Manic Oppressive

I just finished reading Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. Pretty good book. It was recommended to me in High School (My senior year, I think). I had started it then but didn’t finish it until today.

It is a novel about the history of philosophy. Definitely more in the juvenile/young adult category. I kind of wish that I had finished it in high school, because then I would have started my existential angst a lot sooner. Maybe I would be over it now.

But the fact that I had finally finshed something five years after I started made me think of something… I rarely “finish” anything. In my own line of work, nothing is ever finished so this sort of makes sense. There is no “complete version” of any software titles that I’m aware of. The hapless users always have a new one to look forward to at some point.

But in other parts of my life, I realize that I have extended the unfinished aspects to, well, everything. I always end up starting some huge project and it never ends. More projects than not are still alive and kicking, though. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to finish them.

Which gives me an interesting point to ponder before I start my next project, whatever that happens to be. Maybe I’ll just

At dinner last night, with my immediate family, I remarked that I was working on a blog-piece. But only because I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write anything.

I was thinking, “I asked around for a firepoker, because I hadn’t been to the emergency room recently.” They didn’t find that all that funny, probably because they were all around the last time I injured myself. Playing freeze tag. I ended up not going to the emergency room, but I was thinking about it.

It has been kind of weird, travelling with my brother and his fiance. My brother is slowy changing into… well. They needed a map of the area, and there was a perfectly good map in the car, which was in the parking lot. We were in their hotel room. He mentions that the map is in the car, and that he might just go get it.

And then he asks her if he should go get. So they engage in a conversation about who should get the map. I was about to say, “To heck with it, I’ll get the map”, at which point I would hurl myself off the balconey.

But she had convinced him that it was, in fact, ok to get the map. Or maybe they decided they didn’t need the map, I don’t remember; I was crying to myself in the closet.

Fullerton, CA. I just learned that I finally had money again, after the madness with changing my checking account. Took the paycheck a few days to get into the new account. So the money’s finally there, but I didn’t get to hang out with “The Gang” one last time before leaving. So I decided to hang out in the downtown Fullerton area.

It doesn’t feel like L.A. area burb here. In fact, the downtown area almost has a small town like quality with big city people. Normal people. In fact, someone who could easily be my neighbor just crossed the street.

In fact, this place reminds me a lot of Tucson in more ways than one. I have a (possibly) bad habit of wandering into really big music stores, such as the Chicago Store in Tucson. In Fulleron, I wandered into Mo’s Fullerton Music Centers. (no website?). This time around, I actually bought some stuff, mainly Bach’s Two Part Inventions transposed for guitars and a fingerstyle book that contains guitar music for Ashokan Farewell. But the place is much much bigger than sheet music; they got pianos and cellos and penny whistles and instruments that us normal people haven’t heard of.

I almost bought another guitar, but was able to restrain myself. Barely. Someday, I think, I will get me one of those. It sounded a heck of a lot better than other classical guitars that I’ve played for twice the tag price, and my fingers didn’t dance on the fretboard on those guitars.

Anyway, that’s me in Downtown Fullerton.

The past few weeks I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for OpenSolaris to finally open up. Yesterday, I got the email and now there is no doubt that I’ll die alone.

This is very cool. Having the source code to the operating system that I do most of my “real” work on. Already I know why some things on Solaris work the way they do (which can sometimes be confusing). Now there’s a bunch of stuff that I want to do, but I doubt that I have the time.

We’ll see.

Wouldn’t a lisp-based user shell be really cool?

Ahem.

So I may have mentioned that I ran out of shaving cream recently. No big deal; this happens to me every few months. So I went out and bought a brand new can of Gillette’s finest.

When I took the lid off, the entire top of the can came off, exposing the little white tube that the foam comes out of. It turns out that it is impossible to put the top back on correctly. The result is that when I try and dispense the foam, I get this dinky little stream out of the hole, but the entire top part of the can gets filled up.

Not I got a say that I use the weird stuff that doesn’t turn into a lather until you rub it. However, when it gets dispensed into a small area, it has a tendency to expand. And expand. And expand.

Half an hour after I shaved, I wandered back into the bathroom and noticed that there was one hell of a lot of foam in my sink. On the counter. On the floor. Slowly migrating in the general direction of Starbucks so that it could, no doubt, start it’s own blog.

After a bitter battle where I lost two of my closest friends, I was finally able to clean up the mess, however there is still the faint smell of soap lingering in my apartment.

I think that I will write a letter to Gillette discussing my problem, but only because I think that it’s a huge safety issue.

So here I am, trying out the new computer. At Starbucks, a business I never go to (unless it’s free, which it is tonight). The bummer is that the wireless connection prices are way to expensive for me to justify paying for it. $6.00 an hour? And as much as I appreciate SSL, I’m not going to just whip out me credit card in public and make a purchase over a questionable connection.

I mean, really.

And man, there are a lotta cops around tonight. Of course, this is a Starbucks. But
there were a buch of them driving around my apartment complex earlier tonight, and there are a bunch here. It’s a pity that they weren’t at my complex last night, cause some jokers stole our mailbox.

No big deal.

I go to check the mail this evening, and there’s a hand-written sign. It says something to the effect of, “The mail boxes were broken into. Most of the mail was stolen. This happened before today’s delivery.”

So I check my mail anyway, expecting all that important mail I needed to me missing. But I was wrong! I did get the Jury Duty notice.

I’m still wondering what kind of criminal actually steals mail in mass form from apartment complexes. I can imagine, in my mind, that there are a bunch of guys sitting around bored out of their minds.

“We should do something…” one of the guys says, taking the final drag on a cigarette.
“Yeah.” His buddy agrees, “Hey, let’s go commit a federal offense!”
“Dude! That is such a good idea… We haven’t done that in weeks.”
“But what should we do? Smuggling drugs from South America is so *boring*…”
“Hey, let’s go rip off a mailbox!”
“Dude! That is such a good idea!”

And there they go.

I got a friendly call from the nice folks at District30, asking me what was going on with my car. Well…

Long story follows.

A while back, maybe two years ago, I noticed an odd sound coming from the passenger side of my car whenever I made a hard left turn. You know, like pulling into a parking space or pulling an evasive U-turn while eluding the press. Back then, I thought it was the brakes, so I took it to the dealership.

“Yeah, my brakes sound like Barry White getting run through a cheese grater,” I say. They look at it, tell me nothing is wrong, but I really should replace the warped piece of plastic that causes the light on the dash to illuminate for a measly $249…

Occasionally the problem would go away. Sometimes I would just crank up the music so I didn’t have to deal with it. But recently (well, a year ago) my radio was stolen so that option is no more.

Well, on Wednesday, I was coming home from the camera shop, and I noticed the sound while going straight, not braking. “Problem,” I think.

So I parked and looked at the wheel well on that side, and noticed that there was this plastic thing that was once bolted to the body, and it came off and is rubbing against the tire — causing friction and hence noticeable burn marks, I should mention.

So I tucked the plastic that was rubbing onto the tire into place (well, sort of; the whole undercarriage seems to be a single piece of plastic) and tried not to worry about it.

And then I remembered a story from one of my friends. They pulled up at a stoplight next to a big pickup truck that, incidently enough, had flames shooting out of the wheel well in the back. He gets the driver to roll down the window, and politely points out that the truck is on fire. The driver cursed, said, “Not again!”, and takes off like a bat out of hell.

So that’s when I put the extinguisher in the car.

I am not the same person I was this morning… Rolled off the couch and into my car (which was working then) and fought traffic. Traffic has become a large part of my life recently, and I’m starting to hate it. Anyway. Get to work. Accidently bought a iBook (it’s cool). Left work. Fought traffic. Tried to repair my camera, but “We don’t carry the cables, you’ll have to talk to Canon” said the lady at Wolf Camera. And I doubt its the cable but anyway… Then my car falls apart. Literally. When I’m driving to work tomorrow, it will probably catch on fire. I’ll bring the fire extinguisher with me, and if my car does break down, I’ll break the window with the extinguisher, light the damn thing up, and walk away and cry under a bridge for forty days and nights.

Tomorrow, I try and go a day without smoking. So I started eating toothpicks. I can see me getting pulled over after tossing a used one out the window.

Cop: “You were littering”
Me: “It’s a stick officer!”

We’ll see…

This article from Law.com (Justices’ Ruling in Medical Marijuana Case Marks Shift for States’ Rights) has an interesting statement about how a dissenting opinion contained personal statements about the original law.

‘ “If I were a California citizen, I would not have voted for the medical marijuana ballot initiative; if I were a California legislator I would not have supported the Compassionate Use Act,” O’Conner wrote.’

I remember when this was on the ballot in Colorado, and all my very “intelligent” pot-head friends wanted me to vote for it. However, I didn’t because

1. It failed to mention how to distribute to people who needed it.

and

2. It didn’t even mention the existing Federal laws.

So is this about pot being legal or state rights?

I’d like to think that if the majority of the voters want something to be legal, then it can be legal. But if the folks that draft the laws leave out the more important aspects (such as distribution), then the clueless voters will vote for a law that doesn’t make any sense at all and is impossible to follow.

So the upshot is that if you draft a law, be sure and take into account any side effects of other laws.

So it starts by me wanting to leave my apartment because it’s small and lonely. And I have noisy people living above me, even though I live on the top floor. We think they’re either bats or troubled ghosts that keep trying to two-step. Anyway, I grab my bag and open my door, all geared up to go.

And I stop. With the door half open, I suddenly realize that I need to shave. God only knows why all of a sudden, at 11:30 at night on a Saturday, I’m too vain to go to Village Inn with a face that looks like a Chernobyl Peach covered in acne. So I head back to the bathroom, giving my door the “I’ll See You Later, Door!” shove. Of course, it doesn’t close all the way, but instead slowly creaks open. Five, maybe six inches.

Since I was planning on leaving, the apartment was dark.

So I shave. Used the last of the can of shaving cream. Water is running, facial hair is drowning in silent agony, and (for once) blood isn’t squirting out of various places of my neck. Right as I’m finishing up, I hear noises coming from my apartment. Sounded like… I dunno. So I turn off the water and open the door to greet my intruders when…

“Police!”

And all I can see are two blinding points of light, aimed rather rudely in my direction. I tried to offer them a drink, but it came out sounding like a drunk Italian chef trying to sing Blue Moon of Kentucky at Karaoke. So I stopped trying to talk and raised my hands in the air in case they decided, well. You Know.

They were looking for someone, and it turned out not to be me. Which is good, because I don’t think that they were looking for the purposes of selling candy or cookies or newspapers. Or kangaroo, or whatever it is that people sell door to door these days. Once they determined that I was not their “target”, they said, into their radio, “This is not the party we’re looking for.” At which point I waved my arm in an arc (hitting a light switch) and said, “This is not the party we’re looking for.” Then they chewed me out for leaving my door open, and ran out into the night.