10.21.2004
day two: now what?
This could go any of a hundred different ways. There are lots of things I've wanted to talk about, but for now I haven't figured out how to carve out the right kind of space to do the sorts of entry I think I'd probably like to be doing. So I'm trying to get out of the way these kinds of entries I despise, even though most of them have always at least started this way. These blah blah what do I talk about blah blah entries. Betcha there are fifteen entries where I say "blah blah" speaking specifically about the way this very kind of entry sucks.
I'm not doing this entry-a-day thing because I have to, though. I want to, and I'm even in the mood now. The problem's the time crunch. Fall TeeVee's on in force by mid-October, and tonight I'll be glued there between 8pm and 10. Before that my wife'll come home and I'll need to get some kind of dinner ready for us. It used to be that I'd gather some things to talk about while at work; but in addition to this small objective relating to daily updates I'm struggling to keep away from casual internet browsing at work. That's much harder than it should be. I'm a junky, this stuff's so easy to just passively waste time with that when I'm working on code that's not stimulating (tracking down the reason that a drop down list won't default to a display value for four hours is not stimulating. Ever. No matter how many times I do it,) it's second nature to alt-tab my way to my browser so I can check email or read someone's weblog or google for "stupid people driving" or whatever. Having spent a few days making a conscious effort to not have the browser up at all showed me just how much of a junky I am.
Today though it didn't solve the central issue. After lunch I gave myself fifteen minutes online, then closed the browser and tried to work. A few minutes later I found myself thumbing through a PC Connection catalog.
"What the fuck? Where'd this come from?" I wondered. So I sat the thing on the desk and started into trying to figure out how the guy who'd written the code that I have been modifying for the past month had been handling generating forms from the object model. See, when a user saves a policy application without updating the Proxy Date, the system has to send out a letter to the applicant to remind them and hey I wonder if there are any pictures of monkeys playing basketball anywhere fuck the browser's not open.
A few minutes later I was sleeping in my chair. I probably shouldn't have had that oatmeal chocolate chip cookie with lunch. It was a goddamn good cookie, though.
I'm glad to see that leftbrainrightbrain is talking about updating more often. Or I think that's what he's talking about. He's talking about a lot of things there, actually. I'm hoping he does something semi-regular on one of the sides of his brain, or a new weblog, or whichever, as that'd be encouragement for me while I stumble through this idiocy. Of course it's all about me, so get to work, Clypsy.
Since there's absolutely nothing keeping this post from being a series of unrelated thoughts, I'll just slap the pictures of the decorated living/dining room here. They don't really do anything justice, as the camera sucks or I suck as a guy-with-a-camera or some combination of the two.
Up there you've got a poorly lit picture of the entryway, which would look way better if it just looked like it actually looks; then you've got two pictures of the dining room area. Notice the witch and her cauldron in the first one on top of the end-piece for a big-ass hutch of which we only ever had the end-piece. Then you've got our jack-o-pumpkies, Mrs. I's (on the left) looking way better than mine, as it's cute and looks exactly like it ought, while mine suffers from my usual disease of overthunkingness followed by under-execution as, in the middle of carving it, I realized it just really wasn't easy to carve spider-eyes into a big-ass pumpkin. Finally there's Michael Myers, who, when the button on his back is pushed, screams, "oh mygod Michael nooo!!!" in the voice of Jamie Lee Curtis.
The pictures of the spider will wait. They creep me the fuck out, honestly. The spider's still there, and it really, really creeps me the fuck out. Why I don't do something about it (it's been hanging in pretty much the same spot for three days now, so it's probably dead,) I'm not sure. The thing about it is, it creeps me the fuck out. The first night after having seen it I slept terribly, coming half-awake tens of times during the night swatting at the blankets or my neck or my wife's head or throwing the pillows out of the bed or jumping onto the nightstand screaming, "Oh mygod Spider noooo!" in the voice of Jamie Lee Curtis. It's uncanny how much like a damned idiot I am when it comes to freaking myself out in my own brain. Right in my brain, I just... I don't know what happens, but it ain't right. That's a whole thing, though, that I should probably talk about when I put the pictures up.
2 down, 29 to go. (Note: there are some things I've underlined that aren't links. (actually they aren't necessarily underlined. At this point I'm just surrounding things with random tags that may or may not be valid since I don't know what the hell I'm doing.) Those are future-links. Though I probably won't come back and make them function. What they're supposed to be is foreshadowing. That I won't follow through on.)
(I'm listening to some mp3s I got way back when eMusic wasn't retarded, including some Peter Sinfield stuff that's pretty damn cool, and some Spock's Beard stuff that I enjoy now more than I think I did when I first downloaded it.)
