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04:12:34 Wednesday August 04 2004
Sometimes a comment made ages ago, overlooked at the time, suddenly
shines with new insight and profound truth. Once upon a time in
highschool I had a girlfriend. I know it sounds improbable as asexual
as I come off these days, but she was beautiful, smart, and
interesting. We were into SciFi, and RPGs. We both enjoyed the X-Files
a great deal.
One night John
quipped "She wants you to be the Scully to her Mulder." At the time I
took it in the manner it was intended (namely a crack about my
masculinity from a gay guy). But looking back on it today it has
deeper meaning. In the television program Mulder was made human by
Scully. She kept him grounded. Without her to question him at every
step he would be out chasing his own shadow. Reciprocally Scully was
made human by Mulder. Without him she wouldn't believe in
anything. Without him her life would lack adventure and drama.
Looking at the two of us today you can get a fairly clear picture of
what Mulder and Scully would look like if their partnership had been
cut short. She believes and internalizes every interesting proposition
that comes her way. I think she is to the point where she has some
small difficulty dealing with non-SciFi/Fantasy types. I, on the
other hand, believe in nothing. Moral Relativism bordering on Nihilism
plus Material Atheism is about the lowest common denominator as far as
beliefs go. My life certainly lacks dynamism, and I know that I have
trouble dealing with "normal" people.
This is not to say that I am unhappy, although I certainly wouldn't
say that I was happy either. I make no apologies for my decisions and
accept the full weight of their consequences. And, I am certainly not
sitting here seven years later and pining for my highschool
girlfriend. I just read her journal post and it struck me how our
lives are this perfect allegory for an over hyped 90s television
program.
00:04:53 Thursday August 05 2004
My NAT
thinger works. Yes NAT and routing are the two functions that little
box you plug into your main internet connection to "split it up"
amongst multiple computers performs. And I can write it from
scratch. <sigh> I have been coding too long.
The story that you don't know is that I procrastinated on this project
for the majority of the summer session. My professor didn't hold
weekly meetings or have deadlines, and I didn't make much progress at
all. Summer session ends 2004-08-06 and I have been in super crunch mode
for two weeks. I am almost done. Now back to work.
01:07:24 Monday August 16 2004
Quoth The Postal
Service: "I was the one worth leaving." My room mate Matt moved
out today. I now have more than 1100 square feet to myself. I don't
mind being alone so much as the quiet. I grew up in a household with
six people. Somehow I got used to being alone, but I never managed to
acclimate myself to quiet. This problem is further exacerbated by the
fact that my room mates owned all the AV equipment.
In other news I am making great strides toward preparing the house for
sale. Hopefully I should be able to get out of here RSN.
02:59:51 Tuesday August 17 2004
There is not much to report today. I had some difficulty sleeping last
night after completing my entry. I finished reading Mount
Dragon by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They are the authors
of The Relic which is a damn fine book. This one was good light
reading. It got a bit preachy about "the dangers of science" at
several points, but over all a solid book. It keeps you turning the
pages. Next in the queue: Sock by Penn Jillette
At work I am arranging the Argos code into a library for "improved ease
of use" (basically we want our GUI to be able to call some wrapper
functions). It is about as exciting as watching one's toenails
grow.
I read an interesting thread about creepy things to do to characters
in a horror adventure this afternoon. There were some good ideas. I
may steal a few for Ravenloft because it has been decidedly more
"mysterious" than "creepy".
After I made it home I painted the mailbox, worked on taxes, and made
some progress on the PUSH website. I lost a
lot of time this evening talking with Amber on the phone. She called
from her new flat in Colorado. I was glad she called. I had just
recently resolved to send her a post card.
03:53:20 Thursday August 19 2004
Yesterday was not a good day. It seems that the department and I are
having a disagreement about what courses count toward my
graduation.
Today I did quite a bit of work on Professor Xie's project before
noon. Then I met with her at 13:30 and we discussed the next phase of
updates.
After the meeting John and I drove back to Anderson for a quick
visit. I picked up some stuff and fixed some computers. All is well
with the family it seems.
This afternoon I found a television on the sidewalk. So between
donated and scavenged parts I have pulled together a working
AV system for about 40 USD. It is a complete hack, but it works, and as
a graduate student with no money to spare that is all that matters.
02:57:28 Friday August 20 2004
I spent the majority of today arguing with people in my department and
filling out forms. I wish it didn't have to be like this, but
apparently it does.
This evening I went out to the Cactus for a couple of hours with
Terry, Lehmann, and some undergrads that I TAed for ages ago. Lehmann
and I came back to the house. We ran a debian install, played some
Sonic the Hedgehog, and watched a bit of Zim.
05:09:15 Monday August 23 2004
The weekend was not too eventful. I fought with the department a bit
more on Friday. I genuinely feel that I have been treated unjustly in
this matter, but it looks as though things aren't going to turn out
the way I want them to. Just one more data point supporting the
theory that life is not fair.
I hung out with Terry and Lita a lot this weekend. Last night I met
Lita's friend Melissa and her boyfriend (name?). We watched Things
To Do In Denver When You're Dead. I bailed on the game of truth or
dare. I have had enough of that game for one lifetime.
Today I recovered from the drinking on Saturday and did some more work
toward preparing the house for sale. Lita invited me over to her
place, but I got a call to help John fix his truck and never made it
over there. Worked some more on the P.U.S.H.
page this evening after I got home.
For whatever reason I cannot sleep. Class starts tomorrow.
02:06:29 Tuesday August 24 2004
Class went well. Just about what I expected. Professor
Prabhakar seems like a good guy. I have to remind myself that none
of this is his fault. I worked some more on Professor Simonsen's
project this afternoon.
I ran into mcc on campus and he seemed interested in the
upcoming role playing games. With all of the people that have moved
away recently I have had some trouble pulling a regular group
together.
John got stranded in the Wal*Mart parking lot this evening. I guess
his truck wasn't as fixed as we thought it was. I bought the "final"
season of Futurama while I was out there (it was after midnight). I
really shouldn't have spent the money at this juncture, but Futurama
is hard to resist.
I spent a large part of the evening hanging out with Chris. We are
planning on making a trip to Indy tomorrow to check out some bees.
06:46:23 Saturday August 28 2004
Quick Week wrap up:
Tuesday: Went to check out the bees. We met some crazy
people. They were cool. We answered a payphone. Amazing, no?
Wednesday: Did some house work. Filled out forms. A lot of
small things got accomplished, but nothing to write home
about.
Thursday: I almost completely missed Thursday. With no classes
and no meetings I accidentally slept much later than I intended. That
evening I watched some Sports Night with Terry and Lehmann. After I
got home I did more house work and then put my nose to the grindstone
on Professor Xie's project. I was up very late working, but that was
OK because (1) I got a lot accomplished and (2) I got up so late that
I couldn't sleep any way.
Friday: Time constraints required that I get up early. I got
onto campus and did some further damage to Professor Xie's
project. After that I went to class. Followed by a brief stint in the
ACM office which will likely result in me giving my famous emacs talk
again early next month. I attended a meeting, finished registering for
classes, and generally did beginning of the semester things.
This evening was spent at Terry's. We had fiery stir-fry of death and
an astounding amount of alcohol. It was a lot of fun.
05:39:53 Sunday August 29 2004
I spent today recovering from the alcoholic adventure last
night. After I got up I ran Lehmann to his car. When I checked my
phone I found that I had missed many calls from Chrissy. Apparently
she moved into her new dorm at IU
today. I would have been down to help, but I was given little to no
notice.
I spent the rest of the day giving the kitchen a proper
cleaning and working on a Windows 2000 install on Chrissy's machine. I
would have run it down this evening, but due to the extreme slowness
of her machine it took until 2:00 this morning to complete the
install. I really don't think she will be happy with win2k on a P2
300Mhz with 288 Megs of main memory. Her computer, her call. I just
get the funny feeling that I will be called down to undo what I have
done RSN.
01:06:01 Monday August 30 2004
I made my run down to Bloomington today. It took longer to set things
up than I expected. This was largely due to the bizarrely paranoid
regulations surrounding IU's resnet connections.
After I returned I watched a couple of episodes of Noir with John. For
whatever reason I very tired this evening. So I shall sleep now.
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