Older blog entries for Skud (starting at number 58)

I've waited a couple of days to post this diary entry because I wanted to make sure I didn't say anything inappropriate in the heat of the moment.

Umemployed: all of Netizen's staff were laid off last week, for reasons which may become clearer to the rest of the world in the fullness of time. Most of us were expecting offers to be made pretty much immediately by another company, but on Friday we learnt that only half the staff had received (provisional) offers, and that a number of senior staff (myself included) were not among those who received offers.

Angry or ambivalent? I'm not sure whether to be angry about it, or whether to just shrug and not worry too much. To be honest, everyone is more than able to find work elsewhere, and general opinion seems to be that anyone who chose not to take the opportunity to hire Netizen's key staff is shooting themself in the foot... *especially* since those who were offered jobs may not be interested in taking them if the team isn't being kept together.

Job hunting: I'd already dropped my resume to a few places, just on spec, but Friday afternoon was my time to email those places and say "I'm available, make me an offer." I'd like to take this opportunity to say the same thing to anyone reading this diary entry online. My resume is available at http://infotrope.net/resume/ if you want it. Yes, I'm happy to relocate internationally, and would actually enjoy the opportunity to work overseas for a bit.

Alcohol: About half the staff went to the pub mid-afternoon and had a few drinks in memory of Netizen's glory days. That was just the beginning of a long and alcoholic evening, culminating at Abyss, where most of my ex-workmates had gathered to drink, dance, and so on. I woke up feeling somewhat the worse for wear, but recovered pleasantly with a visit to the markets, an afternoon nap, and a couple of job offers before the hangover had even worn off. Have to see if anything comes of them.

Fallout: There's been some email flying over the weekend, and it will be interesting to see what happens over the next week or so.

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So, it's day three or so of the guarana experiment. The plan is to see whether regular doses of guarana (in capsule form) helps me get an attention span, feel less edgy/fidgety, get more organised, be less obsessive, or feel less compelled to eat "comfort" food and/or drink alcoholic beverages.

I'm taking 2 * 550mg capsules when I get up and at 4 hour intervals throughout the day. In a week or so, I might fiddle with that dosage a bit and see what happens, but for now this seems to be working adequately. I've stopped drinking caffeine/guarana drinks (coke, V, coffee, etc) and also tried to avoid really sugary stuff (candy, fizzy soft drinks, etc).

Results so far:

• I'm definitely feeling less edgy. I haven't found myself fidgeting or fretting at all, despite considerable external stress.
• I've been able to concentrate quite well at the office, on the tram (reading books etc), and at home (using the computer with music playing, which I can't normally do).
• I've gotten a few things done which I think I would normally have put off or somehow ignored (laundry, dishes, scanning genealogical records, cleaning up the pile of papers on the hall table).
• I'm eating less, and definitely *much* less "comfort" food. I haven't felt the need to stuff myself full (for example, I left a fair bit on my plate when I had dinner at a japanese place the other night), and haven't eaten *any* munchy food (crackers, etc) since I started. I think my average kilojoule intake over the past three days has probably been half what it has been for the last month.
• I'm drinking somewhat less... not sure how much less, though. I'll keep an eye on it for the next few days. I should get some non-sugary soft drinks as a substitute for my standard get-home-from-work-and-have-a-drink drink.
• I'm drinking *heaps* more water.

Forgot to mention earlier... I've started intentionally messing with my neurochemistry by taking regular small dosages of guarana throughout the day. I'm also trying to stay off caffeiney stuff (and, to a lesser extent, sugary stuff) so that it doesn't interfere with the guarana. Hopefully it'll help me stay saner.

I figure that it'll be hard to tell if it's working or not, especially when you consider the whole placebo effect issue. But then again, if placebo effect works, why complain?

Took myself to see Jackie Chan's "Shanghai Noon" this evening. Very cool movie. Fantastically choreographed fight scenes (Chan vs half a dozen indians armed with tomahawks, for instance), a very funny sidekick, and lots of laughs in general. Well worth the ticket price.

I'd rather stay a child
And keep my self-respect
If being an adult
Means being like you.

Listening: Dead Kennedys (useful for maintaining a appropriately nasty mood on public transport)

Reading: Glen Cook's _Faded Steel Heat_. People told me I'd like this because I like Stephen Brust's _Taltos_ stuff, but I don't like it much at all. Well, I'd probably enjoy it much more if the detective didn't constantly carry on about how he thinks with his cock. I mean, we *know* that sometimes peoples' gonads get the better of them, but anyone who has a constant problem with it needs help. I'd be equally annoyed if he constantly got blamed his failings on being drunk, or having a drug problem, or whatever. It might be a *reason* but it's not an *excuse* ... especially if he's made no effort to deal with the problem.

The company across the hall has been SPRUNG! Penny caught them trying to steal our inflatable alien this morning. So Laz went over there and rescued our yellow robot, who they'd kidnapped and held hostage (wearing a hat and sunnies, perched in one of their potplants). Keep in mind that this is the company that keeps complaining about our unprofessionalism.

News just to hand: apparently they took the robot all the way to New Zealand on tour with one of their staff. They were going to take photos and email them to us, but didn't get around to us.

I just asked Morgan, "Aren't these the same tossers who were complaining about our unprofessionalism?" Apparently everything's friendly and happy now, and Morgan knows them all by name and they like us. *shrug*.

Yesterday was the day of the S11 rallies against the World Economic Forum. It's on the front pages of all our papers today, but apparently it was pretty non-violent, which is good. The protests were all about the evilness of big corporations. Gotta agree with that, for the most part.

On Saturday I spent some time talking to Con Zymaris about open source software and whether what we're doing is worthwhile. I often wonder whether, in fifty years time, I'll look back and think that I've wasted my life. Up until recently I didn't have any real reason to think that I was doing anything worthwhile... I figured that I'd look back and say "I guess I've done alright, mostly". But I really feel like what I'm doing lately in the open source/free software field is worthwhile, and I'll be able to look back in 50 years time and say "I was one of the people responsible for giving computer users a choice."

This ties into the S11 stuff... I figure that if I had a choice between going to the S11 rally or staying home and working on open source stuff, I'd actually achieve more by doing the latter. So anyone who thinks I should have been at the rally can, quite simply, bite me.

Spent yesterday at the LUV Installfest. I ended up organising the talks throughout the day, and spoke on the topics of Intro to Linux, Linux for Business, and Intro to GNOME.

Came home, played with lego while watching videos, then slept (16 hours, yay).

Reading about Burning Man really makes me wish I could be there.

I don't think I'll make it to YAPC::Europe at this rate, either. *sigh*. I have seriously itchy feet right now... need travel!

I got 128Mb more memory on Friday (bringing me up to 196Mb), so Staroffice doesn't totally suck any more. I hope GPLing it will lead to some performance improvements.

So, after all the trouble I had installing my new motherboard, and then my new SCSI scanner, this week I've had an entirely different kind of hardware installation saga:

NEW EARLOBE JEWELRY. As they say, w00t! (why do they say "w00t"? I don't know.)

Warning: for those who are squeamish, skip down to the end of this bit NOW.

So. I have some 2 gauge eyelets from bodycircle. For those not in the know, that's just over half a centimetre (quarter of an inch) in diameter. Stainless steel, look kind of like rivets. I also got a "claw" which is a tapered curved steel thing with a ball on the thick end, which you can also shove through a hole in yourself, if you are so inclined. Likewise 2ga.

Now, I figured 2ga based on my old eyelet, which was 4mm or so in diameter (as close as I could tell using an old school ruler). Turns out that maybe I should have gone for 4ga instead, as they're *quite* large. It took quite some effort to get them in.

The claw thing is useful because it's tapered and with a bit of effort, I could crunch it through the existing hole. Well, ok, effort and a few stiff drinks earlier in the evening. Effort and drinks and icecubes applied to the earlobe. Among our weapons are effort, drinks, icecubes, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Yeah. Anyway.

*CRUNCH* Ow. Breathe deeply. Ride the 'dorphin rush.

So, it didn't break any skin, just stretched it a lot. But it made the back of the hole stretch back along the jewelry in a sort of tight ring of skin. The problem with tight, stretched rings of skin is that they don't get much (any) bloodflow, so it basically dried up and came off today, leaving a bit of rawness and oozey bits which I had to douse repeatedly with mediswabs.

Why is it that there are never any IV drug users around the office when you want a mediswab (alcohol-impregnated pre-injection swab, useful thing for small injuries, zits you've picked too much, and of course oozey piercings)? Sheesh. I had to go to the chemist. And they've changed the alcohol formula so it's not as stingy. Now where's the fun in that?

So anyway, now my lymph system has gone into overdrive and my earlobes are all swollen and my neck hurts. I've taken some aspirin and I'm typing with my head cricked over to one side holding some ice to my earlobe. I'm sure this isn't ergonomic.

I will be *really* annoyed if my ears get infected, mostly because it would lose me a lot of "I'm so tough..." points.

In other, non-piercing-related news I went to the LUV meeting last night for the first time in a while. There's an installfest this weekend and I've offered to talk about intro to Linux and intro to GNOME. Should be good fun (apart from the 9am start, ewww).

Life at Netizen is way too salesy for my liking at the moment. I worked on 4 project proposals yesterday. But I sat down for an internal network design bull session with the half the tech team this afternoon and that was pleasant.

Today was a heavy genealogy day.

Dad came round with a crate full of genealogical records, and we played with the scanner for a bit. I've also updated gentool (to version 0.2, but still very alpha) so it now supports:

• children
• marriages
• multimedia objects

You can see the results on my family tree page. It's definitely getting there. Next step: mess around with GEDCOM "family" records, and make thumbnails of images where possible.

I've also got some photos of yesterday's trip to the beach. They're pretty spectacular. But then, Sorrento back beach is like that. Photography is fun!

Schoen: ok, that's a good enough excuse. Sorry to hear about it :( I really ought to take better care of my wrists too. *sigh*

schoen: I preferred your diary when it wasn't in point form.

Tired. Grumpy. Feeling slightly off-colour. Should have stayed in bed this morning and not gone into work.

Decided to download helixcode's GNOME stuff and play with it. 40Mb over a slow modem. This'll tire out the trans-pacific carrier pigeons.

The war with the company across the hall continues. Today, our inflatable yellow robot disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Morgan has posted a "Missing Robot" sign on our front window. Have you seen this robot?

lavaps has changed shape when I wasn't watching. How do I get it to have a title bar again?

Early morning tomorrow... beach with my dad. Mornings suck. Beaches rock. Especially this one. However, I'm not sure whether going to the beach early in the morning counts as an overall win or not.

Wow. Purty.