Whoah, last post was in 2000. Lots has happened. I dropped out (twice), got and left several jobs, moved to a new city (twice), etc etc etc.

I've kinda decided that being a programmer is for chumps - robotting out crap code for idiots is not what I want to do with my life, and more and more, that seems to what the 'software industry' career entails. Fuck it. I'm trying my hand at something new.

I'm learning Emacs-lisp, slowly. I use XEmacs, though. So nobody on the IRC networks I frequent can help me with the weird problems I run into. This is probably good for me.

I hate things that are good for me.

graydon has ruined my easy life. Once I was content to sit back and exude slack and indifference, letting my irresponsibility, my slack, ruin things for everyone. Now he tells me that to really hate everyone, i have to work like a sonuvagon.

Well. I suppose i have two choices: work more or stop hating people. And that's not really a choice at all, is it?

Jeez.

chain gang

I'm doing a few graveyard shifts at the security monitoring company I worked for last year. I don't enjoy this at all, especially as it takes up time I could spend with Joanna these last days before she leaves.

Just to make me fell less silly, I read Inoshiro's security articles at kuro5hin. If I'm going to be working security, it might as well mean something.

chatty nonintelligences

There's been a few mentions of IRC bots these last few days, so I thought I'd make mention of my BillyBot. He's a python program that does sorta what JWZ's dada dodo does, only (IMO) better.

He's missing a bit of stuff to make him useful (ie, the HTML input filter should be buffered, and he needs better i/o capabilities) but he's really a lot of fun if you fill him with a large and interesting corus. I recommend Billy Graham speaches mixed with GNOME developer interviews.

BillyBot is here

unauthorized public exhibition
I just had the extremely fun experience of having a private large screen movie showing, with a small group of friends, in an empty art studio. Lots of fun - Andrei is involved with the Art Student's Union, and so got his hands on a digital projector (nice!) and a VCR and sound setup. We pulled all the couches in the studio together and had our own little movie theater going.

Tommorow or sunday, I hope to convince someone to drag their machine up their to watch some old demos, one of my big computer-dreams from being 15 years old that hasn't been realized yet.

will produce valueless streams of abstract symbols for money
I'm still looking for a job. Most of my finals are over now and I can invest more energy into the search. I think I'll likely end up in a crappy job this summmer, though, simply because I have no faith in myself.

I spent all of last year in a hypershitty shift-work job last year, getting paid crap, working crap hours, and never seeing my friends. I promised myself that this year, I would go looking for a real job, in my own field, where I'd be doing good work. But I'm shy and very wary(scared?) of new things and tend to undervalue my own skills. So I'll probably end up flipping burgers or something.

I have a friend who doesn't know much more than how to spell "html" and "unix", but he's the best shit-talker in the world. He's got himself a job maintaing a website for the government, and he's gotten other great jobs before. Same age as me, and less dedicated (to the work). But he knows how to talk, what to put on a resume; he has the balls to get away with it.

It's sad .. i'm semi-anonymously telling people I likely don't know that I have no balls.

Hmm. Time to stop whining about myself.

you can hold out
   forever
even walls
   fall
      down

Insert proboscis, Suck Blood. Repeat
I paid my many fines at school - the remainder of tuition, my lab fees, and my library fees. Yi. My library fees were an astounding $80 dollars. I've got expensive taste, apparently.

Mafiaboy, Master Hacker
I actually had the 'hacker' vs 'cracker' talk with my parents today. It took a while to explain. Then I realized, it doesn't matter: 'hacker' in the proper sense is a label that can only be given someone by another hacker.. so if you aren't in the community, the label is meaningless. So I say let them keep calling crackers hackers. It doesn't affect anything, and 'hacker' is a cooler word than 'cracker'. (and with less racial overtones)

whine
Joanna, my girlfriend, is working on the other side of the country from me for four months. She leaves in under a week. whine whine whine. Thank you for your patience.

cat /dev/null
More work on entity's python stuff. The Python C API is passably documented and easy to write with; you tend to forget you are in C and need to take care of garbage collection yourself. Oh well, once it's all working that'll be an evening's chore.

Diddling on a few other little, little projects - haven't had much time for anything, since I've been spending most of my time with Joanna.

I am again of the opinion that Delphi sucks. And also that Windows is a horrible environment for people to learn how to code.

Funny thing of the day: Going over someone else's comments for a project I'm trying to ressurect, I came across this comment describing a constructor definition: "{ Set up the internal state of the object }". Wow. Tautological comments.