01.26.99
Untitled
Security Check
As a matter of fact, I wasn’t up at 4am this morning, as noted by the previous entry. It seems someone from the UK decided to play ‘Let’s search through cgi-bin’ and ran some of my scripts. From what I can tell, they were run and only run from a web browser, so it’s not like someone actually got into the system. And there aren’t any passwords listed inthe scripts, so there’s nothing there to worry about either.
No damage done, just a strange couple of heart stopping moments. It pays to be paranoid, I guess.
Oh, I got a job. 🙂
01.25.99
Regex Project Launch
I spent a few hours today getting the Regex Library fixed up. All the pages are actually linked, the navigation bars stylesheets and titles are in included files. The feedback forms work. Looks like everything’s set.
So then I e-mail Jeffery. jfiedl (by his e-mail address) is the author of Mastering Regular Expressions the most amazing technical book I’ve ever read. Published by O’Reilly of course. I let him know about the library’s existance. We’ll see what his reaction is.
I’ve been reading some journals that I picked up over the weekend. Seems like I’m coming into the last chapter of some stories, next-to-last on others. But what a strange feeling reading about someone’s thought’s that are really there. Really expressive. Really Real. Really frightening.
Tomorrow’s a huge day for me. I’ve been dreading it all weekend. ‘Two paths diverged in the woods and I, I took…’ The right one? The wrong one? The right one for me? for us? for now? for later?
01.24.99
General Notes on Journals
I finally developed a standard navigation bar for the bottom of the pages here. It’s a bit over-done, but I can modify it really easily going forward. I still need to add it to the Mode section of the site.
I started looking around at online journal resources on the web. Amy had told me about the numerous site and web rings that are dedicated to the community that some journaler are part of.
I decided to add Dwelling to a few of the listings and apply to one of the web rings. The rings seem to be pretty exclusive, and Amy has said that there tends to be elitism in some of the groups. I’m not sure why I’ve done this, but I think that most of it is so that I can see what other people are doing with their work.
One thing I’d like to so is put some more detail into my entries. Amy’s been honest with me about what she finds appealing in journals and diaries, and it seems to come down to emotion and depth.
Emotion and depth. It seems like I’m always struggling to add both to my life and interactions with others. I feel like this really becomes an aspect of my work environment. “Professionalism” is just another way of saying “hide yourself.”
In some ways this is okay. People who have to deal with customers are not representing themselves, they are representing the company. Someone’s much more likely to trust a bank teller in a suit than one in a tank top and sneakers.
But when I’m in an environment where the personalities of individuals are going to be part of the work flow, I really think it’s necessary that people are honest, open and themselves.
So I will be more open here, more emotive. and give more depth. That’s always been an underlying aspect of this project, but now, in order to develop it, it will be a bigger part. Wish me luck.
Dream #1
I’m back stage doing community theater in the gym from my elementry school. There’s no costumes, no one has memorized their lines and the director has taken ill. We’re doing some sort of shakespearian telling of a greek tragedy, The Odessey with lots of thee’s and thou’s tossed in. There is an audience of maybe 20 people, but they are seated at the back of the gym, in those fold-up metal chairs. There’s about 50 meters between the edge of the stage and the first of two rows of the audience.
The show starts and people begin reading their lines from the books. The first people are doing fair enough, but I suddenly realize that they’ve started with Scene 2, completely skipping, scene 1, which I’m supposed to be in. Back stage I tell evryone that after Scene 2 we’re going back to Scene 1, and just call the discontinuity, ‘Art’. (A tribute to Tarintino?)
Unfortunately, the other actor in my scene is nowhere to be found. The boyfriend of one of the other actors is milling about backstage; I take him by the collar, drag him over to a round table that has a few copies of the play on it. I tell him to read the part of Laserio.
Scene 1 starts with my line, which for some reason looks like pure Latin. As I start it, I give the reading my full gusto, jumping off the edge of the stage and ranting my lines, raving and stomping across the field of concrete between the stage and the audience. The book in one hand and my other hand a fist, I am at times keniving, then bold, agressive, then reserved. I read my lines reasonably well, but each time I finish my lines, I have to wait a few minutes while the boyfriend actor struggles to read the simple lines that he has. During my parts, he simply stands on the stage watching me as I release enough energy to supply the Western Power Grid into my lines.
The scene and the dream went on for several pages in the book. I wish I had taken the time to memorize the lines, I would write them here.
I don’t remember my dreams very often and this is only the second or third time I’ve ever written one down. I jumped out of bed and ran to my machine as soon as I realized I had lost the flow of the dream because I had woken up.
Meanings? I have no idea. Who were the people in the dream? I didn’t recognize any of them, though I had the strangest sense that the director of the play was my Personal Finance teacher from high school.
01.23.99
Small update
Instead of reversing the order of the entries on the page, I’ve decided to add an intra-page anchor that will allow those who wish to bookmark the bottom of the page to do so. Note the link at the top of the front page, in the intro text.
In case anyone was wondering, ‘She’s a Rainbow’, the music used in the latest iMac ads is by the Rolling Stones. http://leden.tref.nl/jongefrd/Rainbow.htm
01.22.99
Flabergasted!
From the Washington Post:
But when Boies asked him to identify what portion of Microsoft’s profits come from the sale of its operating system vs. other products, Schmalensee said he could not provide a precise number because Microsoft doesn’t use computers to track the data.
“They record operating system sales by hand on a piece of paper,” he said. “The state of Microsoft’s internal accounting systems don’t always rise to the level of sophistication one might expect from a firm as successful as it it.”
Bwah! (sputter sputter) Wha! HUH!?! WHAT!?!?
They’ve got to be kidding!
Activities
Things haven’t been all dreary around here. In fact Tuesday Kam and I went to see Neil Gaiman at Powell’s http://www.powells.com City of Books. I’m not a huge fan, but what I have read I have enjoyed. He’s a great story teller. He read from his new novel, Stardust.
Yesterday I went out to lunch with my friend Jock, an ex-coworker from http://www.newi.com . He suggested that I have the entries in the Intro be listed in chronological order rather than reverse chronological order. I’ve wavered on this in the past, and I’m willing to leave it up to the audience. Let me know your thoughts.
This morning Amy had a dental appointment that should have been nice and quick but the staff or someone forgot about her, and we ended up waiting in the office for 1.5 hours. It seems that along with the concepts of ‘taking care of your patient’, doctors and such should remember that health care is far more a market economy now. Dissgruntled patients/consumers will drop a physician as quickly as they can pick up the phone book.
01.20.99
All better
I’m glad I built in a backup system of sorts into this thing. I over-wrote the journal and archive files today, and just noticed this evening.
Good Things
A couple of good interviews in the past couple of days, but now I wait to see if any of them bite. That’s the hardest part, waiting, wondering, think of how their sizing me up. I know it’s nothing personal but the thoughts are still there.
Got a final paycheck from OMSI that has helped our finacial situation enormously. We’re doing well for another week or so. by that time some freelance work should be playing out well, so we should be able to get by.
Good reading http://www.learner.org/exhibits/personality/ if you’ve got some time.
In the real world, I’m tackling Crime & Punishment. Far better than the Philip K. Dick I had been reading. The Man in the High Castle seems to be one of his more respected works, but I’m a bit underwhelmed.
This desk is still a mess. 🙂