I have no idea how Jared could stand to eat at Subway continuously for so long. I've been going there almost daily for the past six months or so, because it's the only place around here that's open past midnight and has anything vegetarian on the menu. Unfortunately, even there, the only thing I can eat is the Veggie Max, so my daily meal there has become a terribly monotonous experience. Every time I consider the prospect of going to Subway to get another damn Veggie Max, my soul dies a little. It's a lot like how Mayor Quimby feels about his wife (1.3 MB WMV video). It's even worse because Subway is so much more expensive here than it was in Clemson. My daily descents into ennui cost me $7.45 apiece. I really need to start bringing my own food to work more often.

I went to see Jarhead tonight. When I got out, around 11:45pm, I thought to myself happily, "Perfect, just in time to go in to work at midnight." And then I remembered that it was Sunday, and I didn't have work tonight, and I said, "Ah, crap."

Weekends suck when you work night shift. Unless you stay awake through Saturday and screw up your sleep schedule, you are doomed to being awake all through the lonely night and trying to find things to do to pass the dark, endless hours. It's kind of sad that I would actually rather be at work with things to do than sitting here without a care in the world.

Yesterday morning I dropped off my first roll of medium format film for processing. I took the Holga with me when I walked down the street to the panadería for breakfast, and managed to fill a whole roll (which, in 6x6cm format, is only 12 photos, but still). It's so nice to have a fresh point of view for photography — things don't feel cliche or pointless anymore.

I actually think the biggest difference was just the fact that I could take it with me wherever I went — I never feel comfortable walking around with the 300D because it's so big and noticeable. Whenever I pull it out people say "Wow, that's a nice camera." And I know it's a compliment, but I'd much rather people didn't notice the camera at all. I don't want their attention to be on it; I want them to carry on as if it wasn't there.

[Entry Continues...]

Sometimes when I get out of work at 6 A.M., I stop by the panadería down the street to get breakfast. Often there's a homeless guy sitting out front begging for change or food. Today the guy asked me for a cigarette, and I apologized and said I didn't have any, but offered to buy him something from the panadería instead. He said sure, and asked for a coffee.

[Entry Continues...]

This morning I left early for work so I could stop at the panadería and get breakfast. However, when I got close to the San Juan area I ran into a huge traffic jam. Since I knew that traffic equaled no food, I darted off onto a side street to try and find a way around the it.

[Entry Continues...]

So I learned today that the windows in the bathroom at work are apparently only held up by small daubs of caulk. Well, one of them is, anyway.

The bathroom smelled terrible (not really a poop smell, more of a dead animal smell), so I opened up a window and then entered the stall. A few minutes later, I suddenly heard a ridiculously loud, rending crash, and shards of glass skidded under the walls of my stall and bounced off the legs of my jeans. Then I got to spend the next half hour cleaning up broken glass.

When I related the experience to Rob, he said, "It's a good thing you were already sitting on the toilet when it fell, because that would have scared the sh*t out of me."

The week with Meg and Amy was awesome. I didn't get to write about it until a while later, because I immediately left for the Cedar Point trip, so details are kind of sketchy in my memory now, but I wanted to get something down about it.

[Entry Continues...]

This article on Web Browser Forensics (Part 1, Part 2) describes some of the tools and methods we use when investigating a suspected intrusion. I thought some of you might find it interesting/creepy to see how much information can be retrieved from the digital wake your web browser creates as you browse. Some of it is kind of technical, but if you're not interested in the details you can skim through part 1 and look at the screenshots of the various tools and get the gist of what's possible. Example: a cached Hotmail page.

The information described in the article is retrieved from the web browser's cache and history files. Internet Explorer ostensibly lets the user erase their cache and history, but it's interesting to note that the Content.IE5/index.dat and History.IE5/index.dat files — which contain the listing of visited URLs — are not erased when this occurs. In other words, IE will delete the cached content itself but preserves the list of URLs a user has visited. These files are locked by the operating system on startup, so they can't even be deleted manually under normal conditions. To remove them, you have to reboot your computer into command prompt mode and delete them from there. This "feature" has proved useful to us but not as beneficial for the users we've investigated.

Yet another Saturday spent at work. I can't complain, because I do it by choice to earn days off for vacations etc, but it still gets tiring. Since tomorrow is Mother's Day, Luis suggested that I work half a day today and half a day tomorrow, so that Deoscoidy could take a few hours off tomorrow to spend time with his family. We ended up not doing that, but the idea is an intriguing one that sounds like it would make a nice regular schedule — one weekend, you work Saturday and Sunday for 5 hours each, and the next weekend, you get one day off (say Friday). That way every other week you get a three-day weekend, and the weekends that you work aren't TOTALLY consumed by work, so it is still kind of like a free day. Of course, there's also the possibility of just working one full weekend shift one week and getting a day off the next. Each has their pros and cons. I guess the ideal setup would be to be able to pick between the two each week depending on your plans for the weekend. Hmm, I might have to run that idea past Luis sometime...

[Entry Continues...]

Working during the day means there is no longer a 12 hour communication delay between my boss and I, and so I'm kept more busy. However, it's not really all bad, because Luis tends to be quite happy with the work that I do, and so being given more projects means I get to receive more frequent praise for doing them well. So it ends up being sort of nice being able to get things done so quickly and get straight to the acknowledgement of my efforts :) Like a carrot on a stick. I am a simple being.

Hehe. I'm playing Rachel's — Systems/Layers at work. My coworker Fernando tried to be diplomatic: "It sounds like the soundtrack for a movie or something, how the mood changes gradually."

My boss was less so: "Bullshit! It sounds like the music my grandmother played when my grandfather died. I'll be right back, I'm going to go puke."

Bah, I managed to stay up until 11pm last night, but I'm still up at 5am and can't get back to sleep. I hate the feeling of impending doom, knowing that if I can't get back to sleep I'm going to be falling asleep towards the end of work, yet there's nothing I can do about it. The more you want to go to sleep, the harder it is. Oh well, I guess I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.

(Sung to the tune of Perfect Circle's 'A Stranger')

Nice things about working during the day:

• Sleeping in the dark (so nice! I should do this more often)
• Finally get to use my $75 Oakleys (what a stupid purchase, especially for someone who worked at night)
• Seeing other humans/Not feeling like I'm on the set of 28 Days
• Free mallorcas each morning (Ugh that would be bad long term)

Downsides:

• No longer have daytime hours free to do things like renew driver's license
• Daytime environment at work a little less laid back
• Can't just leave headlights on all the time, since I actually experience daytime driving now
• Other people in my bathroom stall!
• Traffic, I have not missed you.

So today I ordered pizza (Domino's 3 pizzas for $5.55 each, mmm, way too much pizza). Since you have to have an electronic key to get to my office, standard practice is for the pizza guy to call when he arrives so we can go out and get the pizza. This guy apparently didnt know to do that, though. When I got a call on my cell phone, I assumed it'd be the pizza guy. But instead it was some woman who said (in Spanish), "Daniel? Are you expecting a pizza? The guy is out here and he's about to leave." Until this point, I figured it was the guard at the front desk calling. However, she continued in a surprised tone, "Are you here at atrium? What floor are you on? I ran all around the building looking for you but didn't find you. Anyway, you'd better get out here, the guy's about to leave. You owe me a slice of pizza."

[Entry Continues...]

Well, I've become quite a punctual person lately, at least with regards to getting to work. For the longest time, it was pretty much standard for me to leave for work right around the time I was ostensibly supposed to be arriving (or later), so it was normal for me to arrive between 20-40 minutes late for work. This wasn't too big a deal, as nobody here really minds. However, now that I'm working 8pm-6am, I relieve the daytime guys, who work 10am-8pm, and often they are the only ones here. So if I'm late, they have to stay late and wait for me. Thus, punctuality became more important. Surprisingly, I realized today that I've actually managed to make the transformation. I now get here between 745-8pm very reliably, usually walking in the door right around 7:58. It's a very satisfying and rewarding feeling, sort of like the experience of turning in an assignment that I experienced occasionally. I never would have thought I could actually learn to be on time for anything. Take that, Danielle, not coming out with us just because I was 45 minutes late to pick you up! And yet you kept my stuffed cow that moos three times. But victory is mine!! Except you still have my cow. And my sweatshirt.

Remember how I was looking forward to this weekend, and finally getting to sleep, catch up on a week's worth of Stargate, etc? I've found an even better way to spend the weekend: working! Luis asked me to cover his shift on Sunday, from 10am to 10pm. Sweet. I like how it's a day shift too, so I get to adjust to daytime and then back to nighttime for Monday night. I mean, I certainly don't begrudge it, since he's got a family emergency, and I'm just glad I can help. I just found it amusing to have the request come on the one weekend I was most looking forward to sleeping :) Ah well, maybe this will all help me get used to sleeping less. Right now, I'm not very functional if I get much less than 8 hours of sleep, and I view that as a handicap.

Tonight as I was driving home from work, I noticed this large wooden tank or some other sort of cylinder which they've built by the side of the road. I have no idea what it could be for, but the area is pretty industrial, so it doesn't surprise me to see it there. What perplexes me more is the fact that it's made of wood and not metal. It just seems so medieval and out of place in an industrialized society.

[Entry Continues...]