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Halloween is the evilest holiday. You all are sick for practicing it!! It teaches kids that death is funny, and that serious matters like witches and sorcery are nothing more than cartoony costume ideas! Goblins, Ghouls, and SATANISTS!!! THATS YOU!! Halloween, or, All Saints Day, used to be very wholesome, where children would dress up as their favorite saint, and hand out healthy snacks like dates and pecans to passersby. But now, since the satanists have gotten ahold of it, its a wicked celebration of all that is despicable! FOR SHAME!!!

Oh wait, did someone say candy? I love candy… Ok, screw all the holy crap, Halloween is awesome, gimme candy! Gimme candy! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I carved a pumpkin last night (which is wicked in and of itself), it ended up looking a lot like a robot, oddly. I also watched The Lord of the Rings on my new DVD player. Its a good movie, I don’t care what any of you say! I just wish it had more Gollum, ‘cause I love that little guy. At least The Two Towers is supposed to have more Gollum, since he plays a greater role in that part of the story.

Oh well, I have to get back to work.

Today was filled with interesting little food-related experiences. The first occured at the cafeteria at the Children’s Hospital. I was at the salad bar getting lunch, when I saw a woman place an entire pickle into her empty salad tray, then, she proceeded to cover the pickle in ranch dressing. After applying a generous sprinkle of sunflower seeds, she left. I’m amazed that what she had created technically constituted a ‘salad’. Oh well.

Just a few minutes ago, I was out buying groceries. The woman in front of me in the checkout line had a very unhealthy selection. Lots of sausage, cheese, potato chips, candy, ice cream, hot dogs, etc. I was thinking, “Wow, how can people go to the grocery store and buy nothing except unhealthy crap like that??” But thats when I looked over at my basket and realized that the only thing I was buying was a single bottle of the store’s cheapest sparkling wine. Oh well, I had my moment of self-righteousness, and then got shot down by the cruel arrow of irony.

Last night I bought me a DVD player. Its a Pioneer DV-656A, sporting progressive scan, built-in DTS decoding, and support for DVD-Audio, VideoCD, S-VideoCD, MP3, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R and CD-RW. Sweet. I enjoy movies, and while I have a DVD player in my computer, its just not the same to watch movies while sitting in the computer chairs, instead of curled up on the couch. Also, my big mondo speakers are in the living room, instead of the computer room.

The funny thing is that our TV is a 13” Samsung. It is so old, that to get channels higher than 12, you have to turn the top knob to ‘U’ and then adjust the bottom knob. It doesn’t even have coaxial inputs, it just has little screw terminals, and an adapter for the coax input. It sports the stock rabbit ears (not even ‘upgraded’ rabbit ears). However, DVDs still look pretty good on it. Small, but good. And of course, the progressive scanning feature of the DVD player currently remains unutilized. However, I have an old 17” computer monitor I’ve thought about setting up as a TV, however, I would need an adapter to take the progressive scanning component outputs from the DVD player to the RGBHV the computer monitor expects. I haven’t seen such an adapter for less than about 120$, which is a little more than I want to spend on it right now. Maybe I’ll just buy a cheap used TV or something. Or maybe I’ll just be happy with the 13” TV, because its really not all that bad, and the big speakers make up for the small screen.

Firstly, I think I need to take a shower. Also, earlier, while in C class, I zoned out. It wasn’t like falling asleep, however. I was sitting fully upright, keys on the keyboard, typing out a program as the teacher talked. I sort of ‘blinked’ and shook my head, and looked up, and he was on a totally different program. I zoned out for about a minute or something. I hastily exited the program I was on, and moved onto the one he was on. I think my eyes were open the whole time, and I don’t remember having any dreams or anything. It was like I was abducted by aliens and then reinserted into space/time or something. Very unsettling. Maybe I’m just going insane.

However, I’m awfully happy about Cocoa, the programming framework for Mac OS X. Its great fun, and very intuitive! I’ve never done any object oriented programming before, but I’m really getting into the book I’ve got, “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C.” If anyone has any ideas for simple little single-window OS X apps, let me know! I’m still uber-beginner, but I’d love some ideas for things to practice on!

Oh, and speaking of going insane, I realized today that I can selectively turn off my ability to understand the English language. I can’t really do it while someone is specifically talking to me, but if I’m standing in a hallway, and there are people talking to each other next to me, I can make it so that I can still hear their words perfectly clearly, but that I don’t comprehend any of them. It just sounds like utter gibberish to me. Then I can turn back on my understanding, and the words turn into phrases and concepts, and I eavesdrop on their conversation. Then, I can turn it back off, and my brain just inputs a useless stream of senseless babbling. Am I atrophing my brain by not utilizing my language center? Or am I saving energy by recycling my thought processes toward better tasks? Only time will tell… The feeling of hearing, but possessing no comprehension reminds me of what it must be like to be an utter foreigner, or someone with a severe mental illness.

Speaking of mental illness, Oliver Sacks, author of books such as, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat,” is coming to speak at Washington University. Saddly, I will be unable to attend, because it is before my last day at work, and it is during the day, when I am very busy. However, Oliver Sacks would be a great person to hear talk (and I’d leave my comprehension circuits turned on). For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he is a neurologist who has written many books on mental illness, and gone a very long way in promoting understanding towards various mental conditions that seem very alien to us of reasonably ‘normal’ mental faculties, which, for the purpose of this discussion, includes just about anyone who is capable of reading this website. After reading his writing, I feel a much greater understanding for what people with severe mental abnormalities experience, and how they live their lives. Through that understanding, empathy can grow, as well as a greater understanding for how my own mental quirks and properties shape my whole development. Oliver Sacks takes a very holistic and humanist view, and promotes the idea that while an illness may affect one specific physical part of the brain, that the entire mind and body react to that change, and shape themselves around it in attempts to adapt and cope. His stories of people living with severe mental illness are filled with technical and medical descriptions of course, but never leave out the deeply human side of each case. However abnormal his patients may seem, there is a deeply human side to all of them that is impossible to ignore. I highly recommend reading some of his books.

Goodnight.

Tuesday, November 5th is my last day at this job! Officially! I’m now preparing to find work elsewhere, and I need to polish up my resume. Where to apply? I’m thinking something to do with helping plants grow, or teaching science to kids. I’ve got some leads, and we’ll see where they go.

I didn’t post at all this weekend. Why? Because I didn’t feel like it. So there.

Saturday night we had a little Halloween get together that turned into a rather large party! I slept in, and then spent Saturday afternoon cleaning up the house, assembling my costume, etc. Then, people started showing up. We had invited a modest group, but they all brought friends, and soon we had over 30 people in our little apartment. I had bought extra beer, with the hopes that people wouldn’t drink it all, and there would be leftovers for me to have later in the week, well, it basically all got finished.

We invited our neighbors, the ones upstairs, to the side of us, and up and to the side (there are only four apartments in our building). Only the girl up and to the side didn’t come, and its because she had some homework that she had to stay up all night to finish. I was hoping she would come down for a few minutes at least, but oh well. Our upstairs neighbors John and Ian are fun, Ian came dressed as Tiger Woods, and John came dressed as our landlord David. David is a real character, pretty strange fellow, and with a very distinctive outfit. John managed to get the look just right, sort of vacant, with mouth gaping. It was quite uncanny. Our neighbors to the side came too, one came as a pregnant lady (which she is) and the guy came as a happy expectant father (which he is). Not very hilarious costumes, but I’ll forgive them this time. The nice thing about having your neighbors come over, is that you can basically be as loud as you want. So the music bumped, and people laughed and screamed, and it wasn’t a problem. Our apartment is pretty well insulated for sound, fortunately.

My costume this year is “UN Weapons Inspector.” Scroll down a bit for pics of my Hazmat suit, then imagine that suit with a big sign with biohazard symbols and the words “United Nations Weapons Inspection” hanging from my chest. Sweet.

Madalene was a fish tank, complete with little fish, blue cellophane, and fake plants. It was a great costume, except she had a hard time sitting down in it. But you sacrifice a bit in order to have a good costume, don’t you know!

Sunday was spent mostly sleeping. A few people spent the night, but they were all gone when I first got up around 11:30am! I was going to offer them rides home and whatnot, but they had apparently taken the initiative before I had even woken up. So I decided to go back to sleep. Then I got up at 4ish, cleaned the house, watched “The Count of Monte Cristo” and fell back asleep. Just how I like my Sundays.

In a surprising stroke of good luck, I’m being treated very well by a vehicle dealership, an insurance company and the lawyers representing them!

As many of you know, my scooter has been stolen twice. The first time, it was recovered that day, and the culprit was caught. However, that has not yet gone to trial. In fact, they haven’t even set a court date, despite the fact that the incident happened over 6 months ago. That left the scooter damaged, and when I took it in to get repaired in early September, the dealership had a break-in, and my scooter was stolen again. It was never recovered. The dealership is responsible for repaying me, but I was worried that I would have to hassle with people to get a fair market value for the bike. Things were dragging on, and I hadn’t heard from them in a while about it, but today, I got a call from the lawyer representing the insurance company wanting to reach a settlement with me. I ended up getting, without any hassle at all, just under $2,300 for the bike, which is a very fair value, and quite a bit more than I had been expecting!

The lawyer had gone to pretty long lengths to figure out a fair market value for the bike, calling many dealerships, and doing a lot of research. I was worried that because since this is a relatively rare vehicle (my model was a limited edition body-style only sold for one model year, in only about 100 dealerships in the US), that they would simply use some generic ‘vehicle value’ equation like Purchase Price minus 20% for each year, minus 10% per 1000 miles, blah blah blah until they determine that my bike is only worth 120$ or something. But they didn’t!

Also, the lawyer told me that the dealership is going to great lengths to keep their customer base happy, and that I have a good chance at getting a new bike for invoice price, which would mean I would hardly have to put any extra money down at all. I’m very pleased with my dealership, which of course is their intent, because it means that I will continue to patronize them for vehicle service, accessories, motor oil, etc.

So hopefully in the next week or two, you’ll see me on a hot new scoot! Yay!

This post caused me to laugh out loud. Way to go Josh, stick it to those damn limeys! You know, many lingustics researchers believe that ‘American English’ is actually closer in accent to the original English that was spoken before the colonies started, and that British began to change their accent after the revolutionary war as a way to distance themselves from the ‘rabble’ over in America, choosing instead to exaggerate the aristocratic ‘style’ of speech that we now know of as ‘British English’.

Of course, that might just be a wild theory set in motion by rabid anti-british factions. Maybe we are just rabble! No! No! Its not true, damn the limey and their lecherous language! Next time a british person tells me that they want to put their “spare tyre” into my boot, I’m going to run away screaming.

I’ve been getting messages sent to the entire library by one of the staff members who is compiling a recipe book. They intend to make the book out of recipes from library members, then sell the book and donate the money to charity. I probably get an email every day requesting more and more recipes. So today I finally broke down an gave up my secret family recipe. Now that it is out in the open, I might as well let you folks see it as well:

I’m not much of a cook, but here is my one soup recipe.

Ingredients:
One can condensed soup (any variety).
One glass or bottle of cold water.

Remove the label from the soup can. This will prevent it from catching on fire, which may taint the flavor of the soup.
Open the can of soup. If you do not have a can opener, a screwdriver or large knife can often be of aid.
Turn a stovetop burner to medium, and place the can directly on the heated surface.
Use a spoon to stir the soup frequently, to prevent burning the soup.
When the soup is warm, remove the can from heat. You may need to use a hot pad, or a pair of pliers, because the surface of the can will be very hot.
Alternatively, you can simply turn off the stove. The burner will continue to put out heat for a few minutes, but you won’t have to touch the hot can. This is especially useful if you do not own a hot pad, and can’t find your pliers.

Enjoy your soup by standing over the stove, putting a large spoonful into your mouth, and then washing it down with a swig of water from your glass. The hot condensed soup will mix with the cool water in your mouth, forming a warm, delicious and convienent mixture, ready for immediate swallowing.

Enjoy!

Well, I just finished drafting my resignation letter for work. I put it in an envelope, and will hand deliver it tommorow morning. I’m glad my quitting didn’t result in any yelling or overly angry displays, but its nice that I’m finally just doing it and leaving. I’ve given them 2 weeks, so they can hire a new person, and then I’m going to make like a baby and head out for a fresh career start. It feels pretty good, actually.

Things have been a little somber lately what with my job difficulties, so I thought I’d liven things up for the moment with a photo of my current favorite possession, an entire Hazmat outer-suit! Yes, it includes yellow booties, a yellow full-body suit that you step into like a bag. It has a drawstring around the neck, so you pull it up, and close up the drawstring. Then you put on the big huge tyvek hood, which includes ports for a ventilator hose, then go the yellow plastic gloves. Then you are ready for anything!!! The suit would fit a hippo however, it is so large.

(Click for larger image)

If anyone has some really vile places they need me to go, just let me know so I can don my suit, and go there!

If anyone wants their own suit-makings, visit American Science and Surplus which is just about the greatest store ever! Especially for cool science stuff, but they also have military things, crazy toys, surplus tools, just about everything. Plus, they are very cool people, very creative and friendly. Good store. Fun stuff.

Today, in a stint of ‘I dislike unsecure protocols’ I deleted proftpd from my linux box, in favor of sftp, which was already installed thanks to openSSH. However, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have a nice, easy to use SFTP client on my Mac. So I searched on Google, and found out that just in the past day or two, Panic Software (one of my favorite small software developers) released version 2.0 of their super-cool Transmit FTP client, which now supports SFTP! Excellent timing, Panic!

Job updates coming later… I’ll post about how THAT went this evening.

I think I did pretty well on my C exam, though I won’t find out until next monday. I just moved /usr to a different hard drive on my new li’l linux box, and that makes me happy. I can actually compile perl 5.8 now! Also, gcc now works, which is handy, because I need it to install perl. Everything is comin’ up Sammy!

Well, not everything. I might quit my job tommorow. I got some rather terse emails from my boss. However, they were phrased in her usual way, which is very patronizing, disrespectful and rude. The emails were criticisms of my performance, but phrased in a not-very-professional way. This is not the first time I’ve gotten this sort of thing from her. I have a meeting with her, another supervisor, and our general supervisor tommorow. There is a strong possibility that I will become very unhappy with my boss during the meeting, and quit. It might take the form of a cordial resignation, with my agreement to work two more weeks so they can find a replacement, or it might be a ‘slap the keys down on the table and walk out’ sort of situation. Hopefully the first, as I’m not a fan of being angry, but we’ll see. I might not even end up quitting, but this has been building up for awhile, and might reach a breaking point tommorow. A career change could be nice. I was thinking of applying to work at the botanical gardens. That could be a fun change of pace…

Have you ever consumed too much coffee, and then, wanting to feel less jittery figured that if you continued to drink coffee instead of stopping like conventional wisdom suggests, that you would eventually break through some sort of barrier, and throw yourself over the edge into a world utterly calm, yet totally energized nirvana? You would be like a spring coiled infinitely tight. Your all seeing mind would cut through the clouds of uncertainty like a ray of white-hot light. You would be utterly lucid, and all mysteries would become exposed. You would be truly a god among men.

It doesn’t work. You just get more jittery. Sorry.

Today I got quite a bit of homework done, some good solid studying for my C exam this evening, and some serious coffee drinking, because as you all know, caffiene makes your brain work better. Or something like that. Either way, it tastes good.

Also, for an additional 10$ a month, I was able to jack our downstream connection speed up to 1.5 megabits. Rawk! Unfortunately, our upstream is still a puny and despicable 128 kilobits. Its much more expensive to add upstream speed than it is to add downstream speed. Hopefully soon though I’ll be able to push the upstream speed up to around 384kb. That would be acceptable. However, this 1.5 megabit downstream is still very nice. A noticable improvement from our 684kilobit downstream we had before. I had to download updates to the Apple Developer Tools, and zing, it went nice and fast. A speed test at Bandwidthplace.com shows me pulling a realistic 1.3 megabits. Sweet.

However, the values as measured by the Mac are consistently about 100kbs-200kbs lower than the values as measured by Madalene’s PC. Now, the PC is an Athlon XP @ 1.33ghz, and the Mac is a G4 at 466mhz, so the PC does have a bit of an edge when it comes to raw processing power, but is that all that is contributing to the speed difference? Is anyone aware of any settings that I can tweak under OS X.2 to help boost network performance? It is BSD based, so any settings tweaks applicable for BSD might be applicable here. Anyway, I can live with the small speed difference, but if there is anything I can do to speed it up, I’d be very interested to hear about it, and if I discover anything, I’ll be sure to post it.

The other issue concerning network performance I need to look at is the fact that I’m using a hub to connect 4 static-IP computers to each other, and to the internet in general. The collision light flashes almost constantly while the computers are doing stuff. Is this a problem that could be alleviated by replacing the hub with a switch? I’ve also noticed a tendency to have unreliable connections at times. For instance, if Madalene is playing mp3s on her computer over the network from one of the other PCs, and I’m downloading stuff from the internet on the mac with three open SSH connections to the linux machine, then things sometimes get weird, skips in the music, bursts of extreme lag, etc. Hmm. I think I do need a switch. Any features I should look for when I’m shopping for a switch? Recommended brands? Would it be worth it to upgrade my machines to 100BaseT instead of the regular 10BaseT they are on right now? If some were 100BaseT, and some were still 10BaseT, would that drag their total speed down to 10BaseT levels, or could the faster computers still talk over fast connections with each other? I think so, isn’t that one of the features of a switch?

Man, so many questions!! Anyway, have fun people, I’m off to my exam.