Journal entries for January, 2005

I've been hearing about how bad the weather is in Clemson. People mention how jealous they are of my 90 degree weather, and yet I sort of miss the ice and snow :) It was always such an adventure venturing out into the abandoned, snow-covered roads. Evokes strong memories of last winter, when I was still there.

I was just listening to Rust In Peace and was reminded of how utterly inadequate I felt that night in New Orleans we did Open Mic Night. And it's not like I'm any stranger to the feeling of inadequacy or anything; you'd think I'd be used to it. I think the reason this time it seemed to affect me more that night was just because music has always sort of been my last refuge; I may suck at lots of things, but music was the one thing I was actually good at. At least, it was the one thing I was usually better than the people around me at. Cat pointed out how much I was comparing myself to others that night, and talking about wanting to be better than them, and it's true. That's not something I normally do, and I usually don't feel particularly competitive (again, since I'm not very good at most things :), but for some reason that night I had those irresistible feelings of egotism, like my little sheltering cove had been brushed away and I had to scurry and find something I could still hide behind.

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Isn't having your oil changed supposed to be easier than doing it yourself? Ugh. My car was 800 miles overdue for an oil change. Normally I'd do it myself, but the Evo comes with a free "PitPass™" maintenance contract which includes oil change (with Mobil1 Synthetic, which is better but significantly more expensive than dino oil), tire rotation, 27-point inspection, car wash, and vacuum; so I figure I'll make use of that as long as I have it. Also, there was a service bulletin pending on my car so I needed to bring it in anyway.

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Crap, there are things I'll miss about PR when I return to the US. Pan sobao and the great sandwiches they sell at panaderías (jamón queso y huevo)... The Donas Aymat donuts they sell at stoplights in the morning... Strange how they are all food-related. Oh yeah, the peaceful silence in my car; my radar detector has sat quietly in a box since I moved here nine months ago. Of course, any serenity gained through the elimination of the annoying beeping of the radar detector is more than negated by the annoyed cursing of the driver.

I can feel my humility draining away. Today I got indignant when my beeper for the urbanization didn't work and I had to wait for the guard to open the gate. Man, I was so much less presumptuous when I lived in a $20,000 house.

Wow. Here's some incredible pictures of the anti-inauguration protest in DC yesterday (link is to first photo in series). My favorite.

It's also the best implementation of the "click the left half of the picture to go to the last one, or the right half to go to the next pic" thing I've been meaning to do with my own photo gallery. It's inspired me to finally implement that myself. I'll probably model it directly on theirs, because it works very well.

It's ridiculous how many more cars I see on the street now. I'm getting off work at 6am rather than 4am, but it's still pitch black nighttime. There shouldn't be traffic before sunrise. This isn't Japan. Go back home and cuddle with your wives for another hour or two, workaholics.

Let's define n as the number of deaths that occur in a disaster. I have a theory that there is a number, x, such that if n is greater than x, humanity will be so awed that people will unanimously agree not to make jokes about it (disregarding the trivial case where n is the population of the world). Apparently, though, x is greater than 150,000.

So about 7 months ago I noted that the cold water faucet in my bathroom had nearly no water pressure and as such was unusable. I've just used hot water to wash my hands, and went to the hall bathroom on the other side of the house to brush my teeth.

Today I mentioned this to my dad and asked if he could finally have somebody come fix the faucet. He asked if I'd tried opening the valve under the sink. I hadn't. That was it.

Seven months, and that didn't occur to me. Aren't you proud that I manage to be a functional member of society despite my astounding limitations?

I really want to experiment with photography more. I always complain that there's nothing to take pics of here, but the fact is there is plenty; I just don't know how to find it. This seems to be a problem for me in general. I think there's three general types of people - some are technical, some artistic, and some are business-minded. It seems I'm more of a technical person, and yet I have this strong desire to be artistic. I really want to write cool music or take creative pictures or write things that are thought-provoking and enjoyable to read, but nothing comes. I've talked about this here before, and I titled the post "the artistic dry heaves", and that's really a perfect description of how it feels. I really want to create, and it's incredibly frustrating that I can't.

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Fernando, one of the two new guys we just got at work, showed me his 18-year-old son's band's CD today. It's really reminiscent of TSB. The band is called WNBF (We'll Never Be Famous), and their "thanks" list is joking around and self-deprecating and mildly immature and full of inside jokes, much like our "callouts" (we had the market cornered on immaturity though). Plus they have a song called "Big Fat Cow". The similarities are eerie :) I think our lyrics were slightly better though. Compare their All I need is some more liquor, All I want is to f*ck your sister with the inspiring, masterfully scripted, Waffle waffle waffle/Son buenos pa' almorzar/Waffle waffle waffle/No solo pa'l desayuno/Waffle waffle waffle/Y a mis amigos les doy uno!

There's just no contest. In the same sense that there's no contest between two pole-vaulters who were both born without legs.

Christmas was a time of little sleep. I worked 6pm-4am on Christmas Eve (as it was a normal workday), got to bed around 5am, was awoken a few hours later to open presents, and was asked to work 10pm-10am on the night of Christmas day. However, because our plane to Disney left at around 1030am on 12/26, I was allowed to leave around 7am so we could head to the airport. Sleepiness was rampant, but at least it made it easy to fast forward through the always tedious plane ride.

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BinRock is now up and running on the new server, and it's a hell of a lot nicer than before :) The old machine was a 333 MHz Pentium with 192mb of PC100 RAM and an 80gb 7200 rpm IDE drive. The new machine is a 2.8 GHz Pentium4 (1mb L2 cache) with 1gb of DDR400 RAM and a 73gb 10k rpm Ultra320 SCSI drive. The difference is noticeable :) The front page used to take 2-4 seconds to load, and now it takes 0.6-0.8 seconds. Now I can finally implement the various photo gallery features I've had in mind for a while.