Hi, me. What's been going on recently?

Well, I've gotten a couple of things accomplished. I ordered new glasses, got my hair cut, bleached it myself, got rid of 3 gift certificates for a clothing store. I also made another mix CD. Here's the track listing.

a smattering of songs
The Get Up Kids.............Holiday
Modest Mouse................Third Planet
Death Cab for Cutie.........405
Built to Spill..............Cortez the Killer
Modest Mouse................Talking Shit about a Pretty
                            Sunset
Sunnny Day Real Estate......In Circles
The Promise Ring............For What Reason
Built to Spill..............You Were Right
Modest Mouse................Whenever you Breathe Out,
                            I Breathe In (Positive
                            Negative)
Sunny Day Real Estate.......Every Shining Time You Arrive
Harvey Danger...............Pike St./Park Slope

( Thank you, softlinker, for pointing out my error! ( : )

Ok, I might have gone a little bit over board on some bands, but it's still a good listen. It is generally a mellow / sad cd. Good for listening while in a mood.

I played Ultimate Frisbee today, it was great fun. I've also been working on my juggling. I am trying to learn both the 3 ball cascade and 3 ball columns. I am making good progress, I'm sure I'll have the cascade down by the end of the week. I finally bought some juggling balls of my own, so I can actually practice now.

I also miss a certain someone. I really have a detachment problem. I find myself pushing away all of my friends. I haven't contacted a number of my friends in a while. The difference with her, is that I'm not sure whether it is that I pushed her away as well, or if she sent out the vibe that she wants to be left alone and I responded to that. You know, I really do analyze these things too much. When one misses a good friend, what else is there to do than wonder what happened? Well, juggling I suppose. Or making new friends.

Well, today was a busy day. I spent about 4 hours breaking servos and turning them into motors. Why was I doing this, you may ask? Well, I'll tell you. Next weekend, there's a program at Chatham College called "Expanding Your Horizons". At some point, I may write a node about it. To summarize, it is a program designed to expose 7th and 8th grade girls to possible career choices. One of the workshops at this program is called "Is there a robot in your future?". The girls work in teams of three to build a small robot out of Legos.

I'm going to be helping out with this program, as part of being on the women@scs (scs == School of Computer Science) Advisory Council, and part of helping is assembling all the components. So, apparently, motors are very expensive, but servos are relatively cheap. The only problem is that the servos we buy only rotate 180 degrees in each direction, and since they will be used to drive wheels, we need to break them in order to make them turn a full 360 degrees. So that's what I did.. For 4 hours.

Oh, and this is the best part. So, for the entire 4 hours, we were complaining about the sticky white grease on all the gears inside the servo and how it was getting all over us. After we were finished, Allison looked at one of the packages and found a warning label that said that these servos are known to the state of California (only California?) to contain a substance that causes cancer in lab rats and possible reproductive difficulties and birth defects.. Mmm, yummy. Well, at least I'll know who to sue if 15 years from now, I can't have kids.

Daylog. Yes... more like a semesterlog. Sorry, guys.

I haven't noded in ages.

Well, that's a lie. A week ago, I wrote 2 nodes. They got killed swiftly.

We are doing a gynmnastic assessment tomorrow. They are clearly filed under the definition cruel and unusual. Fortuantly, I found a few loopholes and am probably not going to die tomorrow.

---

DOWN DATE!
Well, it is now tomorrow. Because of the ineptness of the PE staff, we get to miss out on several classes for gymnastics. Which is a good idea, as I have to do a presentation on what an orthocentre is, which I have not prepared for. I have to do 10 different skills on the floor. I have found 7 dead easy ones. That means I will get -3 points, but who cares? PE isn't really a subject in my opinion.

More things the next 'day' (due to the craposity of the dy log system which doesn't account for other countries). The next day will in fact will still be today.

12:02

Sooooo... a weekend just Happened, and nothing else happened. I went to Kuhmo and came back.

Today's stuff: I woke up slightly late and went to the university by bus. Right on schedule. Considering the experiences I've had with the buses here before, this is something sort of a miracle, because usually walking is faster. =)

The lecture: Someone from F-Secure talked about Symbian's most amazing Epoc operating system.

It sounded like an interesting platform, until he mentioned the file system is based on VFAT, rather than database approach that PalmOS uses.

Here's why VFAT sucks on portable machines: block size is way too big. Yes, even at 512 bytes - consider that GSM mobile phones need to store a lot of 160-byte files... (Yes, I know they shouldn't store SMS messages that way, but at least my Nokia does just that. Memory consumption is HUGE.)

12:18

Some people seem to whine in Slashdot about How Online Diaries Suck - and since this is an online diary of sorts, I want to share a few thoughts.

I keep online diary in two places: Here, and in Advogato.

As you may have noticed, I don't take these things to too personal level. Well, ocassionally, yes. Sometimes I vent my depression or whine that I can't code myself out of a cardboard box... but that's all.

I try to keep these things "Look, this sort of cool things happened today, enjoy". See above comment - I just told what I think of Epoc after a short presentation. Here, I keep my small comments about other writeups, my strange ideas that otherwise have no nodeworthiness, and my ocassional thoughts about events of the world.

In other words, I keep this as a journal of stuff that's somehow tied to the time it happens. The above is what I think of Epoc and the braindead Nokia way of storing SMSes now. Let's see what I think of it in 2 years...

I don't document every move of my heart, or every detail of my life. Things just happen...

21:00

Hmm... One thing is sure: Glade + Perl isn't as easy as Visual Basic. =( it's a lot cooler combination, though.

I'm making an admistration tool for YiffCam (a program to manage the archive and list of hosts that are allowed to view the camera picture =) ... it's something that actually has a GUI, as opposed to what I have usually done (Web/filter/CLI/Curses UI).

I'm using Glade-Perl package (glade2perl tool and related stuff). People told that Gtk::GladeXML is a better choice, though...

00:07

Okay, my whine about Perl Gtk+:

The module is still pretty darn hard to comprehend, and forced me to do pretty strange things.

The module I had problems with in particular was Gtk::CList (that represents a columned list). Dream things that the module was supposed to do:

• "Tell me which items of the list are selected."
• "Tell me how many items the list has."

What I needed to do instead was this:

• "Set up signal handlers for list select/unselect signals, and record each selected item to an array. (Caveat: Stub glade2perl generates doesn't have figurative 'row' and 'column' variables. It may look a bit confusing to a newbie.)"
• "Loop over each item of the list, and stop counting when the list returns undef."

This sort of things are fundamental and, as of yet, I have to say the GTK+ module has way too much complicatedness, probably owing to the C background. Damn.

The lack of query methods for list size is particularly unforgiveable...

Aside of this stuff, I was surprised how easily the UI and operations were built from ground up. This thing is, like, amazing once you get to know it. =)

---

Other day logs o' mine...

Noded today by y.t.: undef

Updated: Metal Gear Solid

Some days I wake up and Italy seems so ... annoying. But then I look at the way the light moves and shimmies and it gets better quick.

Over the weekend I broke my glass pipe. Ohhhh I'm still a bit ssad about this. I mean Nothing lasts 4 ever... but this glass had been with me nearly 5 years. It was the longest I had ever held on to one. I've owned dozens, but this one was extra special. I got it in Veneta, Oregon at the Oregon Country Fair site when the Furthur festival played there in the summer of '96.

I had bought a bunch of hash and was busy swinging it. I traded an 1/8 of hash for 1/4 of some old, old, old KGB. Then I sold half of that... latter in the night (they never cleared the parking lots and allowed people to party all night long) I met a girl who deperately wanted to trade me this pipe for those buds. I wasn't going to do it at first, but then my heart changed.

In the morning when I gave a glance over to the new pipe I was plesantly suprized. It was heavy and blown inside out, a nice piece of work.

Now it's gone. Oh well... I immediately wnet to the market (Porta Pallazo) and bought another pipe (little, hand made Peruvian hash pipe) and then proceeded to buy a new pair of pants and a shirt. Spending money always makes me feel better after I break something.

The rest of the weekend passed by in a haze. Slept late on Sunday, tried to make Thai soup on Saturday. Noded 9 entries for the annual report project at work.

Tiefling will be appearing as contestant number 11 on Channel 4's game shaow Fifteen to One on Wednesday April 4 at 4:00 pm. Thank you.

(PS: this *is* a daylog, as filming was this morning.)

I am suspended from school today and tomorrow. Why you ask? Well because I did not attend a Saturday Detention I was assigned for not wearing my school ID. The truth is that I was sick, but of course my administrator would not believe something like that. Saturday Detentions are just 4 hours of sitting in which one is denied permission to talk, may only urinate once in less than satisfactory facilities, and must sit the duration.

Also by not wearing my school ID I think I was just participating in a bit of solo civil disobedience. School IDs are just a way of taking away mine and other student's individuality and making us in to numbers and bar codes. The school claims that we must wear them for "security reasons", but it should be obvious that they do not work very well. Just last week someone walked into the school and attacked a student and then promptly left. This student must now have reconstructive surgery. Ah I feel better now.

My birthday is on Wednesday. I think my wife and I are going to take Thursday off to... Celebrate.

We took the earrings she recieved from her boyfriend to an estate jeweler this weekend. We should know how much they will give us for them sometime today. They are high enough quality that we should be able to afford a four-star trip to Cancun, Mexico with the money.

There were actually two pair of earrings, the diamonds that she got on Valentine's day, and a set of huge pearls with aquamarine dangles that she got months ago and never told me about. I wanted to just throw them away, but I guess taking a nice trip somewhere is ok.

I haven't been noding much recently, because I don't have anything to say. Sorry.

I have no life.

Everything that happens in my life, doesn't happen to me. Things happen to my friends, and I hear about it and deal with it, but I am always the bystander; the confidant. Everything is outside of myself.

Examples from the past 2 weeks:

• Mom has knee surgery
• Friend cheats on boyfriend with other friend
• Friend (different one) gets forced into three-some and is seriously traumatized
• Sister gets a raise
• Friend gets his head shaved
• Sister buys tickets for trip to Ireland

What's happened to me in the last two weeks? Hell, what's happened to me in the last 2 months? Nada. I just had reading week, and I went to visit traumatized friend, and cheating friend came to visit me. I bought a funky shirt at Value Village.

I am disconnected from the world

School started again today. I got 73% on my Political Science midterm. Is that good? I don't know, it seems okay.

My friends keep complaining that my vocabulary is too advanced. They think I'm being condescending, but really I just love words. I gain more and more here at school. It's marvellous, but it annoys my friends. Does that mean I need smarter friends?

My Eudora is all fucked up. That makes me sad.

I think I have forgotten how desperate and crazy I can become over food, how obssessed and driven. So it doesn't appear to be as much of a problem as it used to be. I have forgotten how I used to buy a bag of chocolate chip cookies at Rite Aid and tell myself they were for everyone. Then I would fix dinner and (having started eating them in the car) eat the rest of the cookies - one of the kids might get two - that evening. The next day I would do the exact same thing again. And during the day I would have had some other cookies, some candy bars too. And maybe another candy bar when I bought the cookies. My stomach would distend and bloat. Sometimes I would eat myself into a physical state of such discomfort I could focus on nothing else but my stomach hurting, actually hurting. The weekends were worse. I'd start out eating something like cookies or candy, and eat - all - day - long. I'd never ever stop, all day. That is when my stomach would usually hurt the worst. I'd begin to have fantasies about bulimia at that point. Once I bought some syrup of ipecac, but I could never bring myself to use it.

Now, this wasn't the worst part, of course. Oh, no. All DAY long - I would have thoughts of those cookies (like they were so great! - please!) pop into my head as I worked and talked to people. As the time drew near to my being able to get them, the thoughts and the drive to get them would intensify until I went and got them. At this point, the cookies were singing to me. Calling me in a siren song, luring me to my emotional death. And did eating them shut this up? No, no, no. It was worse. I was now stuck in a room with these singing cookies, eating them, and the singing intensified. I couldn't hear any other thoughts or feel any of my feelings clearly. If one of my children or loved ones tried to communicate with me, well, they'd better be shouting. Or crying. Or in dire emotional need. Cause I could just barely make out what they wanted or needed if it were a normal, every day kind of conversation. I wouldn't really care. I would tend to it -feeling resentful for the intrusion - as the cookies would keep calling and calling me. They, after all, were my true best friend.

I think remembering this pain and the oblivion is the best way for me to keep walking this path. I'm having a lot of difficulty right now with my feelings; and I will for quite some time, as my confusing, conflicting emotions sort themselves out and I continue to integrate my selves. I also have trouble knowing when I need to be alone, and when I need to be with some one else. It's very hard to ask for a friend to just keep me company when I'm feeling so sad and burdened. Even though I am perfectly willing to do it for some one else - I find it hard to believe some one else (besides M.) wouldn't mind.

It's raining again.

I went back to school today. I had a dreadful cough and cold over half-term, so I was unable to do anything. As a direct result of this, I discovered (or rather, took the time to signup to) Everything. As you might of guessed, then, this is my first day log.

But going back to school..... well, we have another new person in our class. We seem to get all the new people. Hald of them are losers, too.

Parents Evening is coming.. on Thursday. Of course everyone is really worried about it. Except me. I know I'll just get more glowing reports like last year.. It turns out I got 100% on my Business Studies test from last term. Hurrah.

My life seems a bit empty right now... too net-centric if you ask me, but then that's my fault as well.

As I said, it's raining. It'll go on raining. For a long time. For me at least.

Well, I just had my first weekend off for weeks, and it was good. We had snow, big lumps of fluffy snow. (I like simple things like that. There's nothing like walking in the dark in falling snow.)

As I suspected, the coursework is starting to mount up again but it's a downhill slope from here. Only 4 weeks of term left.

Just applied for a scholarship with Sun Microsystems for this summer. It's for 8 weeks, with half of the successful candidates going to California. I would be really pleased if I get it because I haven't left England in 5 years (except for a day trip to Paris a couple of years ago).

This is blatent noding for numbers. My life is so mundane, I can't even write interesting daylogs.

Hrm.. First Daylog in a while.

I'm still working. I was given a sharp cut in pay, but I'm till employed, so that's a plus. I guess. I suppose I should be working now, playing with X509 certificate code, but I'm feeling slightly disillusioned. Maybe it's because it's a Monday, or perhaps because I feel like the new managment gives me the respect of a trained chimp and I could now make more money doing telemarketing. Granted, I 've told myself on several occasions that I'm not doing this for the money, but the point has come to where I'm not sure if I can pay my bills and still have the luxary of food.

Oh well, there is also plenty to be happy about. The love of my life just got her first job, and is soon about to get laid off from it due to bad fiscal planning on the part or her employer. She is not at all sad about it because she hates the job, she'll get severence pay and she still lives at home so she has no bills. Lucky girl.

I've finally got the cobbles together to resume working on my own side projects again, namely my weblog (pyxidis.org) and my first serious foray into mobile applications, the Pyxidis NotePad (notepad.pyxidis.org). The latter is a cool little thing, and it's letting me once again use HDML and gives me an excuse to play with the 'wireless web' feature of my NeoPoint PCS handset.

I'm still striving towards that lofty goal of getting paid to do my own stuff. I hope to make a 'thing' that is cool enough as to actually get investors, etc, so I can devote myself to full time. I'm somehow doubting that will happen, though. I'm in a cynical phase right now.

Oh, and I've got a cold. Feh. ** sniffle **

Wow... my highest ranked node just broke +100. I'd be happy if it wasn't such a painful memory.

When I had my Beetle, (1988-1992, RIP) I would take it to a horribly overpriced garage in Nutley for service. I remember a fragment of a conversation with one of the mechanics. Ed, on spring, when a young man's thoughts turn to love: "All my kids were born in fall and winter. Yesterday I said to my wife, 'It must be spring', and she said 'Oh, I know, I know...'" So, my dreams are laced with sex. And bugs. I sympathize with RevJim23's sentiments in "I'd already be a Buddhist if it weren't for all these damn spiders". Winter weather has become maddening, but I don't look forward to spring's perennial gift of house centipedes.
Rented Orgazmo, a work of genius, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, last night. I had never seen 'Cuckoo's Nest before. Its rank in the various "best movies of all time" lists is well-deserved. I fully appreciate why Randall would prefer to face the music in the institution rather than ROTC.

Wow!

Quite an eventful morning today.

First, I sit down and check my E-Mail at 9:43 this morning, and I receive a message from our local HR director saying she wants to see me when I have a moment. Okay, I can do that. So I walk over to her office, knock politely, and ask "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes. Did you meet the woman who was down here last week giving the Sexual Harassment Presentation?" Uh Oh....

"I didn't meet her personally, but I attended. What's up?" At this point, I'm thinking "Shit! The woman I asked to lunch said something to HR. Fuck!"

"Well, she happened to pass by your office and saw your Britney Spears pictures." (This is where I cracked a smile.) "She asked that you take them down."

As soon as she said "pass by your office", I knew what was coming - it was somewhat expected. So I chuckled, said "Okay, will do.", and proceeded to take down my pictures.

This woman was personally offended. Awwwww.

It's amazing that an overly sensitive, insecure corporate monkey flies down to an office which was formerly another company (that her company subsequently purchased), and becomes The Enforcer. It would have made more sense to ask around the office, something to the effect of "Do the pictures in this office offend you?", but corporate monkeys don't work like that. Plus, the fact that she was supposedly "personally offended" means the damage is done. Like a good monkey, she proceeded to OOOK and AAAK her documented rules and piss everyone off in the process. So now my office is a sterile shadow of its former self, because I had to take down all of my Britney Spears pictures, INCLUDING a poster that our very own director of sales purchased for me. The complaintant is now about 870 miles away, and if the pictures were to go back up, she would never hear about it because nobody here cares.

On the bright side, our beloved VP/GM of our local office went to bat for me, and called up this woman. While I don't have any pull to argue with corporate, he certainly does. He told me in the break room that they shouldn't be concerned, unless there was any explicity in the pictures, or as he put it, "tits and ass." The pictures contain no such content.

Now I'm going to tile my office with hospital-style tile, and E-Mail a picture of it to her with a little note stating that it is now a "sterile environment."

On another note with more company fun, we had a phone meeting this morning regarding usability of our company's intranet. The maintainers of the intranet love to put Microsoft Word documents up, but these documents aren't easily accessed by those of us who don't use Windows. I suggested the idea of plain text or HTML companion documents on the website.

They weren't receptive to this idea, and actually dismissed my concerns with inane arguments like "HTML changes the look and feel of the document" and "I hate saving documents in other formats."

Later, one of the organizers asked for opinions on what "whiz-bang" stuff they can add to the intranet. He actually used the words "whiz-bang." Gee, I thought this meeting was to gather feedback on usability - not suggestions on cool features.

<SARCASM> I love being directed by clueless idiots. </SARCASM>

Lunch Log: Skipped Lunch. Not hungry.

UPDATE: We're fighthing the Britney opression! Our COO thinks this is the stupidest thing he's ever heard. I've been instructed NOT to take my pictures home just yet.

23:18

Now, most of you probably don't care about Finnish sports news - the universe knows I don't - so let me bring you up to speed.
The Nordic World Ski Championships were just held in Lahti, Finland. At the end of the week, one of the top Finnish skiiers got busted for using a banned hemoglobin-lowering substance. This weekend an another Finn was caught doing the same thing. Doctors of the National Skiing Union quit. Next up someone discovered a bag belonging to the union, left in a gas station during a competition trip. Full of banned drugs, of course. People were fired, and the whole nation is expecting the results of tests done to the entire Finnish team taking part in the championships.

So, Why do I care?

This morning when I woke up, the morning TV programming featured nothing but talk about doping. While having breakfast I browsed through the local newspaper, and most of the content involved doping. I got to the office where everyone was discussing doping. While avoiding work I check out my usual news websites, which are all filled to the brim on doping. We head for lunch to the best Chinese restaurant in town, and while eating coworkers discuss nothing but doping. Back at work, we hold a client meeting where everybody jokes about doping. Upon getting home, I'm greeted with a whole family shouting about the shocking doping scandal on top of the TV and radio blaring about the shocking doping scandal.
Please, SHUT UP already!

Am I really the only one not shocked by a thing like this? Professional athletes cheat in all corners of the planet, why would Suomi be any better? This time the cheaters just happened to be caught. Anyone naive enough to believe Finnish skiers would be purity, honesty and good sportsmanship incarnates just got the reality check they needed. In my mind the whole issue is dead simple. People broke the rules, were caught and have to suffer the consequences. End of story.
The only thing I gain from all this media coverage is the amusement of seeing the guilty parties' pathetic attempts to explain their actions. "I didn't know it was illegal" seems to be the most popular one.

All in all, the whole ordeal has only affected my life in two ways: creating a day of frustration, and approximately six months of not watching any news or reading the local newspaper. When it comes to the plain old uneventful Finland, this sort of thing does not blow over quickly.

Sorry about the rant. A day full of repetition on such a silly topic can make a guy little edgy.

Other than that, the day was nice. I have really been into E2 lately, and it feels good. The people who say "this place isn't as fun as it used to be" should just look in a mirror in my opinion. It's what you make of it.
Then again, what does a lowly noder with only 11 months of experience know about this stuff?