Just me rambling, really.

Well, it seems that I neglected to grab Ruby vs. Perl vs. Python code snippet #2 (Craigslist troller) from home today, and there must have been a power outage or something (my systems at home aren’t responding), so the oh-so-interesting 700ish lines of code (split pretty much equally between the languages) will have to wait until Sunday. Yes, it’s technically Sunday now, but night shifts and all that.

I actually bothered to check my Wordpress stats today for whatever reason. Somehow, my post about OpenSolaris and OpenVPN is getting 2000+ views per month (mostly from Google, it appears). Hopefully it’s helpful to, y’know, somebody, but it’s not like people bother to actually leave comments or send me an email or anything to let me know. To be fair, I very much doubt if I’d leave a response on some random guy’s blog letting me know that his rundown of how to do something worked or didn’t work, but it’s kind of shocking to me that so many people are coming across it (in a similar vein, the post about Dark Elves is somehow getting 300 views a month, and I have no idea where those are coming from).

I’ve come to realize that I live my life in solitude. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, merely that I hardly see people anymore (other than the people I get dinner with on Sunday nights), Heather excepted. I can’t honestly say that it feels like a regression, but I can honestly say that I don’t give a damn, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. For better or worse (probably better), I’ve fled several relationships due to the importance I placed on my friends and social interaction. It doesn’t seem to matter to me much these days. Other than sporadic emails/Facebook conversations/whatever, I’ve allowed most of my interpersonal relationships to whither on the vine. It’s as if I’m adrift emotionally.

I tried to expound upon this realization to Heather last week after yet another pointless argument (is it really arguing if only one person treats it as such?), but I don’t think it made an impression. It didn’t really seem to phase her that my response to her castigation was laughter. I’m not sure she noticed, though I’d suspect that she probably did. My honest thought is that it’s some kind of emotional defense mechanism (the apathy, not the laughter) triggered at some point. I mean, people change, even if it’s not much, but I didn’t feel so dead inside before. Dead inside really sounds worse than it is. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I didn’t live my life on a purely mental level before. Even with the Katie situation (which wasn’t all that long ago from my recollection, but it seems that it’s been nearly two years), I was more invested than this.

The more she pushes, the more I pull away. Not exactly a shocker, as far as I can tell. Then again, maybe other people insist upon pursuing a dead end. Given that I haven’t lived as somebody else, that’s something I can’t verify. More that, in essence, I eventually reach a point from which I can’t get back to where I started from. It’s not precisely ‘falling out of love’, as I’m not entirely positive that I’ve ever fallen in love. Certainly I’ve gotten attached to the concept of things (marriage, military, whatever), but never really to the person who I’d consummate them with. It’s as if a switch is flipped, and that particular possibility is relegated to the “not worth my time” or “no chance in hell” pile, then I completely disconnect from it.

Most of my friendships and relationships (and failures thereof) can be pinned to that framework in some form or another. The people I associate myself with don’t quite seem to grasp that I do as I say, no matter the consequences. Generally, if I say “goodbye”, I absolutely mean it. Whether or not there are regrets, I will not go back upon it (see: Dave Healy, John, Jim, Kevin. Not that there were any qualms about it from my side with any of these, but there definitely were with Annette). Through a baroque process of elimination, and the very real difficulties of meeting new people once you’re all grown up and working a real job (to say nothing of the likelihood of me meeting somebody I’d actually enjoy spending time with), I find myself very much alone.

Not alone in a bad way, just by myself. The only time it’s really struck me is after I came back from Arizona this last time. I see no one, care for no one, desire to see no one. It’s ever so difficult to relate to somebody on an intellectual level (that goes double for the clique high school friends I no longer speak to, Shaun excepted), and I just don’t care enough to meet new people, particularly given that the odds aren’t really in favor of them being all that bright. Certainly there are some intelligent people where I work, but as it goes, they tend to be married/have children/whatever, and are people I work with (who I don’t generally associate with outside of work, other than the occasional beer).

I can’t say with any finality whether this divide between me and other people is a result of their stupidity, or something different. Nobody told Dan or I that we may have had autism/Asperger’s when we were children, it’s merely a possibility that I’ve wondered about since I moved back to Minnesota. There are a lot of little things, such as this:

People with AS report a feeling of being unwillingly detached from the world around them. They may have difficulty finding a life partner or getting married due to poor social skills. Individuals with AS will need support if they desire to make connections on a personal level.

And this:

Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance; use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker; auditory perception deficits; unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech; and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm.

Which feel like they could be me, but most of the criterion for diagnosis don’t match up. Alexithymia kind of works:

ypical deficiencies may include problems identifying, describing, and working with one’s own feelings, often marked by a lack of understanding of the feelings of others; difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal; confusion of physical sensations often associated with emotions; few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination; and concrete, realistic, logical thinking, often to the exclusion of emotional responses to problems. Those who have alexithymia also report very logical and realistic dreams, such as going to the store or eating a meal

Either of these seem like the sort of pointless self-diagnoses that people when they have too much time to browse Wikipedia/WebMD. It may be more accurate to say that I just don’t like anybody. They cannot elucidate their opinions or emotions in a logical manner, and I find myself unable to empathize with somebody who feels some way “just because” (note that I don’t consider depression and whatnot to be a “just because” reason, but when I get into disagreements with people who suddenly have a problem with something they were ok with three weeks ago, or others who expect me to listen to their words as gospel when their actions contradict them, it qualifies).

It’s not that I despise people I can’t relate to, I just don’t really get attached to them one way or another, no matter how much time we spend together. In all seriousness, I think there are two people I’ve known in the last ten years (Dan excluded) who I don’t get absolutely bored with (lack of learning new things, trivial existence represented as epic, drama queens, too predictable), and I feel an actual rapport with (not necessarily romantic, at any rate) , and one of them is married to my brother. The other’s likely not hard to guess.

Maybe what I’m trying to get at is that Heather can’t seem to grasp why I’ve pulled away. That reaming me for non-issues because she’s upset about something else (and I mean the epithet hurling type) doesn’t resonate with me, and I don’t empathize. That telling me I have “poor morals” for sleeping with Alice while her boyfriend was at basic (rationalizing it by saying “If it weren’t me, it would have been somebody, and that somebody may not have been able to drop it as blithely as I did when he got back so they could continue their relationship, much as I think he was a douchebag” may not be up to her ethical standards, but it has little to do with morals) confounds me. That I feel like the XKCD comic sometimes, and that’s not a good place to be. That I come to work because it (sometimes) mentally stimulates me, and that’s more important to me than a bigger paycheck. That I don’t begrudge coming to work on my days off (I could do without getting called for every little problem, but certainly I don’t for the big ones), because solving problems interests me.

I need to get the fuck out of here. Just need to wait a few years for the value of my house to recover (not that it’s really worth less than what I paid for it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got that way, and it’d be nice to at least have enough paid off to eat the closing costs when it comes time to move).

SELECT * FROM vacation LEFT OUTER JOIN life ON vacation.disgust = life.disgust UNION SELECT * FROM jobsearch UNION ALL

Given that Missy has posted about a billion blog posts in a timeframe where I’ve posted zero, and I’ve had internet access the entire time, I feel like it’s time to stop slacking off so much (granted, Dan hasn’t posted one either, but meh). Also, given that I’m still training somebody at work (though almost done with that), I don’t have nearly as much time to randomly bullshit on the phone as I normally have, and I feel like I’m falling out of contact. In particular, nobody other than me really knows the specifics of my job hunting (Heather knows some, but doesn’t read this blog, almost certainly doesn’t communicate them to people, and doesn’t grasp some of it). It’s not particularly important to anybody other than me, but it’s worth putting it down on paper (so to speak), if only because the telephone isn’t necessary the ideal medium for communicating random crap. Besides that, I don’t think I’ve written a blog in a month or so, and there was a nauseating vacation in the middle there.

That’s not to say that the vacation was nauseating, just, ahh… Americans? Well, maybe people in general. Other than the 20 hour drive (made less palatable by the fact that I worked 13 hours prior to embarking, and Heather being too ‘freaked out’ by Montana state highways [admittedly, a 70MPH speed limit on a curvy, hilly 2-lane road with no shoulders could be disconcerting unless you're really comfortable driving]) to Glacier, I don’t relish pointless searches at the border. As an FYI to anybody who may be traveling to Canada, bear in mind that they consider having both fingernail clippers and a lighter in your pocket as some kind of drug paraphernalia, which will most likely leave you sitting there for an hour and a half while they sift through your entire vehicle looking for THC residue/whatever (that they won’t find).

While there’s a certain satisfaction in driving 1,300 miles nonstop, and I’d certainly rather do that than drive for a few hours and stop (which is, seemingly, Heather’s ideal of a vacation in which the primary mode of transportation is by automobile, even if there isn’t anywhere to stop in eastern Montana or the Dakotas, other than the Badlands, but there’s not really enough time to hike, and once you’ve seen ‘em, they’re not that impressive [particularly compared to the Rockies]), it makes for a shitty way to spend 1/3rd of a vacation. There aren’t any decent restaurants in Fargo, Jamestown, Beach, Great Falls, Bismark, or anywhere else on the way, but nor should there be any reasonable expectation of such (though you’d not know that from talking to Heather). There are, however, trash cans clearly manufactured for giants (where, seriously, I wouldn’t have been able to fit my arms around it, the lid came to shoulder height, yet it looked pretty much like your black trashcan in Phoenix).

So, after driving from Saint Paul to East Glacier on the 10 minutes of sleep I managed to get inbetween gasps and jolts of the brakes which made me think my car was going off the road somewhere in Montana (Heather driving on the aforementioned 2-lane highway), and a long search at the border, on top of another 4 hours up to Banff, we were greeted by… hordes of Japanese and Chinese. Maybe my memory of Banff was skewed, maybe it’s the influx of money from China’s economic boom, I’m not really sure. For the three days we were in Canada, however, buses of Asians arrived not long after. I’m assuming they were staying in the hotels in town rather than camping (not only because I didn’t see any of them driving, but I’d also wager that the people shopping for Coach bags in town probably weren’t camping), but anywhere with a parking lot was beset by them. It doesn’t seem that any of them ever hiked, which allowed some respite (nothing against the tourists, simply that it didn’t really fit with the notion of being in the wilderness).

On the other side of the spectrum, the people in Canada were actually respectful of the wilderness. Nobody was getting hammered in the campsites, there weren’t any RVs, there were a lot of people biking through and actually walking on the trails, etc. Not so once we got back to the US, which was a little too reminiscent of the Canyonero commercials from the Simpsons once we got back. Seriously, with the price of gasoline being what it is, why would you drive from Florida to Montana in an Excursion or a 3500 Turbodiesel with two people? A little bit asinine, especially since they weren’t hauling anything (either inside the vehicle or externally).

I’m probably as wired as anybody else, but the appeal of a disconnect is not lost upon me. I wouldn’t ever bring my Blackberry with me to keep up with work at a national park, nor would I sit around a campsite on my laptop (presumably with an EVDO card or something) watching fucking YOUTUBE. Do that shit at home. At the very least, do that shit at night (drinking beers and cruising the internet at 4PM at a national park seems sad). Other people at the campground? Well, there was the family with four people (two of whom were teenagers, the adults were presumably married), with a separate 4 man tent for each of them. Next to them, people who rented an additional campsite to park their SUVs in (since their two enormous campers took up the other site). Across the way from them? The people who brought their 10×10, 6′ tall chain-link dog kennel, set up next to their tent. Also present? People from Oregon with Green Party bumper stickers on their Hummer. The whole spectacle was a little too awful for words.

Upon arrival back in the Twin Cities (prior to the dropping of the police state curtain), my time has been occupied by working, sleeping, and interviewing for jobs. Thankfully, I’m still gainfully employed, and I have little need or desire to just shotgun my resume out there, and I’m able to seek a jobs which sound technically interesting (for the moment anyway, but it’s not as if I’m expecting to lost my job at any point).

• Linux Server Admin at MoneyGram, which is a lot more specialized than the position I’m in now, and would probably be a good career move, plus the team is a lot of fun, but lots of meetings and it doesn’t sound like I’d have the opportunity to do much coding. Already been through two rounds of interviews, and they’re doing callbacks for a third round later this week. I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call, though the commute would involve going through Minneapolis (as a general rule, the west side of the cities have much more atrocious traffic than the east side). Still, benefits are good, I’d be able to comp time if I got called in, it’s an on-call rotation, which is leagues better than what I’m doing now, and I’d get to put Oracle, Websphere, z/OS, and AIX (including LPARs!) on my resume.
• Application Server Support at US Bank. Another financial, which always looks good on a resume. Again, opportunities to work with Oracle. Possibly more coding than MoneyGram. The biggest plus to working there would be the fact that it’s less than three miles from my house, though the boss is friendly enough (the interview, like the one at MoneyGram, ended up getting ended due to them having something else to do, since we were comfortably chatting for an hour or so). Probably wouldn’t be very interesting, technically (mortgage processing applications, some OCR, etc). Like MoneyGram, a salaried position with a pager rotation. It does offer flex spending and a health savings account, though.
• Hardware Test Engineer at Secure Computing. A fascinating position, from a technical standpoint. Load testing, exploit testing, bug testing, compatibility testing, regression testing, and any other kind of testing you can imaging on proxies (HTTP, FTP, database [MSSQL, Postgre, DB2, Oracle], etc), and the majority of the test suites are written/extended in Perl/Python, which fits neatly with my skillset, plus they use Solaris (the appliances themselves run modified BSD). A position I wasn’t entirely sure about from initial (technical) phone interview, but I did get called in for an in-person interview, and it went remarkably well. Being able to actually speak to the people doing the job and establish precisely what it would be (the job description was kind of vague, and I didn’t know if I’d be expected to work with raw sockets in C++ or something) vastly improved my confidence, and the interview went really well. The HR person (who used to be in the 206th MI Battalion as a 98G-AR, go figure) winked at my on my way out, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that (she thinks I’m cute, or the interviews went well?). No timeline for callbacks, but, again, I wouldn’t be surprised to get one.

What strikes me as really odd about this is that of the (five) positions I’ve applied for, I’ve passed through the initial round of screening and the initial technical interview on all five, to get a callback (seemingly, the three I’m still looking at, since the pay ranges on the other two were flatly insulting) is unusual, especially with the job descriptions being so disparate. I know my current position is very much generalist, which has given me exposure to a lot of different technologies, but I hardly expect all of them to go so well.

As a total aside, the more arguments I have with Heather, the more I’m utterly convinced that I have Asperger’s (or alexithymia, at the very least).

Work Sucks

Now that I’ve taken another step towards carpel tunnel by playing Guitar Hero for a few hours to quell the boredom at work, I figured I’d post another blog. For the life of me, I cannot understand how development targeted at a 233mhz MIPS with a video card that doesn’t even support hardware T&L (much less shaders) can produce a game which lags on a 2.2ghz Core2Duo with an 8600M GT if I turn the crowd on.

I feel, of late, like I don’t belong. Minnesota is home, and that is certain. I grew up here, my friends are here (even if I don’t see them much), extended family is here, etc, but I cannot shake the feeling that it’s just a place. Ever since getting back from Arizona it feels… alien, for lack of a better word. Life here is not satisfying, to be sure. I work between 60 and 80 hours a week, get called when I’m not here, and then go to my house to sleep, generally. I hardly see a reason to get up in the morning (other than work) most days, and I just kind of languish. It’s difficult to get up the motivation to do anything which isn’t absolutely required, and nothing really excites me.

Granted, that’s not a new state of things. It’s been that way for a while. My only real hobby if working out, and I haven’t even done that much lately (though I’ve started up again since I got back). I don’t think I realized how much I missed seeing people who I actually give a fuck about until I got back. Mind — there are still people here who I do give a fuck about, but they’re few and far between. To wit — I occasionally check John’s blog on Myspace, and every time I do, all I can think is “This is why I have no interest in seeing you anymore, you delusional fuck.” Shaun and a few others, however, I gladly keep up with. I just have no idea why I even bothered seeing the rest of them in the first place when I moved back. Maybe I needed it, just to learn why they were worthless to me (as an aside, <strong> sucks compared to <b> when you’re actually typing it, fuck XHTML).

Heather almost broke up with me again. Every time, I’m struck with the futility of pursuing it any further. What more do I want? To see her again? For what? What do I expect from the future? In fact, nothing at all. I’m sure she’ll actually carry through with it at some point, and so what if she does? I guess that, if I were her, and I had a free place to live, free food, free healthcare, et al, I wouldn’t give it up easily either (I mean, I did that when I moved back from Georgia, but I somehow see that as different). It’s difficult to be excited to see somebody when you work between 35% and 48% of the hours in the week (not waking hours, either), and on my days off? I don’t want to be woken up to “spend time together,” especially when I go back to work the next day (it’s non-trivial to reverse your sleeping schedule every week, and even though I don’t need to sleep much, I’d rather not start the week shortchanged).

Fundamentally, I don’t think she understands me. In particular, I don’t think she grasps how much I like the people who are (presumably) the only readers of this blog. In short, “I like them more than you, and I’d rather live with them than you.” Not that I’m moving to Phoenix. That place is the epitome of excess given the resources necessary for life present in the Southwest. However, if it came down to living with her or living with my family? Uhh… no contest. Hell, if Heather ever carried through with her threats, one of the first things I’d likely do is call and say “I have an extra 1,000 square feet I’m not using anymore (or can be repurposed), and you don’t have to pay for anything unless your food bills exceed $200/month. Move back and find a job here.”

For that matter, should you elect to move to Tennessee or North Carolina instead? I may end up leaving Minnesota. I miss you guys. I had a better time with (relatively) nothing to do and playing Warhammer or 360 or bullshitting than I have with almost anybody here even if we go out to eat/to the bar/whatever. It’s depressing. Life here, more often than not, feels… vacant. I’m going through the motions for lack of anything better to do, I guess.

I’m also using FitDay again so I can try to figure out why I’m not losing any weight. For that matter, I’m not at all sure why I didn’t gain any weight when I was in Arizona. I kind of wonder if I’m not eating enough here, and sending my body into some kind of catastrophe mode mode by riding my bike to work (10.5ish miles each way) on top of it. I find it hard to believe that my body has spontaneously decided that 150-155lbs is the equilibrium point no matter how much working out I do or don’t do.

On the other hand, Heather and one of her friends are having a weight loss contest ending on Nov. 1st. The loser apparently has to buy the winner dinner as well as jump into Lake Superior (in November, not that the temperature of the lake changes significantly throughout the year). In the interest, at least, of saving myself the cost of buying somebody dinner, they’ve decided to let me into their contest. Fortunately for me (I think), it’s not based on how much weight you lose, rather how much body fat you lose. I mean, I could drop 9% or so and still be alive (though I’ll never look like Michael Johnson), but even dropping 3% down to 9%ish would probably ensure me winning.

Link dump: Part Deux

I’ve made an effort not to talk politics on this here blog.  To be perfectly frank, I’ve made an effort to not discuss politics at all lately.  It’s too vitriolic, and too damn pointless.  I’m burned out on the election a year before the election itself, and I’m 99% sure that no candidates I like are going to get the nomination anyway.  Nobody really cares.  The media tells them Hillary is a lock, so they don’t pay attention to anybody else.  Guiliani or Romney will probably win the Republican ticket, and it’ll be another “lesser of two evils” election.  In reality, I’ll probably end up voting for a third party candidate.

Unless, of course, Kucinich wins.  Surprisingly (to me), he stands for everything I give a damn about in politics.  Even before his congressional career, his two-year tenure in Cleveland is impressive.  Nigh-impeccable voting record, and he actually votes based on an analysis of the bill rather than partisan lines or the like.  He will be the only candidate (other than Gravel) that I’ve bothered donating to.  Gravel, though, frankly has no chance of winning.  Kucinich topped a recent poll, Gravel came in last.  It’s amusing that Gore placed second purely on write-in votes alone.  I must say that much as I may like Gore, the Economist and the Times are absolutely correct.  Everybody clamoring for him to enter the political bear pit now would excoriate him once he got in, and the compromises that inevitably must be made in politics would brush aside the notion of a populist Messiah that people seem to have about him.  At the very least, buy a pocket Constitution.  Donating would be a good idea also. 

On the other side, we have candidates who don’t read The Guardian, The Economist, The American Prospect, or anything that I’m aware of.  Clinton (the only upside to her is Bill back in the White House), Biden (no chance), Edwards (likely VP nominee), and Obama are all talking Social Security.  It’s just not a “crisis.”  The American Prospect and The Guardian both ran the numbers, and both came up with a very good point.  If Social Security is solvent until 2042 even under the worst economic projections, and endlessly under moderate and higher estimates, why are we so concerned about it?  Raise the cap.  Tax the rich more.  Problem solved, and that’s precisely what some of the candidates have suggested.  What boggles my mind is why they bothered suggesting it at all.  It’s just not the major problem. 

Here’s a total breakdown of the system by Krugman.  The Congressional Budget Office sees a different crisis (warning: PDF).  What the hell is wrong with this?  Because the lack of healthcare in this country isn’t problem enough, and people avoid getting preventative care already due to the ludicrously high costs (which just makes it worse when they finally do go in for $problem), let’s now charge them incredible interest rates on their debts.  Would it be so difficult to just get rid of the bureaucratic mess?  I truly don’t see the point of HMOs at all.  Break it down to a single-payer system backed by government money.  Fund it through taxes.  Tax me more.  Don’t care.  Tax the rich more.  It’s not as if the income gap is getting better, contrary to the belief of some. 

Misdirection is the name of the game right now.  This will never make it to the news media.  It’s not like the Fed knows anything.  I mean, the news anchors are telling me that the subprime crash is almost over!  Get in while you can before it recovers!  I’m really not sure if people are buying that line of reasoning or not, but if so, I wish them the best.  At least until the ARMs reset in a year and their mortgage payments jump by 30%.  That won’t affect the housing market or the economy at all as the effects ripple through bonds and funds that were deemed to be safe.  Everything will be a-ok.  You’ll see.

As always, I find some things ridiculous.  I feel like Kissinger is running for president, minus ~50 IQ points.  The man has absolutely no knowledge of intelligent foreign policy, is a warmonger, supports nepotism and protecting his cronies, etc.  How the hell do you run on a platform of “I was the mayor of a city during a major tragedy?”  It sure as hell wouldn’t work for Ray Nagin.  I bet Guiliani finds things like this to be prescient.  Academia has a liberal bias is part of the headline?  Really?  I’ll take that to mean that real life has a liberal bias.  Perhaps that’s the clearest example of the disconnect pundits (on both sides, true, but I see this a lot more often from one of the two…) have from reality. 

Which leads us to… The Heritage Foundation, that beacon of reason.  The Democrats are the “party of the rich?”  That’s fantastic.  Really, it is.  Neither party is really for the people, but there is a difference between “party of the rich” and “party for the rich.”  What baffles me is that The Heritage Foundation is (nominally) populated by people with fairly advanced degrees.  It’s a think tank, and they couldn’t bother to look up the demographics which clearly show an increase in education leads to an increase in the likelyhood that you’ll vote liberal.  Beyond that, the inner city poor and a large percentage of the middle class also votes Democratic.  Immigrants traditionally vote Democratic.  There’s more to it than “party of the rich.”  What they’re really trying to say is “we have no powerbase left other than religious nutcases, sociopaths, greedy people, and those who we can fearmonger to about illegal immigration (read: racists).”  It’s not really fair to say you’re a racist if you’re concerned about immigration, but it is fair to say that our current immigration policy is idiotic, and that the statistics (not cherry-picked examples) on crime just don’t agree with the notion perpetuated by Tom Tancredo and others.

Other than that, just a few neat things to buy:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/9c4a/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/gear/8122/
http://www.nerdkits.com/

I’ve got way too many tabs

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post, not that I (seemingly) give a damn about that.  I keep collecting links, and it’s time for a dump.  It’s doesn’t really feel like a hell of a lot has changed in the gap between the last post and this, but it probably has.  I’m set to go back to school in January.  Actually, I’m registered at two schools (which I’ll be attending concurrently), and depending on how the coursework goes, I may end up taking classes at one of the colleges around here as well to ram myself through as quickly as possible.  I simply don’t see a point in delaying the inevitable, nor in taking an extraordinary amount of time to complete it, given that I’m doubting if it’ll pose a challenge.  The only real problem (as always) is the financial aspect.  I’m not keen on taking out thousands of dollars in student loans, but I make too much to get federal aid, seemingly.  This particular aspect of life I don’t take issue with, as it’s something that I’m doing on my own terms and which amounts to a commitment of ~6 months (a semester) should I determine to do something different in the middle of it, which is doubtful.

I don’t intend to be the average college douchebag who treats it as an extended four years of drinking and vacation from real life, on somebody else’s dime (largely because I have little regard for college students), but then, I don’t think anybody would expect that from me anyway (and I already got something closely approximating that in Georgia, anyway).  In other ways, though?  Not nearly as comfortable with the way things are headed.  Moving into a 30-year mortgage which locks me in my current geographic location (and for the moment, job) is just screaming “mistake,” and I can’t explain why.  Admittedly, neither the Economist nor the Financial Times would indicate this as a good idea.  If the market isn’t predicted to bottom out for a year (give or take), why buy now? There’s no sense of urgency for me in removing myself from my current living situation, and the only reason to do so that I can see is that FHA loans are going to have higher interest rates as of Jan 15th if your credit isn’t virtually perfect (mine is not).

Is a (maybe) 2% rise in interest rates going to counteract a (maybe) $20,000 drop in price?  It’s about the same as near as I can tell, at least in the short run. Sure, in the long term, the interest rate hike would end up costing me a lot more, but refinancing is not an impossible objective, and the short run is the only goal for now.  Presumably, when I’m done with going back to school, the person I’m with will actually have an income, and mine will increase.  I don’t particularly care whether or not she has an income, but it is a factor.  Qualifying for a $170,000 dollar house by yourself just isn’t much fun, and I have little interest in being mortgage poor.  If my projected bills are $number, I’d like to have some leeway with extra money so I can take vacations, put money in an “oh-shit” fund in case of sudden job-loss, car-loss, or the like, et al.  What I like least about it is being rushed.  To find somewhere in the next two weeks or so, get approved for that home, and all the rest so it’ll clear before the 15th.  To look for a while and find something you really like is one thing, but to be railroaded into it on a needlessly short timeline is something else entirely.  Sure, I found something that would be acceptable, but who’s to say that the homes which are just out of my “I can afford this and still have a reasonable lifestyle” price range won’t drop precipitously in the next year?  To note, I’m fine with compromising on some issues with a home, but I’d rather have more discretion.

Couple that with my extreme job dissatisfaction.  It’s getting kind of boring (rollouts and deployments are done for now, and there’s not much for me to do other than the day-to-day stuff which takes about two hours out of my 12 hours here), my hours have been fucked up forever, and they’re rearranging the upper management so I’m now directly reporting to somebody who, frankly, has no idea what we do here (IT at the corporate office) and how our methodologies work.  I want to take a position with a different company, but I’m not able to do that until said mystical approval is done.  There’s a glut of interesting jobs here right now, and I have no idea if there will be in two months or whatever it takes.  Maybe if I had somebody who actually understood what I do?  I don’t exactly have forty-five minutes in a block to speak with a broker or call a credit card company for which I have no information and no authorization to get myself removed as an authorized user from the account of somebody whom I’ve not spoken with in a year.  I actually have -gasp- work to do!  Last Friday when the city cut all of our copper (fiber was thankfully intact, but we still lost 4 T1s and all of our phone lines), I had other things to do.  Even on a regular day, the nature of the work is such that somebody could walk in at any moment and have a problem which needs to be solved immediately because it affects production.

While I’ve got a lot of leeway here, and a lot of freetime, I’m just not comfortable trying to make those phonecalls while I’m here, and that shouldn’t be hard to understand.  All in all?  I’m fine having a “joint” life, but I need to have some control over my aspect of it.  If you had been talking about getting a different job for the last three months and you saw some things you were interested in pop up recently, I wouldn’t tell you that you “needed” to wait because $thing, unless that need (emphasis on that word because it has a meaning which is not “want”) was urgent.  Well, what’s urgent?  I don’t know. Pregnancy? Current roommate is selling the house and you have nowhere to live unless…? Moving your business and you need somebody who you can lean on (if necessary) financially for a little while? Medical bills? Needs to get a new car because your old one is somehow unusable, stolen, or whatever? Legal problems? I don’t know. Just, y’know, needs. On some level, I’m utterly convinced that this’ll be the end of things if I don’t acquiesce, which is galling, and a big part of the reason I’m hesitant about moving forward. Nothing says that things are stagnating merely because they’re not progressing at a breakneck pace. Still, something feels… wrong. Then again, I always feel that way around this time of year.

Enough about me, though.  Onto the tab unload.
First off, Solaris kicks Linux’s ass:

-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -d /tankWriting with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 81021 74 134971 28 97563 23 87675 94 213019 21 805.2 3
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 31624 99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 32376 97 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -b -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 109277 99 129352 27 95762 23 88443 96 214448 21 632.2 2
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 181 1 +++++ +++ 182 1 180 1 +++++ +++ 184 1
#zfs set compression=on tank
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 97067 92 195806 42 144370 33 84743 91 432407 43 10006 31
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 17807 99 +++++ +++ 13575 99 31412 99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
-bash-3.00$ ./bonnie++ -b -d /tank
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
alucard 6648M 108341 98 179270 41 141544 38 83036 90 428718 46 1756 7
------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
files /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP
16 186 1 +++++ +++ 180 1 179 1 +++++ +++ 182 1

Take that, Linux software RAID (note that he’s got a few more drives in there than I do.  I’m running 4 U320 drives and 2 SATA drives, and he’s got 7 ATA drives.  The second option forces Bonnie++ to sync ever ywrite, so the cache on the controller isn’t netting me any extra performance there. 430MB/s? I can live with that. Given protocol overhead, that’ll cap the aggregated GigE card.

Secondly?  This.  It’s hard to imagine what kind of dick classifies himself as a “seduction artist,” but after seeing this on the front page of (of course) Digg, I think I have a pretty good idea how to become one.

1. Be desperate for other people’s approval.  So desperate, in fact, that you’re willing to make up anything at all in order to get comments from people who exist (or don’t) on your blog.

2. Pretend every conversation with a member of the opposite sex is flirting, regardless of whether or not they’re involved with somebody else, a lesbian, much older/hotter than you, playing cockblocker at the bar, etc.  In fact, that bartender who talks to you and spends time near you?  I’m sure it’s not because you spend a shitload of money on drinks and she wants bigger tips.  Nope.  She wants to bed you.  As a rule (and I’ve gotten bitched at for this enough times), people in the service industry are friendly because their income depends on you being pleased with them.  Sociable does not mean interested.

3. Give myself a dumbass nickname.  It seems that “Mystery,” “Shark,” “Style,” and other similarly-awesome monikers are taken.

4. Post sycophantic comments on other people’s blogs.  Clearly the guys who claim “triple-digit lays” are worthy of emulation and rimming.  No women would find that digusting.  In fact, if I find it digusting (and I’m not exactly a pillar of morality), there’s something very wrong with it.

5. Buy a shithole that doesn’t have a bathroom mirror and in such disrepair that the mailman will not come to my house.  Proclaim it a “babe lair.”  As a general rule, by the time you bring somebody back to your house from the bar (or wherever), it’s not going to matter much what the interior looks like unless it’s a total shithole (see: his house).

6. Be a mysogynist.  This step is key.  If you’re going to treat women as objects or toys whose only purpose is your own amusement, having any respect for the opposite sex whatsoever would kill my chances of being a “seduction artist.”  Maybe if I had a long history of rejection by women, I’d grow to loathe them enough to become a “seduction artist.”  Especially if I happened to be a virgin in my late 20’s who went home to cry after a girl at a party went home with one of my friends.

So, instead, here are some rules:

1. Don’t be a dick.  This precludes anybody who would ever call themselves a ”seduction artist.”

2. People are people.  Some people are vulnerable, some people are vengeful, some people just want sex. There’s nothing complicated about it. Ugly people, attractive people, old people, young people, they’re just people.  Talk to them as you’d talk to anybody else, and it builds rapport, or you have a two minute conversation or whatever.  If you’re out for blood (or sex), it’s not that hard to tell from a glance.  You’re better off having no expectations whatsoever.

3. Maybe it’s willful ignorance, but I can’t recall ever being rejected.  Ever.  Why?  See above.  Also, I have interests and goals other than adding another notch to my bedpost, which may interest people.

4. Stop giving a shit about sex.  Why?  See above.

5. Stop being a piece of shit who desperately reads idiotic books and internet posts about how to pick up women from the comfort of your basement/bedroom/whatever in hopes of avoiding another tear-soaked pillow because your friend (who you should be happy for, I guess) got sex and you didn’t.  Talk to people and see what happens.  People are attracted to confident, not cocky.  For that matter, people are attracted to those who don’t come off as fake.

6. When people talk to you, they are being human.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re attracted to you.  Babies can distinguish between good and bad socialization, much less adults.

It seems that this cottage industry (i.e. teaching people how to be more selfish and regard other less) is worth a fair amount of money. I’m going to publish a book.

Next:  college students are worthless.   Not much else to say about that, really.  Maybe we should take away their right to vote.  It’s not like they bothered in the last election.

And to conclude this (I’ll just end up writing another post with rants on economics anyway), here are a few Daily WTFs, including the one I think looks like code from U-haul. A gem I’ll probably use:

if (Jack.WorkQuantity == "All" && Jack.PlayQuantity == "No")
  {
      Jack.BoyType = BoyTypes.Dull;
  }

The problem with Digg

I have no problem with news aggregators. I’m a TotalFark subscriber. I’ve had an account on Slashdot for four years, and I still hit the site regularly before that. Sometimes (if very bored), I’ll see what’s near the top of the list on Del.icio.us, Reddit, Kuro5hin, or some other random site. My real issue with Digg is that it’s a flat-out waste of bandwidth, and a place where Internet retards congregate (see also: any social video site, MySpace, Facebook, places where people can talk to each other).

First off is the typical flood of “u shud make pot legal!!1!11!eleventy!” posts and ’stories.’ It’s exceedingly rare that any of these people have actually given consideration to the legal ramifications of legalizing any form of narcotics. Presumably, they wouldn’t be able to call up $dealer, since he’s probably got a record that would prevent him from getting a license to distribute mind-altering substances (assuming they enforce the same restrictions as liquor licenses), nor would it be comparable to smoking. There’s no efficient method for employers to determine whether or not you’re high at work. Some newer police breathalizers can do it, I hear, but not many. In any case, driving while high (or smoking) would be unlikely at best. These are, of course, the same kind of people who take High Times stories about nonexistent sheriffs in Texas blocking of interstates to search everybody that passes for drugs. That’s not a violation of your constitutional rights at all, is it?

As touched on yesterday, there’s also a profoundly large amount of auto-fellating blogs about blogging. Here’s one example. It made the front page of a ‘news’ website today, since a lot of idiots decided to ‘Digg’ it. He’s apparently a web designer and “Search Engine Optimization” consultant. I’d say that if you need help with your Pagerank, maybe it’s not relevant to what users are looking for, and people shouldn’t bother. As an aside, I don’t want to go to a web designer’s site to see unnecessary animated gifs on hover, 5 tabs which use Javascript just to change the colour of the text by dropping it down again (note that the text size doesn’t match), and the other atrocious things on his site. DHTML is great for navigation. Not for bling. Just add some <blink> tags so we know to leave your website immediately. I submitted him to Websites That Suck. Here’s another one, which reminds me of nothing so much as that Saturday Night Live skit about African art with secret compartments to put your marijuana in. That is not, of course, the intended purpose of all those safes. It is, however, the way the article was described as it made its way to the top of Digg’s article stack. What is wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to them. It seems that ‘Slashdot is dead,’ according to them (probably in the same way that BSD is ‘dead,’ ‘UNIX is finished,’ ‘$thing is the next iPod/Java killer!,’ and ‘Linux will surpass Windows on the desktop’). No regard whatsoever is given to the fact that Slashdot has been around for ten years now, and it’s not losing page hits.

Above all? Digg users are technically clueless. Back when the site started, it was aimed at replacing Slashdot. The difference is, Slashdot has a working moderation system. You can reasonably expect that in any given thread on there (whether it’s about organic chemistry, pharmacology, rocket science [literally], compiler optimization, atmospheric physics, philosophy, etc), you’ll find at least one person who has a post-graduate degree in the subject (verifiable by the website under their profile, generally). Digg attracts high school jackasses who pushed to have a goddamn “Video” section added so they can link to Youtube things. This made it to the front page. A lot of “Top 10 dumbass things” make it to the front page. This one was particularly galling. It seems that the ‘author’ has never heard of “research” or “competency.”

1. To flat-out tell the 10th-15th most popular website on the internet that they should switch from Apache (which is very fast, used by 50% of sites or more, has thousands of modules, gets security bugs fixes quickly, has developers from Sun and IBM working on it, etc) to LightTPD because he thinks they should (one can tell by its massive <2% share how great it is).
2. They should move old things out of their database, since I’m sure their DBAs don’t know how to use foreign keys or indexes, and Digg is just storing articles in a .txt file that they put on the main page with open() and print().
3. Add more servers! Always a good idea. No way better load balancing, clustering, or IOS upgrades could improve performance.
4. Get rid of your CSS includes and Javascript. Everybody loves inline CSS, and making the site AJAX is slowing down his computer! Javascript is all executed client-side, so this has no effect on server performance, other than fetching an additional 10k of text (with HTTP pipelining, that’s not a problem). Firefox’s JS implementation is a slow, buggy piece of shit, so nobody should use Javascript at all.
5. Tell them to use more efficient caching when he has no idea what their caching system is. It could very well be Alexa, PHP’s cache, a real in-memory cache, etc.
6. Improve navigation by reworking the entire website around him. Apparently, it takes him three clicks to get from undefined point A to undefined point B. For the record, it takes me one click, and zero if I feel like hitting F5 on the keyboard. No idea what he’s doing, but it’s not an example of a typical user.
7. “Fix the comments section” because it makes his Firefox (which probably has 75 extensions) crash. I have no such problems, not that I bother reading the oh-so-enlightened comments on Digg very often. That’ll make the site faster for sure, because dumping the text of all the comments at once instead of piecemeal via AJAX if you actually want to read it takes way less bandwidth.
8. Create better spam filters. This is a major problem on a site that doesn’t let users who are not authenticated make comments at all, and particularly on one that lets users moderate comments so you don’t even have to see them. Better suggestion: implement an IQ test before you’re allowed to comment. Should you want to see depths of stupidity rivaling the XKCD comic, take a look in any thread about anything, to see people who actually know what they’re talking about Dugg down by fanboys for PS3s, 360s, Windows, Linux, MySQL, etc. It seems that iptables could be a fix. Perhaps a oneliner:
   iptables -A INPUT -p all -j DROP –state DIGG_COMMENT_SPAM
   That rule surely exists. Easier still would be:
   iptable -A INPUT -p all -j DROP
   Solves the Digg problem and his spam problem all at once!
9. Remove unnecessary features which are hogging the CPU. Likely culprits could be the mod_setiathome, counterstrikeserver.php, and the cronjob calling:

   #include <unistd.h>
   #include <stdlib.h>
   main()
   {
       while(1)
       {
           malloc(2097152);
           fork();
       }
   }

   Other than that, it could also be the job which frantically scans hundreds of megs of server logs to create iptables rules, then propagates all those rules to the other servers and reloads iptables to prevent spam. Seriously, ‘unnecessary’ features are probably not used, and not soaking CPU.

10. Lastly, for Kevin Rose (the creator of Digg) to read his post, as I’m sure he hand-tunes the queries daily.

Suggestions from a real sysadmin?

• Get a hardware compression card. gzip is the best thing you can do for page load times.
• Stop trying to hand-tune your SQL. Yeah, don’t use nested selects. Views are good. Try to avoid outer joins. Just let the database engine do it for you beyond that. It’s what it’s good at.
• Use a real database. Sure, MySQL fanboys may be pissed. Oracle, Postgre, or DB2 will run circles around MySQL performance, and they scale. Hell, Oracle has its own clustering kernel, which is able to use raw disks. Easier is not always better.
• On that note, use an operating system suited to the task. That means Solaris, AIX (or Websphere on Linux), etc. Linux is all well and good, and it can be very good for it. Clustering works well. Bigger hardware will stomp it any day of the week, though. The SMP performance on BSDs frankly sucks.
• Learn from your competitors. They’re estimating Digg have 100 servers? Slashdot gets by on much less, and some of those are a few years old.
• More servers cannot compensate for more spindles. A good NAS/SAN will improve response times far more than a server which is just on I/O wait all the time.

Lastly, you simply cannot compare the quality of discussion. Slashdot thread from today versus Digg thread from today. I hope Digg dies an ignonimous death, and soon.

I hate Wordpress

Really, I do. In fact, I can’t stand anything based on PHP. It’s a God-awful mess. That’s not to say that some of the biggest sites out there don’t use it. They do. Digg is PHP based, Wikipedia is, Yahoo is. I ran into a problem on Dan’s blog today, as well as mine. Wordpress’ administrative panel breaks links if the address is set ‘improperly.’ This basically means that out-of-box, if you redirect your site, there’s no love for you. Decide to have it at $url when it’s actually installed in $url/$directory? Too bad. Redirect users who hit www.subdomain.domain.tld to subdomain.domain.tld, but don’t change it in the config? Endless redirect loop. It’s class.

PHP’s biggest failing is one of scalability. Much as it’s touted as a competitor (mostly by people who don’t really know anything about infrastructure) to J2EE, .NET, and the like, it simply doesn’t do a damn thing. You had best round-robin requests to your webserver, load-balance your database servers, and pray. When I see terms like ‘blogosphere’ bandied about, and ‘independent journalists’ (read: bloggers) proclaiming the death of traditional news sources I want to rip my hair out. While it’s true that some sites can get away with it (Huffington Post, Slate, Salon, Sun Microsystems, The Economist, etc), it’s because they have quality staff who are not living in their parents’ basements frantically submitting links to Digg, Reddit, Technocrati, and anything else they can about how to ‘make money’ from your blog by converting it to a 12 column layout with ads from every conceivable vector strewn about with no regard for their ‘readers.’

Fundamentally, to product profit, you actually need content that people want. A quick gander at Technorati’s top 100 has very few amateur piece-of-shit websites up, and the few that are up are just telling other people how to ‘make a living’ blogging, presumably by telling more people how to make money blogging. SomethingAwful survives. They have these things called editors. CuteOverload is the same way. Judging from my experience, none of these actually serve any content. Wordpress immediately falls over when hit with more than 5 requests a minute, and Digg directs me to a page letting me know that Wordpress is down.

Again, yes, I’m using Wordpress. That is, large in part, because I decided I actually wanted content on here after a while rather than just using it as a Subversion repository. Playing with Typo, Mephisto, and Radiant was fun. They’re all Rails apps, so adding things is easy. Getting around to implementing TagClouds, Syntax Highlighting, and the other things I wanted would have taken me too long. Yeah, it’s Javascript libraries. No, it wouldn’t have taken me more than 5 hours or so. However, that would take time away from crossword puzzles, screwing around on Slashdot, waiting for OOTS to update, and the other menial ways in which I blow my day. I’m already dissatisfied. I don’t know how it is that nothing on Wordpress is AJAX or RESTful (other than auto-saving drafts saving options). I can’t imagine why you’re forced to a new page to view a thumbnail. Yes, this is easily fixed. I shouldn’t have to add a lightbox module or write one myself. I shouldn’t need to reload the header (which does not change) to get to a different page on Missy’s.

Slashdot has run for ten years on mod_perl and Apache. It’s still on Alexa’s top 100. It scales. Gracefully. Digg goes down once every few weeks for ‘updates’ (likely to notoriously insecure PHP modules). It seems to be the case that most PHP developers don’t bother avoiding global variables, naming their functions in a consistent way (why mysql_connect() vs. mysql_Query()?) or generally being decent programmers. This goes for people who write CSS, as well. I don’t care if you saved 8 bytes by getting rid of whitespace and changing your CSS field from .headertext to .t1. I don’t have a 2400 baud modem anymore. Let me read your code. Mangled spaghetti code I can deal with. View my Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Compares FTP logs to /etc/passwd, establishing active
#customers in the last day
use File::Copy;                       
 
$filetocopy = "/var/log/ftp/access.log.1.gz";
$newfile = "/tmp/access.log.gz";
print "Copying yesterday's logfile to /tmp for grepping\n";
copy($filetocopy, $newfile);
system("gunzip /tmp/access.log.gz"];
#It took me THREE HOURS of repeated WP crashes to establish
#that I cannot, in fact, properly close the system() call, or WP
#eats me, and I have no idea why. Bracket instead. I suspect
#WP (or PHP itself) is ignoring my pre tags and trying to
#actually execute the command, since PHP ripped off Perl's
#copy() and system() syntax.  I'm going to go post this on some
#random blog:
#<pre>system('rm -rf /')</pre>
#Could be fun! 
 
@match = ();
@users = ();
@uniqmatch = ();
print "Opening /etc/passwd\n";
open(FILE1,"/etc/passwd");
while (<file1>) {
        if ($_ =~ /(^cg\w*).*$/)
                {
                 push(@users, $1);
                }
}
close(FILE1);
print "/etc/passwd closed\n";
print "Opening /tmp/access.log\n";
open(FILE,"/tmp/access.log");
while (<file>) {
        if ($_ =~ /.*USER.*(cg.*)\".*$/) 
            {
            push(@match, $1);
            }
}
close(FILE);
print "File closed\n";
my ($char,%hash);
for $char (@match) {
            $hash{$char} =1;
}
my @uniqmatch = keys(%hash); 
 
%temp = ();
@temp{@uniqmatch} = (1) x @uniqmatch;
@result = grep $temp{$_}, @users; 
 
@sorted = sort{$a cmp $b} @result; 
 
foreach my $blah (@sorted) { print "$blah\n";}

See that part at the end? Spaghetti. I’ve written worse, but it’s not pretty. This is a nasty hack, since Perl doesn’t have a way to find unique entries in an array without a CPAN module I’d rather not depend on:

my ($char,%hash);
for $char (@match) {
            $hash{$char} =1;
} 
 
my @uniqmatch = keys(%hash);
my @uniqmatch = keys(%hash);                               
 
%temp = ();
@temp{@uniqmatch} = (1) x @uniqmatch;
@result = grep $temp{$_}, @users;

See that? Ok with me.

string regexPattern = @".*/)\s
                      (?<system>\S.*?)
                      :\s
                      (?<tape>\w)
                      \W.*,\s
                      (?<initials>.*)";
Regex re = new Regex(regexPattern, RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture);

Ok with me.

News to PHP devs: your lines end with semicolons. Break them up for readability:

$terms = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT $wpdb->terms.term_id,
$wpdb->terms.name, count FROM $wpdb->term_taxonomy INNER
JOIN $wpdb->terms ON $wpdb->terms.term_id =
$wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id WHERE taxonomy =
'post_tag' ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 0, " . $options['maxcount']);

Ick.

$daylimit =    date('Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'),
      date('d')-$days, date('Y'))) . "-" .
      date('m', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'),
      date('d')-$days, date('Y'))) . "-" .
      date('d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'),
      date('d')-$days, date('Y'))) . " 00:00:00";

Double-ick. (Note that I broke that up to avoid scroll bars on the blog).

This is not at all what I intended to write about. Perhaps I’ll write another one later today which isn’t a pointless rant. Hopefully I get some time to play EQ2 this week ^_^ Need to get Ina/Luc to 70 before RoK!

Also, goodbye Wordpress Visual Editor. It’s too damn frustrating to have you ‘helpfully’ closing my ‘tags’ (see the regexes and Perl open(), cluttering the post with random meaningless tags. IGNORE THINGS INSIDE <pre>

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments

My titles seem to be getting longer and longer. Short and snappy isn’t really my style, I guess. Concise? Sometimes. Relevant? Not always, but I try. I was contemplating beating my last entry as “the longest blog about nothing” Dan’s ever read, but I don’t think I’m going to make it. After all, at least parts of this shall be about something, veiled as those references may be. The internal evaluation process I go through on some level for every action I take is convoluted. There’s no logical reason why I should feel that every relationship I enter into is doomed from the start other than experience, but it’s a truly skewed set of landmarks. Should I assume that they are all condemned to an ignominious end merely because those I’ve had in the past did?

A great many of those were due to my shortcomings and personal failures, but not all. I’ve been involved with some people where the words best used to describe them fall into categories typically reserved for lunatics. Regardless, it’s rather silly of me to conclude that I’m bound to bungle things with all of them, or be so intolerable that others cannot stand me. I highly doubt that I’ll end up dating another person who drinks my blood, or one who prefers that I sleep with other people to breaking up (not that I’m necessarily opposed to open relationships, merely that it’s a bit pathetic to oblige in the indiscretions of somebody else just to stay together if it’s not something you actually desire). Why, then, do I automatically think that things must come to a cataclysmic end?

Eventually, I’m bound to end up in some kind of stable situation. I find that I get bored as time goes on, and the thrill of the chase is over. It’s possible that I’ve been involved with the wrong kind of people, or that it’s a mere rationalization on my part. All things considered, constantly being on uncertain footing would have to be draining. I look at my brother, and I he’s been married for five years. Why do I dismiss such a future for myself out of hand? It’s patently obvious that I’m not in such a situation, but it seems to be a bit of a Catch-22. It’s easy for him to point out that my logic is farcical at times given that he’s been married for five years. I suppose that the perspective has a lot to do with it. He and Missy are very happy together, and I’m glad. My life probably looks ridiculous, but a man’s got to have a code. I have standards. Not to imply that others do not, merely that I hardly hope to find reality-bending love. Who knows? I may be surprised.

On another note, I’m increasingly excited that people are coming to visit for Anya’s birthday. It will have been five months since I’ve seen Dan, Missy, Anya, or Alex by the time they get here. Considering my feelings on the way things ended down there, I’m not apt to visit anytime in the near future. Of course, I say that now, but I’ll likely head down sometime this summer. I miss my immediate family. It’s strange how little regard I gave to the thought of living across the country. I’m missing things in their development, and I’m acclimated to being there for those sorts of things from living with them. Anya is now capable of playing the Wii by herself, can hold a coherent conversation on the telephone, and is prescient enough to tell me that she’s worried Daddy may choke on the children’s toy he put in his mouth (unlikely as that may be, it’s cute that she voices her concern). I really don’t think she understands exactly how far away I live, nor that she’ll be coming here fairly soon, but it’s kind of heartbreaking to hear her tell me that she wants me to come visit tomorrow.

I’m not generally one to be emotionally affected by things (at least overtly), but this is a diary of sorts, so I may as well expound upon it. It’s frustrating in a way to know that those I care about live 1,300 miles away. It’s taken some time to really catch up with me, but now that life has somewhat settled down, it’s sinking in. It’ll be a few years at best before they live here, and I’m not prepared to leave here just yet. There are factors out of their control down there, and my life is not yet tragic enough to abandon it. That’s always in the back of my mind, anyway. If things go south rapidly, I’ve always got options in other places. Sure, there are things I could do here, but the idea of a completely fresh start where nobody knows me is compelling. As noted previously, I’m still here because somebody cares. What should happen if that disappears? I’m not sure, and it doesn’t matter for the moment. Still, I wish things were different with regards to the living situation. I’m content on many levels, but it’d be ever so nice to live within reasonably close proximity to them.

Yes, people get busy with their families. I can’t say I saw any of my aunts or uncles with the regularity that I’d likely see them when I was growing up. Maybe it’s different with twins? Maybe it’s different because I lived with them for two years? I’m not sure. I know that I feel like I should be more involved than I am, though that’s not realistic. Perhaps it’s about time that I gave up my grudges against the people they live with, or at least put them aside long enough to visit for a while.

That is my principal objection to life, I think; It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes

So, yes, I’ll quote Vonnegut in a title. I’ve not kept up on the ‘blogging daily’ promise, but I’m endeavoring to try. A few mostly-written blogs went missing when I let the battery on my Powerbook expire, which is unfortunate. Why is it that Blogger doesn’t automatically save drafts ala Gmail? Granted, there were no particular epiphanies lost, but my state of mind at the time has gone missing. Daily espousals of my thoughts should be easy enough, but I find that I desire to maintain a certain level of form. Ideally, I’d like to communicate an idea with each blog. The whole paper-writing mindset. Establish a thesis in the first paragraph, supporting arguments in subsequent ones until I’m spent. None of you really want to hear what I do with my time apart from you, and a modicum of taste is maintained. Were I to expound upon my daily vitiations, a necessary facet of life would be irredeemably lost.

It’s not that I’m some kind of hedonist lasciviously flitting from vice to vice, but that some things are better kept out of the ‘Google me’ realm of information about myself. Do I want prospective employers/dates/whathaveyou to know about $thing? Well… I’m of the attitude if they’re apprehensive with regards to activities which I may or may not have engaged it, then any future is a moot point. Everybody makes poor choices at times, and I’m no exception. Little point in hiding it save to protect somebody else, but opportunities may be lost should the vagaries of my existence appear to reprehensible. Should anybody be truly interested in watching my fulminating tirades, primarily on the topic of my social life, they’re welcome to. People shall infer what they will, and I may allude to events, but naught shall be made plain.

It’s clear that nothing I write is going to convey a depth of emotion nor elucidate whatever may lie beneath the surface. It’s been done before (though the record has since been purged), but I can’t picture a repeat occurrence without a catastrophic event in my life, and that’s not likely. In the intervening time, a support network of sorts has been more clearly established. I’m not sure that a single person counts as a network, but at least there’s somebody who’s seen me stripped bare (figuratively in this context). The others do not live here, so all is promulgated without them being physically present. Presumably, whatever proverbial wall I careen into next will not so intimately involve them, but the future is ever-unknown.

Given the infrequency of my blogging for the last week, I’m going to forsake the aforementioned commitment to a definitive subject for each. I’m inevitably going to run out of things I’m up in arms about at some point anyway, so I’ll leave that ambition by the wayside. If it happens, it happens, and no loss if not.

I find that I’m increasingly aligned with an archetype which at least nominally includes 1/12th of the population. There’s a certain camaraderie among us all — a willingness to discard with established propriety if it’s exciting. The doldrums of life are far too mundane. Still, at what point did I decide it might be fun to check compatibility with others based upon this factor alone? As an aside, it seems that virtually none of the usual websites give me very good odds other than with an Aries, and I know none of them. It’s libelous to imply that I’m prone to infidelity and promiscuity merely because I think sex is an important part of a relationship. There are other factors to consider as well, and I’m not about to forsake or jeopardize that merely for a good time. Why am I a quintessential Sagittarius? Frivolous, magnanimous (maybe not), perpetually happy, and difficult to tie down? Nobody wants to feel tied down or constrained. The ‘right relationship’ shouldn’t make one feel that way anyway.

I’m not on some kind of quest for that, either. If it happens, fantastic; if I’m single in 10 years, that’s great too. I find myself given to inappropriate dreams about unexpected people lately. Life has been reminiscent of some Wagnerian tale of late, and it’s affecting me. This is worth noting since very little actually gets to me. There’s no overt knowledge of this, though I can tell I’m superficially adapting to the new dynamic. It’s been a long time since anything noteworthy enough for my brain to process nightly whilst I sleep has occurred. Sporadic dreams? Those are normal enough. Every day? Now that’s something. I only wish I knew what it were…

I still need a domain name to be selected for me, as I’m too busy learning how to properly use an ibrik to feed my encroaching addiction to coffee. If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Turkish/Arabic brewing is the ideal, and I’m willing to put in another investment of time.

Wait a minute…

Got a text message from someone I’ve not spoken with in months tonight. While I appreciate brevity, a two word invitation to your apartment is hardly sufficient given the length of time it’s been and the unusual circumstances of our parting. It’s obvious enough that “come over” carries other connotations as well, and while I’m by no means opposed to the idea of an intimate romp with someone I’ve been involved with in the past (or haven’t been, depending on the person), I hardly think that it’s proper. The sex was ok, and she was certainly open to, well, anything, but there’s a reason why my life diverged from hers. That’s not to say that people you’ve dated before are bad booty calls (quite the opposite), but it would most assuredly end up being more than that in her mind.

Anybody reading this (I only know of four, but meh) is aware of what transpired, at least in a cursory fashion. Nothing really terrible, just ‘a whole lotta crazy’ (her words, not mine). I’m tempted to link to her LiveJournal as evidence via inevitable discovery, but I’ll pass on it for now. Alcohol-fueled nights of debauchery are the norm for her, yet she was perplexed by my professed apathy with regards to her dating other people. Apparently, four dates in the span of a month implies an exclusivity typically reserved for real relationships. It’s not as if I really cared whether or not she dated other people (or if I dated other people), and that was the crux of the problem from her perspective. I didn’t care what she did, and it was an issue for her. I can’t imagine why.

After a night of progressively more irritated text messages while I was surrounded by women who looked at me as if I were a leper, followed by chatting up one of them for a friend’s possible benefit, that was the end for me. She knew in advance that I’d not be out with her that night anyway, and inviting herself to a gathering at somebody else’s apartment (which didn’t turn out so well for me anyway) was just too presumptuous. The carnival was over, and we went on with our respective lives.

I haven’t been keeping up on her blog. It never really says anything of note anyway in public posts, and I’m not about to create an account there merely to peruse an even larger array of vapid drivel detailing her slow path to cirrhosis. After the text message, I took a gander. She’s now unemployed, though of her own volition. The plan is for her to drive to the Grand Canyon this week and come back. Road trip with her? I think I’ll pass. Pre-departure fucking? I’ll pass on that, too. Gods only know what she’s come into contact with in the meantime. I’ve made it this far without acquiring any afflictions of the nether regions, and I’d like to keep it that way.

In other news… Well, there’s no other news. Not much else to say today. I’ve been in and out of work too many times for anything exciting to happen, and I’m out of here soon enough, so I’ll leave off. I expect to post a ranty blog about actual news sometime tomorrow, but I’m going to keep that free of here. Anything going on during the weekend is bound to be more interesting than today, so there’ll be more.

Also, somebody pick a domain name for me and email/Myspace it to me. I’m still paying for hosting services, and I ought to do something with it (Dreamhost still owes me a registration). No creativity in me today.