Advogato blog for redmist

11 Dec 2001

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 21:27:38 GMT

[1324]h

Personal:

Depressed. Everything seems rather pointless...especially computing. I try to read, but I can't concentrate for more than five seconds. I have been sick for the last 4 days, and I have finals tommorrow that I am TOTALLY unprepared for. Lonely.

Programming:

I can't stand computers anymore. So ugly. To much shit to know. Perl, Lisp, XML, XSLT, MySQL, PostGres, C, C++, networking, SML, Assembly, and on and on...IT NEVER STOPS! My memory is not that good.

School:

Failing. (UPDATE:Actually, I passed all my classes with As and Bs)

Work:

Painful.

26 Oct 2001

Fri, 26 Oct 2001 23:42:51 GMT

[1618]h

Personal:

OK. I have a free day today so that makes things better. Also going to see a friend that I have yet to meet in RL tonight.

Programming:

Been doing some Lisp. I love it. Kinda sick of Perl. Don't get me wrong, I love Perl. It's just that when you use only one language for too long, it gets old. Better to learn and use many languages.

School:

Went to HAZMAT class last Wednesday. Pretty cool stuff. Pretty scary stuff. Apparently, it's legal to transport thousands of pounds of incompatible (an understatement) hazardous materials in a non-compartmentalized big rig with only cardboard "barriers" in between the different types of hazardous materials.

There was this one incident in which almost 40,000 pounds of ether, formic acid, sodium cyanide, sulfuric acid, industrial solvents, hydrogen peroxide (%90) and other bad ass stuff was being transported in the back of a big rig. It stopped at an inspection station, and the inspector noticed a leak coming from the back of the truck. He opened the doors, and smelled ether and acid. The truck was quickly brought to a field far away from people and aired out. HAZMAT techs with Level A suits on entered the truck and removed and seperated all the materials according to hazard class and whether or not the materials had breached it's container. All in all, a bottle of ether and a bottle of sulfuric acid had been leaking, which was incredibly lucky considering what could have happened.

Work:

Finally! A day which does not involve supporting Windows users! I got to fix a b0rken HDD on a nice Penguin server. Work is pretty decent...for now.

25 Oct 2001

Thu, 25 Oct 2001 06:14:21 GMT

[2305]h

Personal:

Blah. Now becoming more busy. I don't want to be. I just want to sleep all day.

Programming:

Lisp goood! People who bug you BAAAD!

School:

Cut one class, went to the other. Happiness or satisfaction was not found in either.

Work:

Alas, I have started working for my old company today. We will see just how hellish it is. I geuss it was just in time; $11 in my bank account and bills on my desk.

20 Oct 2001

Sat, 20 Oct 2001 11:57:38 GMT

[0445]h

Personal:

Just got back from a nice night drinking, playing pool, and watching Quills with my pal Gavin and his friend. For a while, I was happy.

Programming:

Completed the code for the first version of a big project today. I was pretty irritated by the fact that I had to use a pretty un-elegant method to achieve some of the functionality, but it was the least un-elegant choice. Now begins the Lisp coding.

School:

Whatever.

15 Oct 2001

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 10:22:27 GMT

[0309]h

Personal:

Very angry. Bitter. Upset. Frustrated. Bored. Sad. Too many people are dicks.

Programming:

I FUCKING HATE MLDBM!!! The documentation is horrible, the temporary variable is a kludge, and it sure as hell doesn't handle hashes of hashes of lists! I am using MySQL just like I should have from the beginning. I thought, "I'll use MLDBM because it requires no real installation/maintenence of software, as opposed to a real RDBMS which requires at least some setup, administration and know how. Anything to save the user some time and patience." Well, I was wrong and computers suck.

School:

Mid-terms tomorrow. Walk in. Sit down. Write a null set on the exam. Walk out. Go home. Sleep. Maybe I should start caring...naaah.

12 Oct 2001

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 00:33:49 GMT

[1720]h

Programming:

Still debugging EFF code (Perl)...much more difficult when you leave the code for a while, and then come back. Trying to figure out how to deal with the fucking horrible Lisp environments out there. The best one I have found is SBCL, and the Top Level interface in that environment sucks ass. No command line editing or history and shitty documentation on compilation adds up to frustration and a steep learning curve. The whole learning C thing is going well. Still trying to figure out what I want my first project to be. Putting off learning Standard ML and Assembly until I learn how to manage my time better.

Personal:

Still really depressed. I haven't been happy, even for a moment, in...well, I can't remember. It's a really shitty feeling. Never satisfied. Always sad...feeling like something is missing. Maybe if I marry Bjork...

I think I see a pattern forming...

27 Sep 2001

Thu, 27 Sep 2001 11:10:18 GMT

[0351]h

Work:

No more! No more soul-sucking work! The soul-sucking is now being done by school. Unemployed and proud!

School:

So I am taking Fire Combustion and Behavior, Hazardous Materials Technology, and DC Principles. They all suck. Not the fields of study, but the form in which they are presented to me (namely, school). School is one of the most profoundly destructive and backwards ideas ever conjured by the insidious and flawed mechanisms of the human brain. It assumes that

I am not curious, and
I need to be pushed in order to learn

both of which are not true. I cut class this morning and learned twice as much as I would have in class, got my finances done, and read 20 pages all before my class that I would have been in was a 1/3 over.

Personal:

Bored, angry, lonely and depressed. Occasionally something good will happen. My life is going no where. Waaah.

Programming:

I am doing some volunteer coding for the EFF. My grandparents think that what I doing (for the EFF) is "awful." My mind has been under siege by a variety of fascinating and complicated subjects in CS and it's underlying memes.

20 Jul 2001

Fri, 20 Jul 2001 10:35:19 GMT

[0323]h:

Work:

Work is getting sucky. I have to build a machine tommorrow out of an old fubared Dell Optiplex GMT 5100 with a b0rken BIOS and I am not happy about it. Other than that, work is cool. Have to say that I am looking forward to being paid. How I wish I was working with software.

Personal:

Fucking bitter. Time passes in imperceptible quanta of torture. Last time I made a journal entry was 6 July? Where did my life go? I WANT IT BACK NOW! At least I now have a really good knife and I get to sleep in this weekend. Still lonely.

Programming:

I am working on a volunteer app for a non-profit. Really interesting stuff (for a good cause, but I am under tacit NDA). Reading "Network Programming with Perl" by Stein. A very good book. Wishing I could live my life using only macros (in the Lisp context), and continuations.

6 Jul 2001

Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:15:51 GMT

[0258]h:

Work:

Today it was filled with Clone Pain (remember clones?). Wierd hardware setups, pain, pain, pain. Rest of the day was filled with sitting on my ass. Working is no fun. You always say "I need a job" when you are without one (and thus, no cash); however, when you do have one, you find all your hours gravitating towards this sink of time and energy (and loss of sleep). Even though you now have cash, you have lost so much else. Fuck work (the idea in general).

Personal:

My girl left me. Heart shattered into a thousand equally traumatized splinters. I am now exceedingly lonely. I just want somebody to snuggle in a nice warm bed with. It's not much to ask, ya' know. I almost posted a personal ad the other day. Then I realized that the only responses that it would draw would be taunting. Yaaar.

Programming:

Discovered the joys of Cascading Style Sheets (not really programming I know). Learning more about MySQL. Writing a media and information interface (generic term for a little program that holds pictures/video/sound along with descriptions/narrations). Re-habilitating my Perl Kung-Foo after college nearly obliterating it. ANSI Common LISP by Paul Graham is coming in the mail and that makes me excited. Built my first kernel (2.4.5).

17 Jun 2001

Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:40:02 GMT

[0425]h:

Well, the last couple of weeks have been interesting working in IT for the first time. It can be fun and it can be hell. The wedding won't be so bad. Haven't had more than 3 hours sleep for each of the last 14 days. It hurts. personal life improving. Linux box becoming more and more kickass. Just have to play with IPchains and figure out why random colored Cyrillic and ASCII chars sometimes display themselves on one of my virtual terminals. Very strange.

I have fallen in love with emacs. Not only does it have a very cool config interface (if you know Lisp), but it cooks for you, wipes your ass, ties your shoes AND edits your text. Nothin' like coding in Lisp, C and Perl at the same time in three different buffers. Such a turn on. Makes me want to run around in a toga.