02:45:08 Sunday February 01 2004
I accidentally got up early today. I forgot that January has 31 days. I suppose that means that my appointment is tomorrow. Fortunately I did get to work on the packet sniffer all day. So that project is moving along nicely. I learned all kinds of interesting things about Ethernet frames trying to trace down an anomalous packet I keep seeing. Other than work nothing interesting happened today.

01:37:34 Monday February 02 2004
I completed my Ally training today. There was an inordinate amount of "ice breaker" games, which I never enjoy. Over all it was a good thing. I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know, except that "Streisand ticket-holder" is a synonym for gay. Of course the goal was not necessarily to learn. The goal was to give some money to a good cause, raise awareness of gay issues, become a member, and get the door card so that all who pass into my office know that it is safe in here. See also: PFLAG

I finished The Da Vinci Code the other night. Come to think of it I didn't really learn anything there either. There was the interesting bit about how if you were to project the path of Venus in the elliptical sky over an eight year period onto a two dimensional surface it traces a pentacle. Other than that it was uninspiring. I suspect that I was supposed to be impressed that he knows about the Gnostic Gospels and what not, but I already know most of that stuff. He does not cover any interesting topics in detail. It is all very rushed, which I suppose is all right for a mystery/thriller. However, it is a lousy mystery. I had the "main bad guy" nailed even before we met him. Overall the research is only skin deep, the characters have interesting jobs but are not themselves interesting, and you are left with the impression that the mystery was written by someone just a little less clever than you. It is a quick and easy read. So if you are in the mood for something light pick it up, but don't expect too much.

In other news I am starting to fall apart. After working through two weekends and not getting much sleep and general stress the ticking has begun. It is damn early in the semester for that so I am somewhat concerned. I am going back on my medication and trying to grab some sleep tonight. I have become almost completely useless for work since it has been so long since I had a break. I put together my own set of oblique strategies or more aptly Oblique Stratagems. I have the suspicion that I will be faced with many difficult problems this semester. They will be useful indeed.

05:18:36 Tuesday February 03 2004
Much more was accomplished today. Perhaps I should have crashed earlier yesterday. I got off to a slow start because I had to change the tire on my car. There was a flat and I have been remiss to change it these past two days because of the deathly cold weather. However today everything warmed up and Matt needed to get to school so there were no more excuses. After changing the tire I had some fish for dinner and headed off to work. I completed my paper for 590d, lecture notes for 490-dsp, and filled and emergency feature request for Professor Simonsen. Also on the list of odd jobs that got accomplished today: mailed the financial aid people, made a bank deposit, paid some bills, did some laundry, and crashed calypso (the house fileserver) twice while trying to sort out some MIDI business. Perhaps sleep is more important than I often give it credit for.

22:28:39 Tuesday February 03 2004
I did all of the requisite Tuesday things today. I didn't stay late to work on my packet thing. I decided to grab some sleep and put that off until tomorrow. I finally gave up and joined orkut. Drop me a line if you want an invite.

I have been reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. I can't seem to get to sleep any more without reading a couple of chapters of something. So any time I finish a book a new one is always immediately in the offing. SD&CP is a series of semi-academic takes on pop culture. It is kind of hard to explain. For example:

As America's best-loved semipro freelance conversationalist, I am often queried about my brazen humorousity. "How is it possible," I am asked, "that you are able to extemporaneously lecture so effortlessly on such a myriad of complex topics? What is the key to your incisive, witty repertoire?" ... The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible -- but remarkably specific -- "cultural accusation" (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist(this makes you contemporary). ... For example when talking about music: "Oh, let's face it we all know that if Rivers Cuomo makes one more album about the Cubism didactic, he might as well just give up completely and turn Weezer into a hobo-core three piece."

04:55:20 Thursday February 05 2004
I slept well again last night and accomplished much today. I am beginning to believe that there is a positive correlation between sleep and work. I got up early and had the tire on the vehicle fixed. That turned into quite an ordeal because I forgot to set the parking break and the damn thing fell off the jack between getting the spare off and putting the new tire on. *CRUNCH* the assembly that holds the brake slammed into the ground and left a gash a half an inch deep in the concrete. Still once I got it jacked up again things went all right and there didn't seem to be any permanent damage.

While I was out I got a new lug nut for one of the other tires since it had been MIA for some time now. It was metric so I had to shop around a bit, but I found one. Once the car was in shape I headed into work. I got some solid work done on my packet sniffer. Then I went to a meeting with Professor Simonsen and Chinh. They were both feeling sick. After a late lunch I splurged and bought the latest Transmetropolitan graphic novel even though I can't afford to be buying comics right now.

Upon returning to the office I had an interesting discussion with Rick concerning the necessity (or lack there of) of IPv6. I learned that their obnoxiously long addresses do at least have a shorthand.
de:ad:be:ef:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:fe:ed:fa:ce
can be abbreviated as
de:ad:be:ef::fe:ed:fa:ce
Note the magic double colon.

After dinner I called the financial aid folks to hopefully speed some much needed funds my way. I forwarded some mail that mysteriously appeared at my house and some contact info for potential employers to Terry. I finished my self evaluation for work. It had a very high Dilbert factor, but at least it will net me some training. After that I worked diligently on my packet sniffer. It is starting to shape up.

Interesting things on the web today: here and here
Both good and bad news for gay marriage today. I suspect that in 50 years this will all seem as ignorant and pointless as making blacks sit in the back of the bus. What does it take away from traditional marriage?

04:51:51 Friday February 06 2004
I am in deep hack mode. Learned some new things about the format of emacs regular expressions today. Wrote a butt load of code for my packet sniffer. I am a bit off because of my medication. More on that when I am not so pressed for time.

02:28:12 Saturday February 07 2004
"Her feline past lives are plain to see
their similarities are shown in this life again."

FACT: Dienu (also transliterated Dayenu) is Hebrew for "It would have been enough".

04:56:40 Saturday February 07 2004
Don't bother me. I am in deep hack mode. I will go sleep soon. I will awaken at 12:00 tomorrow. I will hack for 12 more hours. I will turn in my packet sniffer.

07:50:53 Monday February 09 2004
I am back mostly. My packet sniffer did not quite come out as I would have desired. I am highly disappointed. It came very close to having filters and working properly. However at the last minute I got caught up in a big parsing mess that I never properly resolved. The frustrating bit is that the difficult filtering stuff underneath at least mostly works, but the grader will never know that because it will crash on parsing. I wouldn't feel so badly if I hadn't implemented all the filtering stuff. However having spent all that time working on it and now getting no credit for it just makes me frustrated that I didn't spend a few extra hours in the previous days to get the parser working. It probably would have taken less than four hours. <sigh> Just disappointed in myself I suppose.

I took the day off today. I sat around and played risk (Sara did quite well for her first time playing), did laundry, played Metroid Prime, read the most recent Transmetropolitan and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I also sat around and talked with John which is something that I haven't done in a while. His confidence has improved greatly ever since he got a cause.

I think having a cause is important at our age. John is coming to it a little late, but it is still good for him. To me it seems that a cause is a more adult way to identify yourself. As we grow older I think that we will start to identify less and less with the movies, music, books, and art we hold so dear now and more with our role in society. Causes are the intermediate step. We would like to believe that we can identify with the type of person we are. Supporting a cause is a way of showing others one aspect of the kind of person you are. If you support enough of the right causes others will start to get a better picture of who you are like a scatter diagram. However, nearly everyone falls into the trap of being a "banker" or a "programmer" or whatever. Very few people introduce themselves as environmentalists at cocktail parties. Although it would be nice if we could all list the things we believe in when we meet new people it isn't practical. The things we believe in are often divisive and no one has enough time to learn everyone's take on everything. A first reaction to all this might be that I am some idealist saying that everyone is going to "sell out" but that isn't so. I think it is good that we take on simple roles and identify that way. The bottom line, and something that I think is wonderful about humanity is that we are each amazingly complex creatures. People change. They have amazing, odd, and often contradictory beliefs. To paraphrase Angela: "People are always telling you to be yourself as if yourself is this definite thing like a toaster." It is okay to be a banker because most of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out who we are. Our chances of explaining that to others is practically nil.

19:15:04 Tuesday February 10 2004
Well it is about time to go to sleep. I know you are thinking that I missed a day, but you are wrong. I haven't slept yet. Between my odd hacking hours and crashing out on Sunday my schedule managed to contort itself into something that was not even remotely diurnal. So I stayed up last night. I didn't really need to, but I was having a hard time concentrating. I couldn't seem to get any work done for the life of me. There was probably only four hours of real actual work to complete for today and I didn't finish until about 09:00 today. I did put together what I believe is one of my better lectures for cs490-dsp. We learned about μ-law encoding and error correcting codes today. I did do a little work on my XML feed for qblog. I also made a bit of progress on Professor Simonsen's code. I need to make sure that I get up early and show some strong progress on that at our meeting tomorrow. I shall wrap myself in the warm folds of unconsciousness.

02:45:52 Thursday February 12 2004
Awoke reasonably early (not as early as I had hoped) this morning and got some solid work done on Professor Simonsen's widget. I didn't get the next revision out before our meeting at 14:30 but she was cool about it. After the meeting I hung out in the office. I pecked at my work and updated my .emacs file. It is hard to get real work done with so many people coming in and out all the time.

I moved all of my mail over to the CS servers and set up some spamassasin filters. I finally got around to doing my paper review for cs590d about midnight. It was an awful paper too. I should create cs490-dsp notes now, but I am tired, so I will get up early. I should also mention that I know what I am not doing (and hence what I AM doing) on the upcoming Valentines day. There will probably be more on that on Vday itself, but don't expect too much. I consider this a matter too personal to talk about to my family let alone post on the world wide interweb.

03:21:21 Friday February 13 2004
When I awoke this morning I almost called today a loss. I didn't sleep much and what sleep I did get was lousy. I got up early produced some lecture notes on Finite Field theory for ECC's. I got into a heated debate that I wasn't in the mood for because I wrote "This paper has no strong points" as a review for David Moore's Internet Quarantine paper. It seemed like something fun to fight about last night, but with a headache and sleep deprivation it was not enjoyable. In 636 I think we may have some cheaters. Professor Comer said something about it today. I will have to watch and see if anyone suddenly disappears. Sleep now. I need to get up and do work before my meeting with Professor Xie.

04:17:12 Saturday February 14 2004
After some decent sleep last night I got up and did some work for Professor Xie. I can't help but feel that her project is going nowhere. After our meeting with her I had lunch with Lehmann.

Lehmann is someone that I met through ACM a while back. He is scrufy and personable and enjoys life. Generally a good set of traits for an evangelical type. Even though I don't agree with him on a lot of higher principles he is still a great guy to be around. He is alway willing to laugh at himself and others, probably more than me which is somewhat remarkable.

After lunch I wrote and submitted a patch to mpg321 (a command line Linux/Unix mp3 player). I am like a real "open source" person now. We had a long meeting at work. Apparently many people in my group think that supercomputers are the only way to do important science. I had to bring up the point that most researchers don't even know what to do with the power of the machine on their desktop. I think there is a lot of low hanging fruit out there where scientific progress can be made without a massive investment.

After the meeting I worked on Professor Simonsen's code. I am ALMOST done with this part. When I arrived back home I discovered my house full of people playing Scrabble. Matt got drunk and Sara with no 'H' got upset because she has low expectations for tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow I need to get some sleep so that I can prepare for the big event.

Oh, yeah. Today in the history of the internet: Microsoft admits that major portions of the Windows NT and Windows 2000 source trees have been leaked.

09:25:58 Sunday February 15 2004
That VDay thing happened today. I am not a big fan of this particular holiday. I am not going to bitch about how it is a corporate plot by the greeting card industry, but I definitely think that Sara with no 'H' is correct here when she claims that no one is happy on Valentines day. "People in relationships are stressed or let down. People without them are frightfully lonely." The reason for this actually has something to do with Sex Drugs & Coco Puffs.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal", because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple next who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

In reality this is just echoing a sentiment that I first heard espoused in The Dao of Steve:

Dex: (to Rick and Maggie) Do you guys ever worry your marriage is an obstacle to reaching enlightenment? Rick: (sarcastically) Do you ever wonder if your philosophy is an obstacle to having a life? Dex: Seriously, man, because romantic love for a lot of people becomes kind of religion. You know, face it: most people feel that their personal relationships are more important than relationship with God. We should just admit that romantic love is our national religion; it's like the state religion of America.

And I think it is the truth. This is the real reason that we have such high divorce rates. No one expects a level of romance that is actually attainable. I feel bad for us as a culture. We are making a lot of people miserable. There are only two possible solutions to this problem (1) be miserable or (2) become a cynical bastard and laugh at it. As a result I held an Anti-Valentines Day party this evening. The invite contained the following.

Beheading Day - On February 14 a long time ago some guy got his head chopped off. This no doubt had something to do with love as anyone who has had a significant other can testify. Thus every year misanthropic bastards such such as myself throw a party and play Mario Kart out of respect for all those poor dumb saps out there who have dates and are most likely due for a beheading any minute now. The Rules of Beheading Day -------------------------- (1) You do not talk about "Love" (2) You DO NOT talk about "Love" (3) You DO NOT come with a date. If you are in anything that can be remotely described as a romantic relationship YOU ARE NOT INVITED. ...

I wasn't going to write about the events that led me to hold this party, but I was mentioned so I thought I would comment briefly. Erica was my high school girlfriend and first love. As a result of coming through a difficult patch in her life she showed up back in my life several years ago. Since then we have been dating off and on. We haven't been anything that could reasonably be called boyfriend/girlfriend, but we have done the Valentines Day thing together each year. This year she elected not to. The reasons for this are not entirely clear to me, nor are they entirely unclear. She is WELL within her rights to choose as she has. However last time I drove down to see her we both realized that there was something wrong with the way our relationship was idling and neither of us could come up with a solution.

03:40:29 Monday February 16 2004
For the most part I did nothing today. I played some Metroid. I read The Joy Of Pi. The only thing done today that could even remotely be considered productive is that I finally sat down and finished the next revision of Professor Simonsen's project. I needed to waste a day, and today was a good choice.

20:45:08 Tuesday February 17 2004
Yeah, I missed a day. After the group meeting yesterday I went to work and got some things done. Not nearly what I would like, but enough. I then had my 590d paper written by midnight. I spent the rest of the night (until 06:00) putting together a project for my students and preparing lecture notes. Then it was back here for a quick nap before I got up to teach. After teaching I skipped 590d and had lunch with my students. They are good kids, very curious.

After lunch I went to cs636 where our router assignment was presented. This will be THE major project for the semester. The individual pieces seem easy enough, but the overall system is surprisingly complex. After class I went and listened to Professor Simonsen discuss our project. It was a good talk and it was well received. I intend to keep on pushing ahead on this project because it should advance her career and her field a great deal, but also I would like to be associated with her work in the future.

I finished Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs. It was not bad. It could have been much more interesting if it weren't for the sports bias. A decent read if you have nothing more pressing on your list. After the joy of Microserfs I decided to go back for a little more Coupland. I am currently reading his Life After God. It actually isn't an Atheist manifesto. Rather it is an interesting story that asks if this next generation that has been brought up without ever going to church can find some kind of "spiritual" aspect.

06:32:21 Thursday February 19 2004
I am not sure how normal this is, but if I sleep for more than about nine hours I wake up with muscles that feel like Jello. This condition seems to persist until I eat something. I suppose 9 hours is a long time to keep the body at 37 grad C maybe I am just hungry.

After awakening I came in to work. I did the usual stuff. We had a meeting with Professor Simonsen. That went very well. She is pleased with the current progress. I suppose that the meeting on Friday will not go as well.

My cs636 router group got together for the first time today. They are all good guys and I am psyched to get coding even though I have too much to do already. I even set up a wiki to do documentation stuff. I actually like the idea of a wiki better than the idea of a "blog" because I have long thought about having some kind of online "thought bucket" into which I could dump little tidbits of information, books I want to read, commands, example UNIX configuration files, and the like. A wiki is almost what I want. Perhaps there will be a qwiki along with qblog before too long. Speaking of which I still need to document qblog and finish the rss generator.

I put together some notes on information theory and compression for cs490-dsp. I don't think that they are half bad if I do say so myself.

05:43:02 Monday February 23 2004
For some reason I have been thoroughly uninspired to write for the past two days. On Friday I simply augered (yes it is a verb) into the bed after attending all of my meetings and squashing some bugs for Katy Professor Simonsen.

Saturday was a total waste. I suppose I will be more sane for it, but I can feel the hours slipping by this semester, because I need each and every one. Experience has shown that if I attempt to work straight through the weekend I will end up wasting one day anyway. I went out with the set {John, Wanke, Rick, Paul, Carrie} to meet Scott and his wife (who's name escapes me) at the cactus. We had dinner at Scotty's. That was quite enjoyable. I had a Mo'Fo' Cluck which is their spicy chicken sandwich thing. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this dish was spicy enough to kill a few thousand taste buds. I also discovered that someone has named a beer after me. It isn't half bad either!

After dinner we made it to the cactus. Everyone got plastered, save for myself. I was sober driver. You may not realize that being sober driver is the equivalent of running a day care for 150-200lb children. John got sick on the pavement before we even made it to the bar. Carrie was so drunk that she had to be physically placed back on a stool because she couldn't manage this feat by herself. Paul got all sentimental and wouldn't quit insisting that I watch after Carrie "If anything should ever happen to him". By the time the bar closed I had a killer headache from the babysitting and the smoke and the loud music.

I did get to meet Scott's wife which was interesting. It just makes me wonder how the two of them ever ended up together. It is not that she is too "good" for him or something like that. I just marvel at the fact that these two personality types decided to get together and raise children. Very strange

Today got off to a slow start. I spent most of the afternoon playing Metroid and doing laundry. Eventually I got off my duff, had dinner with John, and made it to the office to do some actual work. I got the larger portion of the ARP cache written for our 636 router. This project still promises to be a lot of fun.

04:32:53 Tuesday February 24 2004
I awoke too late this morning. I don't know if I slept through my alarm or turned it off without becoming conscious or what. Regardless I missed my 590d group meeting. They sent me notes so I can get ready for the next one.

After I finally came around I bought a belt. Mine was dead. It turns out that if you are a man with a 32 inch waste you just have to make due with a 34 inch belt. I know this sounds picky, but my belt is something that I wear ALL DAY EVERY DAY so in many respects it is more important that a lot of other things I own. After that I headed over to student services and paid off my emergency loan.

When I arrived at work I discovered that the new computers that Rick and I were not certain we would get had arrived. This is a scary multi-gigahertz thing with dual flat panel monitors and all kinds of insanity. I have been resisting the urge to start the install all day, because I had too much to accomplish. It always takes at least a day to get things the way I want them after an install. Perhaps tomorrow I will do the install.

Chris got his C2 account. A search of the livejournal accounts shows that a few noders have been wondering about the Valentines. Erica mailed me with a table width problem that I couldn't find for the longest time. It turned out to be a long-hyphenated-description that was preventing a table from wrapping. I am now reading Strangers In Paradise concurrently with Life After God.

04:49:06 Wednesday February 25 2004
I set up the new computer today. Big honking screenshot of dual headedness is available here. I still am having problems with the usbmouse (I am using my old ps2 mouse for now) and the sound card (I am suffering in silence on that one, get it? silence!). My favorite new feature is the 80 Gig hdd. I was quickly filling the 6 Gig I had before.

I need to hurry up and finish ARP for our group meeting on Friday. I don't know when I am going to find time to do that though. Tomorrow I have a meeting with Katy that I expect to go well. I need to produce some dead trees for that meeting.

I find that I am accomplishing less and less. No, that is not it. I find that I am taking longer to accomplish the same amount. I suppose eight weeks in to the semester working 6+ days per week is getting old. I kind of sympathize with Brad. He has exactly the opposite problem. He hasn't had anything to do in eight weeks. Maybe I could con him into coming up here and between the two of us we might make one decent happy human being.

22:48:46 Thursday February 26 2004
No sleep was acquired last night. I did manage to get in with enough time to rest my eyes for a couple hours. I hopped out of bed and ran to my 590d meeting. We are getting close to having a project that we can actually work on. I am probably too big a fan of rapid prototyping, but all this sitting around and thinking about design before writing the first line of code seems wasteful to me.

After that I taught 490-dsp. Definitely not my best lecture. I completely spaced a term.

I went to class. I updated my resume and sent it out to some company in Toronto that was interested in a Scientific Applications Developer. Apparently is is some biotech company looking to write drug discovery software. I don't know. It could be fun. It would be far far away and I would still be within driving distance if I wanted to hang out with Kelsey.

After the resume I "finished" writing ARP for our router. It is all there, but it needs a lot more testing. All in all a very productive day. Time to grab some Z's before I collapse. Tomorrow is the meeting with Professor Xie and that is about it. I may even get to take TWO days off this weekend. w00t!

04:08:14 Saturday February 28 2004
Not a lot happened today: Made forward progress at work, Came home at a reasonable hour for once, Played Metroid, Cleaned the house, Talked with my roommate about stuff.

Since today was so uneventful let me fill you in on some things I have neglected to tell you about. I imported a greenish gamecube controller from Japan. I have been short one controller for some time, but I couldn't find a fourth that I was willing to buy. There are only three colors available in the states black, purple, and orange. And I am of the mind that you should be able to determine who has which controller just by glancing at the front of the console. So I needed a fourth color. I didn't pay anything extra for the controller (list price 24.99 USD) but I did pay 10 USD to ship it.

I finished Life After God earlier this week. Definitely not as good as Microserfs. Not a bad book by any measure, but it takes this arty path and tries to tell a story without much narrative. It is largely a series of "vignettes", for lack of a better word, that kinda form a story in the end. Mostly they consist of observations about everyday life and things. I have to say that this book is very powerful. I think everyone over 20 can identify with the melancholy caused by the emotional numbness that develops as we age. This book definitely makes you feel, but the feeling never goes anywhere. It also makes you think. I am still puzzling out the ending.

I also finished the first two trade paperbacks associated with Strangers In Paradise. It is good stuff, girly stuff, but good none the less.

The next book in the queue is Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

And in closing I want everyone to know that it smells like victory: