Never been one to let the carrier drop

Remember our ‘mottos’?

What did mine mean? I’ve finally realized I don’t know, and don’t understand it one little bit.

(Mine, if you’ll recall, was ‘I am not god’.)

S.

THose of you who can’t stand such things should probably skip this entire entry. I’ll try and make it a lj cut

Well, good things and bad things have happened today..

On the bad things list, we’ve discovered a flaw in the charger boards [or our calculations, or something] which will require soldering a capacitor across a surface mount part on all thirty. Rats and shucks and drat and such.

On the good news list, Lee has, in yet another moment of brilliance (he has a lot of those.. ) figured out a way around BOTH the nasty-heavy-ugly-transformer circuit for transferring energy and the nasty-ugly-get-rid-of-too-many-watts circuit.

One wire. Probably can carry network data as well.

How does he do it?

Well, I’d probably better not divulge any of the details since it’s not my idea and he might want to patent it or something.. I haven’t yet gotten a definate ‘yes, sheer, you can use this’ but he doesn’t seem massively adverse to the idea either..

So hold onto your seats, it looks like the SheerREg has become the ‘Scotty’ [the name has to do with the cheapness of Lee’s latest brainchild] and can actually _move power around_. Series battery regulation never had it so good.

I’m not sure if I”m happy that we’ve found a new and far, far better solution to the problem (I even got Electronics Workbench to admit that it will work – and if it will admit that it will work, it almost surely will – it won’t even admit that a AM radio will work. ;-)).. well, Lee’s found a new and better solution, I haven’t done much except list reasons why I can’t believe it will work..

or unhappy that the Tango chargers will not, in fact, be done at the end of this week –

and can’t run the nifty token-ring version of the bus I envisioned even if they were done.. it’s just too tanj fast.. or they’re too tanj slow..

I mean, these things have trouble communicating at 9600 baud. It’s truly pathetic..

Well, two more days in sunny, warm Minnesota, then it’s back to (brrr) seattle and (boring) parking meters. IT’s been a good semi-vacation, and I’ll be hopefully all recharged and ready to knock out some serious parking-meter-age..

S.

soon to be alone.

Well, not really, but sort of.

I’m sure it will be good for me.

I wish ..

I don’t know what I wish any more.

S.

What a experience.

S.

apologies to my friends for past three journal entries.. I mean..

S.

I wanted to express my thanks to all of you who offered listening-time, thoughts, sympathy, and whatnot at my last few upset/confused/etc journal entries.

it’s nice to know taht people care. Really.

I’m going to go spend about 20 minutes playing, then I’m out for tonight. More job interviews tomorrow. (Always strange to be the interviewer instead of the interviewee, although I think I do all right..)

Had some very good Pakistani food today, no one expressed displeasure at me for anything which is always nice, and got PHP and MS SQL and IIS all on speaking terms..

The other night, someone told me PHP was a ‘shit language’. Actually, I think this guy just enjoys messing with me – either that, or he hates every tool I like. I mean, he even proports to prefer cocaine over weed – maybe someone’s taking things a little far here. (I admit, I’ve never tried cocaine. Am not going to either – it’s soooo not my sort of recreational chemical. Sounds more like a exotic form of torture to me – I rev hard enough on my own, even caffine is a bit more stimulant than I can handle at times..)

Anyway, so, somewhere in the middle of my standard lecture about how php, vb, c++, c, assembly, ad nausium are all just tools, he started to try and out-geek me.

That’s always a fun feeling. Actually, it was very educational – I learned what ACID is (with respect to databases – bet you didn’t know your database had ACID..) and what MVCC is, and a bunch of other geeky stuff..

he did not, however, out geek me.

That generally only happens at DefCon.

Shortage of geeks as geeky as me? I don’t know. Probably just as well, really.

Other events in my life today.. hmm. I’ve been on a rereading kick – this week we’ve done most of the Heinlien cannon (who *bounce* has a new book *bounce* coming out! I can’t wait.. and not only that, it was apparently too racy to be published at the time. sounds interesting) and now I’m rereading the Phantom Tollbooth. Not sure what I’ll do after that one.. (did you know there’s a EV in the phantom tollbooth? The car Milo drives around throughout most of the story is electric. And apparently never needs to charge, either.. I wonder what kind of range it gets )

Sadly, I’ve exhausted harry potter 5 after a few rereadings.. I reread some Dianne Wynne Jones novels to make up for it (memo to Harry Potter fans: Dianne is at least as good a writer, and she’s got more books out. Feed your childrens-fantasy cravings! Go nuts!)

The focus motor on my right eye is going through underuse – which is a little alarming, partially because it means I haven’t been being my right side enough, and partially because, well, everything out of that eye is blurry now.

I guess I need to dig up a eyepatch and force myself to hang out on the right for a while.. I nearly always drift back over to the left when I’m reading as soon as I stop thinking about it.

On the other hand, maybe it’s handy. One eye for close up work, one eye for distance..

(This is waht we call making excuses)

Ah well. Probably better exercise that before it gets worse.

Reading with my right eye always feels so surreal – I mean, the fact that I can do it at all is odd, since I wasn’t using it at all when I learned to read. Really makes you wonder where words are stored. And I definately read slower with my right eye than my left.

Gives me the jitters to try and read two things at the same time, too, although I can sort of do it. (talk about your STupid Human Tricks)

Anyway, I’m rambling, but the basic upshot of all that is that I need to exercise my right eye before it flies south for the winter. Also need to visit a dentist – nothing hurts, but it’s been a while and I’d like to keep it that way. Was tlaking to a friend of mine today who had to have 7 bridges put in – of course, as I recall, this has something to do with him discovering the joys of meth, another drug that you couldn’t pay me enough to take.

[For that matter, you couldn’t pay me enough to take prozac..]

I always find the War On Drugs Kid Propiganda very amusing.. it’s like they completely forget, as they foist off Xanax, Prosc, and Rittilan on kids, that these are just as much drugs as the recreational kind.

The NWLNC broke up, which is sad.. I’ll miss the mini-raves in the middle of the westlake center. I keep wondering how one gets permission to do one of those – it occurs to me that with recent upgrades to my PA, it’s probably as many watts as the one they used.. of course, now that it’s getting into the colder months, it’d be a lot harder to get people interested in coming to a event.

They’re replacing the NWLNC for something that’s more anti-drug-war and pro-music – but I doubt if it’ll be as electronica-oriented..

[sigh] electronica is dying, I guess. And just as I was getting good at it, too.

Well, I see that I’ve rambled on for far longer than I intended to, so I’ll just leave it there

Fiction idea: It is discovered that the internet is ‘alive’ – in the process of waking up (I’ve talked about this one before) and all the spam we’re getting are the first thoughts of it – it’s reacting to what it’s been taught.

Hm.. I should explain that better, so that it’s funny to people other than me, but I can’t seem to be bothered.

Anyway, again, thanks to all my friends, especially those of you who actually read this tripe!

People have suggested that I should write journal entries about things other than the extremely technical details of my day to day life.

I’m not really sure what else to write about. Every once in a while, I find some trance or house or goa (I’m informed that it’s different from trance – I am apparently color blind to genre in electronica.)

Anyway, tonight I played some for a friend of ours (How).. I don’t know if he really liked it or not. He’s a hard guy to read. He gave me a thumbs up, and almost-not-quite fell asleep. Said he felt kind of entranced. Nicest compliment I’ve gotten this month, really..

He’s going to miss my jam session with Ron.. (and I’m going to have to work my tail off to get php working tomorrow unless Simon fixes it.. anyone out there know anything about PHP and IIS? oh, wait, I promised, no geekery..)

P. left the house upset with me today, for leaving a dish next to my computer while she’d been cleaning [I thought How was about to arrive and wanted to get showered and dressed – picking it up was still on the stack of things to do – really] and for having the dates for How wrong.

So we got off to a rolling good start. I also was up until 6 yesterday, thinking over what to write and how to write it and what the reuslts would be and what results i wanted.. ‘When the coin is in the air’, as my good friend M. used to say. M. is the aptly named Sir Not Appearing In This Film – but he’s a old friend of mine, and one of the most awesome people I know.

I hope I do get to work with him again.

I’m interviewing people for various roles around my consulting projects. For a minute I was afraid I had phased myself out, but then I realized, I can’t do that. No matter how hard I try, phasing myself out isn’t possible.

I must sleep.

Things must get better.

(in other, good news, aparently my grandfather is not going to die – this is good, as I’ve recently been realizing guiltily that I haven’t seen any of my father’s side of the extended family for many years.. except that I saw some when we went back to NoVa to go camping with my parents. It was suprisingly reassuring – somehow their taunts that were so upsetting when I was young, were just funny.. like I could meet them as equals.)

I guess one of the big problems with having a parent die before you’re a adult, is you never get to meet them as a equal.

(thought inspired by something out of a friend’s journal)

S.

in reference to that linked entry earlier..

P. says she doesn’t remember asking me to post. I have full motion video memory of her, in the last few days, saying I should post more, with the implication being (to me, anyway..) about our recent problems.

Which doesn’t, of course, mean it happened.

One of the annoying things about having experienced things that weren’t really happening once, is that after that, you’re never quite sure of your senses. Once you’ve had one really vivid, really beleivable hallucination, you can never know for sure if what you’re seeing, or remembering, is live, or memorex. Can I prove that it really happened, just because I remember it? No..

P. also commented that I shouldn’t be worried about J.’s decision to shuffle off this mortal coil because he had problems that I don’t. Well, possibly, but how can I know? I tried to tactfully ask L. why he chose to die – but she didn’t answer, which could mean many things – A: tact is not my strong suit, B: she missed the question, C: was too painful to think about (can’t blame her there..) D: she didn’t know or E: something else altogeathers.

P.’s third comment (or actually her second, I’m addressing her second two comments in reverse order.. from memory, so we’ll see if there are any massive discrepencies in my understanding of them.. the nice thing about computers is they’re very consistant..) .. anyway, P.’s second comment which I’m addressing third was that the passive-aggressive thing was more or less a tossed off comment.

Well, okay, to explain further. Me posting links to misc. mental disorders does not mean that I’m convinced I have them. It means I’m trying them on for size. My (mythical? since I like to pretend they aren’t there when I’m writing..) readers can comment ‘yep, that one’s you to a T’ or ‘No, that one has nothing to do with you’..

I saw a bit of myself in both the description of a passive-aggressive and the description of

Of course, maybe we all have a little bit of every disorder in us, and it’s only when one becomes dominant that it’s a serious problem.

It occurs to me that I wasn’t nearly sympathetic enough when D. was in the position I’m in now. (or have I been using V. to refer to h*? I don’t remember.. oh well, my old friends will all know who I’m talking about anyway). Now that the shoe is on the other foot and I’m the one remembering things that didn’t happen according to my SO, I realize how downright disturbing it is..

On the other hand, P. has also spoken a number of times lately of having a poor memory.. [which is strange, because she can apparently hold a matrix of several thousand ‘classic’ english titles in her head, to say nothing of assorted sea-bird facts, appointments, and who she needs to talk to about what.. I think what she means is she has a selectively poor memory, or there are some facts which don’t save well. I can relate – my memory is selectively poor as well. I guess we’re just not all built to store any arbitrary type of data you might choose to throw at us..]

I’m still waiting for my friend to arrive from the airport.. I should have woken up later, obviously.. 😉

Maybe I’ll go take a nap.

S.

I should probably mention that I actually rather *like* two-semitone transposes. But it’s still fscking funny..

Musicians, you will find this one funny. The rest of you can just ignore it.

Truck Driver’s Gear Change