September 29, 2003
Who here thinks that state-of-the-fart would be a really good name for a band? Weird Al album? Blog?
Show of hands?
Ok, right, nobody?
10:40 PM part of a balanced breakfastSeptember 25, 2003
The paperclips are like little cockroaches holding on for dear life, holding my life and my papers together.
02:43 PM part of fragmentsSeptember 24, 2003
Found in production code that is deployed around the world:
Public Function Whatever(ByRef poStream As Variant, _
ByVal psTempDir As String, _
Optional ByRef poConn As ADODB.Connection) As Long
''' REPLACE THIS WHATEVER FUNCTION NAME WITH SOMETHING MEANINGFUL THROUGHOUT THE
'''' FUNCTION !!!!!
Lessons learned:
- You don't have to be very good at what you do in order to get rich; you can just be lucky and competent - but you do have to work hard.
- You certainly don't have to be nice in order to be successful.
- There is no way to fake experience, although you can fake knowledge and confidence.
- Just because somebody has traveled all over the world and met a lot of people doesn't mean that they have any sort of perspective as to where they fit into the world; they can still feel as if they are very important and have a lack of understanding of other people's feelings and motivations.
- I can be a very hateful person.
- You tend to hate people that are slight variations on your worst self-image; you hate what you are but don't want to be.
September 22, 2003
Things to do while taking a 'break' from work.
- Stare at your desk
- Read tales about far-away places like the suburb on the other side of that hill
- Jot down small observations about yourself: Likes cake.
- Spend entirely too much time on small things, like reformatting documents using cool fonts
- Imagine yourself high above your office staring down at all the people working like idiots
- Read up on web stuff at various hip websites, all of which copy each other's style.
- Organize your web bookmarks
- Clean off your desk
- Walk around the building
- Go outside and call your spouse
- Organize the documents on your desktop
- Do pushups in your cubicle, then stop right before somebody thinks you are masturbating
- Think about what led you to waste your life without so much as a fight
September 19, 2003
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell
September 17, 2003
Today I actually used the knowledge that in some browsers, the order that you specify link pseudo-classes matters. The knowledge bursted out of me like a portly stripper with tendonitis waiting inside some bachelor's cake, solving an important problem in the minimal amount of time and making me happy. I'm glad I took this job, because today I feel like a web developer and not just a software developer.
But then again, this all boils down to the color of some letters on a screen somewhere, so it is not really something to get excited about.
10:16 PM part of work"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
HL Mencken.
11:54 AM part of inspirationSeptember 16, 2003
My style would be more Stealth Rap, but whateva.
12:27 PM part of a balanced breakfastSeptember 14, 2003
It did not feel real to me until we actually got there and I saw here struggling to breath; only able to move one arm she would alternate between putting it over her head and laying it across her chest. There was a small cart of sandwiches at the entry of the room; it was put there by the nurse who knew the sequence of events that would occur.
Her breath was a painful background, and her face was marked with her struggle not to panic, not to be afraid. Never one to complain even after hip and knee surgeries back during a time when they were less sophisticated - never one to complain even after fighting off pneumonia multiple times in her 80s - never one to complain despite losing the ability to read, write, and hear converstations (her favorite things) - she was crumbling, and she would look up at whichever face was nearest and try to say something. Unintelligible to us, we interpreted it as 'water' and gave it to her on a sponge; a few times it sounded more like 'help' to me and I struggled to hold it in.
The nurse who spoke with us was calm and followed procedure: a little dose of a strong pain killer, and then a morphine patch, and then a stronger dose of morphine up until the body relaxes enough to let go. She was the one who gave us distance and calmed us down, and she was the one who was actually there when she passed.
September 11, 2003
2 years ago this morning after the towers fell I did the following things:- Put down my coffee and quit studying.
- Went to the library and did not look at the TV.
- Called my wife.
- Called my sister and told her not to bother coming on campus.
- Went home.
- Ate two hot dogs and watched the news.
- Took a nap.
- Woke up and studied.
- Went to sleep.
September 09, 2003
Looking back, what most impressed me about her during our first meeting was her natural defensive-driving skills. Our first date followed the typical high-school script: eat at Denny's (but this time without the friends who introduced you), only one of us can drive, so she did since she was a year (felt like a lifetime) older than I was. On the way there she was driving and I was small-talking when two grown men in a pickup truck came over into our lane while looking at a house over to their left. She swerved off the road into someone's yard while honking the horn. They heard her just in time to move back over so that she could come back onto the road before the yard ended and we hit a telephone pole and fire hydrant on the corner.
She hadn't been driving long, but she reacted the right way and saved her car and us without breaking a sweat. How she reacted afterward was a little different:
You stupid motherfucker! Fuck you you stupid piece of shit! That's right, you better not look over here you fucking dumbass or you'll swerve and almost kill somebody else!
She started shaking and cried a little after it sunk in. If I were to ask her about it now, she would probably get a little worked up - she is still mad really - but if it happened again we would probably be safe.
01:08 PM part of fragmentsSeptember 02, 2003
Hey guys, if somebody is paying you to replace all of the software that runs their business, don't you think that they don't want it to work exactly like the old stuff?
Well, I mean, we've got to make sure that our stuff let's them run their business.
Yeah, but wouldn't they just keep the old stuff in since it works and it will take our stuff awhile to get stable?
Well, no they are replacing the old stuff because it is old.
Yeah, sure, but this isn't a car or a house; software doesn't grow cobwebs or rust. Their current system works really well.
They are paying you to write software that runs just like their old stuff, so just be quiet, ok?
Ok, but they are going to be pissed when they see that they are still going to have to fucking pedal to get the machine to start.
Ha, ha. Real fucking funny.
07:54 PM part of workAnd as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?: We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.
We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
...
Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of the northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can, and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I moved to Atlanta with a certain vision of it that I have found to be in stark contrast to its realities. I grew up in a city in Georgia that was close enough to Atlanta to feel its modernizing influence in many ways, and I grew up wanting to move to the big city. My limited experience with it growing up was either through the study of civil-rights history or through personal experience. Our few trips to Atlanta left me with the impression that all kinds of people lived there; that it was the melting pot that I had imagined.
After living here for the last few months I have found that Atlanta is as bad or worse in terms of residential segregation compared with other areas that I expected to be behind the times such as Columbia, SC. I lived in a northern Georgia county, which I jokingly refer to as land of the white people because of its 4% minority population. Atlanta is just like everywhere else, the whites live on one side of town and the blacks live on the other.
Atlanta in some ways is worse than other places because it pretends to be modern; it stands up when people ask what city will lead race relations in the next century. Even though there are many rich, successful black men and women in Atlanta, in my suburban life I don't see or hear about any of them - they live to my south.
02:45 PM part of unavoidable sadness