My throat is even more sore. The meeting was silly. Still waiting for network patches for mongers.org.
I added some Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) quotes to the jokes section. Arsed around.
Someone sent me a 1.2MB video file in email and quickly regretted it. Suffer.
Attended early and long meeting in Eastpoint. Tomorrow's early meeting has been postponed, but I need to attend another one in the afternoon.
My throat is slightly sore.
Mick's MP3 naming skills needs to be actioned.
I do not remember what I did on this day.
Woke up much, much too late. Did not have a headache and my tummy was ok.
I have been assigned to a project which requires me to be in Eastpoint at 9am on Thursday and Friday. What an unreasonable hour.
Later in the day I suffered from a strange headache. It happens to me sometimes, and the strangeness vary but this one had me looking for my mobile phone. I made sure it was within reach so I could call for help if I needed it. My mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage, you see, so I suppose my paranoia over peculiar headaches is natural.
I will be going to see my doctor in Denmark. In my 4+ years here, I have been to see Irish doctors twice and I am not making that mistake any more. I remember the first time I went to see a doctor here. It is a while ago at this stage. He shook my hand as I entered and told me to have a seat. He asked how he could help me. I told him I needed a HIV test done, and the ignorant fucking asshole took a step back.
I wanted to punch him. I had to go to the hospital to get the test done, so he gave me a piece of paper that I was to hand to the nurse at the hospital. When I did, she looked at me and asked if I had recieved counselling for this. I just looked at her and went "Uh. No," and I thought "Hello?" -- to this day I wonder what drugs the two were on.
Shit. Now I stayed up all night again. Not good.
With little effort and a few select comments, I got a project manager hooked on the idea of putting code and documentation under CVS control, which means she is now advocating my agenda. So I plan on taking a holiday from now until June of next year.
I wish.
I meant to meet with Dave so he might provide me with motivation to complete the tasks that have been assigned to me. Mick called, however, and suggested we go for dinner and beer. I am absolutely fucking delighted we did. From 7pm to 2am I had the best meal, the best laughs and the best chat I have had in a long time. My cuddly tummy is sore from laughing.
Thanks to the wonders of technology we exchanged music, and one particular song Mick gave me was a live version of the following song by Bruce Springsteen:
(spoken) Here's one for friendship Well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school Tonight I hear that neighbourhood drummer sound I can feel my heart begin to pound You say you're tired and you just want to close your eyes And follow your dreams down Well, we made a promise, we swore we'd always remember No retreat, baby, no surrender Like soldiers on a winter's night with a vow to defend No retreat, baby, no surrender Well, now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind, now I'm ready to grow young again And hear your sister's voice calling us home across the open yard Maybe we could find someplace of our own with these drums and these guitars Well, we made a promise, we swore we'd always remember No retreat, baby, no surrender Blood brothers on a summer's night with a vow to defend No retreat, baby, no surrender Now on the streets tonight, the light's growing dim The walls of my room are closing in But it's good to see your smiling face and to hear your voice again Now we could sleep in the twilight by the riverbed With the wild open country in our hearts and those romantic dreams in our heads As we made a promise, we swore we'd always remember No retreat, baby, no surrender Blood brothers on a summer's night with a vow to defend No retreat, baby, no surrender No retreat, baby, no surrender
These type of experiences are what life is about, and the dreams that stuff is made of.
Wulffeld said in email that the couch he expects to have acquired come January should fit a corpulent hobbit such as I. Housing potential, he offered. Yoda, I am.
Stayed in bed late again. Arsed around. Dave showed up to fix my router so it can do PAP authentication against our dialin servers but it does not work for some reason. He left copies of "Cisco Internetwork Troubleshooting" and "Building Cisco Remote Access Networks" in case I felt like some light reading.
Has the moon changed phases lately? Stupid women are bothering me a lot lately. Another one, who started talking to me while I was idle, made it to the muppets section, and her nickname actually was Stupid.
Stayed in bed late. Upgraded Operation Flashpoint to version 1.30. Shot a few people in the head. Got shot in the head myself. Then I got blown up. Then I crashed an Apache attack helicopter. On takeoff.
How was your weekend?
Woke up much too late. It was past 1pm. Dave was supposed to call me but did not because he also slept very late.
I need a vacation. So, I will be in Denmark in January 2002, from 11th to the 26th. At the very least, I will be spending time in Aalborg and Copenhagen. If you want to add locations to my travel plan, contact me. I see Århus and Odense as possible additions. Time allowing, I will travel anywhere with clueful people, food, alcohol and a place to crash for the night.
See my travelplan for preliminary details. It will be updated as arrangements are made.
I sat down and wrote code for the first time in months. I kept having to look up function calls and other bits. How quickly one forgets.
Boo! I am so tired. Work is giving me a headache. The team is still waiting for news about salary and final acceptance of the changes in team leader roles.
If I acted as unprofessionally towards my employer as they are towards me, I would probably be dragged in court.
This getting out of bed before 8pm is really silly. I need to sleep!
I mostly arsed around. OpenBSD does not support execution of ELF binaries and converting them to OLF did not help. It appears FreeBSD has the required support, which is nice.
Went to bed early.
We went into the office and Dave presented the CCMS project for peer review while my mind was absently crawling back into bed.
Met with a very skilled detective from the Computer Crime Unit. We have worked together on a few occasions so we chatted about a number of things. He suggested we go for a pint around christmas. I have been on call since November 1st and my rotation ends around 11th January 2002.
Went home around 5pm and slept for a few hours. Headed over to Dave's to get copies of the Solaris libraries and RSA software to take another stab at getting the ACE running on OpenBSD.
I ended up listening to "The Queen is Dead" by The Smiths with the CD set on repeat play.
So I broke into the palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner She said: "Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing." I said: "That's nothing -- you should hear me play piano."
Strange lyrics, hm? How about this one:
Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I've held it pays my way and it corrodes my soul Oh, I didn't realise that you wrote poetry I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, since you ask You are a flatulent pain in the arse I do not mean to be so rude but still, I must speak frankly, Mr. Shankly.
Stop looking at me like that.
Worked on our projects with Dave for a few hours. I also tried to get the RSA SecurID ACE for Solaris running on OpenBSD under srv4 emulation but a corrupt tarball stopped my efforts.
Mr. Wulffeld sent me an URL to the "Seventeen Seconds" CD on Amazon.co.uk. This shocked me because last time I looked, the dispatch time was listed as 6-7 weeks which in my head is as good as non-exsistant. Now it is listed as 24 hours so I expect I will make another purchase from Amazon soon.
I found email in my inbox from xi. He claimed he and a crowd of people were in Dublin playing tourists and asked if I wanted to meet up for pints. What a silly question. So I met all these Danish strangers in The Porter House for a pint. They were all much taller than I. Having finished our pint I took them to Afsana for dinner. Most could not handle the spicy food so I asked the waiter to supply the "ladies" with water.
Being kind and all, I advised them to put a roll of toilet paper in the fridge before going to bed. A comment was made that no further details were required. It would just be done. I put forth a recommendation for lunch in Tante Zoe's before they flew back to Denmark.
Pictures of their trip are available in a wide table from droso's website. I have taken the most interesting pictures involving me and added them to the gallery. I am the one dressed all in black, vaguely resembling a member of a covert ops/sniper unit.
After dinner we went to The Foggy Dew for more pints, and I was home some time after midnight.
Today's original entry was "Uh. Shit." because I could not remember a thing. Thankfully part of my day emerged from the wastelands before commit-time.
Woke up around 11am and arsed around for a bit. In the afternoon I went over to Dave's and worked until 4am. My life is very exciting. Perhaps "Uh. Shit." would have been a better diary entry.
I woke up just after 11am and shuffled aimlessly around for a few hours. I met up with Dave around 2pm and had late, filthy breakfast and then went back home.
I was fumbling around on the website of IBM's Almaden Research Centre when I came across the press released published recently on "Pixie Dust" usage in storage media. IBM found a way of increasing diskspace by 4 and they estimate that the standard disksize in desktop PCs in two years will be 400 gigabytes, compared to today's standard 20-40 gigabyte disks. I have used just over 10 gigabytes of the disk in my Windows machine which is primarily applications.
The world is expecting that everyone will be creating their own home movies in a few years and hence need the diskspace. So I was thinking about how I would use computers in the next few years. I do not have a lot of personal data. My home directory on c-tower is 221 megabytes in size, and this includes source to Dancer and a few other bits. If I were to become an OpenBSD developer I could see my need for home directory storage swell past 1 gigabyte, but that type of project would be stored locally on my desktop or laptop computer. My point is, I do not see myself needing 400 gigabytes of personal storage. The only things that I do store are MP3 encodings of some of my CDs, website mirrors, various large applications, game patches and drivers that I want to keep for future reloads of my Windows machine -- and all of these things are stored on a my fileserver.
I use my laptop for real work which only has 6 gigabytes of diskspace, and while I am running short on space for source code in /usr, etc a 10 gigabyte disk would meet most of my needs.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0a 62M 31M 28M 52% / /dev/wd0d 62M 4.0K 59M 0% /tmp /dev/wd0e 62M 14M 45M 24% /var /dev/wd0g 387M 73M 295M 20% /home /dev/wd0h 4.8G 4.5G 30M 99% /usr
Jerry sent me a link to "The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech" which is a short paper on coding theory explained using plain English and comedy. If you liked my description of Mel Gibson's password troubles you will also enjoy this one. Find it listed in the generic security section of my recommended page. God forbid you learn about technology and have a laugh at the same time, hm?
I have less than 45 days left to fix my diary layout without breaking a single URL. I imagine it will end up looking like "/diary/year/month" with Apache magic to prevent the old URLs from returning a 404. A bit of forethought would have prevented this, Alex.
I recieved email from my landlord. He is still not recieving my rent in full even though I have spent hours talking to my bank to resolve the issue. The lack of complete payment is making me look bad, and Bank of Ireland is really starting to piss me off.
I also recieved my package from Amazon, including 3 Stephen King books, a handful of BDSM erotica books and "Boys Don't Cry" by The Cure. I am unable to find "17 Seconds" in stores or online. I fear the album will go out of stock before I find a copy for my collection.
Stop looking at me like that. I already told you in March that I live a secret life which includes a wicked slave and sexual freedom so wipe the look of horrified surprise off your face. They are my naughty books and you are invited to keep your filthy hands off them. Of course, I welcome intelligent conversation on BDSM if you are curious. Human sources of non-intelligent conversation, e.g. drooling or giggling like a 15 year old fuckwit, on the matter (or any matter, really) will be subject to my wrath.
You are reading the diary of the kinder, gentler Alex, by the way.
Ireland played some sort of soccer match so all of Ireland has shut down. Ireland lost but, due to the magic rules of soccer, will proceed to the world cup.
Long overdue, a female by the name of Cybergoth was added to my muppets section today. I had a conversation with her on IRC and she just did not get it.
In yesterdays meeting I was informed that management felt my public relations, administrative and various other skills are not of the same quality as my technical skills and I was asked to step down as team leader of the computer incident response team. It was actually phrased much nicer than that, but the end result is the same. Management suggested Dave take over the role as team leader and I continue to act as a technical mentor in the role of security architect.
This change in roles would make it Dave's headache to deal with muppets so I am not sure if I should see as a demotion or a blessing. And so I relinquish command. Godspeed, Dancin' Dave.
(Very dramatic, do you not agree?)
Stayed at Dave's place until 2am and we agreed to continue early tomorrow before the soccer match.
I had two back to back meetings starting at 11am. First the weekly team
meeting and then in the afternoon a meeting with my manager's manager on the
future of the team within $EMPLOYER, including salary and business
support topics. The salary issue will be disclosed pending my "decision" on
change in roles offer made by management.
Nobody responded to my survey. This must mean no females read my diary any longer. Sniff, sniff.
Went into the office for a 11am meeting, or something.
It is 2 minutes to 8am! What am I doing out of bed at this hour on a Sunday? Answers on a postcard, please.
I wish to run a little survey, for no particular reason what so ever, amongst any female readers of my diary. Girls, I want you to imagine that you are spending the night with your partner. In the morning you both wake up within minutes of each other and chat for a bit. He then needs to go to the toilet and as he gets out of bed, you notice his large morning erection. How do you react? Do you giggle? Do you beg for permission to get some? Do you command him down on his back and ride him senseless? Do you complain at the prospect of wasting a perfectly good hardon and have him come back into bed? What do you do? I want to know.
All answers will be kept confidential and we will not sell your email address. Really.
Tori is a dirty little slut, by the way:
Look I'm standing naked before you Don't you want more than my sex I can scream as loud as your last one But I can't claim innnocence
It is 3pm and I have yet to recieve a single response to my survey. I fear I will recieve no responses.
I went to see the 6pm showing of "The Others" and it gave me a fucking heartattack. It is an excellent horrormovie and while they do use sudden cameramovements at times, I was on the edge of my seat because the story was scary, not because of some lame mood music playing in the background.
I could punch a hole in the wall. f-control has been moved to the same network as c-tower, and the downloads from the websites hosted on f-control is causing increased latency for my ssh sessions to c-tower. Gorm's bandwidth will be upgraded on November 20th. We will see if I can last that long without losing my mind.
I got out of bed at 9.15am. Madness.
Large parts of the world is still unable to view my homepage. The performance increase, across the entire Internet -- as a result of the lower number of visitors, is significant.
Santa Claus arrived by helicopter at the Shopping Centre this morning and I missed it. It completely slipped my mind. Very upsetting.
That was sarcasm.
I rolled into bed just after midnight.
Some people seem to still be unable to load my site after the IP changed yesterday. Funny enough it works for me, but many people in Denmark are still using the old DNS data.
I have been told it is snowing in Denmark. Imagine that.
I have been playing Counter-Strike and Quake 3 over the past few days. "Sir Alex was railed by Mighty Mouse." -- how depressing is that?
Lately I have noticed that I do not respond to discussions well any longer. I started doing this on purpose when accessing Usenet or reading mailing lists, because I felt there is no point in explaining myself to someone who listens for the purpose of responding to my point, rather than understanding it. So now when talking to people I will only state my view once and then not care if people get it or not. Today Dave and I disagreed on something relatively important and I found myself not bothering to discuss the subject.
It is an interesting development. Not optimal, but interesting.
f-control changed IP address today so if you had problems with reaching the site, that is the reason.
Amazon responded saying "It does appear that something may have gone awry with the delivery of your order" and they have created a replacement order at no additional cost. Nice.
Mick sent me a message asking what I was up to, but I was too tired to do anything so we will not be having dinner tonight. Perhaps tomorrow, or next week.
Crawled to bed around 10pm.
I stayed up all night and did not get tired until the morning. So I slept from 7am to 11am and met up with Dave later.
Mick and I will be going out for dinner Thursday or Friday. I meant to go to West for lunch today but I did not. Perhaps I will later this week. Do you find it confusing how everything around here is called West-something? I thought so. Let me clarify. The estate is called Westend Village. The shops are called Westend Retail Park and the local bar is called West. The local gym is called West Point but as it was here years before the rest of "West" I assume it takes its name from the US Military Academy of the same name.
The CFO is paying a visit to our server building on Friday, and people are being required to pack away cables, paper and anything else that may make the place look untidy. Keeping up appearances. How lame is that? I remember when Lou Gersner (IBM's CEO) visited the IBM buildings here in Dublin. Months before, the local management started painting hallways, fixing "bald" spots on the green lawn, etc.
I sent a note to orders@amazon asking if they could help me find the second consignment I ordered on October 17th. It has yet to arrive and was dispatched the same day as the other consignment which I recieved weeks ago.
Placed a pre-order for OpenBSD 3.0 and a couple of cool-looking posters.
At Dave's I found it difficult to concentrate on the tasks at hand. I went home early and straight to bed.
I woke up at 8.30am and headed into the office for 11 o'clock. The weekly meeting lasted an hour and a half, and afterwards Dave, Jerry and I went to Tante Zoe's for lunch. They make an excellent Gumbo. If I had to, I would be completely willing to end someone's life just to have a portion of their Gumbo.
Today was quite upsetting for my sensitive personality for a number of reasons: Dave laughed at me when I accidently referred to mainstream rapper "Puff Daddy" as "Puffy Dad". To me it is all the same shit and the fact that I did not remember his name speaks volumes about how important his music is to me. Once Dave stopped laughing a reference to my age quickly followed. Vague comments were made that perhaps I should start caring what people think of me. I do care! I care a lot.
We headed back to Blanchardstown late in the afternoon and I wanted to nap for an hour or two and then head over to Dave's and continue work on some projects. Unfortunately, I woke much too late and now I am unable to sleep again.
For a long time now I have been meaning to investigate reasonable ways of generating PDF and Postscript files from SGML or similar but I have no done so yet. I suspect it will help my productivity as I will be able to write our reports even if I do not have access to a Windows machine with Office installed. I have also considered learning TeX but while I may be motivated to learn it, the overhead might be too great for Dave and Jerry. I am not convinced generating documents from TeX would work in our environment. CVS controlled SGML files seems to be the way to go. If you are aware of suitable options I would like to hear them.
Supposedly the salary issue will be resolved this week, but preliminary reports of the result indicates there will be plenty of consequences to suffer. I want somewhere to place mongers.org and get my GIACs:
If $EMPLOYER can provide me with this, it would be a matter of not caring if
my employer takes my advice or not. I wonder if I can do that.
This router has taken away a number of headaches. A few issues remain but the fact alone that I can use my machines as the tools they are, instead of having to switch an Internet connection between them helps a lot. The router does not disconnect at random like my previous ISDN T/As have been know to do. Shouts out to Dave with the Cisco skills, and my anonymous benefactor who donated the router in the first place.
It is time for a filthy breakfast. What are you looking at? I eat rashers, eggs and toast for breakfast. I am seriously fit, I tell ya!
Pink Floyd released "Echoes" recently. It is a collection of their greatest work over the past many years. ("Greatest" being measured in sales). Still, the tracklist makes the album worthwhile for anyone who find Pink Floyd inaccessible. Once you have grown a liking to their hits, buy some of their other stuff.
I did it again. It is 11am and I have been up all night. I am still unable to dialup using my router. I will summon Dave's Cisco skills later if he is around. My laptop has also decided to stop communication with its serial port which means I cannot connect to the net with it until my router becomes functional.
I browsed through one of the erotica newsgroups on Google at some point and found a really excellent erotic story. I have been in contact with the author so I may be able to share the story with you in the adult section I have contemplated running on the Dominion for some time.
Dave used his Cisco skills and proved that my assumptions on the router problems were wrong. So now all my machines have Internet access and the router is online within a second of recieving a packet for the outside world. I will need to upgrade the IOS as it is vulnerable to a denial of service attack, set up some ACLs and another dialer group for dialling into work.
I went to bed around 7pm and woke up just before 11pm. 4 hours of sleep is just not good enough so I hope I will want to sleep more soon.
I went back to bed around midnight and slept the rest of the night.
It is 5am and sleep will not come to this tired body.
Around 6am I decided to go to bed, and Holy Sausageroll!, I have slept until 8pm, only waking up a few times for the briefest of moments. You should be proud of me.
Yop's are available in a number of flavours. Strawberry, raspberry, strawberry & vanilla plus the recent horrible addition of cola-flavour. I urge you to stay away from this flavour. If you do decide to try it and you hate it, I do not want you to waste my time by telling me how horrible it is, and how right I was. I know perfectly well how horrible it is, and how right I am. Got it?
In other news, IOS is a strange operatingsystem. When commands fail (e.g. isdn call interface bri0 1891150150) there appears to be no indication of why to the user. I never studied Cisco's documentation closely before and I always believed it was excellent. Now that I have been reading all of the documentation on the device in my posession, I realise it is quite lacking at times. For someone clueful who does not know a lot about router configuration, the documentation might as well not be there at all, as it simply contains step by step guides rather than information enough to understand and learn.
Using Cisco Fast Step made the situation even worse and I am now unable to login to the router. Fast Step configured the thing to require a username along with a password. The 'Line' LED comes on whenever I plug the ISDN cable into the router, which makes me think it does not understand to use basic-net3 as the switch type.
Alcohol does not help me sleep. At all. I growled and turned for a few hours then gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed.
An individual who wishes to remain anonymous has donated a type of Internet access device to the Alex Mental Relief Fund. The device should address the issues experienced with my other Internet access devices in the area of, well, Internet access. You may recall my complaints of certain features that made my connection die under certain circumstances.
I extend my deepest gratitude to my anonymous benefactor. (The identity of the benefactor is known to the editors.)
A discussion with my old friend Mr. Gooph caused me to go find an old picture on the net of a female who tore my heart to pieces some years ago. As we were talking about her I felt my heart beating faster, and as the subject turned to her ex-boyfriend who used to hit her, my blood boiled with fury. I was quite surprised at my strong reaction of just talking about her, after all this time.
The one that got away.
Tried napping around 10pm as I felt very tired, but got up and out of bed before midnight.
I have little passion left for anything these days. The hardware for mongers
has been sitting on my desk in work for months, I do not feel like working on
Dancer or any of my other personal projects, I am unable to concentrate on
reading for longer periods of time. Because of the issues in work, I do not
know if I will be working for $EMPLOYER in two months, nor if I will even be in
Ireland in two months. This hangs like a thunderstorm over my head, making me
unable to plan more than a few days ahead.
You are reading the official diary of a bitter, antagonistic and weary old man -- hey, at least I am writing in this thing.
And no, none of this means I am about to kill myself so hold the flood of sympathetic email. I trust you are aware of my theory on suicide versus genocide? Stop worrying and let me rant, god damn it.
I was unable to sleep again for most of the night. However, at 9am I looked at the time and two seconds later I looked again and it was 3.45pm. Err, oops. At least I am sleeping a little.
So I went out in the evening. Only Jerry and Brian showed up. We went to Kingsland for dinner and we stayed so late we missed the beginning of the Laugh so we decided to go to see Woodsy in the Porter House instead. My ears are ringing from the volume the man plays his guitar. Brian got drunk from 3 pints of Brain Blasta which was funny.
Some women were dancing behind us, and one kept rubbing herself against me. Most guys would have become interested, turned around and started chatting to her. I am not like most guys. I figured she was trying to snarf my wallet from my backpocket. Get away from me.
My hearing is really messed up.
At her request, I have been talking to my ex almost every day since I broke up with her last week. She felt it helped her ease the pain. We have not spoken for the past two days, however, because of my schedule and tiredness. This afternoon she wanted me to know she was ready to carry on alone so we have ceased talking. Godspeed Spirited One.