Author: Jason Doucette

Poor poor AngelA. She’s only been gone a few days, and I just don’t know if she’ll be able to deal with the intense curriculum that is… Bachelor University.

Today’s lesson is: use technology to simplify your life. If people see a cluttered home, they’ll think less of you. Today I tackled the CD problem that I alluded to in Saturday’s posting. I’ve upgraded my CD storage system to deal with the problems with earlier techniques. My old system was a bunch of sleeves that sat on these trays. You put the CDs in the trays, and then you flip through the sleeves, which take up less space than the jewel boxes. The problems here are primarily that the units don’t stack and you still have a bunch of individual sleeves. My new storage system is stackable, expandable, and the CDs never have to be take out. Yep, it’s a multi CD player. It stores 300 of my favourite CDs.

I’ve just filled it with 241 CDs. This represents just about every CD I’ve ever owned (I decided to leave out the CD of 75 sound effects), and if I average 13 tracks per CD, it’s about double what’s on the iMac, which has a lot of Napster crap on it that shouldn’t count. You have no idea how surreal the random setting can be when applied to a lifetime of music. For example, I just experienced a transition from some soft gentle blues number to the theme song from the movie “Wayne’s World”. I regret selling my MC Hammer CD at a yard sale years ago, otherwise I think my collection would be complete.

I haven’t grouped the CDs at all, although it seems I can, and I might even be able to use a PC keyboard to help with this, if only I knew where I put it. I think it’ll be one of those things where I’ll keep meaning to but never will. Sure, I’ll program a playlist or two for when company comes over, but let’s be honest, I’ll “forget” how the use these lists when the chance arises.

When AngelA first moved here, I had a 25 disc player that was filled with stuff I pretty much enjoyed. One of her earliest comments about me was “I don’t know about this music selection, dude”. She has no idea what she’s in for. There are five Tom Jones CDs in there, ticking like little bombs. That’s about a 1 in 48 chance of mayhem in itself. My week is getting more and more fun.

In other fun adventures, I actually had to buy the Weekly World News this week. The front page says that the world’s fattest twins stole the world’s fattest cat. I haven’t read the actual article yet, but there’s always a chance that Bat Boy had some involvement. The WWN is like The Onion, but some people actually believe it. For the record, they do print true stories. About 10 years ago they ran a piece about body parts being found around my hometown. All true. The last issue I bought was a week by week prediction of how the world would end in 2000. No hits yet.

Damn, my music library sucks.

So this guy gets arrested in New Mexico, but it’s not because they found 2000 anti-tank missiles, it’s just because he didn’t have a proper license for them. The rest of the article makes it a more boring story, so just chuckle over the state of the world with me.

Incidentally, the guy was Canadian, so don’t think I’m slagging the American system at all. Far from it. Over the past several months, I’ve seen a few proposals to convert the Canadian dollar to American money, and I’ve also heard somewhere that US dollars will start coming out in colours other than green, so maybe there’s some harmonization there. This may have already been suggested, but I think Canadian dollars are just going metric. $1 US is worth about $1.56 Canadian right now. A mile is 1.6 kilometers (right now). If we can devalue the Canadian dollar just a bit more, it’ll become the “metric dollar”. This will really help tourism. Every car will have a built in currency conversion guide on the speedometer!

Speaking of speed, I got on my bike today for the first time in a long while. This might have something my reading The Immortal Class lately. Incidentally, I had to link Amazon instead of Chapters because Chapters feels the book isn’t available yet, despite it being in my hands. Amazon says it hasn’t been published yet either, so maybe I have the only copy in Canada. Anyway, Amazon has it for cheaper (in metric dollars). Back to the point, I went riding. Man do I suck. I don’t think I can really blame the bike here, even though it’s getting up in years. What I can blame to some extent is my seat height, which after some actual research seems can be tweaked a bit. Of course, it requires the one hex key that I can’t find anywhere. This may become the Bachelor University lesson for the day: when you can’t find your tools, it’s time to clean up. In any event, my mortgage company can rest easy; I won’t be quitting my job to become a bike courier anytime soon.

AngelA’s left me again, for a week this time. It’s sad and depressing, yes, but it’s also an opportunity to resume Bachelor University.

Today’s lesson is: people will give you food if they think you’re unable to care for yourself. I’m assuming that this only applies to recent bachelors, but it’s worth exploiting. I scored myself a sushi meal of leftovers, which would have been a delicious dinner if only I’d closed the container properly. Now I have a backpack that’s been delicately perfumed with ginger and wasabi. Perhaps that “I can’t take care of myself” thing isn’t just an act, but we’ll be sure to find out as bachelor week continues.

To set the theme for the week, I’ve been going CD shopping. I wasn’t near any used shops yesterday, so I did some shopping around at the major chains first. That didn’t work out so well. I ended up buying an EP instead of the full length CD that I wanted, simply because the EP was so overpriced at store one that it seemed wrong not to buy it at the more affordable store two, even though I could have gotten a much better dollar per song average with the full length. The used shops yielded some decent bounty today, and if nothing else happens this weekend, I can rest secure that I finally own Mermaid Avenue. It’s long overdue.

An added bonus to all this is that I’ve rediscovered my stereo. The iMac has nice little speakers, but they’re still little speakers, and all these MP3s are taking up an incredible amount of disc space. Hmm, I just did some browsing around, and there might be an update to Bachelor University a little sooner than I thought…

Regardless of if the music’s on your computer or on CD, you can’t beat a good live show, and I’d be in danger of losing my fan club membership badge if I didn’t mention the upcoming appearance by The Golden Dogs at the Horseshoe on Monday night with First Born Unicorn and Choda nicely surrounding their 10:45 set. This is substantially more notice than I gave last time, so you should be able to charter a plane at a leisurely pace.

I’ve slept less than 6 of the past 65 hours, and my office, where I’ve coincidentally spent a great many hours lately, is getting taken out by some kind of insane killer flu. Vegan immunity powers, activate!

It says here that “Brand names engage the “emotional”, right-hand side of the brain more than other words“. That could explain a lot of anti-economic protests. “Ok, we don’t care about globalization. Put your damned products anywhere you want. Just stop putting labels on them! It drives us nuts!”

All The Web feels that VP contains “offensive content” and filters accordingly, but Beef.org slips right on through. Why, if everyone weren’t actually out to get me, I’d consider myself downright paranoid. I sent them a bug report in any event, because I’m good people.

Or something. Why am I still awake? Everything can wait until morning.

(20:30)
Of course, with all these new hours I’ve found in the day, you’d think others would concede to my grand vision. But NOOOO… The next bug was found at around 3pm, and involved painful geometry. Got it working in an hour or so though. I’m actually feeling pretty good, I wasn’t nodding off at all today.

I found this a few minutes ago while I was looking for something completely different. Yeah, it’s from my site, but it made me laugh. The joy of test data…

(7:30)

A brief summary of the past 16 hours:

3:00pm: Project isn’t going well. Serious time must be spent, but it’s still doable.
4:00pm: Call AngelA to cancel TVA for tonight. Hey, I might even get home before she does!
7:00pm: Ok, the initial tests are working out, I’m looking at a 10pm exit.
9:55pm: Looking good…oh. The system won’t work with frames. At all. Crap. Why didn’t I ever try it with frames? Ok, midnight. I’ll be home before it becomes tomorrow.
11:30pm: I hate COM, I hate DOM, I hate documentation, I hate my time management skills. Revised exit plan: 3am.
2:30am: Finally manage to walk through a document object. Do I just suck, or am I just really really tired? In my favour, the algorithm didn’t need changing, I just didn’t have a clue how to get the objects I needed.
3:00am: Oh yeah, the 3am exit plan…right… I exit for snacks from the 24hr store up the street. Date squares and brownies, baby. Date squares and brownies.
4:00am: Wow, it doesn’t feel at all like oh yes it does.
5:00am: A brief reflection that this was another of several exit times I had made up. Oh well.
6:30am: Finally install the new build on some test workstations and try them out. Nothing breaks, but I’m not looking for new problems at this point.
7:00am: Next crisis, have to get another system up and running for some tests. The advantage of the project from hell is that everything else looks pretty trivial by comparison. This one takes 15 minutes.

And so it goes. For the record, it was a Windows app that I wrote about 9 months ago that had a few issues, not the least of which was that a good 5000 lines or so of it was written in “can’t sleep clowns will eat me” mode. I am now the king of what not to do. The sad part is that I’ve got physio this morning, so I need to stick around. I figure I’ll either be really tense or really relaxed.

I think I was sensing my impending doom yesterday when I went to the local bookstore. I was looking for a copy of I was a Teenage Dominatrix because Josh said some nice things about it, but they didn’t have it. I ended up getting The Immortal Class, which is a memoir or something by a 25 year old bike messenger. I really have to stop buying books about other careers. Nothing against the author, but I’m hoping it’s filled with stories of being hit by big cars and other fun tales designed to keep me from having a quarter life crisis and dropping everything for a more physical (and much lower paying) job.

On the bright side, my job doesn’t really have a dress code. Sure, generally we don’t wear shorts, but it’s pretty casual aside from that. On the way back from the bookstore I saw a restaurant with a sign that said “casual dress code enforced”. What the hell does that mean? Can you get kicked out for wearing a suit? Is the code just enforced when they feel like it? If I ever open a bar, the sign at the door will have explicit instructions of what to wear if you want in, possibly complete with home-study guides that would change every alternate Tuesday. I never know how to dress for any event or occasion…

Well, I’m at the point in the fatigue-o-graph where the room shifts in time with my pulse. If they paid me overtime, I could buy drugs for the same effect, but they don’t, so I don’t, and somehow, that’s win-win.

I’d be willing to pay some serious cash to get revenge on whoever put that System of a Down song in my head, except I don’t know who to blame. Like most songs that get in my head, I don’t know the words, so I’ve spent a few hours already muttering “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAHBLAH!” Most enjoyable.

Speaking of enjoyable, I got to spend a good chunk of last night working on the VP link list. I pretty much always add a link if a site links to VP and tells me about it, but the vast varied world of the internet has necessitated the addition of the VP juvenile filter to the link code. That’s right, I’m listed on a porn directory. Anyway, the first step was migrating the links from a flat file to an actual database. Making a maintenance app didn’t take very long (it’s amazing how many shortcuts I take when it’s something only I will ever see), but entering the 60 or so links was one of those things where doing it by hand would’ve taken about the same amount of time as writing a utility. For some reason I entered them by hand, which was just as well, since I added categories. The next step was a simple matter of visiting each page to see if it was still around (funny, all the Geocities sites are gone), which was a mix of nostalgia (“hey, I forgot about this one!”) and amusement (“when’d I link to THAT?”). After all that, nothing has changed yet – I still have to change the VP source itself, which I’m not looking forward to. The changes are easy enough, I just hate looking at code I wrote a year ago with very little knowledge of Perl. After 6 years in a development job, you’d think I’d have accepted by now that code rarely gets rewritten from scratch. Ah well, it’s nothing a few hundred million in venture capital won’t fix, I was reading a magazine at the doctor’s office that said them “dot coms” are pretty hot.

Last night wasn’t all work. I fired up the PlayStation for a bit of GTA3. Man do I suck. I even used some cheat codes and I still got my ass kicked, and to top it off my thumb is killing me today – not the tip, the part that connects to the wrist. Not a good thing to discover when you have heavy weights suspended above your throat. Does anyone make arcade style PS2 controllers? The grip is causing some serious problems.

On the bright side, I also drank some beer last night, and there’s no sign of repetitive strain injuries there. Hmm, how would one even make ergonomic beer? Is there still venture capital money for that?

Wow, an article about a kid who made a bomb using instructions from the internet and blew his hand off (although it looks like he kept his now-unopposed thumb). Back in ’94 or so (possibly pre-web, I can’t remember) it seemed like that was the only bad thing people could come up with about the internet. Parents were all concerned that their children would die in horrible bomb making accidents because of bad instructions on the internet. Actually, I think people were worried about other children making the bombs more than they were about their own well behaved brats, who were no doubt bypassing the bomb info in favour of the drug and alcohol recipes. Speaking of which, I used to wonder who would actually ingest the outcome of an internet drug recipe, but that was before I heard about inhaling gasoline and household cleaners. Yeesh.

Anyway, this will no doubt cause a crackdown on the porn industry, who got so big that they distracted everyone’s attention from the other information that you could find online, like bomb making. And calculus.

In other news, I started at Meme Machine Go and somehow ended up at the Advocacy Game. Great fun, and yes, somehow in the midst of all of this I’ve been working.

It’s too cold at work, and it’s too hot at home. I hear it’s a smog day, and we may have had one yesterday. I don’t know. I used to check these things online, but it’s too depressing. I found out about today because it was on the front page of the paper I stooped in front of after my (pain free!) run this morning. I was a bit bummed that the smog article was taking up valuable front page space that should be dedicated to actors who drive race cars into walls, but then I saw that Jason Priestly made it into the prestigious “bottom of the page” slot, which is technically “above the fold” if you hold the paper wrong. The smog article cut across the fold, which means you have to work harder to read it, especially with the air the way it is.

Ok, that “see y’all Sunday night” bit at the end of the last entry must’ve been a metaphor for something completely unrelated to actually writing something on Sunday night, because Sunday night was driving night.

You know that scene in Empire Strikes Back where the rebels are fleeing Hoth because Vader’s troops are invading, and the PA system blares “the first transport is away”, and everyone cheers? The sound guy missed out on a large section of the extras who were no doubt muttering “about time guys, we’re scheduled on the last transport and those AT-ATs are getting closer.” Picture Hoth with a beautiful lake, a rebel alliance of 15-20 people, a transport that can carry 6-8, and an invasion army of a “wake up it’s time to go to work” alarm, and that sums up the end of the holiday.

The rest of the time was great though. I swam in a lake. Mostly I floated, but the consensus is that I’ve graduated to “pollywog”. I also discovered that I’m happier in Hawaiian shirts, because once I put on the trappings of civilization on Sunday, it was all downhill. I’m not sure what that means, but maybe when winter comes I can start wearing shirts with palm trees on them under a sweater and no one will be the wiser. For now I’ll have to settle for palm tree underwear, although I’m a bit frightened to think where I could even find such a thing.

Unlike some people, I don’t really have any amazing stories to tell. It was a weekend away from here, a weekend where pants were optional, and a weekend that ended on Monday, as weekends are known to do. Tonight I’m going to take full advantage of the VP submission backlog and kick back with noodles and a movie.

Some random links and stuff before I make the journey into the wilds of cottage country:

This caught my eye this morning: “Canada may need to hike immigration levels beyond 300,000 a year to offset its aging population, Immigration Minister Denis Coderre says“. Now, I’m pretty sure we’re not just trying to maintain our rank on the global population ladder, so I’ll assume that we’re trying to get more people to pay taxes and support our pension plan. Somehow I know that this is different than slavery, but the concept of importing people from other countries to work to maintain the lifestyles of our old people seems a little odd. Now, if we could just drop the retirement age to, say, 30 and slam the immigration rates way up, would that be so wrong?

I’m sure glad I registered HermanThrust.com so people wouldn’t be able to make money from my immense fame and fortune. The weirdest example of this I’ve seen recently is NealStephenson.org, which links to the European Graduate School. Maybe there’s a legitimate connection, and at least there aren’t any popups, but it’s still pretty strange.

As mentioned above, I’m heading out to a cottage party today, which means I took the day off. We also had Monday off for the ever cryptic “Civic Holiday” which was renamed “Simcoe Day” because that made so much more sense, so now I think I’ve painted myself into a corner. I just had a three day work week which also turned out to be a pay week. Next week I face a five day work week with no payday. The contrast is stark.

There are many things to be done before I leave, so I’ll see y’all Sunday night.

Here’s an example of why I haven’t been around much.

Someone needs a PC built. I have a million things to do, and I don’t really understand why this has become my problem, but it’s easier to load an image on than to explain to the seven or eight bosses out there what’s going on. There comes a point in the process where we need to wait for some other resource to be freed up, so I slap a “do not touch” note on the monitor and go on with something else. A few hours later I return to finish things off.

This person obeyed the note to the letter. He did not touch the monitor at all. He did, however, turn off the computer.

This kind of stuff has been going on all week.