (Gregorian): 4 August 2000
Old style (Julian): 22 July 2000 C.E.
Fixed: 730336 R.D.
Astronomical (at noon): 2451761 j.d.
ISO: Friday, Week 31, Year 2000
Coptic: 28 Abib 1716 A.M.
Ethiopic: 28 Hamle 1992 E.E.
Islamic (until sunset): 3 Jumada I 1421 A.H.
Persian:14 Mordad 1379 A.P.
Baha'i (until sunset): 'Azamat Kam'al, B'ab of V'ahib 9, Kull-i-Shay 1 B.E.
Hebrew (until sunset): 3 Av 5760 A.M.
Chinese: cycle 78, year Geng-chen, month 7, day 5
Hindu Lunar (from sunrise): 5 Sravana 2057 V.E.
Hindu Solar (from sunrise): 19 Karka 1922 S.E.
French: Decade II, Septidi de Thermidor de l'Annee 208 de la Revolution
Mayan] (long count): 12.19.7.7.18

Everything Day Logs
Yesterday | Tomorrow

Everything Snapshot

Time: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 00:03:09 GMT
Everything server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU mod_perl/1.21_03-dev
Number of nodes: 636299 (1866 new since August 3, 2000)
Number of users: 17480 (43 new since August 3, 2000)
Number of links: 2756636 (22128 new since August 3, 2000)

Node to user ratio: 36.402 nodes per user
Link to node ratio: 4.332 links per node
Link to user ratio: 157.702 links per user

New Nodes: [Can machines think?] [Bummer] [Beano Commercial] [books I am currently reading] [Frisco] [No Idea] [Tail Banging] [Bummer] [third rail] [modified duration] [Wrestling is fake] [Emperor Norton's first proclamation] [the deep end? what's that?] [Moment Of Weakness] [fruit cup]

Users Online (34): [hamster bong] [Uberfetus] [coffy] [Electricsound] [MasterYoshi] [Gamaliel] [whizkid] [birdonmyshoulder*] [hamstergirl] [Fruan] [gnarl] [Sand Jack] [Zari] [Anonymous One] [Jeeves] [rp] [ZamZ] [imago] [ScottMan] [mcc] [Eos] [sparky] [Pyro] [hackthemainframe] [Wuukiee] [2501] [sydnius] [Detenator] [Paper Bag Head Boy] [0x45] [spelunk] [kermitov] [weidmans] [everyone]

JeffMagnus node count: 4015 (1 new since August 3, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience: 9241 (25 more since August 3, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.302 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.631%
JeffMagnus node of the day: E2 server facts

Yesterday | Dizzy->Day_Logs() | Tomorrow

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8:30 BST

I should finish building the mini TV station in the lab today: video source, encoders, multiplexers, modulators and receivers. I have to learn about MPEG2 transport streams and PSI thingys (whatever they are)

13:30 BST

As I was clearing a space in the lab for a VTR, I felt something cold against my wrist. It was a scalpel that had been left under some papers stacked on top of a box. As I had moved the box, the papers and the scalpel had fallen to the side - over my wrist. The scalpel was balanced blade edge against my left wrist but hadn't cut the skin. I moved my right hand slowly and picked the scalpel up, then placed the scalpel carefully on a work surface.

I then freaked out.

I started to shake uncontrollably and couldn't breathe. I knocked several expensive pieces of equipment over as I backed quickly into a corner. Tears came into my eyes as my proximity to disaster sank in. I sat down and wrapped my arms around myself for 15 minutes, swaying slightly from side to side bumping against the wall.

This may seem like an exagerrated reaction, but I hate scalpels. I've spent a fair amount of time in hospital; I probably view scalpels as some kind of metaphor for suffering. All I know is that I cannot stand the sight of those sharp knives and will act totally irrationally to get away from them. Some engineers use them to cut packages open or scrape circuit board tracks; I wish they would use something else :(

This has ruined my whole day :(

23:45 BST

Just got back from seeing Gone in 60 Seconds with my Brother. He's a car nut; I thought he would enjoy the film. Pete was really, really disappointed with it - he had thought it would feature more car chases and less acting. I, however, loved it. I hate cars with a vengeance, so I was pleasantly surprised by this film. It fit a lot of characters together quite well, imho.

Fuck ... another day, another day.

I got to work for eleven damn hours today, without any sort of break (except to go to the bathroom TWICE). At least my boss bought me dinner. Still, while I'm glad that they like my work, I wish that we weren't rushing so many projects so that I could get them completed before school starts (24 days ...)

Eh. Whatever. That wasn't that, bad, though. I even got paid to watch the Republican Convention. Tired, though.

I'm going to go back to Montana for a few days in a couple of weeks. Weirdness ... I haven't been home for longer than three days in a year and a half. I have to do primary care physician shit and go to the shrink again - the usual drill. Now, at least, I'll get them all over with at the same time.

I'm wondering what will happen when I go home. I've been thinking about the past a lot lately, and it's not all sitting well with me. There are people I need to see, things that need to be said, and things that I'm afraid to deal with.

Should, at least, be interesting.

12:08 EET

Half-asleep at the office again.
My limbs will probably come apart from all this stretching, and the constant yawning will most likely get me lockjaw. The traditional Friday euphoria is quite low today because of my weariness. Again I managed to miss many hours of much needed sleep by thinking "Oh, it's not that late yet" all night. Thankfully we don't have strict hours here at work, or I'd be in a big trouble.

The bosses celebrated the company making a nice profit by buying themselves Nokia 7110 GSMs. I myself think WAP is just another overhyped piece of useless crap, so I'm not jealous or anything. Still, I would appreciate some sort of bonus too. Maybe when this company grows past Oracle.. :)

The Assembly 2000 began yesterday, but I have no intent of visiting the giant Quake-fest. I used to be in the demo scene back in the Amiga days, and it really hurts me to see the scene die and be replaced by kiddies leeching pr0n and playing Counter Strike. But since there really is no scene to talk of anymore, it would be stupid to say those kids shouldn't be allowed in.
This whole thing makes me wonder, though.. The Finnish media always makes a big deal of talent scouts finding new experts for their companies.
What, experts in Quake?
I myself learned a great deal about music in the scene days, but what skills do you get from deathmatch? Except maybe improved reflexes?
I know, it's just supposed to be fun. So why won't they shut up about the whole creativity part and call it what it is: A huge bunch of people downloading warez and playing.
The demo scene does still exist, though. But the hardcore sceners don't seem to do much other than get drunk and stoned (not that there's anything wrong with that) and the few products presented at the competitions simply suck ass. I remember when quality demos were released every day, not aiming at big $$$ from a demo party. Not all of them were good - some were downright terrible - but at least people were productive! Oh well... Like they said in Northern Exposure, things become extinct.

Whoops, this entry turned into a rant-like thing. Why did I even bother getting all worked up about such an issue? I could probably use a joint.

Morning:
Wife has to be at work a half hour early this morning, so our schedule is screwy.
Neither of us should be going in, we are probably both still contagious. She has to, by law, and I am too far behind to dawdle around here at home another day.

Planning to reverse engineer Quicken or something like it for the web so I can do my own finances over the internet. I should be able to do a pretty cool finance trracker in ColdFusion within the next week or so. Then I need DSL and a server to run it on...

I made level four last night. I am already past the level five requirments for xp. I guess now it is time to perform my Everything Journyman Project. Whatever that is.

Work:
I love my Job!
"Paychecks and Doughnuts" day.
I am so far behind at work I don't even feel like starting. There were some things due back on Wednesday that I need to publish before I can start the stuff due on Thursday... Coding on a fast schedule sucks so much.

Home:
I can't wait...

hey you forgot erisian::Sweetmorn, day 70 of Confusion, YOLD: 3166 (unacquired)

last night i was assured a job working construction at halloween haunt. yay. now i can pay my girlfriend back the money i owe her (because i am a pathetic excuse for a boyfriend) and get a car. maybe some new joy division cd's and a hawking book or two.

ooooooooorrrr... maybe i'll just screw getting the car, get a tattoo, and buy a bike. =)

life is funny. you see, all the time you're looking out from the inside, and you wonder what everyone thinks looking in. and then one day, you realize..

it's all a big joke..

you stop taking things so seriously, and realize that you are on your own time, and if you really wanted to you can tell your "supervisor" to shove his corporate stopwatch up his pompous, self-serving ass. or your school principal. whatever. it doesn't matter what you(i) wear, it doesn't matter what they do/say, it doesn't even matter what you think although you'd(i'd) like to think it does.
the point is thus: cheese whiz. and remember, chickens don't eat ice cream.

---

powered by sleep dep, chocolate mint chip ice cream, caffeine and sex. lots of hot sweaty usb port sex.

I woke this morning to a computer that actually works, for the first time in a week. I'd bought a new 45GB Caviar, and a copy of Partition Magic 5, but I stubbornly persisted in trying to solve the problem without a floppy drive. (I'd barbifried my existing drive by putting the data cable in backwards. Again. Dammit.)

So I scraped up what little money I had just before payday, took a lunch break at 3pm, and went speed-shopping for floppy drives. I bought two at Circuit Shitty for $50 total, a lower price than I could find at Staples, Office Depot or Best Buy. (Why two? Because I should have kept the old floppy drive in the Linux machine and not tried to swap it around. Now I've got one floppy drive per machine. As Click and Clack say on Car Talk, it's the stingy man who pays the most.)

I've finally got the system stable and am busy destabilizing it by installing all manner of nonsense -- VNC, ZoneAlarm, the distributed.net client, all my old Internet apps, and so on. But hey, I've got over 50GB to play with, and my 6.4GB machine is in the Linux box so I can finally install a full distro. I'm thinking I'll try Debian first.

I've got a meeting with all ten of my major customers this morning, after which I get to spend an hour or so changing passwords on our server. Joy. After that it's time for some Recall reports. First up: All the large print collections at one particular library, including the call number, author, title, barcode, number of uses, and date of last use, sorted by most recent last use. I'll probably have to feed the big green paper to the dinosaur to get that many columns. Bleh. Could be worse, though -- I got paid, I've got the bread machine set up to have a loaf of raisin oat honey bread ready when I get home, and I got more than 6 hours of sleep last night. What am I complaining about?

Oh yeah... the meeting. That's right.

I don't understand women. I love my girlfriend, but she drives me insane. When my friend Paul, who has decided to become her friend only, comes over EVERYNIGHT to drink, she will scoff at everything I say and ridicule me for cracking stupid jokes just like I've always done.
When it's bedtime it's a different story she's as sweet as she can be. However, I have not by then forgotten about her evil-bitch-side that makes fun of, and is rude to, me. It ends up making for a long night of not much sleep and alot of arguing.

I do have some other wonderful friends, Allison a very good friend of mine for many years is coming to visit this weekend, that's always fun.

Some neighbors of mine and I are gonna go 4x4ing this weekend that should be a blast. There is some kind of competition to be held at Shiloh Ridge, for 4x4's. I'm there dude.

friday!@# morning

alarm. hit the snooze. get out of bed before it cycles. i feel okay. not nervous or anxious today. smoke a morning cigarette. do the female equivalent of shit, shower, shave.

get dressed (jeans, black shirt, docs). walk the dog.

go to work. the beta release i was told to be around for went off without any hitches whatsoever. the only call we recieved was that everything went as smooth as silk. our focus in designing this project was usability, and it seems that we might have hit the nail on the head.

today is friday!

i will eat sushi today.

friday afternoon

i am begining to think the surgeon lied when he said he took my gallbladder out. guh. wednesday this happened too. sudden awful pain in the same area. only standing up and walking will relieve it. happened today after having some crackers. ouch. grizz says it's normal, the muscles in the area are still squeezing the non-existant gallbladder. all i know is i hurt. a lot. i probably won't have sushi today, afterall.

i made EBU today!

i'll probably lose my standing (second from the bottom) almost immediately, but i made it. :)

---

News

• England's Queen Mother turns 100
• california's electricity woes: a hot summer is putting a drain of the supply of electricity in california. an emergency has been declared in california, meaning large industrial customers are facing rolling black-outs in exchange for reduced electricity costs. the citizens of california are waging a ratepayer rebellion against electricity costs which have doubled or tripled this year. customers are being urged by politicians to pay only as much as they paid at this time last year.
• more wildfires in the western united states: there are approximately 60 separate fires covering more than 700,000 acres in ten states, mostly in idaho. so far this year, 3.76 million acres have been burned.

Factgirl's fact of the day:

NASA scientists are still receiving data from Voyager even though the signal it is emitting has 20 billion times less energy than that emitted by a standard digital watch.

Barring any catastrophic events, JPL should be able to gather information from the the cosmic ray subsystem, the low-energy charge particle instrument, the magnetometer, the plasma subsystem, the plasma wave subsystem and the planetary radio astronomy instrument, for at least the next 20 - 30 years.

-its a fact!

Well, like so many people around here recently, today is my last day at work. Not because I'm going back to school (unfortunately), but because I've stolen as many thumb tacks and erasers as I can fit into my car. Also, my contract is up and it's time to move on.

It's been an interesting ride. When I first got here (about nine months ago), it was the middle of the dot.com frenzy and everyone was cheery and optimistic (paper millionaires). Now, well, as I've said before, it's like a ghost town and those of us who are left are filled with a hopeless and gloomy misery. I guess those of us that are still here are like men or women in a really bad relationship. We all know it sucks. Our friends tell us it sucks. But still, we've stayed out of some misguided loyalty or nostalgic optimism. Next week they'll find out whether they can keep the doors open or if it's on to Chatper 7.

Next week I go to Washington, D. C.. Yay!

I'm glad ophie's doing the headlines again.

After a series of procrastinations, i finally took my fun-in-sun throwaway camera with pics from Europe to get developed. they will be ready in under 2 hours, which means i should have a great pic of me to scan and put in place of that silly manga girl on my home node.

I probably don't have a lot of time, since the dog is whining and barking because no one has taken him outside yet today. Its interesting the different things you notice when your not employed working regular hours. I mean, i like not being employed.. i feel less of the got to 'keep moving' nonsense that most everyone does to maintain their cars and homes (even though they also get married to combine 'ratrace' incomes to afford a semi-reasonable place.. and then they get caught having kids... and well game over.. you can imagine the rest)

What i really don't like are mini panic attacks when i call someone. It makes my thoughts scatter and my body start shivering (it's not just the damn air conditioning, they finally shut it off last night. I prefer being sticky to the insane body temperature shift from going inside to outside). This reaction probably has both something to do with the psychological and the physiological.. it makes me mad actually that i feel that way, when otherwise i feel quite alright.

I always have ideas when i'm running, i've considered doing 1 hour in execution, complete stories, since i dont think i can sit down for that 72 hour 3 day novel contest, but perhaps i can do stream of conscious writing. A creative friend of mine in London suggested just doing 3 pages of stream of consciousness writing a day without stopping to think. This helps creative artistic people to find ideas and lets them come easily, rather than forcing them.. which will always end up in frustration.

The dog is whining too much, (his room is right above mine, in the laundry/dishwasher room), so i better go for a quiet walk to the park and enjoy the sunshine, and wander over to the photo-place. It would suck being a dog when you can't do the business end of things without someone taking you.

I think he's having a fit.

Thank God it's Friday.

I can't take any more of this stupid job. It's total bullshit. I am so sick of feeling like I'm going against my morals and personal opinions by supporting this garbage known as Compaq. This stuff is such crap that I'm ashamed of my company for selling it.

I found out from my dad that they got my resume at his company, along with a "boatload" of others. Great. So, there go my chances at escape. I guess I will have to keep looking, but I feel so discouraged lately. What's the damned point? Ugh. If I could only win the lottery...

The good news is I'm not pregnant, for the umpteenth month in a ROW! WooHOO!

I feel sick from eating some shitty macaroni and cheese out of the vending machine. I hope that I can leave early. I simply don't care if the customer gets tech support today because I feel like crap.

There has to be a way to get out of here for a few weeks. I wish I had the money to just quit this job. Just walk in here on Monday, hand them my resignation, clean out my desk, and go away forever.

Oh cute. I just got email telling me that I have to move to another desk for a week while they do work on the heating ducts over my head. Another desk all the freaking way across the building. Two hours notice. Man, this totally sucks. So, I am now packing up what I might need for the next week since this desk will be covered in plastic and construction workers.

Dumbest question asked of me today: "Does Australia have its own currency?" We hire some real brains here.

Blah. Lets hope that the weekend is good.

Nodes That I Wrote Today:
none

CD's I've Listened To Today:
none

Today's Horoscope on my Calendar - Take advantage of a thaw in the celestial cold war. The harmony of the spheres reaches Earth and your creativity soars. You can make brilliant headway in almost any field of endeavor. Mother Nature beckons as the Moon joins Ceres.

Its all a bunch of tree huggin hippie crap.

First day log.. Waking up, I realized what a disastrous mess my room is. God, I need to clean this up eventually. Later... Barely get out of the house on time so I'm not late to work. Nobody would believe I live like this if I told them. I'm only like this at home. At work I am greeted by the same faces, sitting at the same desks, doing the same thing they did exactly 24 hours ago. How predictable. The day drags. It's Friday. It's payday. 4:30.. the weekend begins.

What now?

I get home. What a mess. I'll clean it later. But it's the weekend! I think I'll --- zzzzzzz.... Waking up, I realize it's going to be another one of those weekends. You know, the type where you say you'll do all these things, but that's as far as it goes. Maybe I'll clean.. Later..

This day has probably been one of the most tiring I've experienced in, oh, a very very long time. However, it did happen to present many hilarious moments during its course and thus it is worthy of daylogging, I think.

I'm functioing (barely) on three hours of sleep, and so, I am not sure precisely how coherent this might be.. never the less, here is my day, summarized for convenience and the like.

• I woke up around 5am, after wandering off to sleep around 3am, which left me quite thoroughly exhausted. Luckily, sleep deprivation generally makes for comical happenings. (This was especially true today.)
• We left the house around 5:30, and I was relatively chipper, in that "I know I didn't sleep enough but it's making me act strange" sort of way. Listened to upbeat crazy pop music until I was too tired to move my arms, they felt really heavy and then I drifted in and out of sleepyland for the three hour car ride to our destination.
• We went apartment/house searching, and looked through numerous houses and a few apartments. Key points here: Nearly all of the houses we looked at are quite slummy and some of them trashed. In one, there was a polaroid of a naked post-shower male tacked to the back of the door. Frightening, to say the least. There was also silly string all over the place. We looked at another place that had no doors on any of the rooms aside from the bathroom, this was not so good. It was a crazy, crazy place. And then, there was the trashed place.. fully stocked fridge that hadn't had electricity in about a month. Disgusting to say the least, but sadly, it was probably the best place we looked at all day. We looked at a few other places but none were quite so interesting as the one with the Matrix standup cardboard thing pinned over a huge gaping hole in the living room wall. The hole went right through the wall into the front bedroom. There was also a variety of empty alcohol bottles strewn about the kitchen window sill. Ahh, looking through houses is fun. We had numerous laughs and such.
• We ate lunch at pizza hut. Bleh.
• Unfortunately, we managed to hit rush hour traffic on the way home because we took too long in the city. I hate cities. That stupid city smell. Makes my throat hurt. Cars are evil.

Overall, the day was just exhausting and I'm quite drained of energy I might have had were it not for the city adventures. I need to wander off to dreamland now, I think. I'll update this tomorrow when I remember the other funny stuff that happened.