May 30: Casa Casa Casa!

Work. Sleep. Work. Sleep. Backshfit can be rough. For some reason, it's not just like any other shift — you really feel like all you are doing is working and sleeping. I'm not sure why that is. Last night went by smoothly, with lots and lots of company from various other employees of the illustrious IWK. Tawnya (health records clerk extraordinaire) is supposed to call me at some point to “fix her computer”, which means Internet connection. I'm sure it's probably just something in the TCP/IP settings that is set wrong, because (apparently) the connection itself works for other people. Blah.

So, I'm heading off to my last night of backshift tonight. I'm not too happy about it, though, because working backshift on the women's side during the week means that I have to deal with extra patients in the morning, of the sort that I was never trained for. It's always a best-guess-fix-it-later sort of situation when that happens. I think I need a few more training shifts up there if they're going to get me to work up there on a regular basis.

I'm at Amanda and Russell's place at the moment, watching Janet play Tetris being somewhat aimless. I need to find something to amuse myself, other than the episode of Columbo that I got last night (I love Columbo — it's my one of my favourite shows). And ack, I just turned the brightness on my monitor up to max and now I'm somewhat blinded. I had it on low earlier to save batteries...eeep. Can't see.

Anyway, someone should come up with some amusing activity for tomorrow evening. Mike wants to have people “over for drinks”, which translates into “come see our kick ass new house”, but I don't think that will happen until later. So, from four-ish til nine-ish, I need amusement. I'm sure somebody out there is up to the task.

Did everyone read that news story in Linkpool about the freaky little British kid that convinced someone to murder him? I'm not sure who's stupider: the 14 year-old mastermind of his own murder, or the daft 16 year-old that actually thought the British Secret Service might be contracting assassins on an MSN chat room. Damn.

May 26: Arg! (The Megapixel Chronicles)

So, I took Megapixel back to Futureshop today. The hard drive made a strange noise when it was in heavy use, and had some errors on it when I first got it. Although I'd fixed the errors, I wasn't comfortable with the possibility of a flaky hard drive. The exchange process was straightforward, and it turns out that I go to school with the guy who did the swap. Anyway, upon getting Megapixel 2.0 home (and no, I'm not going to keep the 2.0 part) home, I proceeded to check everything out and found the exact same errors. My conclusion is that the HP folks must have just messed up when making the factory-default image. According to Norton Disk Doctor, which gives considerably more information than CHKDSK, there were chunks of the hard drive that were marked as being used, but weren't really. Whatever. It works.

Of course, I wanted to install Windows XP Professional instead of Home. This was a mistake: it turns out that the Dalhousie VPN software I need to get online at school has a major conflict with pro, meaning that once I'd spent, oh, five hours setting up my system, I realized that I couldn't get my wireless modem to work. Can you say “Blue Dcreen of Death”? After much more messing, I managed to get it working (sans Dalhousie VPN software), but I realized that the only reason I wanted Professional Edition was for the IIS web server. I thought to myself, “hey, my system is now a compromise, when it would do everything I want with Home Edition installed.” In case you hadn't guessed how this story ends, I've wiped the hard drive and I'm putting Home Edition back on. I'm both disappointed and happy that Hewlett-Packard decided not to include a “restore to factory default” CD set. While those are nice and easy to use, they install lots of crap I don't want, and they would toast the partition I've set up. I remain undecided overall.

Anyway, it's three-thirty in the morning and I'm not sleepy. Backshift really sucks sometimes. And I had forgotten how much Ren & Stimpy kicked ass.

May 24: Wonderful Quotes

Nick: I love you in that platonic way. You know, I'd do you if I had to.

May 24: Deepest Sender

Discovered whilst browsing through Firefox extensions, looking for something interesting: Deepest Sender. To quote, “Deepest Sender (it's an anagram) will hopefully end up being the LiveJournal client I always wanted. The UI is primarily based on the Visions (the default one) Win32 LiveJournal client, but it lives inside Mozilla. Response sorting, saving and password functions have been lifted from the LiveLizard project.”. The anagram? Depressed teen.

So, I thought I had to work tonight, but upon arrival, found that I was mistaken. Isn't life a bitch sometimes?

May 23: Houston, We Have a Problem

Well, I had a fun-filled, action-packed, powerful-hyphenate weekend — how about you? I wish I'd done a blog entry earlier, so I didn't have to pack so much into one, but hey — I'm lazy. So, here's the recap.

Friday morning, I went to FutureShop in the hopes of buying my dream laptop: the Toshiba Satellite A20-H4D. Unfortunately for me, they didn't have any. However, the guy said that they had something very similar for the same price. The catch? It was a Hewlett-Packard. I decided to take a peek anyway, and I'm glad I did, because I found my new digital soulmate: the HP Pavilion zv5160. Sure, it's a Hewlett-Packard, but there's plenty to love: 128 MB of RAM on the video card (ATI Radeon 9000), speakers by Harmon/Kardon (my god, the sound is wicked), and...WIDESCREEN! And of course, any laptop that is a worthy successor to Pixel can only be named Megapixel. We're in love, although there is an issue: the hard drive makes some weird noises sometimes. Houston, we have a problem. I think I'll take it in tomorrow and see what they say about it.

Continue reading “Houston, We Have a Problem”...

May 21: Shiznit, Ma

Shit, man. I can't believe that Andy Kauffman is alive. When I first saw the blog, at first I assumed it was another one of those humorous celebrity blogs (did anyone ever read Miss Cleo's LiveJournal back when it existed?). However, I guess it's safe to say that it is, in fact, truth. Weird. Sometimes real life is stranger than any movie.

New laptop tomorrow.

May 18: Meet Me If You Care (I'll Be at the Spot)

Well, boy howdy. What a crappy day yesterday turned into! It started out fine, assuming one doesn't mind doing manual labour in the yard (I don't do much outside, so I can handle it). However, by the time nine pm had rolled around, I was ready to kill somebody, because the headphone jack on my laptop got snapped off. Somebody must have stepped right on the plug that was hooked up to it. When I turned my beloved Pixel off to better investigate the problem, I never expected that it wouldn't turn on again. But it didn't. Today, I took her to Decision One in Burnside, and they're pretty confident the can fix it. Price tag: about $100. Ack. Adding that to the $215 speeding ticket I received whilst rushing home to see my injured computer and you have an unhappy and expensive night. Oh, well. I went to sleep with a deep feeling of karmic destiny. Don't let things bother you: somehow, they will randomly work out.

Moving on to the next topic, it's time for a new computer. Sure, nothing will ever top the rush of getting my first laptop, but I think it's time to upgrade anyway. Every two years sounds reasonable, right? The one I'm looking for is basically Pixel, updated by two years. It's the Satellite A20-H4D, and yes, sad as it is, I've memorized the exact name already. To sure it up, it's 2.8 GHz (versus Pixel's 1.8), 512 MB of RAM (vs 256), 32 MB of video RAM (vs 16), a 60 GB hard drive (vs 40), and S-Video TV-out (vs composite). Plus, the USB slots are now USB 2.0, meaning I can actually use Steve's portable hard drive without having to wait years and years for stuff to transfer.

I want it.

May 18: Ack.

Um, my laptop got broken and then I got a $200+ speeding ticket on the way home from Russell/Amanda's. Wow. I'm going to go to sleep before my head explodes.

May 16: Sometimes You Gotta Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Badgers, badgers, badgers. Everywhere, it seems. How's life?

The last few days of mine have been fairly eventful. I've complained to everyone I know about the horrid situation that befell me this weekend, ie, working on the women's side of the hospital instead of the children's side. I'm starting to get used to it over here, though, so it's not so bad. Maybe I should get trained to do daytimes and get added to the WASCL (I have no idea what this horrible acronym stands for, but it's the list of people to call when trying to fill extra shifts, and it makes me think of Elmer Fudd). Tonight is going by pretty quickly — almost halfway through the night already. This is largely because I have some company, in the form of Tawnya, health records superstar. We've basically just been listening to music and eating popcorn — not such a bad way to spend a Saturday night, I guess. And to be getting paid for it, well, it's a done deal. Sign me up.

Friday was Castro's birthday, so we got pizza from Pizza Hut, and it arrived with a free DVD (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — this is after we got Weekend at Bernie's on Tuesday). Janet, Tony, Pugsley, and John joined in the merriment, and I have to say, I still it's a great movie, even after a decade and a half. I still remember how ridiculously excited I was when it came out and I got to go see it in theatres.

Moving onward, I went over to TJ/Vanessa's this evening/last evening (arg — backshift screws up ones sense of time to very thoroughly that I think a specific term should be created for the phenomenon) for a barbecue. Hung out with TJ and Vanessa (as one might expect), as well as their son Logan, Steve, Keddy, and those three people that always seem to be there and I can never remember the names of. Oh, and their dog (Haley) is great. Just as I was leaving, Keddy brought over his new girlfriend (ooooOOOOooooh), Emily, but I couldn't stay. Needed sleep. For some reason, I've slept a whole lot over the past few days.

I place the blame squarely on tight pants.

May 14: Late Night with David Letterperson (Sprunt.)

One of the most interesting things that one can do is to dig through other people's crap. Oh, don't get all high and mighty on me: you do it. If you find that somebody has lost their wallet on the side of the road, you'll dig through it. If you're visiting someone's house, you'll (stereotypically) look at the contents of their medicine cabinet. The vast majority of web browsing is pure snooping (come on, how long has it been since you've come across a directory listing instead of a web page and gone through all the files there?). The high pinnacle of snooping, however, is digging through somebody elses hard drive. It's unfortunate that the opportunity to do this (in a morally kosher circumstance) rarely presents itself.

I'm at work, and I'm bored, and I'm snooping. The person in question? Myself, years and years ago. Now that SpindeXML Explorer is all but done, I'm finding it fun to dig through my old indexes and look at the files within. It's basically like going through the files of a stranger, because I would never have remembered a file called !-Schedule.txt (random, and boring example...that happens to contain my grade 11, fall 1999 class schedule). It's lead to some real gems, though: for example, Britney Spears VS Drag Queen.txt
(Britney Spears VS Drag Queen.txt. I can remember this one right now, off the top of my head, even though it's theoretically been more than four and a half years since I've touched it. Now, if you're reading this, it means that in the, oh, eight hours between me actually writing this and posting it online, I've forgotten to dig up the actual file and put it on the site. Yes, I am a knob, and you should make fun of me.)
. I don't know what blows my mind more: the vast, vast majority of things on the Internet that are weird and absolutely hilarious, or the shocking rate at which we seem to be losing them. How many people out there make as conscientious an effort as I do to retain everything they've ever seen? Seriously, I dare you to try it. Go for a month and keep every single file that you come into contact with. Come up with some way of organizing it. Stash it away. In six months to a year, go back and look at it, and see how many great things you'll rediscover.

I'll be right back. I gotta take a dump.*
(I'm not really going to take a dump. I'm quoting George Carlin here — “Things You Don't Wanna Hear” to be precise.)

May 13: Please Pretend You Care

Ah, what a frustrating day. Ever have a day where nothing goes right? This definitely isn't one of them. But it is a piss off, nonetheless. Despite lofty plans of hanging out with Simon, I've ended up just sticking around the house and watching, of all things, episodes of the Tom Green Show that I downloaded in, um, April of 1999. I keep stuff forever. I'm not sure why, but I got an uncontrollable urge to watch the show. Weird, eh?

Anyway, today has been productive in a “hey, what a geek!” sort of way. For those of you who have been blissfully spared of “come look at this, and please pretend you care”, I'm working on a new program. It's called SpindeXML Explorer, and it lets one browse through their SpindeXML CD indexes in a way that looks/acts/feels just like Windows Explorer — take a look. I wrote this exact thing two years ago when I first started messing with .NET, but the files got corrupted and I never got around to writing it again. So, I've gotten around to it. I find it fun and interesting to dig through my old CDs and find files I've forgotten about — such as old episodes of the Tom Green Show — and I'm much more likely to do it if I don't have to mess with actual CDs. Overall, the project is a Good Thing, since it gives me lots of practice working with C#: XML readers, file I/O, working with GUI objects...I love it. I only have two more things to do before it's finished: make the “Delete Index” command actually delete the index, and make it show the appropriate icons for files. I'm trying to make my code as clean as possible, since I think I might open source the whole thing. Surely, I'm not the only one who has gobs and gobs of CDs full of data.

PS: Whoever posted that incest porn site to Linkpool, um, go fuck yourself.

May 11: One Point Six One Eight

Like most people who are me*
(Note that this is a fairly elite group, which currently has but one member.)
, I have an incredibly small bladder. People who have to pee quite often like to have a little variety — it's no fun seeing the same bathroom eleventy billion times a day. Fortunately for me, the emergency room offers many choices for the discerning washroom connoisseur. During one of my visits this morning, I noticed something odd written on the wall, in tiny pen digits: 1.618.

I thought, hey, that's weird — why would somebody write a random number on the wall? But then, after a moment of thinking about it, I realized that it wasn't a random number...it's the Golden Ratio, aka Phi. This is one of the most important numbers in the universe, right up there with Pi. The Golden Ratio is the result of dividing two adjacent numbers in the Fibbonacci Sequence*
(The Fibbonacci Sequence: With the first two numbers being 0 and 1, to obtain the next number in the sequence, just add the previous two together. Therefore, the Fibbonacci Sequence begins as 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...for any pair of adjacent numbers, dividing the larger number by the smaller number will give you Phi, the Golden Ratio, which approaches 1.618.)
and controls all sorts of things in the universe. Hell, if you do a Google for it, it'll tell you the exact number (1.61803399). And this was written on the wall of the bathroom.

Anyway, enough of that unnecessary topic. I just realized two travel related things recently: Simon leaves next week, and within a month and a half, my house will be flooded with Scots.
...
Ack! My system was taken over by Sasser. Goddamn Dalhousie network (I'm safe at home, thanks to my trusty firewall). All is well now, but I'm out of time and have to get back to work. Oh well, you can all wait a little while before hearing about my zany Scottish relatives.

May 07: Ill Tidings

Last week, out of sheer boredom — reaching extreme levels, in fact — I decided to mess with Mono. For those of you who have social lives, I'll take the time to explain what that is. When Microsoft released its .NET Framework, geeks around the world realized that, hey, this isn't such a bad idea. Some open source folks jumped right on it and created an open source version of the framework, complete with new compilers for a lot of the languages. Since I'm always on the look out for new languages to learn, I decided that it might be cool to mess with C#. C# was widely derided as Microsoft's latest attempt to kill Java, and indeed, there are some similarities. However, there is one key difference:

C# kicks ass. I really like it. It's a testament to the usability of a language when I can go from never using it (except for a “Hello, World!” thing I did last week) to creating a functional program with it in a single afternoon. Today, I created a replacement version of the spindexml_add component for my SpindeXML program which uses a C#-based search component (graphical interface is still written in Visual Basic, but it's just a front-end for the C# component). Doing so boosted performance significantly, making it about three times faster. The built-in functions for parsing XML documents are absolutely amazing, and I highly recommend that any serious geeks — especially those using Microsoft's .NET Framework — give Mono a go. It's really good.

Anyway, I spent the day lounging around with Janet and Steve. At one point, Vanessa and TJ came over with Logan, who crawled around the living room and tried to eat my mouse. Several times. We watched The Last Starfighter, a delightfully bad eighties movie with a great storyline, and then Keddy wandered over for the Friends finale. My vote: great ending, but the show bit the shark a few years back. The first three seasons were some of the most amazing pieces of television ever, but once Ross started dating Emily, things went downhill. And I'm surprised they didn't find a way to work Janice back in there somehow for the ending. I don't, however, wish to be like every other blog on the planet for the next few days, so that's all I have to say about that.

At this point, it's almost time for sleep. So I'm going to mess around with Mono a bit more and wander upstairs. Ciao.

May 05: Maria -- You Gotta See Her

I wonder what percentage of my blog entries/rants are put into the “whatever” category. Probably 90%. And why do I bother, anyway? The category doesn't sort them at all, nor is it ever visible. What a waste of time.

Anyway, I spent yesterday down in the valley (Wolfville/Kentville/New Minas, etc) with Janet, Russell, Amanda, and Alexander. For a three month old baby, he was pretty happy in the car. The weather was pretty crappy, but it was a nice day nonetheless. We snapped a few photos, which I will post later, but the highlight of the day was lunch in the King's Arms Pub. I had uber-spicy nachos — I swear, there were more jalapenos than nachos. Lovely.

The drive down was vastly improved by the fact that I finally had the tires fixed on the car. There was a wobbly unhappiness in the rear tires that made the car shake quite a bit when it was on the highway. Now, its silky smooth again, although the Canadian Tire guys warned me that our battery was starting to die. This car is weird.

Upon returning home from the valley, I promptly went to sleep. I was very tired all day. The odd thing is that I slept from about 6:30 last night until 10:30 this morning. That's 16 hours of sleep — I am such a freak. Wait...I shouldn't use the words “I am” in conjunction anymore, since they seem to have been coined by God. I guess beer commercials are an earthly sin.

So, who wants to go on an epic adventure tonight?

May 02: Oh, Dear God

I am currently experiencing the worst pain I think I have ever had. I have no clue why, but I'm having ridiculous stomach cramps. Ack ack ack. And I'm stuck at work for another five and a half hours...the adventure continues.

...

Two and a half hours later, I feel fine. For some reason, the owies just evaporated about half an hour after they started. For a while, I was really thinking I would have to go home — but how I would get there, I had no idea, since I couldn't drive with that much crampage. I'm very glad that it went away, but it left me very tired. So, now I'm all sleepy. But I'm on my lunch break, so life is fine.

Actually, it's not 100% fine — I got the mother of all paper cuts whilst helping Tawnya, internationally acclaimed “unluckiest person ever”, fold some letters and stuff them into envelopes. I'm not exactly sure how I managed to do it, but somehow I got a really deep paper cut. The rare kind that actually bled. I guess it's just a crappy night.

In other news, a vicious new Windows worm is making its way through the Internet. Read up on the new Sasser worm and make sure you're patched real good.

May 01: I Believe in a Thing Called Love

Telus is now offering I Believe in a Thing Called Love, by the Darkness, as a ring tone. And I'm seriously considering downloading it.

How's life for everyone? I'm currently embroiled in a long and bitter 12 hour shift. That's right, 50% more work than usual. A few people are on vacation and a heap of others are out sick, so quite a few people have been pulling extra-long shifts for the past few days. I'm not really complaining: it's not that bad, and I get time-and-a-half for the extra four hours. Read: I get paid for 14 hours, despite only working 12. That's awesome.

Continue reading “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”...