Sun, 24 Sep 2006
Not dead, just busy
Been crazy lately. In the last month, the following thing have happened:
I have been to Dallas, TX. and setup a new colocation site for Linden Lab.
I have a new girlfriend.
Linden Lab has suffered a network security breach.
At some point, my car’s battery died.
It’s been a hell of a month.
Tue, 08 Aug 2006
I sold my TV
My television has been sold as of yesterday. Hurray! I am on my way towards having a lot more space in my apartment, as well as possibly never owning a stupid screen (vs. a smart screen) again. It’s been interesting how many people have suggested that selling my television is a symptom of insanity, or a political statement of some kind.
Sat, 25 Feb 2006
Step up or go home
Went to a party with Hoss and saw some people I hadn’t seen in a while (Annie and Jenn). It was fun, but I was tired and burned from drinking last night with work friends and having to do emergency work at the colo this afternoon while hung over. The depth of my exhaustion became evident when a particularly hot girl showed up and I just couldn’t deal; it was obvious that either I had to step up and talk to her or go home, and it was just as obvious that talking to her was going to be impossible.
So I went home. Lesson learned: I shouldn’t let myself get this fried, since I will never know when hot girls might arrive.
Fri, 03 Feb 2006
Snowboarding to clear ones head
Going to Tahoe with Benjy and Rick; maybe I’ll have some spectacular insight with respect to my current personal suck.
Arg! Rick just called, and we’re going to be delayed; doesn’t sound like we’ll get up to our hotel until 1am. Suck has been increased.
Tue, 31 Jan 2006
Final conversations
I may have just had my last conversation with Amanda. This was the “Hey, we can’t fool around anymore because I’ve been on a date with someone else” conversation. It’s unclear to me how many people have this conversation, but if you haven’t, don’t. It sucks.
To everyone who told me that it was a bad idea to post-breakup undefined ex-thing: you told me so. I didn’t listen.
Honestly, I don’t know that I should have listened. As with the whole relationship, the part that happened after the breakup was also sweet, and I’m not sad about it. I just hurt now, still, again, etc.
Things didn’t work out. What the hell is that supposed to mean, really? In our case (oh, but there is no us, not any more), it meant that we had issues, and we couldn’t make the time to resolve them (vet school and startup company will do that to you), and so instead of slowly dying, we ended while we still thought well of each other.
A friend from work gave me a mnemonic for the stages of grief: Always Drink Alchohol Before Doing Anal. Yes, normally there are supposed to be five stages, but we added one to the front, leaving Alchohol Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance. I have no clue where I am; probably Depression. Or maybe just drunk.
Sat, 07 Jan 2006
Clearing out the other memory box
I went through my other memory box today, which mostly consisted of photos. Yikes. I range between looking rakishly handsome and oh-my-god-what-was-I-thinking. It kinda fun. I also found and eliminated a ton of photos of various people and things that I just don’t care about anymore (just like with the old letters).
It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel “lighter”; like emotional debris has been removed that I’ve been carrying around for a long time.
Fri, 23 Dec 2005
Home for the holidays
Went up to Yreka for Christmas holiday; Mom immediately started feeding me. It’s kind of like being fattened for the slaughter, only without the slaughter.
Christy arrived today, and we’re now looking at photos. Happy holidays.
M
Sat, 10 Dec 2005
Hawaii
My family got together in Hawaii for Thanksgiving this year. It was schweet; we (Mom, Aunt Linda, Uncle Duane, Christy, Doug, Emma, Catie, and Ben) ended up staying at Aina Malia on the Kohala coast of the Big Island. The coolest part of the trip was when we went hiking on new lava but we ended up playing a lot of Settlers of Cataan and eating lots of tasty food, too.
Sat, 19 Nov 2005
It’s my birthday!
Today is my 28th birthday. Under more normal circumstances, I would fill today with friends, a cake, some booze, and a party. Instead, I’m flying to Hawaii to spend a week with the extended family. This is gonna be a hell of a lot of fun.
I’ll be back in town around 9pm on the 28th.
Sun, 06 Nov 2005
Booze and CostCo
My friend asked me if I’d take him to CostCo this weekend since his usual source of transportation is now on the other side of the country attending medical school. I figure what the hell; it’s not like I’ll actually buy anything. What could I, a single guy living alone, possibly want from CostCo, home of the 50 gallon container of peanut butter.
We entered surrounded by people with large waists and larger families. There was a severe cart shortage; I look this as a sign that the economy was in trouble. After some swift negotiation, we obtained a cart from an exiting shopper, and proceeded on our quest for frozen buffalo wings, bricks of cheese you could build housing with, and enough toilet paper to have consumed a small forest. Then, out of the blue, we pass the liquor area. No big deal, I think. Who wants to buy crappy wine by the case? The boxes of Franzia careful arranged at the end of the isle appear to support my theory. Then, I see it. Good booze.
Cheap.
How did I not know this? CostCo sells high-end booze cheap! Anejo Patron, The Glenlivet 18, and Laphroaig (which I have embarrassed myself in multiple bars attempting to pronounce) are now present on my shelf of boozy goodness.
My friend thought I’d spend some money on food or something. Ha!
Fri, 21 Oct 2005
Clearing out the memory box
I’m in a mood where staying up until 01:30 going through an old shoebox of letters seems like a good idea. I found all sorts of stuff: aerograms from people I used to know in Thailand, letters from old high school (or elementary school!) friends, old girl friend letters, christmas cards from grandma… it was pretty cool.
As I went through the box, I found myself sorting stuff into 3 piles. One pile was a collection of letters from Claudine which I wanted to clump together; they are nice letters and while that part of my life is closed it was nice to re-read them. One pile was other stuff, which was mostly Thailand letters, but also included letters from Costa Rica and high school. The third, and most important, was the trash pile.
Quite a pile it ended up being: into it went a huge pile of love letters from my first girlfriend (we all make mistakes, I guess), letters that no longer had any emotional meaning, a bunch of junk that had just ended up in the box (like a UC Berkeley Reshall phone bill). It felt like a spring cleaning for my brain… especially those love letters. They had to go; it’s been 10 years, after all, and it didn’t end well.
I have a vague idea of going through that stuff and doing something with it; maybe trying to contact some of those people from long ago or sharing some of the letters I found from people I still know from way back (yes, Gina, I have letters from you from high school… be afraid). I’m not saying I will, since these introspective moods don’t hit me that often, but at least now the memory box pretty much only contains memories that I want to keep.
Mon, 19 Sep 2005
Dumped
I’ve been dumped. Amanda and I are no longer dating.
I’d write more about it, but I’m basically numb (Denial!).
Mon, 05 Sep 2005
Diet Sodas
A couple of weeks ago I took a road trip with Viv, Hoss, and Lilli to Albany, where Viv is going to medical school. This took about a week. I decided, as a game, to see if I could make it from coast to coast without drinking the same kind of diet soda twice. It turns out that this is not hard.
We have: Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Pepsi, Diet Cherry Coke, Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (longest soda name ever), and the various diet 7-ups, some of which are really nothing like 7-Up at all, really.
Diet Cherry Coke seems to be an east coast thing; I’d never seen it before, but it was everywhere once we hit Indiana. Diet Vanilla Pepsi is less complex than Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (what could be more complex?) but is much smoother than Diet Coke with Lime. Viv says that Diet Coke with Splenda is more like Regular Coke than Diet Coke. I’m inclined to agree… [mmmmm, more chlorine]!
Wacky stuff. I’m torn between the joy of such choice and the probability that future historians will consider the bazillion types of diet soda to be the fall of Western Civilization.
Thu, 01 Sep 2005
Saw this on BART
Talk about violating truth in advertising laws:
“If a rewarding lifestyle means anything to you, then make your next career move to Fresno!”
No kidding. Fresno.
Tue, 09 Aug 2005
Vegas has amazing bathroom technology
Two weekends ago, I was in Las Vegas. I didn’t gamble, or see a show, but I did drink a lot. The things that stuck with me the most, though, were the bathrooms. No joke. We’re talking bathrooms with artificial stars on the ceilings, bathrooms with little LCD screens playing music videos above the toilet paper, bathrooms that aren’t quite co-ed, but where there is only a small partition barely above eye level that seperates the boys from the girls.
Even the public bathrooms at the Westen were way above average; wooden stall doors, plenty of room, marble floors. This is the way a bathroom should be: a room dedicated to civilization and civilized behavior. Not some smelly cesspool of filth (the unfortunately normal case of most public bathrooms in other cities I’ve visited or lived in).
I doubt other cities will take a cue from Las Vegas, and begin municiple bathroom programs designed to revitalize their decrepit toilets. But they should. After all, if a town with a reputation as dirty as Las Vegas can have clean bathrooms shouldn’t every town?
100% focused
Is it actually possible to be 100% focused on the task at hand even 10% of the time? How do you train yourself to do this?
I wish I knew; I’m way happier when I can get into that mode.
Sat, 06 Aug 2005
No more PDA
As of about a week ago I stopped owning a Palm Pilot for the first time since there have been Palm Pilots. For many folks who read 43 Folders or have read Getting Things Done this will be no surprise; after all, the GTD cult has demonstrated that you can get a lot done without carrying around a micro-computer in your pocket.
I wasn’t convinced even after starting to practice GTD in my own little half-assed way (text files in a folder called ~/gtd, CVS to keep them synced between computers, and vi) and realizing that plain text lists were just better than fancy ToDo list applications. But I still kept my address book and my calendar synced with my Pilot because how else would I know what the number to Zachary’s Pizza was at 10:30pm on a Sat. night when I’m at my friends house? I mean, honestly! That number is important!
I then had two things happen in fairly rapid succession. The first thing was when I realized that my cell phone actually had every phone number in my address book in it AND my calendar (go go gadget iSync). The second was when bsii busted out with a Hipster PDA when we were drinking at Zeitgeist and demonstrated how damn useful a deck of index cards and pen could actually be.
I now have a deck of index cards and a small pen in my pocket and use them to suppliment my collection ‘o textfiles. It’s working great. My cellphone acts as remote calendar and phonebook and additions just go on the index cards for review and addition the next time I’m at a computer. I’m much happier with my system, it’s much cheaper than a Palm Pilot, and I carry it everywhere (unlike the Pilot which I carried most of the time but not always).
Thu, 07 Jul 2005
Healing process
The leg is healing, slowly. I am now walking to and from work (major improvement from before, where I was driving to the BART, then taking a cab from the BART to the office). The sad part, of course, is that walking to and from work is now effort, since I’ve been unable to do anything for weeks. On the bright side, every time I walk I am making myself a little tiny bit stronger, so it’s not that frustrating, and even the little bit of additional activity seems to be helping with respect to sleep and feeling good.
The stretching helps, too. I need to figure out a comprehensive workout plan now that I’m just about ready to start up again; resuming the couch-to-5k is probably a reasonable place to start, but I should add yoga or suffer the consequences.
Sat, 28 May 2005
Trapese!
Took a trapese class today with Viv and Hoss and Jenn (with her boyfriend Mark on camera duty). The first part of a lot of fun; the staff was very friendly and really helpful. They were very helpful and made lots of suggestions that worked around the fact that I’m a big guy carrying a little too much around the middle.
Unfortunately, my last run through didn’t go so well; I has having trouble getting my feet up onto the bar, and my last try I kicked too hard and heard a big popping noise from my right leg. Turns out my hamstring didn’t like the kick upwards so much, and decided that was a good time to let me know.
So, I’m layed up on my couch, a bag of frozen string beans under my right butt cheek watching Firefly DVDs. It was a total blast, but I’m bummed that I got hurt.
Serenity!
Last Thursday night I did something pretty nuts; I flew to Las Vega to see the Serenity sneak preview with friends, and then flew back Friday morning for work. The movie was awesome; I can’t wait to drag everyone I know to it when it comes out.
For those of you who don’t know, Serenity is the movie based on the Firefly television series; I really liked it, but it got canceled because Fox has no taste.
Wed, 11 May 2005
Mmmmassage
Just got a massage from NHI. It’s a pretty sweet deal: $35 for 50 minutes, either Swedish or Shiatsu (but you don’t get to pick), and the massage therapists are all students of the institute.
I got Shiatsu. It was good. All is good.
Wed, 04 May 2005
I’m sick boo pucky
Finally succumbed to the Linden cold/flu/horrible illness that has trashed the office. Ugh. I haven’t felt this crappy in a while. My nose feels like it’s going to fall off from the sneezing. And the blowing.
I’m going back to bed.
Tue, 05 Apr 2005
Back from Costa Rica
Back in town for a couple of days, unpacked, and mostly settled. Now I just need to figure out and get gallery setup on radix, and then I can get the photos posted, and put up the travel log.
Mon, 21 Mar 2005
Radix back online
Whew. After a serious amount of heavy lifting by Rand, Erick, and myself, radix is back online after a disk failure. That hurt. Lots.
Happily, we’re now running Debian, which has already reduced the admin load a fair amount. Here’s hoping the Debian admin excellence outweights the Linux kernel crappyness.
Sun, 13 Mar 2005
Owww the irony
I just flipped my desk chair over backwards and hit my head against my desk while reading the chapter on pain in the Blue Shield self care guide.
Oww.
Happily, no damage, but the back of my head really hurt.
Tue, 01 Mar 2005
Two fun things I’ve done lately.
Two things stand out as being particularly blog-worthy; two weeks ago I participated in the San Francisco Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt, which is probably the most fun I’ve had outside in the pouring rain ever. Running through parts of San Francisco that I’d never been, stopping to watch the parade, grabbing some egg custard pastries and a few boxes of those snap rocks to make the hunt a little more lively. Tons of fun.
And this last weekend, I had the privilege of attending that most rare of events: a Piratical Fondue Party. That’s right, baby: pirates and cheese. This gave me an excuse to go to San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store, home of the infamous Karl. Amanda was pleased to make Karl’s acquaintance, and I was simply pleased not to be mopped.
Wed, 05 Jan 2005
Time vs. Energy
I think once you get past the basics of food, water, housing, and iPod, a person gets to a point where they find themselves wanting more time. They start to say things like “Oh, if only I had 25 hours in a day”, or “Gee, I wish I had time for that”. I’ve been feeling this way myself lately.
The other thing I hear is “I’m tired”, or “I’m groggy”, or “I’m totally fucking hungover”. In other words, “I’m low on energy”. I feel that way too.
So, what to do?
I think the correct response is to not worry about time so much, and concentrate on energy. Having an infinite amount of time but no energy would be no fun, but having a ton of energy with only a little free time would be tolerable, and may even be a lot of fun because of feeling amped up all the time.
The current battle plan involves doing things to increase my energy, where energy == how I’m feeling on a given day. I want to think about that a bit to define it better, but just working on a “I feel like rockstar” vs “I feel like a boiled cabbage” will help.
Wed, 17 Nov 2004
I need space!
Here I am, trying to get semi-organized, and what am I finding?
I have no space.
For anything.
My desk, which I thought was reasonably sized, is too small to support the stuff that I need to use it for. Hence my floor. Floor is not a good place for stuff to live.
Mon, 15 Nov 2004
I’m done with being tired
I’m done with being tired. I’m done with being unmotivated. I’m done with stupid rants like this one is going to be, but we can’t be done with everything all at once, so here you go. I read Getting Things Done recently, at the recommendation of a couple of process geeks who’s blogs I read, and it was inspiring, despite it looking like something a 45 year old middle manager would buy at an airport with the hope that it would save his life. Now, of course, the issue is to act on it, but hey, can’t have everything all at once.
I still haven’t figured out what, if anything, has changed about my mood/life that’s made me suddenly feel more lively, but here it is. I feel more lively. In fact, I feel really good. Still can’t write for shit, though.
For some irrational reason it makes me happy that the GTD website is run on PHP… I was totally expecting ASP or something equally corporate and ugly.
Sun, 07 Nov 2004
Tasty Dinner
Went to La Moone for dinner with Cody and company. Really tasty sushi, nice martini. Yum.
Sadly, no Amanda to share it with, ‘cause she’s busy studying. Boo.
Thu, 04 Nov 2004
Bored
I’m bored. And tired. Early day today, at home now, wanting something to do but too tired to do anything interesting. Sigh.
Hung out with Dave today after work. Was nice; he’s been out of town for a long time, off doing interesting things.
The Halloween party this year was a great success. Sadly, I don’t own a camera, so I have no pictures. I’m waiting for the various galleries to get put up.
Boo! My nice Lowa walking shoes have developed a hole in the soles… time to get to REI and get a new pair.
Sun, 03 Oct 2004
Punk Rock Orchestra
Saw the Punk Rock Orchestra Friday night. It was awesome… 50 piece orchestra, playing from Schwartzenegger Über Alles to Institutionalized. I liked their cover of Let’s Have A War best. The show was at the Swedish American Hall, a fun quirky little venue; we ended up on the balcony which gave a great view of the orchestra.
Fri, 24 Sep 2004
Skype
I just tried out the Skype MacOS X Beta, and the SkypeOut service. Wow. I just talked to Lilli (in England) for a half an hour for less than US$0.50, and the sound quality was pretty solid. It took all of 10 minutes to download the software, install it, setup my account, and buy a 10 euro block of talk credit.
Pretty sweet. If I end up using this a lot, I think that it would be worth experimenting with a headset instead of the laptop microphone and speaker, and there are probably some settings that may improve voice quality or bandwidth usage.
Pitch/Sap Remover
I foolishly parked Solid under a pine tree the other day, and ended up with a ton of pitch all over it. Getting pitch off of a car is a total bitch. Google suggested that oil or mayonnaise would help, but all that did was make a mess. Besides, I hate mayonnaise, and refuse to believe that it could serve any useful purpose.
However, all is not lost! After much research, I found what appears to be a very good (and cheap) pitch remover: rubbing alchohol and an old t-shirt. Just soak the t-shirt in alchohol, and then polish off the pitch and sap. Works like a charm.
Tue, 21 Sep 2004
Been a while
So much has been happening lately, it’s been difficult to write. Just finished moving 300 servers between colocation facilities at work. Glad that’s over and done with.
Been spending a fair amount of cycles on self-organization tactics. I think the tactics are starting to work (things like home directories in CVS, one TODO file, using iSync to manage my phone and Palm info), but the overall strategy needs some work. I’m still feeling overwhelmed.
I’d love to write about non-work related things here, but there just isn’t anything else to talk about right now. Obviously, I’ve been working too much.
Tue, 03 Aug 2004
Sleep debt
Learned about a concept in sleep management called “sleep debt” yesterday. For every 2 hours that you’re awake, you gain 1 hour of sleep debt that must be paid off sooner or later. If you don’t pay it off by sleeping, you carry it with you, and it screws you up; apparently as little as 20 hours of sleep debt can cause reduction in the ability to think clearly.
This helps explain my grades in college.
I’ve decided to try an experiment… well, two of them. The first one is to just try to get out of sleep debt: I’m going to sleep 10 hours/night for the next 2-3 nights. The idea is that if I’m fully rested I should be able to just get up in the morning without needing my alarm to wake me up. Then, after I’ve done that for a couple of nights, I’m going to cut back by about a half an hour per night until I can’t wake up without the alarm. This should let me figure out how much sleep I need per night.
Last night was the first night sleeping 10 hours… and it’s weird. While I did sleep a solid 10 hours, I woke up this morning feeling like crap, and felt pretty bad all day. Hopefully that’s unrelated to getting a lot of sleep.
Sun, 01 Aug 2004
Visiting Home
Went home with Christy this weekend for Mom’s birthday and saw my aunt and uncle and cousins, too. My “baby” cousin Caty is going to college this year in New York; it’s crazy that she’s 18.
My aunt cooked a delicious meal for mom’s birthday, including prime rib. Yum.
Thu, 29 Jul 2004
Old Photos
Just spend a few hours going through old photos from the ex-girlfriend box, and putting them into an album. Why did I do this? I wanted to get rid of the box and save some space.
Why didn’t I throw the box away? Good question…
A google search for “ex-girlfriend box” turns up nothing, so a tiny amount of explanation is in order, I think.
Long ago, we all watched Doogie Howser, M.D.. Doogie, of course, had a girl friend Wanda, who he dated, and then broke up with. There was an episode which has stayed in my mind for the last 10 years or so, where Doogie was bummed out, and mentioned that he had a box where he’d put all of the memories of his relationship with Wanda.
So, an ex-girlfriend box is like that: it’s the place you put the photos and notes and things that remind you of that person when you can’t bear to throw them away just yet. I’ve had an ex-girlfriend box for the last 4 years, and I finally decided that it was time to do someting about it.
So, I cracked that sucker open, and purged. Some stuff went into the trash. But the old photos… I ended up deciding that I didn’t want to throw those away. So, I albumed them. They are now safely behind plastic, on a shelf. Originally, I was all for throwing them away, but as I looked at those pictures, I realized that there were more than just Claudine and I in the photos; there were other friends, or places I’d been, and those things are important, and fun to remember. Besides, Claudine and I dated for two and a half years during an eventful time of my life (end of college, first job), and it would suck to have to just toss all of that time because we broke up and I had a hard time getting over it.
So, it’s done. I now have a bunch of frames to put new photos in now, which means I’d better go find some new photos.
Tue, 06 Jul 2004
Cha Cha Cha
Went to Cha Cha Cha with friends last night. Good sangria, and really tasta tapas. The sauteed mushrooms were the best dish that we ordered, despite Danielle throwing one at me.
Sun, 27 Jun 2004
KGAY
The local pop-alternative rock station Live 105 transforms into KGAY every SF Gay Pride weekend. They get a new set of DJs, and change their playlists into campy 70-80s songs and electronica that would be found in various SF clubs. Fun tunes, and a nice change from their usual fare.
Tue, 22 Jun 2004
My writing sucks and other bits
Heh. Title says all: my writing sucks. I have vague memories of being a better writer a couple of years ago, but that is probably just my brain filtering out things that could be harmful to my ego. One of the reasons for doing this is to practice writing, but obviously that’s not enough; you have to practice good writing.
As for the other bits, I still need to collect my notes and photos from the AIDS/LifeCycle and put them into some kind of interested form, but in short: I rode all of the 580 miles, and Patch is still in one piece.
One of the side effects of the LifeCycle was that I ended up dropping caffeine for the week by accident (aka, “Why do I have this nasty headache on Day 2?”), and so I’ve been pretty much running without since. Too bad it hasn’t improved my sleep.
Sat, 08 May 2004
Depression
When I was growing up, my mom commented that I experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows of any kid she’d ever seen. Now, normally, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but my mom was a teacher at the county juvenile hall, so she saw a lot of kids with pretty serious issues. Now, I’ve never been diagnosed with any form of clinical depression, but I definitely notice mood swings that are sometimes on the edge of my control; bad weather, for example, requires a fair amount of mental effort to feel okay during, while a nice sunny day makes almost any trial significantly better. Obviously, this happens to everybody; it just seems to be “more so” for me. It’s like I’m borderline within societal engineering tolerance; just this side of not fitting into the appropriate emotional stability slot.
This is fine, and I’ve developed a large set of fairly effective mechanisms to deal (as I think most people do). None of the above is different from most of the people I know, even.
What’s interesting is that this morning, I was depressed. And it was surprising; I haven’t felt like that in a long time, and for good reason: my life is pretty fucking rocking right now. Went to breakfast, still felt depressed. While at breakfast, I had an epiphany: I was tired. Benji, Hoss, and Jim were over last night, and we were playing Pacman Vs. (which, by the way, is the funest multiplayer console game I have ever played) until about 0200, and I woke up this morning about about 0800, which means that I have 6 hours of sleep, but I’ve also skipped sleep for the last couple of days. Being tired == feeling depressed. Sure, it’s perhaps obvious to everybody else in the room, but I’d never connected them before.
It certainly explains a lot about college, anyway.
What was great, though, is that once that occurred to me, it got better. Poof, no more depression. Still tired, but I know how to deal with tired. And hell, it’s the weekend, there’s nice weather, and I’m feeling good. Sweet.
So, do you start a new entry?
blosxom, and I think blogs in general, want to categorize entries. That’s fine and all, but what if you’re blogging a bunch of stuff all over? Flipping to a new entry in a new category interrupts the flow to make a bunch of tiny entries in many categories. The alternative, I guess, is everything just ends up in /random. That’s not necessarily bad, but it makes for wierd writing.
Sun, 02 May 2004
Managing a todo list
So, as I sit here on Sunday night looking at the vista of my upcoming week as represented by a column of little unchecked boxes in my Pilot’s Todo app, I realize that not only do I have enough things to do to keep me busy until next April, but that they are all due in the next two weeks.
More accurately, they all feel like they are due in the next two weeks. Luckily, that’s not true: some of them are due this week instead.
Using the Pilot’s numbered ranking doesn’t work for me; I just either end up with a huge set of priority 5s that I never get to, or an equally large set of priority 1s that I never get to. Sorting them by due date is useful, but only sort of; I then get tasks that I bump from day to day as they don’t get done. I really want something more organic and automatic but that’s hard to find (although, I saw Life Balance recently, and it looks like it might have potential).
But then I started thinking: what’s the point of the todo list that has things on it you never actually get to? The answer seems to be just to make you feel bad about the stuff haven’t done and won’t do. So, maybe the solution is simply to delete the old stuff, or the stuff that you know you’re not going to do, and just accept it. If it’s really important, you’ll remember it anyway.
Wed, 21 Apr 2004
So much for vacation
Whuf. My relaxed, zen-like trance from being underwater evaporated like butter on a blow torch. Obviously, I carry too much stress about work internally. Course, we are changing ISPs this week, which involves renumbering all of our IPs, which is a bit tricky to do correctly. So I guess the stress isn’t self-induced, but I really should just relax and deal with problems as they arise.
I’ve come up with a possibly useful technique for limiting my caffeine consumption; I set an alarm in my T3 for 1400 that signals the end of my caffeine intake for the day. It’s still okay to finish opened beverages, but it’s not okay to open any more cans after the alarm has gone off. Last week I tried it at 1500, and had no trouble at all. This week is a little harder, but still pretty easy, and having the alarm as a reminder has been a good way to prevent the emergency 1600 wake-up-and-hack Coke.
Given the trouble I’ve been having feeling well rested, I figure it can’t be doing me any good having stimulants running around in my bloodstream while I’m trying to sleep, hence the caffeine reduction plan. That, and I hate that my current lifestyle seems to demand a high amount of artificial stimulant usage.
This article about caffeine over at howstuffworks.com pretty much explains it all, in horrible detail. Expecially the part about sleep.
Sigh. I’m so hozed.
Tue, 13 Apr 2004
Diving Diving Diving
I’m going diving. On a boat. For 3 days.
I’m very excited about the whole idea of getting wet several times in that period, with no servers to be found. In fact, I’m not going to even think about any technology not related to compressed air until Sat. Yay.
Mon, 12 Apr 2004
Parking tickets
So, I’m now at the point where I’ve acquired more parking tickets since buying my (overpriced, useless, car-defacing) City of Berkeley parking permit than I did for the 8 months of parking on the street without one. This tells me the following:
- I’m a sucker for buying the permit.
- The motivation and reason for purchasing a permit (namely, that you can actually park on the street without getting a ticket) is not valid.
- Parking permits/tickets really are just an expensive way for the city to collect taxes that they couldn’t possibly pass via a vote (although, in Berkeley, they probably could get any sort of tax they want passed, given that we now have the highest sales tax rate in the state… ).
Of course, I’m also uselessly angry; you can’t actually get rid of parking tickets. Nobody runs on a “no more parking tickets” platform. Everybody hates getting them, because invariably you’re not actually doing anything harmful; you’ve violated some random, obscure “No parking on the third Wed of the month” rule, which is listed on tiny little signs that look like every other tiny little sign, except, wait, those tiny little signs say “No parking on the fourth Tuesday”, and those others say “No parking except when the third moon of Neptune is waxing with respect to Libra”.
Damn it. I’m out of checks.
Tue, 06 Apr 2004
I’m a tired monkey
Did a deploy this morning. Second Life 1.3.3 has been released to the masses. Suprisingly difficult to get up this morning; must get more sleep. (Note to self: duh.)
Spent rest of day in dream-like haze of Perl scripts and Apache Portable Runtime, admittedly in sequence, as opposed to all together.
Had dinner with Gaby at Beckett’s. Got mostly caught up with what’s been happening for the last month or so.
Mon, 05 Apr 2004
Why doesn’t the computer do all the work?
Sometimes I like to do the work instead of having the computer do it so that I feel that I am being productive. It’s a very bad habit, but I don’t think I’m the only one. In fact, I’d wager that many sysadmins and developers fall into the bad habit of doing things by hand instead of automating them because doing useful automation is non-trivial.
If this isn’t true, why are websites like infrastructures.org necessary? Why do people spend (waste) so much time screwing around with computers over and over again instead of solving the problem at hand, once and for all? Why doesn’t every site run cfengine, or some equivilent tool?
I hear tales of sites with a quarter of the hosts and 20 times the sysadmins, and I just gotta wonder what they are doing and why they are doing it that way, when there are seemingly much better ways of doing things.
Sat, 03 Apr 2004
Amanda’s back!!!
Today! In 1 hour and 20 minutes! Hurray!