Blog
Archives : Jan’04 Feb’04 Mar’04
Thu Feb 26 11:08:34 2004
I frequently mention this blog in emails that I send to females I'm trying to meet on Match.com. I suspect many of them are leery of the fact that I proudly call myself a geek (and Alpha Geek, at that), and that I have my own website and keep a weblog. Well, there is no shame in it, as this article explains. (Recommended reading for anyone considering getting to know me.)
Thu Feb 26 10:54:29 2004
I have not yet assaulted the dryer to determine its malfunction. The reason? I'm ashamed to admit it, but I had no multimeter. Yes, I actually called myself a geek while walking around without a multimeter in my tool chest. So yesterday I ran out and purchased one. I got the old-school analog type just to overcompensate for the previous lacking thereof. The analog types are better anyway. Why, back in my day, we didn't have any fancy LCD readouts! You had to read the needle on the scale the same way you read your slide rule, dammit! And when your circuit calculations tell you that you should be measuring 5.0 volts across a resistor, with an analog device you could tilt your head and read 5.0 volts. With a digital, you would get some crazy answer like 5.2 volts or 4.9 volts. Bah!
Wed Feb 25 13:45:39 2004
Grr. Had to postpone the appointment with the lawyer/mediator today. The soon-to-be ex can't seem to find a babysitter. I guess I'll have to schedule for a day when that will be my responsibility.
Update: New appointment set for Tuesday, March 2nd. I'll find the babysitter.
Tue Feb 24 10:36:06 2004
I have un-hidden my Match.com profile. It still says "separated" under marital status. I figure after Wednesday, it will take the lawyer/mediator a few days to put the papers together, and then we'll have to plan a court date. Once a judge approves the contract, I'll officially be "divorced". I'm expecting all that to take less than a month. It will probably take more than a month for anything to happen on match.com, so it all sounds good.
Mon Feb 23 19:03:32 2004
The divorce is on the horizon. I (err, we) have an appointment Wednesday at 5pm with the moderator. Lets hope all goes well. (Fingers crossed)
Sun Feb 22 18:17:17 2004
Galley creation perl script complete. Pictures from Holiday Valley are up. Pictures from SnoeShoe are up. Enjoy.
Sun Feb 22 11:52:02 2004
Smith Oil proved me wrong. They rushed out to get me a half-tank of oil the morning after I called! And on a Sunday, even! You guys are awesome!
In other news, Laundromats rock. I was able to get in and out with my 50 lbs of laundry in less than two hours. I'm a little confused about these washers that they have called "double-loaders." The barrel rotates horizontally instead of vertically, and they are supposed to take twice the load of a regular washer. However, the inside is smaller than a regular washer. This suggests to me that filling a regular washer up to the top with clothes (a "single load" in my world), isn't the right way to do it. Maybe I can find an FAQ on the web regarding the proper use of a washer somewhere… Anyway I didn’t have any trouble with my 7 "single-loads", which fit nicely into 3 dryers. Well, the one washer did start bouncing around, but sitting on it took care of it.
Sun Feb 22 07:49:16 2004
The temperature in my house is now 53 degrees, and slowly dropping. I've been so busy lately that I haven’t been checking the level in my oil tank. It went empty sometime yesterday. I ordered another fill, but Smith Oil only does deliveries Monday-Friday. I'll be out doing laundry and shopping for groceries most of today, but when I get home I'll probably kick up the portable electric heater, and confine myself to one room. Ah, life’s little adventures.
Sat Feb 21 20:52:42 2004
Today my mom purchased a table saw for herself. She called me over to help her put it together. She has quite a woodshop going in her basement now. She has a scroll saw, router, cordless drill, dremel, drill press, power sander, band saw, and now a table saw. I only have a circular saw and a handheld drill. There is something seriously wrong with having tool envy over your mom.
We also had a nice talk about my future dating. She insists I'm a "good catch," and I’ll do fine. What mom wouldn't think that? Her point is that I should find someone with whom I can be best friends. I totally agree with that, but her justification went something like this, "In 30 years sex wont even be an issue. So find someone that you can still be friends with when your 65." That’s great, but at 33, I still have a few hormones left. Come on, I'm not dead yet.
Listening to: New Order, The Crystal Method, and Amber. (A mix kind of like peanut butter, pickles and bananas.)
Sat Feb 21 17:58:18 2004
I just spent the last two hours driving around looking for a Laundromat. The closest one by the phonebook’s reckoning was in downtown Akron, so I headed there. The first was non-existent (I have a very old phonebook), the second looked open at first glance, but upon closer inspection I discovered the ceiling hanging down in bits and what looked like a bum’s bed made out of newspapers in the middle. I tried the door anyway just in case that was the normal mode of business, but it was locked. I gave up on Akron and headed for Barberton (the phone book had several listed for Barberton). Not knowing anything about where I was or where to find one, I drove aimlessly through Barberton. It wasn’t long before I happened by one. It was closing. A nice old lady shooed me off, and when I expressed my frustration with there early closing hour (5 pm?), she was nice enough to give me directions to another nearby (The Squire Coin-Operated Laundry), which also turned out to be closing at 5pm. It seems there is some tradition that was unknown to me, owner of my own appliances, that Laundromats close early on Saturdays. But they do open damn early on Sundays. I’ll try the Squire again tomorrow.
Fri Feb 20 12:32:02 2004
Well, I'm back at work today. I survived SnowShoe with nothing more than a few bruises and sunburn on my dome and face. The pinnacle of my achievement was making Cupp's Run (a 1.5 mile black diamond) with only one spill (and that spill doesn't really count because it was in an easy part). Snowboarding is awesome. It offers fine looking women, lodges, alcohol, snow, high speeds and injuries all in one. Boo-YA!
I’ll have some pictures up soon.
Tue Feb 17 15:55:36 2004
Well, this story set off my ludicrometer. A yogi has copyrighted his yoga techniques. Um, prior art? Like 5000 years of it? Hello, anyone? What’s next, a patent on karma garnering techniques? This is really a case of a McDojo gone too far. (I know McDojo is a martial art term, but I consider yoga similar enough for purposes of this discussion.) Imagine a world where each instructor tried to patent or copyright his or her improvements to these types of art forms. What a mess. Gah.
Tue Feb 17 10:18:35 2004
Well, I'm in the office for today, heading out for SnowShoe tonight. Holiday Valley was a blast. We picked up our lift tickets at about 9:50 a.m. and rode the slopes for over 9 hours. We only took two beer breaks, so it was quite a workout. I have a few pictures I might put up later.
Sun Feb 15 04:25:11 2004
My mom sent me a Valentine with - get this - stickers inside. My son gave me a Valentine with a 10 pack of Kit-Kats. So, I’m feeling rather loved at the moment.
Why am I up at 4:20 am? Well, I meant to wake up at 4 to get ready for my trip to Holiday Valley, so I'd be ready to leave by 5. However there must have been a user error operating the alarm clock. I woke up at what I thought was 4am, and after getting ready for an hour, I checked the clock in the kitchen – 4 am again. Time warp? Nope. The alarm clock got set ahead by an hour somehow. So now I have an hour to kill before I leave. Blog time.
Fri Feb 13 12:48:48 2004
I did a little extreme banking during lunch today. Anytime the amounts are over 1000 dollars, I call that "extreme banking." I owed my in-laws (would they be called ex-laws after the divorce?) a bit o' cash, and having them paid off really helps me move onto true bachelorhood in an unencumbered manner.
Fri Feb 13 10:02:08 2004
I was just easing my way into the start of my day when I came across this post by Frank J., and now I'm cleaning coffee off my monitor and keyboard. Who says Friday the 13th isn't bad luck?
Read the comments, too. Some are just as good as the original post.
Thu Feb 12 14:50:57 2004
Just a little list to remind me of everything I need to do on Saturday before my trip. I could write it on a piece of paper, but then I'd loose it.
oil change for car
clean car
pick up dog food
check chicken's food and water
haircut
get some serious gloves (forcast says single and negative digits)
adjust bindings
laundry (maybe)
get cash
pack (don't forget clean underwear - thanks, mom)
chapstick
Tue Feb 10 06:33:37 2004
The blog-by-email script now drops each blog entry into a folder with the format YYYY-MM. Each folder is then updated with it's own index.html, as well as an index.html at the root of the blog structure. This allows for automatic archiving. The index.html in the root will have entries for this month, and last month, automatically rotated. New version here. Now I just need to build an index with links to the archive folders, and that bit will be done. But if you want to see what it looks like, check out 2004-01 and 2004-02.
Oh, yeah, each entry has an anchor tag now, too.
Mon Feb 9 15:28:04 2004
Zero eggs today. Yep, count 'em, zero. I don't know what I did to piss the chickens off, but they're on strike. Maybe they don't like coconut. I put some coconut shavings in their feed the other day. I'm not picking it out. They'll just have to deal with it. Maybe a large poster of a fried chicken hung on the inside of the henhouse will show them I mean business.
Sat Feb 7 17:43:54 2004
The dryer, it mocks me. Second load into my stress test, and it quits. Check power, seems good. Dryer bad. True to the tenets of bachelorhood, it seems I may have to re-acquaint myself with the Laundromat.
Disassembly is eminent.
Sat Feb 7 17:19:10 2004
I'm a traveler through space and time, but strangely I seem stuck here, and now.
Sat Feb 7 13:59:05 2004
Ah well, gotta get to that laundry today. I'm also thinking about putting some work into the blog-by-email script. I'm 'tabling' the idea of reader comments for now. Today I think I'll index the entries by month/year and build in auto archival features. If I get really motivated, I'll clean up the chicken pages. I'm planning on taking pictures during the ski trip, so I need some kind of gallery scheme. Infinite things to do, finite resources.
Listening to: The Butthole Surfers (various tracks)
Fri Feb 6 11:08:55 2004
I actually have a significant amount of work to do today. My job is to automate otherwise boring and repetitive procedures within IT. Like installing software. Today I'm enhancing a wrapper script around BMC's installation for Patrol. The goal is to type one command, and chug, chug chug, all is done, ready for production. Then I hand that 'one command' to other people, whom are then empowered to "Install Patrol".
It’s the kind of thing very few people would consider 'fun', but I like it.
Fri Feb 6 09:08:18 2004
Only two eggs today. The chickens, they mock me.
Thu Feb 5 13:08:54 2004
My results from the ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY SELECTOR
1. Spinoza (100%)
2. Kant (92%)
3. Nel Noddings (85%)
4. Jean-Paul Sartre (79%)
5. Aquinas (76%)
6. Stoics (68%)
7. John Stuart Mill (67%)
8. St. Augustine (67%)
9. Jeremy Bentham (65%)
10. Nietzsche (62%)
11. David Hume (60%)
12. Epicureans (53%)
13. Aristotle (51%)
14. Prescriptivism (48%)
15. Cynics (45%)
16. Thomas Hobbes (31%)
17. Ayn Rand (30%)
18. Ockham (27%)
19. Plato (16%)
Thu Feb 5 11:26:49 2004
My bachelorhood skills are improving. By this Saturday I will have gone two entire weeks without doing any laundry. Saturday I will conduct some strenuous load testing on the capacity of the washing machine and dryer. I have also rediscovered the benefits of eating food directly from the can. Saves on dishes, and on time. Now if I could only figure a way for the dog hair to clean itself off the floor... Anyone know any animals or bugs that eat dog hair?
Thu Feb 5 09:52:43 2004
Three eggs today. Production is ramping up nicely.
Wed Feb 4 11:58:30 2004
I’ve been getting one egg a day since Jan 28th. Today, production doubled. One more chicken has started producing. Once all four hens are producing, I’ll be harvesting eggs at the rate of 4 per day, and production will be at its peak. With all the money I’ll be saving on eggs, that chicken coop will pay for itself in, um, about 15 years. Woot.
Wed Feb 4 10:10:40 2004
The ride into work this morning was accompanied by the psychoholic tunes of White Zombie, Astro-Creep 2000. I take a lot of country back roads to get to work and this is a great disk to slip in, jam loud, and imagine my Subi is some kind of big-block GTO, as I drive way too fast. Anyway, one of the songs on that disk is "More Human than Human" and it reminded me of a story.
Some time back, I forget if this before or after I got married, when that song was still new to the radio, I had my ex and my mother-in-law in the car, headed somewhere. The radio was turned low to accommodate conversation. My ears perked up as I heard "More Human than Human" come on the radio, so I declared, "I love this song" and turned it up so I could hear it, careful not to crank it too loud, because I didn’t want to offend the mother-in-law. Those familiar with the song might recall that shortly after the song starts, there is a young lady vocalizing the throes of ecstasy for several seconds. I, however, forgot. Well, the lady vocalist went into her award winning performance, and I could feel two cold stares drilling into me. I looked around, and all I could come up with was, "What? She’ll be done in a minute."
I wonder why the in-laws never liked me?
Tue Feb 3 14:23:42 2004
One day, many years ago, my friends and I sat in a Denny's somewhere near Toledo, Ohio. We had all recently seen "Forest Gump", and we were making a game out of completing the sentence, "Life is like..." Pick a silly noun, and complete it with something that may or not make sense. It was the kind of fun that amused us back then, and as usual, I wasn't paying much attention. Then, the waitress came by and topped off our coffees. Everyone then reached for their creams and sugars, except for me. It was then that I said, "Life is like a cup of coffee. You can spend a great deal of time getting your cream and sugar just right, only to have the waitress come along, top you off, and mess the whole thing up. That's why I drink my coffee black." Everyone looked around, some lights came on sooner than others, and in the end everyone solemnly understood. That was indeed how I lived my life. One person even went off several days later to write an entire essay on the comment.
Years later, now in the recent past, someone that was aware of my particular philosophy on the matter caught me adding copious amounts of cream and sugar to my coffee. They looked and me with a knowing grin and asked, "Why all the cream and sugar, I though you liked it black?"
"Sometimes the coffee is so bad you just gotta do something."
Tue Feb 3 10:20:48 2004
I’m going to weigh in on Maxwell's question posted on Feb 3, 2004, namely, "Will we ever reach a point where we cannot advance any further?" The answer is easy, in my humble opinion - No. We, as humans, are very limited creatures in the grand scheme of things. Think about it - we only have 5 senses, and we are only cognizant of 4 dimensions (3 we can control, and one we cannot, time). This fact alone renders us powerless to perceive a great deal of the universe, let alone understand it. Think about math vs. physics. Math is a pure science, where we start with the concept of vs. 1 and build form there until we get number systems, pi, derivatives, trigonometry, etc. Physics is our attempt to apply our pure math to our observed world. How often does the theoretical outcome match the measured outcome? Never. That’s why we have "significant digits" and "margin of error". That’s why we build things with "tolerance". That tells me that either our understanding of math or our perception of the world is wrong. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to understand it though. The more we try to understand, the more we see how much we don’t understand. That’s what drives us to understand more. That’s how our technology evolves. As humans, we have an infinite way to go before we reach our limits. Should we ever advance beyond the human condition, we may take a step closer to “total understanding” of the universe, but I wouldn’t count on that being the end. More than likely, a new beginning.
Addendum: Here's something else to think about - what if the laws that govern the universe are not static? All that we are trying to understand might be a moving target. ;)
Mon Feb 2 19:00:41 2004
Looking for a comic? Try Neurotically Yours. If you can't understand the squirrel, drink a pot of coffee and try again. It will help.
Mon Feb 2 17:38:24 2004
Ug. I just realized that if the blog-by-email script is to handle comments from the unwashed masses, it needs to deal with HTML mail, multipart mime email and auto-annotations of all kinds. Maybe it's time to rethink my strategy towards reader comments. I could convert the webserver to Apache, but that would mean having to re-familiarize myself with how to secure it properly, and tracking bugfixes again. Good ol' DJB's software never left me in that predicament. I believe there are some patches to publicfile floating around somewhere that can cgi-enable it. I'll have to give them another look.
In other news, my chickie pages are a mess. I really need to thumbnail the pics and maybe add a comment or two. Perhaps Maxwell was hinting at that fact when he posted his link for today. Clever guy, that one. But I don't want to write all the html code to make it look nice. Maybe I'll write a perl script to do it for me. Yeah, that will be easier. (brain gears go grind, grind, grind)
Update: I found the exec-cgi patches to publicfile that I was thinking about (here). Only they are not patches, they are wholy seperate daemons consuming their own port numbers (Not very good for people behind firewalls). The cgi daemon only does cgi, not html. Html is for the html daemon, get it? I could write all my web pages as perl scripts, but I don't think the people that I host sites for would want to do the same. The pondering continues...
Mon Feb 2 10:45:39 2004
I purchased a snowboard last night. I've been boarding just about every Sunday since the season started and I'm getting sick of paying the rental fees. I went to MC Sports looking for a new pair of gloves and discovered they were having a sale on the boards. So, typical to my spontaneous and utter disregard for my finances spending style, I grabbed up a Lamar Snowboard, Liquid bindings, and a pair of boots (forgot the brandname). I didn't really feel the need to get top-of-the-line stuff, hell, I could have an ironing board strapped to my feet it would be just as much fun. So, I got my ghetto gear and hit the slopes. I did all right with the new board, it took a little while to get used to it, and my toe-side is harder than it should be but I think I can fix that with an adjustment to the bindings. I've got a trip planned to Holiday Valley Feb 15th and 16th, and I'm just now getting word that another trip might be in the works for Snowshoe on the 18th and 19th. Sweetness.
(Update - boots are Lamar, too.)