Journal entries in 'Miscellaneous' for June, 2005

This morning I was eating a pack of Cottage Doubles, and it tasted a little weird. I thought of checking the expiration date, but it didn't really taste that odd — it could have been all in my head — and I knew that if I checked, and it was even a single day past its expiration date, I wouldn't be able to finish it, even though I knew in my head it was perfectly fine. So I kept my eyes fixed straight on the TV until I had finished eating it, and then turned it over to check. It turns out it expired about two weeks ago. Hmm. Curdled Milk 1, Dan 0.

Sorry for the outage. BinRock was inaccessible for the weekend. It went down on Friday morning, but I didn't realize it until I woke up Friday evening, just after Bryan had gone home for the day. As a result, he couldn't take a look at it until he got into work today. A weekend without BinRock! Oh, agony.

If you're curious, the problem was that it somehow lost the part of its network configuration that told it how to get out onto the internet, so it was alive and well, it just didn't know how to talk to us. The poor little guy must have been so frustrated.

Ugh, the one night I was too lazy to bring food to work, it turns out it's Noche De San Juan and the streets are completely clogged with cars. It took me an hour to get to work, whereas normally it takes about 10 minutes. If I go out to get food, I might be gone for hours.

And dammit do I hate those little scooter motorcycles that have gotten so popular all of a sudden. These people are kind of like the motorcycling equivalent of the "new rich," who suddenly suddenly find themselves on a motorcycle and havent had time to learn how to use one. They just know that when they are in a car they always see motorcycles driving between the stopped cars at stoplights, so they've decided that now that they have a motorcycle they never have to wait in line.

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Arr, living in my room is like a neverending game of Tetris on level 9, except I don't get the cool music to listen to. Things keep piling up all over the floor/desk/chair/bed and it's a constant race to find places to accomodate them and free up space. But my efforts are in vain, because more stuff soon fills the gap that I just opened up. I need to get back in a multi-room house like the Compound where I can "advance to the next level" by moving all the accumulated stuff to one of the empty rooms and sigh in satisfaction at my newfound space. Yes, that'd be a good long-term strategy.

I like the latest Nissan XTerra ads I've been seeing on TV; the ones with the math equations that take care to point out that the XTerra doesn't come with leather seats or "bling bling". Back when I was in Clemson, a guy in the car club who worked at CarMax used to tell me about how the XTerra was one of the only SUVs that was actually built like the truck it was supposed to be. It offers heavy duty 4WD differentials, etc., and is built on frame rails, rather than the unibody design of most cars (and modern SUVs). However, he lamented that people tended to ignore those features, and the most popular model by far was the 2WD model without all the offroad equipment. It's nice to see that Nissan also disapproves of this misguided interest, and is trying to restate the truck's real purpose.

I don't understand it when people drive faster than me. I drive a sports car with above-average handling and braking ability, and I drive as fast as I feel comfortable. It troubles me when a large SUV passes me going at least 10-15 mph faster.

What the hell? Interfaces? Reflection? Parameter Covariance and Contravariance? Mixins? I thought I knew how to program. Who made up all of these words all of a sudden?