To continue with a trend I've set, here's a list of my current scars/scrapes, etc:
*cut on left thumb from when I tried to open a jar of mediterranean pickles and sliced it open. Doesn't look like its gonna heal
*same hand, broken pinky. I think that happened when I was little and my mom closed a door on it, but I'm not sure. Never bothered to get it fixed, about 50% mobility in that finger. It sticks out at a weird angle. If anyone asks, I played volleyball professionally.
*right hand, index finger, big-ass scar from when I pierced it with a piece of glass. I broke a vase and was trying to glue it back together. I've not seen so much blood before. Still no feeling in most of that digit.
*both hands, forearm scars from my pet rabbit, ChiChi. She was an amazing pet but would get freaked out whenever there were cars and slice me up as she tried to get out of my lap. Most healed but some got infected and scarred.
*nose; lots of scar tissue there. Scraped most of the skin from it when I fell on my face. Long time ago so now the skin there is extra smooth. Broke it twice playing basketball in high school. Had it 'fixed' so I could use it for breathing this year. Still doesn't work.
*face; scars from chickenpox. I'd pick at the scabs and not let them heal. Meh.
*neck, left side, there's a little spot that kinda looks like a birthmark. I was bored in high school and wold put iodine on that spot every day to see what would happen. It permanently marked the skin; kinda like my own home-made tattoo.
*left ankle; really bad sprain the week of graduation in college. I couldn't walk for 2 weeks. Swelling went away after 6 months. Its not stable yet but I remain hopeful.
That's all I remember at the moment
Today I drove into Pikesville to buy some cake for the new years' party. I got 2 kinds: chocolate mousse and fruit torte. Both delicious and parve. There's a special bakery there that makes these cakes; they're magnificently delicious and go with everything. I miss living in that area; its a nice shtetl.
Was watching weeds the past couple of weeks. I should not like that show: its about suburbia and family life. But for some strange reason I enjoy it. I keep trying to find an episode I can watch with my mother but it seems they get more and more outrageous. At first it was the profane language use. Then they started showing some risque scenes of lovemaking. And the episode I watched today; a 12 year old went to a massage parlour for a handjob. There's just no way I can watch that with my mother.
I'm always looking for shows to watch with her; I feel terribly guilty about something and always try to find ways to get her involved. I don't remember my parents back in Russia but ever since I can remember they haven't really had any hobbies or interests. At all. They work, they come home, drink a bottle or 2 of wine at dinner and watch tv till its time for bed. My dad is too much like me for me to help him. But I'm always trying to get my mother involved in stuff so she has something to do. I got her a mosaic kit last week and am hoping she'll start putting those together. People need interests/hobbies in their life. Mine is the internet and reading. And to some extent, playing games online. They need something too. I got her hooked on watching dog whisperer and now its me or the dog. She loves animal shows so I'm always looking to find some to watch with her.
Currently, we watch:
*dog whisperer
*its me or the dog
*the it crowd
*select episodes from the office/its always sunny in philadelphia
*dog town
Finally got a chance to see Slumdog Millionaire. What an extraordinary movie. Excellent camera work, very low-key acting. Just overall, an amazing movie. I love all redemption movies and this one was a classic. I look forward to watching it again. Got me to thinking about how much I admire drive and determination in other people. For as long as I remember, I've wanted a goal in life. It just seems so silly and pointless. The main character in the movie had 1 goal and pursued it all his life. I wish I could have that. But then again, so does every other real person, I think.
Remembered work today for some reason. I keep going back to the performance appraisal and the one negative that I had on there was how my previous PM said I wasn't willing to support their integration. He actually gave me a bad review for that. What an asshole. Ugh, it makes me mad still.
I can't seem to let it go. Here it is in a nutshell: that project was poorly thought-out in the beginning. It was all on internal R&D funds so there were no customers. The reqs all came from this one guys' rather large anus. And they kept changing from week to week. Every month I'd get additional reqs to support new hw. I didn't get any help and the other guys in the group were major assholes. There was no communication top-down or horizontally. The mngmnt would make all the decisions pretty arbitrarily and I would be told at the last minute. At the end, they ran out of money and I was told to clear out my desk. Fine, I moved to a new project. A few months later I get a call saying I have to support their integration offsite in 2 days. Huh?!? I don't work for you anymore, remember? So I got yelled at by my previous PM about not being available at the drop of a pin. And my current PM yelled at me cause they pulled me away for a good 2-3 weeks. I got crap from both programs for that one. And now my PAS says I didn't cooperate enough.
The guy is such an ass; he's a terrible manager. He uses people when he needs them and dumps then when he's done. One of the groups that worked with us and gave me a lot of support; we were supposed to take them to lunch. Never happened. Hell, teh SOB still owes me a few lunches cause I always delivered early. In spite of the reqs changing on me. I hate knowing I'm being used.
What makes this worse is that I can't think of how to get even. Usually, I try to come up with a semi-plausible scenario where I get my vindication. In this case, what options do I have: forget about it and pretend like everything's fine so when I get called next year to support their project again, I just get it over with and don't even bother trying to get out of it. Or, I can try to put up a big fuss about how I'm not responsible for that work anymore. But when I tried it this year, I got shit on my PAS and he kinda threatened me about not having a career unless I'm willing to 'be flexible', I a flexible, when people respect me. He can probably blackball me forever in my company; he's a pretty high-level manager.
So the best get-even scenarios I can come up with is try to get out-promoted and get him fired in 10-15 years, which is unlikely at best cause he'll be retired/dead by then. Or take my keys to his car, which is resorting to petty vandalism. I really don't have any other options here.
I collect grudges like fighters collect scars.
Today was a good day. I don't get to say that too often.
Barnes&Noble book buying expedition on the way back from my acupuncture session.
A couple of hours at my parents' friends house. I usually refuse to attend these but they have a dog; australian shepherd, and I will do anything to play with it. I watch the dog whisperer religiously and got to try out a few techniques today. They worked!!!
That dog gets very excited when people come in. I withheld my affection until after she calmed down. That put me in a dominant position, I think. And then whenever she would start barking, I would hold on to her collar until she stopped. At first she struggled a lot but soon she didn't. It worked just like Cesar said; I've controlled the situation and got what I wanted.
Another big thing was playing catch with her; she'd bark a lot if I tried to throw the tennis ball to her. So when I stopped she paid attention right quick and I was able to modulate her behavior. I feel like a dog behaviorist now; so sweet!
Had a few people over for fight night today. It was a boring affair but twas nice to share it with others. I did not expect Wandi Silva to get KO'd. Nor did I think Mir would win nor Griffin lose. I was 0/3 for the night. All fights were over in 2 rounds or less. The under-card was boring. Generally, an underwhelming evening. Got slightly drunk and headache-y with a few beers. Ah, what it is to be young and foolish!
Sorry, got carried away with the restivities going on all around. Thought I'd give a brief status update on my situation as well as a promise. More on that later.
I've been on vacation now for over a week and it is amaaazing. I don't feel guilty doing nothing because I truly deserve this break. Or so I tell myself.
The ai class went alright, surprisingly. I expected a lot worse. The proff didn't question us too much and I ended up doing no work on the paper/poster. First time I got a free ride, I think. Its not bad but the stress of not knowing if it'll get done or not is almost as bad as having to do the work yourself.
I've gotten myself a hanukah present: a whole bunch of books off my wishlist. Books are probably the love of my life. When I was a little kid, I'd daydream about having a library in my house; imagine the extravagance of having a separate room just for your books where you can go and read. And now that I'm working I can afford to buy all the books I want. Still don't have a library for them. And my mother refuses to let me store them in my room because apparently they collect dust. So she stores them in the basement. Whatevs, at least I own them. Someday, I shall have a real library...
I'm real excited about finding a book by this fellow "Fisk". He got the Chomsky stamp of approval and he writes history/journalism books. My contemporary history collection is rather sparse. Additionally, I'll be the proud owner of prozac nation, 1st ed. The pre-movie version. As well as a work from O'Brien, the bloke who wrote leaving las vegas. A couple of others I can't recall right now.
What with the vacationeering, I've had the time to spend an afternoon in bed with a book. Haven't done that since college. Its perfect on a rainy day with a glass of hot chocolate.
I didn't go to kindergarden so I read instead. We had a very large collection of books in Russia. None of them children's. I grew up on Jules Verne translations and masters of russian science fiction - a series of at least 30 tomes that you had to buy on the black market. We threw ours out when we moved to America; to my regret. The librarians all hated me cause I read all of their recommendations and its not like a real library where you can check out what you want; you check out what they give you. So I ended up re-reading the books in our library over and over again. I think I read most books at least 2-3 times and my favourites, much more than that.
In fact, one of the games I liked to play is try to calculate the total price of all the books at our house on a toy abacus I had. Never was able to do it.
I think I might spend the rest of my life trying to build a library that was as large as the one my parents had back home. Strangely enough, I'm ok with that.
Just woke up. Got home today and thought about napping a bit. Woke up just now.
I should not be awake right now; its entirely too cold for that.
This should be a pretty interesting week for me.
On monday, I've got the yearly get-together party with my HR manager. This will include mostly people I don't know as well as some people I don't like. Such greats as the NanoManager will make an appearance.
To get ready for this particular disaster, I'll need to prepare: shave, shower, combing of hair, finding a matching pair of socks + underwear. UGH! Just listing it out here is exhausting.
Next up is the poster sessions at my soon-to-be-ex-graduate program. I know its going to be a failure because I've not done anything to prepare for it. There's no possible scenario where this can go well.
And I'm going to miss the Terminator series on the telly. UGH ^ 2!
On thursday is my professional performance evaluation. That means that I also have to somewhat look respectable that day. More socks,combings,showers,underwear....
Also, somewhere in there is when I'll get yelled at about trying to stabilize the failing build, not attending the 3hr meeting of Doom and generally not doing anything at work.
I'm a terrible employee, no excuses about that, but its just soooo hard to care. This weekend, I've spent in bed trying to will myself to go see the remake of that old movie starring Neo. So far, no luck.
I fell asleep during the fight night yesterday and tweaked my neck so now it doesn't really turn well. This is actually a Good Thing because my posture is now impeccable.
Today's daily frustration is brought to you by work.
How hard is it to put down code in a sensical manner? What I mean is that you want to have your src,headers folders at the same level on the build structure, or at least roughly similar. What I'm seeing at work is src->folder1->includes. They put down includes folders in right underneath the source directory. Man alive, why? Also, I'm seeing src folders 3 levels deep reference includes 2 levels up.
But that's not the worst thing they do. We use eclipse which is an IDE, but they don't trust it to build correctly because its 'magic' or something. I thought black boxes were a Good Thing. So anyway, the edits are done in eclipse and the making/running is done on command-line. I asked why. I was told because its easier. Why is it easier? Because eclipse is too complicate. And then I see them editing code in gedit.
So fine, everyone has their quirks. And some people are just silly. If this didn't affect me, I wouldn't care. Unfortunately, it does. I put all my build artifacts under build while the manual process just dumps it out in cwd. That means that their scripts will work with the eclipse directory structure sometimes. So anytime someone checks something in, I've got about a 25% chance of it not working correctly because of pathing issues. I now spent about half my coding time trying to get the eclipse build working. Trying to reason with these people has not worked so far; they tell me to 'just use the command line'. I want to tell them to 'just GTFO' but am afraid to.
And today, when I brought up this issue again; that sometime in the future, a sane developer might actually use eclipse to maintain the heaping pile of cow manure that we're putting together, my coworker questioned why we should be using eclipse at all when the command line works just as well. That's the intellectual equivalent of making the argument for telegraphs over the telephone.
The cherry on top is that today is thursday and I have the weekly 3hr meeting, my ai class paper is due monday which I haven't started and I'm almost certain I'll drop out of grad school for the 2nd time.
To end things on a positive note, I have discovered Gouda smoked cheese and my life has never been the same. I don't care that it makes me obese, I'm going in the kitchen to have some chocolate soy milk and a hunk of gouda!
Worked a bit on the scraping project today. This is one of my small projects; something I keep around when I have a few hours to kill. But nothing too involving.
The idea is that I have had a xanga account followed by a lj account followed by vox. Right now when I blog, my entry is owned by whichever host I'm using. So in the case of xanga, I outgrew the atmosphere a long time ago. And yet there's still no way to get my data out and transfer it somewhere else. There's nigh near 4 years of entries in there; I refuse to abandon it.
So I've hacked up a little screen scraper in ruby with Mechanize/Hpricot to get my blogs out. It was my first time playing around with JQuery/XPath and I gotta say; I was very pleasantly surprised. Its nice!
Currently, I can dl all my blog entries and save them off for later processing, ordered by date of blog. So the next problem to solve is what do I do with all that data - in my case, over 260 individual entries? Vox is a PoS; its way spammy and has ads. Etc, ad naseum.
It doesn't make sense to jump to another provider so they can lock in my data again.
I've been considering publishing it through Google Base; their open dbase api. And perhaps building out a simple UI running directly on top of base; its got all the javascript hooks to query it.
Then, I can self-host the javascript/html anywhere, even on a free host. Its minimal size and all static content. All the business logic would get pushed to the front-end. In fact, there would be *no* back-end to this thing. The client would talk directly with GBase so there's no bandwidth that you have to pay for. The advantages are that its available to anyone and the user can pick how they display the data.
I wonder if a blogging platform that is open exists already? It should, but I've never heard of it.
In high school, we had this teacher, Morah Freidman. She was a very strict disciplinarian; you were not allowed to speak and any bathroom trip were to be under 3 minutes in length, and even then if too many people went, she would get mad. That by itself, did not make her extraordinary, by any means. There were quite a few hard-asses in my school. Unfortunately for us, she for some reason believed that we were slow. Not in the repeat-it-a-second-time-so-everyone-understood-it way. Oh no, she assumed the entire class were blabbering idiots who could go incontinent at any moment. She must have believed us to be severely handicapped and mentally retarded, at the very least. Because the things she said and 'taught' were not high-school level. For one lesson she'd have us memorize about 10 different people and their contributions. And she kept quizzing us on it for months. Literally, she could not believe that everyone got it already, so at the start of every class she'd go through everything we ever learned from the first class till now. And maybe had 10 minutes at the very end to 'teach' us something new.
This was a novel experience for everyone, I think. This must have been 9th grade. Some kids are already thinking of college, SAT, PSATs and honours classes. And here's this teacher who treats the entire class as if we're the children of drug-abusing, feeble-minded, syphilitic parents. A few protested; first by speaking to her privately. I've heard second-hand that she ignored such pleas. Then going to the principal, who did not interfere. Finally, a few kiss-ups inevitably decided to just learn the material that she kept 'teaching' us so well, that she would have no choice but to teach us something new. That backfired terribly and she ended up ignoring them for the rest of the semester as show-offs.
Eventually, we realized that we could not escape Morah Friedman and just ignored her. She would rant and rave about how we didn't want to learn anything. We would collectively stare at the ceiling, or, if you were lucky, the window. The whole situation was ridiculous but we had no recourse, we endured.
Come spring-time, everyone was staring out the windows. So Morah Friedman, in her infinite wisdom, decided we can have class outside. So she split the class into 2 teams and had us play 'Red Rover', with an educational twist. She'd get to decide who'd 'Come Over' based on our answering her questions. She'd stand to the side and say: "Evan, what does this and this mean?" And young Evan would answer at her and if she deemed the answer correct, he'd get the chance to run the 100 feet to the other side. If he did not answer correctly, she'd pick someone else.
At this point, we were all successfully trained and just went along with it. Except, apparently, for Evan. He answered the question but instead of running 'over', he stopped in the middle, dropped trough, and ran around in circles screaming gibberish and gesticulating wildly.
Morah Friedman had a major freakout and young Evan was never seen back in the classroom with her; he was punished with detention every day we had class for the rest of the semester.
Its only today while I was sitting in a 3-hour meeting that I realized why he did that. Its not that he wanted to make her mad; its just he's exhausted all other possible ways to protest the utter stupidity of Morah Friedman's rules. He could not take it anymore and he just lost it. That was his protest; taking his pants off and mooning the entire class, because all his other requests were ignored. He was not given any other options.
I bring this up because I'm sitting in this meeting with the team lead talking utter gibberish at me; about stuff that's not even our focus. We're supposed to go around the room with status and problems. Instead, its 3 hours in, and he's still talking. I can't understand what he's saying. I mean, I hear him but it makes no sense. Some 2 hours in, I'm not even sure its English anymore. What am I supposed to do? I can't leave; that's a big no-no. I can't make him stop, cause he's on a roll. What do I do? What CAN I do?
I remember young Evan then and start laughing hysterically.. There's no way of resolving this. I have no options left. All I can do is get up on the table, drop my pants and scream. Cause I've tried everything else to make him stop. Who knows, maybe this will work. After 3 hours, it suddenly begins to seem like a perfectly reasonable response.
When every avenue of protest you have is exhausted, you come up with some pretty inventive outlets for your frustration. Young Evan had the right idea. What he lacked in finesse and refinement, he made up for in execution. Alas, I did not go through with my personal protest. But I'll be fucked stupid if I go to that meeting next week.
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