Focus
Last night I was trying to do some reading for my history class while the TV was on a hockey game. I couldn’t do it. I had to turn the hockey off.
When I was a kid, I could read a book, listen to music, listen to the TV, and think about the fun that I would have with my friends over the weekend all at once. I can’t do that anymore. Is it a sign that I’m getting older? What changed in my life that prevents me from paying attention to multiple things at the same time?
I hope I’m not starting on the slow road to Alzheimer’s. I’m only 33, and I can feel my mental facilities slipping away. I used to be able to learn new things at a rapid-fire pace. Now it takes me hours of study to learn new things. Granted, the things that I’m trying to learn are more advanced and complicated (like Ajax) than they were in the past (like BASIC.)
Maybe I’m finally to the point where the new links in my brain take longer to form? Maybe my brain is full and there’s no way to do a brain dump of all of my useless knowledge?
Is anyone else my age having this problem? Or is it just me?
Out Sick
Yesterday started out in the cold snow with a shovel in my hand. The shoestrings on my boots were broken, so I was wearing my tennis shoes while shoveling snow. They’re not waterproof, so my feet and socks got wet while I was shoveling snow. I was running many hours late, and my feet were already cold, so I didn’t notice that they were wet until I was at work. I had class last night after work, and the room was a steady 62 degrees for the entire 4 hour class.
By the time class was over, I was feeling pretty miserable with the wet feet, and coldness that surrounded me. I got home, and I ended up falling into bed fairly quickly. I took some vitamin C before crashing in hopes that it would help…. it didn’t.
I woke up this morning feeling like my eyeballs were about to blow out of my head, and my throat was a little scratchy. I decided to play it safe and stay home for the day. I’m feeling a little better this afternoon, but not enough to go run a marathon or anything.
I should be feeling better by this evening, so that I can get back to work tomorrow morning.
Alphabet
Ok. I’m running out of ideas to blog about. I thought I could go for a while with the blog, but I’m running dry. Maybe I need to read more blogs to get some ideas about stuff to write about. For now, I’m stealing from Jhianna again. She got this from Gingerbread Latte, so I don’t feel too horrible about stealing from her again.
A- Available or single? :: Available to one person: my wife.
B- Best Friend? :: I don’t really have one. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to claim that a single person was my “best” friend. Last one was Jason, and he has set a high standard for all other friends. There may never be another one. Then again, maybe I need to stop comparing all of my friends to the ghosts of the past.
C- Cake or pie? :: Pie. Preferably pumpkin. Cool whip optional.
D- Drink of choice? :: Diet Mountain Dew or beer.
E- Essential item I use every day. :: The Internet. I have so many different ways to access it these days. I can even tap into open (or not so open) wireless networks with my handheld to browse the web or check my email.
F- Favorite color: :: Blue. It’s always been blue.
G- Gummy Bears or Gummy Worms? :: Bears. Worms don’t have heads to bite off first.
H- Hometown? :: Midland, TX
I- Indulgence: :: Sloth. I love to sleep. I spent most of my weekends in bed asleep.
J- January or February? :: Neither. They’re both in the depth of winter, and I hate winters.
K- Kids and names: :: I would love to have one or two. I would like to use the name Denise (my little sister’s middle name), or Luveal (my grandfather’s middle name) in their memory.
L- Life is incomplete without? :: Caffeine
M- Marriage date: :: March 15, 1998. Beware the Ides of March!
N- Number of siblings: :: 4. 1 little sister that was killed in 1997, and 3 little brothers.
O- Oranges or apples? :: Oranges. Apples get stuck in my teeth.
P- Phobias or fears? :: Not really bad enough to be a phobia, but I hate flying because I’m not the one in control of the airplane. I’d rather drive, thank you very much.
Q- Favorite quote? :: Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
R- Reasons to smile: :: Friends, pets, family.
S- Season: :: Spring. I love the renewal of the Earth.
T- Tag 3 or 4 people. :: Nah. I’m too lazy.
U- Unknown fact about me: :: I didn’t hit puberty until I was 15.
V- Vegetable you don’t like: :: Spinach. I’m allergic to it.
W- Worst habit: :: Popping my knuckles.
X- X-Rays: :: Lots on my teeth. Many of my right arm. Full body once.
Y- Your favorite food? :: Pizza. No bait.
Z- Zodiac sign: :: Cancer. I’m a crabby disease. Go figger.
Regex
My boss sent this image to me yesterday. I’ve gotten a great laugh or three out of it. It so sums up how I look at the world. I often daydream (usually while driving) about going out and doing something great for the world, but most of my skills are sorely lacking in the ability to do that. At work, I fight against spam every minute of every day. Maybe that’s how I’m making the world a better place. I just don’t know.
Most of my daydreams involve helping out individuals on a personal level. Sometimes it’s thinking about moments in my past where I’ve stepped in to save lives, prevent injury, or provided solace in a time of pain and trouble. Other times, I think about how I could help out someone that I care about. Most of the dreams are violent, and I’m not always the one that comes out on top. It really depends on how I’m feeling at the moment. If I’m in a good mood, then I always win the fights. If I’m in a bad mood, then the opposite happens.
Some of you may wonder how I could dream of losing a fight. It’s not that I want to lose. It’s just that I’ve never had control over my dreams, and I rarely have control over my daydreams. My nightmares are even worse because I am totally under the sway of my subconscious. I’ve never been able to pull out of a horrible dream unless someone wakes me up or an alarm goes off. It’s just always been that way.
Neh. I just looked at the start of the post. It started out with saving the world with regular expressions and Perl, and ended up talking about my powerlessness in nightmares. What a true Rambling Thought! I guess on that note, I’ll stop typing and get back to what I was doing.
Best Friends
Over the years I have been blessed with numerous good friends. Some are friends no longer because they chose to start using drugs, we had a falling out (which were usually my fault,) or one of us moved away and we never really stayed in touch. During all of these years, I’ve only had a handful of “best friends.” I guess I set the bar really high for a person that is part of my life in such an important way.
While growing up, I would move quite a bit, and leave friends behind in old neighborhoods. I really never did have a best friend. I was still learning about friendship and how friends should treat one another. My father has tons of great friends, and I learned quite a bit from them by watching how they would treat each other. They would joke around, insult each other, and laugh at minor misfortunes that some of them would experience. However, when the chips were down, and it was time to pitch in and help, they would drop everything for their friends. I was never directly taught how to treat my friends, but as I was growing up, I learned quite a bit from observing how my father and his friends treated each other. I guess it’s one of the better things that I learned from my dad even though he didn’t try to teach me anything directly.
As I think back to all of my friends, I guess my first best friend was Chris. We lived fairly close to each other. His mother and my mother were good friends, and we were in the Cub Scouts together. We held on to our friendship for quite a while. Then he got into some legal troubles, and was sent away to a juvenile facility that was about a three hour drive away. I don’t remember the exact details, but I remember that it was some pretty bad stuff. I didn’t want to associate with someone like that, so I never did make a point to look him up once he was free.
Several years passed before I met Curtis. He is, without a doubt, one of the most creative and intelligent people that I’ve ever met. We had lots of common, and that’s why we got along so well. We met our freshman year of high school, and we were both social outcasts. This helped us bond quickly, and we remained tight until his dad was transfered to Oklahoma just before our senior year of high school. We would do almost everything together. We would ride our bikes to the mall (a 25 mile round trip), skateboard (Curtis actually taught me how to skate), build remote control cars, sneak out at night and roam the neighborhood for the fun of it, and just hang out and joke. We had such a great time together. Curtis wrote me a letter a few months after he moved. I was going to write him back, but the letter ended up getting washed in my jeans pocket. The letter, along with his address, was destroyed, and I’ve never been in touch with him since.
A few months after Curtis moved away, my senior year of high school started. Through my first love, Heather, I came to meet a great group of friends. They were all in a drug prevention/recovery program, and I was invited to hang out with them. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant among teens in my home town, and I figured that I could stay clean by hanging out with these people. I was right. We had a blast hanging out as a group. I couldn’t single any one of them out as a best friend, but they were all great to be around. It wasn’t until recent years that I found a comparable group of friends. When I graduated high school, I (along with a few others) was ousted from the group because the drug prevention hangout that we stayed at after school was for high school students only. There was an adult group, but I had nothing in common with them. I tried attending their meetings, but it just wasn’t the same. Out of the high school group, I managed to bond with J.J. quite well. We ended up moving in together after high school, and we lived together with a variety of roommates over the course of the next two years. J.J. and I spent so much time together that my step-mother would proclaim that we were attached at the hip. J.J., being a recovered drug addict, slipped and fell back into drug use. I was there for him. I reached out to him, and offered to pull him back into sobriety. The new “friends” that he made were heavy drug users, and he enjoyed life through the haze of drugs more than he valued life on the straight and narrow. I didn’t want to get sucked into that form of living, so I cut ties with J.J., and moved on. It was a painful thing to do. J.J. and I had been through quite a bit together. Up to that point in my life, I had never found someone that I connected with so well, or knew as well as I knew J.J. We had that strange, mystical connection that some twins share. In a tight spot, we would look at each other and, without speaking a word, know what the other person thought. It was strange. It was great. I’m still sad to this day that I had to cut him out of my life.
Several years passed, and I met Jason. We played dungeons and dragons together for a year or so before we really connected. He was still living with his parents in a small town about an hour drive north of my hometown. He would drive down for the D&D games, and if they ran late, he would crash at my place for the night instead of driving home. Eventually our gaming group got together almost every night, which meant that Jason was at my place almost every night as well. When we would stop gaming, and everyone would go home, Jason and I would sit and talk, joke, and smoke cigarettes until the wee hours of the morning. After a few months of doing this, our friendship was cemented fast. I’ll never find a replacement for J.J., but Jason managed to fill the void that J.J. had left behind. Jason and I started to hang out outside D&D, and we would pretty much go everywhere together. I had another friend “connected at the hip.” Jason eventually moved in with me and my roommate, and we both got into mudding, and joined the Society for Creative Anachronisms pretty much at the same time. We would spend endless hours together on the mud. We had two computers and two phone lines. We would sit next to each other and play the games, so we were almost always together in the game, and we could see each other’s screens at all times. It was a blast. While in the SCA, we joined two rival houses, but we were always together. The heads of our houses frowned on us being together all the time, but we didn’t care. However, when it came time for war, houses were (mostly) forgotten, and we would have each other’s back during the battles. We were willing to die for each other. We also lived in a borderline bad neighborhood at the time. One night one of our neighbors started beating his wife in their front yard. I ran out to break it up, and I got the guy off of the woman. He came after me, and I manged to coax him back onto my property. Keep in mind: this is Texas. He was attacking me on my own property. Jason, my roommate, or I could shoot and kill the guy and be legally free of repercussions. Jason stepped on to the porch with his .357 magnum, and told the guy that he should stop. The look on the guy’s face was priceless, and it was at that moment that I realized that Jason would be willing to kill for me as well as die for me. I had finally found someone that I could call a best friend. We spent another year together as good friends, but I was getting tired of my home town. I couldn’t find a job anywhere, so I picked up my life and took it to San Antonio. I only saw Jason one other time after that. He had moved to Arkansas to be with his mother, and I drove up to Arkansas to visit him for a weekend. It happened to be the re-release of Star Wars Episode IV, and he was a huge Star Wars fan. I figured I’d take him to the movie for his birthday. We had a good time for the long weekend, but it was over way too quickly. When I left Arkansas, I never saw him again. I talked to him a few times over the years, but I have not spoken to Jason since around 1999. He told me that he was entering a seminary school to become a Catholic priest. His ultimate goal was to become a Franciscan Monk and teach to convicts that are spending time in prison. It’s a noble aspiration. I really would love to reconnect with him, but I’m not sure that will ever happen. Maybe if I save up some money for a private investigator, I’ll be able to find him. I just hope that he’s alive, happy, and doing well in his endeavors.
Since Jason and I parted ways, I have not had a “best friend.” Sure, I’ve had friends. I still have friends, and I love the friends that I have. However, none of them really jump out at me as being a better friend than all of the rest. I’m close to all of my friends, and I have their back at all times. I’m also pretty sure that they have my back as well, but would they kill for me? Would they die for me? I don’t know. Maybe I’m holding the bar too high. Each of my best friends has been better than the previous ones. Should I stop looking to improve upon what I’ve had in the past? Maybe the ghosts in my past are too impressive and I’ll never consider another person my best friend because of that. I’m sure it isn’t fair to the people that are currently in my life, but I’m not sure that I can stop comparing what I currently have to what I once had. Maybe someday, I’ll find that just right person that I can step up and claim to be a best friend. Maybe I’ll never have that again. The thought of never having a best friend again kind of makes me sad. I enjoyed having someone in my life that I could rely on for anything. I also enjoyed being there for a person in all aspects of life.
Chris, Curtis, J.J., Jason, I hope this day finds you happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Cybernetics
If cybernetics existed now the way they do in the fictional futures, I would most certainly get cybernetic eyes with infrared vision, night vision, a digital camera, zoom vision, and flash protection. I would link the digital camera to a flash card that would be inserted into a slot in my skull just behind an ear. That would allow me to carry a plethora of files, knowledge, information, pictures, and other goodies with me at all times. I would also get my knees (maybe my whole legs!) replaced, so that they would no longer hurt me when I walked up stairs. Now that I think about it a little more, I would also try to get some form of wireless Internet access wired into my body, so that I could access the Internet from anywhere that I could find a hot-spot. That would totally rock. Of course, this would all have to run off of Linux, so that I could hack into it and make some personal improvements. No way I would let part of my body run off of some sort of Windows mobile operating system.
I probably wouldn’t stop with the eyes, legs, and wireless networking, either. For those of you that have played R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk role playing game, you know the rules about Cool and Humanity. I would probably start with a fairly high Cool, and whittle away at my Humanity until I was right on the verge of being Cyberpsycho. Yeah. I would have a hard time stopping the improvement on my physical form. My only limitation would be financial.
Perl Popper
Many moons ago, at another job, we moved our entire office network to another location for a trade show. We had some software that would check the local mail server to see if there was any email for the user that was logged in. We needed to use this software at the show, but could not access the mail server from remote. This caused the software to hang at startup. We could have hacked the code to disable this since the software was written in-house, but we didn’t have the source code with us at the remote location.
There was a config in the software to tell it where to check for new mail (thank God it wasn’t hard coded!) We had a Linux box on the network acting as a bridge between our local network and the Internet. We didn’t have a POP server on the Linux box, but we needed make the software think that it was talking to a POP server. This box was very underpowered, and we didn’t even have a C compiler on it because of space considerations (it was a VERY old laptop.)
Thankfully we had Perl installed on the box. I quickly whipped out vi, Perl, and my coding skills to emulate a POP server. After 20 minutes of coding, I had a bogus POP server running. It would authenticate any combination of username/password given it, and would “LIST” zero emails for the account. There were a few other commands that I added to the fake POP server, but I don’t quite remember what they are now.
This inspired me to write a real POP server in Perl just to see if I could do it, but events conspired against me. I’ve just not had the time to do it. Someday I’ll have a free week to spend to write the POP server. I don’t expect it to be robust, fast, memory efficient, or even useful. I just think it would be a fun thing to write.
Maybe I’ll be able to recruit Shinto to help me out. Of course, he has even less time than I do now that he has a daughter. Maybe when Serenity graduates high school we’ll be able to get together and write it. That’s only 16-17 years from now. I’m sure that it will still be on my todo list then. Maybe we’ll actually see Perl 6 before that time arrives.
Ten Questions
I watch Inside the Actors Studio when I get a chance because I really enjoy the depth and breadth of the interviews that James Lipton does. My favorite part of the show is the Bernard Pivot questionnaire that is asked. Here are the questions along with my answers:
1. What is your favorite word? Cromulent
2. What is your least favorite word? Lackadaisical
3. What turns you on? Companionship of any kind
4. What turns you off? Intentional Ignorance
5. What is your favorite curse word? Fuck
6. What sound or noise do you love? A child laughing for no reason other than to laugh.
7. What sound or noise do you hate? The brief moment of silence after hearing tires screech on pavement. You’re not sure, for that moment, what catastrophe is about to happen.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Veterinarian
9. What profession would you not like to do? Gynecologist
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Your family is at a table in the back. We’ve saved a seat for you.
Fucking Snow
This shit just has to stop. I’m tired of being trapped in my house every weekend. This royally sucks dick. I want to go out and hang out with my friends. I want to get out and play D&D for more than a scattered few hours. I’m jonesin’ for a serious D&D game where we sit and play for 4-5 hours straight.
I also want to spend more than a few minutes outside the house and away from work. I’m just so upset about this damn snow. Fucking weathermen don’t know a damn thing about the weather. They said that we’d be getting about five inches of snow. The stupid bastards should come out and shovel my mother-fucking driveway that has over a foot of snow in it.
Grrrrrr…. I’m just so pissed right now.
I WANT OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!!!!!
Hockey Cheerleaders
I found this site while checking out the stats on the Florida Panthers to see if my most hated hockey player, Todd Bertuzzi, was doing any good since he left the Vancouver Canucks as a free agent. I never did find out if Bertuzzi was doing any good, but I did find out that the Florida Panthers have cheerleaders!
What the fuck? Since when are there cheerleaders in hockey?!? Where do they stand and do their thing? Is it like the Ice Capades where they come out on skates during intermission and dance around? What a strange thing!
My next question is why don’t the Avs have cheerleaders? Huh? If they can make ice in Florida that is thick enough to skate on, then we can certainly find some college coeds that are able to skate and dance in skimpy outfits here in Colorado!
