Doctor, Doctor

On Tuesday I finally went to the doctor with the hopes of solving my "problem".  Now, when I say "problem", what I really mean is "inability to use the bathroom regularly, sometimes for 1+ weeks".

Fair Warning:  The following story is about a personal problem you may not want to know about.  The phrase TMI might be appropriate.  Proceed at your own risk.

It's something I've always had to deal with, but ever since I got down to around 220-240 pounds, the problem has been increasingly hard to deal with.  I started taking fiber pills after a scare in June where I couldn't go for a week and felt like death.  Did they help?  It's hard to say.  All I know is that as of Tuesday, I hadn't gone for nine days--fiber or no fiber.  That sucks.

That afternoon my scheduled appointment which was luckily setup the week before came up.  I went, filled out the requisite newbie patient paperwork, and waited patiently for the visit.  After what seemed like years (but was really 5 minutes), they called me up.  A worker had me step on some scales (188.9 pounds--wow) and took my blood pressure.  It's a curious moment when they're reading your pressure and your pulse.  You know they they you're nervous since it must be registering that way.  They don't say anything.  Neither do you...

After that I was lead to a room where the worker asked me about my problem.  I detailed my...problem, albeit awkwardly.  After a few minutes of that unpleasantness, she left and said the doctor would be by shortly.  It wasn't a but a few minutes and he showed up.

After about five minutes of explaining my problem again with a bit more detail, he decided I most likely am suffering from IBS.  He gave me some pills and a prescription for Amitiza.  With a box of what he assured me would be quick relief (PLUS good regulation going forward), he sent me on my way.

Let me tell you something about Amitiza that you may not know.  It's something called a chloride channel initiator, and it's magical for people like me.  I went that night, I went the next day, and the day after that.  Heck, I'm a down right "regular" Joe now.

Thank you, Doctor.

Applebee's? Yeah Right

It's always funny how whenever the thought of an Applebee's trip comes up, something inevitably goes wrong.  In the past, it has been things like death in someone's family, lack of gasoline, bad tires, sickness, or quantum decomposition of the Applebee's restaurant itself.

This time, it was illness again.  One member of the Applebee's party was potentially sick last week.  To be safe, I suggested we wait until the weekend until we could be sure he was over his cough.  Our trip was planned for Sunday.  By Saturday, he was feeling like his old self again and I was happy for this.  I mean, who wouldn't be?  Steak burger.  'Nuff said, right?

Sunday.  I call the guy shortly before we should be heading out because I haven't yet heard from him that day.  Turns out his cough had come back like Bruce Willis with a vengeance.  Figures.  It's the Applebee's Curse, after all.

I suppose there is a bit of irony here as well, since by Monday it was clear what he had.  He had caught that cold going around in this community.  The irony here is that I'd already had it just a couple of weeks prior.  I wouldn't have become sick again if we'd went like he had offered.  Oh universe, how you hate me so.

A Little Bit of Everything

There's good news and then there's good news.  There's also some bad news.  Good news:  Some friends visited from Arizona a week ago.  We had a grand time--we went out to eat, watched a movie, and basically did all the things we used to do back in the old days.  It would be a nice group of friends for sure.  I think I even managed not to creep out one of my friend's wives (it's the first time I'd met her).  That's quite an accomplishment for a geek like myself.

Bad news:  One of them had been infected with some kind of turbo-infectious cold which the person then dutifully spread to every last one of us, unaware of their own participation since symptoms had yet to manifest.  We all got sick this last weekend except for the one who had it first.  He was sick a day sooner.  heh

Good news:  We're all over it now.  It was really quite mild.  It also gave me an excuse to chug orange juice.  I don't normally get a lot of OJ since it has a lot of calories.

More good news:  AMD's new 800-series chipsets are out.  Supermicro already has four boards available based on these new chipsets with more coming soon.  I am excited and will be buying one as soon as I can.  Hopefully it will help out my system's performance.  Hello, quad PCIe 2.0 x16 + dual PCIe 2.0 x8 (x4) + PCI + 16 DIMM motherboards.

Each Day Needs Meaning

It seems I've forgotten something important for every day life.  Each day needs meaning.  That isn't to say that every day is going to be the most important day of one's life, but each day really does need to be valued in some way.  The reason for this isn't the cheesy, cliche 'live every day as if it were your last' kind of thing.  The reason is as follows.

Each day is bland if it has no purpose.  If one lives in the grand scheme instead of living in the day to day, that person is doomed to never be satisfied.  This is something that I myself have struggled with.  I'd wonder, "What should I be doing with my life?  Does my day to day life have any real purpose?  What am I doing that matters?"  This is a bit of a trap.  When caught up in those questions, I lost the meaning of the day itself for the sake of my life.  Ironically, this in itself would lead to a failure to achieve anything useful due to the frustration of focus.

So, starting a few days ago, I've started working toward living for the day and assigning some level of purpose to each day.  Even when there's no specific goal, it seems to help with the problem of purpose, worth, and meaning.  Remember that sense of anxiousness I talked about some time ago--feeling as if there's something waiting for one's self in the future despite not knowing what it is?  That's what I'm after.  To conquer the subject of this post yields that reward.

Even so, I'm feeling much better now than I did just two years ago.

District 9

Tonight I plan to see District 9 with John.  I've heard it is a good movie, and truthfully that's more than I really wanted to know from other people.  People tend to like to ruin movies for other people.  I think it stems from the pressing need to demonstrate to others just how smart one person is...some kind of evolutionary trait that compels a person to share what they know with the community.

This behavior makes sense historically.  "Me Ogg.  Me know how make fire.  Look!"  Yeah, that might have been nice in ancient times or now in the context of general knowledge or science, but when it comes to movies...phew.  I like to know as little as possible about a movie before going to see it.  I don't want to know how other people rate it, any "insignificant" detail, or even that the opening credits used red lettering.  The point is that any detail someone reveals to me kills off that piece of the experience.  If it was cool enough to warrant noting and revealing to me later, perhaps I might have enjoyed that fresh experience as well?

Heh...enough movie rant.  In other news, I'm feeling much better today.  This morning I woke up and felt 100% "normal" again for the first time in probably a month or two.  No light headedness, no tiredness, no dizziness, no intestinal pain, no dehydration...nothing but normalcy.  This feels so good.  While I don't imagine it'll stick around, I'm certainly going to try and enjoy it while it lasts.  Eventually I'll figure out what is wrong with me.

I'm not a flashy guy by any means, but I'm sparkling

It's perhaps fitting that I'd choose a line from the song "Oh My God You're Weird" to describe my mood right now.  Never have I really been one to conform to what is considered normal.  While that in and of itself may be a conformity, its only consequence is irony.

Enough of that, though.  Why am I sparkling?  I'm feeling pretty good right now.  There are only two things that do that in life:  drugs and good moods.  In my case, it isn't the former.

For whatever reason, I'm feeling wholly good right now.  Lately, I've been getting whiffs of those good "general" feelings from the fun days of yesteryear.  Specifically, that feeling of day-to-day contentment that had no real cause, rhyme, or reason from when I was younger has been generously floating around.  While I've got no real reason as to why this may be, I am certainly enjoying it.

Things are going well.  This must be what normal people feel like.  It has been a long time for myself.

Computer Update

The issues I was experiencing with my dual socket system did indeed turn out to be motherboard related.  Once the replacement board arrived, everything came right to life.  Go figure.

Anyway, I've been having trouble getting many games to run.  I don't know how much of it is OS/driver related and how much is hardware, but I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  Rise of Nations and ArmA II flat out refuse to launch.  Many others like all HL2-based games run fine.

In any case, I'm well on my way with the voltmod to hopefully grant me 1.300VDC for vCore.  The extra 4GB of RAM has also arrived, so I'll be back into the medical research project soon too.  Hopefully my voltage regulators don't blow blue smoke.

Computer Users, Part Deux (And Dualie-Hex Update)

Computer Users, Part Deux

Remember back in May when I wrote a quick blurb about how my computer users at work "cause me no end of frustration some times"?  Well, today I'm reminded of that observation.  This time they aren't complaining that things are slow, however.

It's the classic office story.  While I can't really fault the person responsible since this is very typical (and even anticipated) behavior, they are the direct reason for why the following happened:

1)  User receives strange email in a foreign language with "attachments".
2)  User clicks on attachments, not noticing anything strange.  They are strange, of course, but it takes more familiarity with this sort of situation to know why.  All the attachments are just HTML links in the message body, and they not all only point to the same URL but point to an obviously suspicious one like shfsdhsdfgh.34y83qnhhdfjh.com
3)  User's computer is infected with (an admittedly weak) virus, and their address book is spammed with the same message they received.

It's a wonder how a Portuguese message manages to spread into the English-only speaking world, but it happened.  Oh well.  Time to play cleanup.

Dualie-Hex Update
I ended up having to refund my dual socket F motherboard.  The second socket didn't appear to work, and that severely hampered my dual hex-core system project.  Newegg wanted $35 for "restocking" the broken piece of shit when all that should be happening to it is throwing it into a dumpster.  In case they do try to pass it off to another customer, however, I've included a note inside the box informing them of what is wrong.

Hopefully Newegg won't notice and it will save the next guy they try to pawn it off onto some time.  After all, they supposedly function test every "open box" item they sell.  Either they never bothered to test mine or they are completely incompetent and only tested the first socket.  It's probably why the original owner punted it back in the first place.  No telling how many hands it has passed before coming into my own.

It's probably just a genuine lemon motherboard.  One of the RAM sockets was even soldered in cocked at like a 15 degree angle.  QC at Supermicro needs some attention.

Anyway, I RMA'd the board and ordered a brand new retail box one with next day shipping.  Today will be the day it arrives.  Hopefully it was indeed the board itself instead of a dead HT link in one of the $500 CPUs.

A Long and Winding Story

Thursday, I received the parts for my new desktop/workstation build I was planning on.  Straight from Newegg came two AMD Opteron 2427 6-core CPUs, two 2GB ECC/reg DDR2-800 DIMMs, and a Supermicro H8DAE-2 dual Socket F motherboard with HT3 support.

The adventure started when I first tried to boot on Thursday.  I actually had video!  I was expecting nothing since only the latest BIOS added support for Istanbul CPUs.  "What a lucky break!" I thought when I also discovered that in the manual there was an "Emergency BIOS Recovery" procedure for updating the BIOS even without a CPU.  All that was supposedly required to use it was the motherboard, a power supply, and a keyboard.  Hold down Home and Ctrl during boot and the chipset and BIOS boot block itself have sufficient logic to update from a floppy with a file named SUPER.ROM (the updated BIOS image).

I decided I'd try this.  Heck, it almost worked already.  So, I powered up with the appropriate keys held in on the keyboard.  All it did was beep repeatedly after accessing the floppy.  After some searching, I found that the manual was simply wrong--the file had to be named AMIBOOT.ROM in order for this procedure to work.

Booting again into the recovery mode with the file renamed to AMIBOOT.ROM yielded an on-screen status of what was happening.  This again was in opposition to what the manual said, since it indicated status would be audio-only (four beeps upon finishing) and nothing would be on screen.  After about 30 seconds, the process finished and the screen printed "Success" briefly before rebooting itself.

...Nothing happened.

After the flash, nothing would power up except for the chipset fan, and that's probably just hard wired into the power plane.  Not even the CPU fan would spin up.  I decided to install the second CPU just to be safe.  Who knows?  Maybe the update flipped which socket is seen as primary (required).  No joy.  I was dead in the water.

Then, the old technique I'd heard about back in the nForce2 chipset days made its way to the front of my mind after seeing it mentioned online for a different person's similar problem.  Hot flashing.  No, not post-PMS hot flashing.  In this context, the meaning is to boot a board with a compatible BIOS chip/controller and remove its BIOS chip while running.  Then you insert the ROM you want to re-program (the dead one from my Supermicro in this case due to the apparently bad boot block after the update) and do a BIOS update.  The update gets written to the inserted ROM and once complete, you simply power down, pop it out, place it in the original board, and re-insert that board's original ROM as well.  In theory, you end up with everything being back to how it should be.

On the only board I had handy that I could do the hot flash with (most of my other modern boards do not have socketed flash chips but are instead soldered), the update failed.  Heck, upon closer examination I observed that the board couldn't even update its own BIOS yet alone help me in flashing another.  Since I happened to have two of these boards handy, I tried on the other one.  Same issue.  I looked online for ages trying to find a solution, but there were just others posting that they too have a problem updating the hardware.  No solutions.

By this point, I've spent all of Thursday night and all of Friday doing the actions previously described.

Being somewhat tenacious when it comes to solving mysteries like this one, I ventured further.  I had replaced my dad's motherboard with a fancier one during his last upgrade a few months back.  I went over to his place and checked.  Sure enough, his board had a compatible BIOS type.  Armed with this old hardware and his current CPU (borrowed with permission of course heh) to run it, I went back home to try again.  Using a new flashing utility I found called Uniflash, I tried flashing my Supermicro's 8Mbit ROM chip.  No luck!  Three cells near the end failed to verify after flashing.  Since most of the data did verify, however, I decided to try it.  All I need to at least try the BIOS recovery procedure again is a working boot block, and that only comprises the first 8KB of a BIOS.  Apparently, the boot block was stored in those final cells as I was still unable to boot or do anything useful with the Supermicro board with this reflashed ROM.

It was at this point that I decided to go to lunch.  I needed a break.

Once back, I remembered that I saw a BIOS chip in my old DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G motherboard I used to run.  It died during a bad BIOS flash over a year prior, and it just so happened to have an identical SST 49LF080A 8Mbit flash ROM--just like the Supermicro.  I hot flashed this ROM like I'd previously done to the other chip.  While it failed too, different cells failed to verify.  It was at this point that I became somewhat discouraged.  It was possible that both ROMs were physically damaged, and the fact that both chips failed but in different areas (yet both failed in their own respective cells each time they were re-flashed again and again) suggested such physical failure.

It was approaching night time, and I decided a nice shower was in store.  While I often get breakthroughs in the shower when it comes to intellectual conundrums, I had no such luck that time.  Laying on my bed afterward, however, I received what I was after.  Half a year ago, I'd put together a Tyan dual-CPU system that was in much the same situation as my present one.  The CPUs were too new to be supported by the BIOS, and I hadn't even tried until a new BIOS chip with the latest firmware flashed to it arrived via mail (for $27).  Being a server board, it was more likely to be an 8Mbit ROM like I needed.  All of the desktop boards I'd surveyed around my house that had socketed ROMs were 4Mbit other than that DFI.

I went to my dad's place again where I'd built that machine, and sure enough...in the pile of parts on the floor from that build was an electrostatic bag with the Tyan's original BIOS chip in it.  It too was an SST 49LF080A!  It couldn't hardly be damaged.  It was handled with care, stored carefully, never updated/flashed, etc.  With it in hand I raced home.

The hot flash on this new chip could save the day!  Could.  It didn't.  It too failed like both of the other chips.  Since it was almost impossible for the chip to be damaged, that pointed to the possibility that there was simply something wrong with this board when flashing these chips.

Desperate, I asked around for other motherboards that might do for flashing with.  My dad's old old old dual-CPU board from years and years ago was available.  Being an old AMD 760MPX based board, it had been around for a while.  I took that board home with me and tried again.  Success on the first attempt!  I had a properly flashed chip...probably.

After dropping the ROM into my Supermicro, I tried to turn it on.  Fire!  No, not the literal kind.  I mean the machine turned on and was working.  I was now operational.  Finally.

Kinda.

While the machine worked, it didn't seem to work when two CPUs were installed.  Some times it would fail to boot at all.  Other times it would boot but the second CPU wouldn't be detected.  Ack!  I swapped CPUs and it still did the same thing, but that did at least tell me each CPU was individually operational.

That leaves me where I am today.  I don't have enough memory modules to run two DIMMs on each CPU.  The manual says two DIMMs are required on CPU1 when two CPUs are installed.  It also says no DIMMs are required on CPU2, but it is preferred.  I don't know how up to date or accurate the manual is.  It may be that CPU1 does require 2 DIMMs but that CPU2 must have its own memory as well before it'll work.  Some old, really slow ECC/reg DDR2 DIMMs are coming from a brother in the area on Tuesday.  At that time I'll be able to confirm or reject this current theory by testing it.

Until then, I'm just a one-CPU pony.  Or is that a one-trick pony?  I don't know.  All I know is that I'm exhausted.  That concludes my time between Thursday night and Sunday evening.  Man I'm a geek.

Silicon Day

Today I've got a double header for you.  First of all, I can't for the life of me seem to get hardware virtualization support working on my Dell Studio 15 (Submodel 1555, P8600 CPU).  Whenever I enable it in my BIOS, it stays disabled.  *shrug*  I don't get it.  The CPU supports it, and the BIOS suggests that it and the motherboard aren't going to get in the way.  The bad thing here is that this will prevent me from using the fancy Virtual XP Mode for Windows 7 feature.  That's double bad since I'm having trouble with one of my company's core software products where this might help.

In other news, the two AMD Opteron 2427 processors that I purchased on Monday will be here tomorrow should UPS's delivery estimate be accurate.  That's one thousand dollars worth of silicon by itself.  It's insane.  I'm insane.  Nobody needs a 12-core desktop at home.  Maybe if I were doing lots of SolidWorks renders or something it would make sense.  I just think the technology is neat.  Granted, I will see some real benefits though such as when I'm doing my HD x264 encodes.  Throwing three times as many cores at the problem should help immensely.

Time will tell if I actually managed to upgrade or downgrade, however.

Hey, This Might Be Funny

Right now, the average American is three times as likely to have Novel H1N1 as they are any other type of flu.  Also new today is that my county (which pretty much means this city) has had two confirmed cases of H1N1.  Yay!  It has finally arrived!  Throw out the red carpet.

Joking aside, it is very unusual for people to have the flu in late June/July.  Yet one person here at work seems very likely to have the flu.  If so, the chance that it is Novel H1N1 instead of something else is very good.  Being the young adult that I am, this concerns me.  Older people are not as strongly effected as I would/will be.

This is going to be a heck of a fall/winter flu season I bet.

Bad News

Dell finally updated the status page for the laptop order I placed with them on May 19.  Though I'd originally ordered this laptop because the estimated date predicted it would arrive before the Rochester trip (and that was the whole purpose for ordering it in the first place), it doesn't look promising that it will arrive in time.  After ordering, Dell immediately pushed it back a few days from the pre-ordered ETA date.  Last night, Dell decided to do me a favor and push it to the end of this month, making the total time from order to arrival (estimated) a funtastic 42 days.

I don't think it takes 42 days to do anything.  Heck, by the time it actually gets here it'll be out of date even though it wasn't when I ordered it.

In other news, I'm less than excited about going to Rochester next week.  New York is one of the swine flu capitals of the world, and it doesn't look to be letting up.  Oh, how fun would it be if I contracted it, brought it back with me, and was the reason for it spreading to this region.  What does that make me?  I'd have been the avenue by which others were infected, but at the same time it wouldn't have been intentional.  Oh well, I'll probably come back just as healthy as when I left.

Anyone smell bacon?

Rochester Bound, Soon

As I see the days until my Rochester trip on Sunday erode, a few things come to mind.
1)  I do not want to go, but that's irrelevant.  It's boring, but I'm getting paid.  Classic business trip.
2)  Currently, the laptop I ordered from Dell specifically for this trip has yet to arrive.  Three business days remain.

3)  Neat projects this week.  =)

I've been working on a neat project this week to deal with our company's incoming orders.  It's neat for a lot of reasons, but here's one of my favorites real quick:

The same application can run in three different modes, configured in its settings page:  Local, Remote, and Relay

Remote mode is responsible for order file distribution to subfolders where file mirroring software picks it up and transfers it to our local location.  It is also responsible for cleanup of old order fragments (abandoned orders) and transferred files (completely mirrored).

Local mode is responsible for order file distribution to subfolders locally where the order processing servers pick them up.  During this process, the software records that the file is complete in a compact database.  Periodically, the local mode agent tries to tell the remote mode agent to delete a transfer once complete.  Once the remote agent confirms that an order file has been removed, it is stricken from the database only then.  This ensures that it always happens without fail, even through Internet outages.  Local mode also sends out a broadcast packet every so often, which will be explained below.

Relay mode is the only mode that has nothing to do with distribution or file management.  Its sole responsibility is to listen for the broadcast packet from the local mode client.  Once it receives the packet, the remote address is locked in and the relay tries to connect to the local client.  Any time a connection attempt fails or it is disconnected, it simply retries every 15 seconds or so.  It does the same thing with another socket to the remote mode agent.  It also messages the local mode agent any time it is disconnected from or reconnected to the remote mode agent.  With that information, the local mode agent is able to pick an active link to the remote agent for communicating file deletion commands, etc.  This gives the added benefit of retaining functionality across multiple WAN links even when one dies.

Pretty neat stuff, and this is only a small part of what it can do.  :)

Curious, That Feeling

For quite some time now, I've been trying to regain that mental state that I possessed as a child.  The state I'm talking about is difficult to describe, but some of the primary aspects are as follows:

1)  Wide field-of-view.  As I have aged, without even noticing, my view of the world has become like a tunnel.  When I go to the store, I see the road and my speedometer but little else.  A wide field of view means that when driving down that same road, I see an entire scene instead with tree rows extending into the corners of my eyes.  The entire scene is observed without even moving the eyes.

2)  Sense of imminence.  In adulthood, there's little to provide a sense of imminence--that feeling of something coming next at any given moment.  For the entire duration of childhood, there was adulthood to provide imminence to any given moment of childhood.  In adulthood, there isn't anything ahead except for the goals one makes.

3)  Evaporation of introversion and inspection, aka "Pure Emotion".  As a child, I could look at the clouds and just feel things...non-specific things.  It was just that the clouds invoked feeling in and of themselves within me.  There were no words or thoughts involved.  It was pure emotion.  In adulthood, I've been consigned to feeling very little emotion beyond the basic lot such as when something is funny or sad.  Feeling warm and happy from moment to moment is mostly just make believe.  Most of the time I feel nothing at all--not in a negative context or anything.  It's just blank.

So, why the post then?

I felt that feeling on Sunday for a few minutes.  From time to time I've had whiffs of it that last for a few seconds.  Latching onto the moment had always been futile, but that never stopped me from trying.  However, on Sunday, I was driving to the video store to return a movie (Taken) for my mom since I was doing the same for one of mine.

With the bright sunshine and empty roads, I sort of "fell" into that mindset by accident.  When it happened, there was no mistaking what it was.  Instead of returning directly, I took the long way home by going out the east side of town and around the city on the highway.  The whole way, I retained the feeling.

It was all very odd to experience.  It wasn't as good as I'd thought it was.  Every moment took an eternity, and there was such an emptiness.  It was a special kind of torture, really.  It took a few hours for the feeling to wear off entirely, and when it had I knew that I've been yearning for the wrong thing all this time.  Perhaps it was just a sour experience because the other aspects of childhood have long since vanished.  There was no school the day after, no current events to that kind of life.  It was just empty.

Curious, that feeling.

Boss Man Likes Me / My New Laptop

It looks like boss man likes me.

On Tuesday, I finally decided to go ahead and buy a new laptop computer.  I did this primarily with my upcoming business trip to Rochester, New York in mind.  When away from home, it would be best if I had a way to remotely log into the work systems for when something inevitably fails to work properly.

Wednesday, I started talking to IT Guy (my predecessor) about the laptop I'd purchased.  After a time I'd covered most of the interesting aspects about it including how good of a deal it was and why.  Also on the table was a discussion about why the configuration I'd chosen was particularly well-suited for a "good" laptop.

I was careful to pick out components that would work well but also save power, such as an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor.  The ones that begin with P indicate a TDP of 25 watts, maximum.  Most Dell laptops come with T-series processors that indicate a TDP of between 30 and 39 watts.  This should add up to a significant power savings.  Also of importance was my decision to couple the laptop with an LED-backlit screen.  This alone can potentially save 30-40% of the power budget of a machine.  The video card has been upgraded as well.  There are both good and bad things about that choice power-wise, but one thing to consider is that the video card has a TDP of 11 watts.  It also happens to feature ATI's UVD 2.2 acceleration technology which will let me watch HD video using virtually no CPU power, thus saving battery life during movie playback.  Last on the list of power-minded decisions was the inclusion of a 9-cell battery for extra run time.

It's no slouch, either.  The screen is 1920x1080, so there will be enough logical screen space to do things without becoming frustrated.  Using my P3's old 1024x768 screen was a nightmare for doing any kind of meaningful work.  The processor runs at 2.4GHz, and can likely be easily overclocked if needed.  Thanks to UVD, however, nothing should require that action.  The laptop was a 7200 RPM, 320GB drive.  This alone should help make the machine feel snappy.

Why does boss man like me, however?  Well, IT Guy appears to have told boss man about my purchase.  The next day, Boss Man called me into his office to "talk about computers".  He asked me about the laptop I was buying and then, quite unexpectedly, asked me to cancel the order so that the business could buy it instead.  How cool is that?  It works out well for everyone.  I get a new laptop, my ancient work machine gets retired, and I have a way to remotely administrate when I'm out of town.

I suppose something had to go right this week.  Thanks again, Boss Man.

Difficult Users

I hesitate to say that I hate my users at work.  Honestly, hate isn't the right word.  They cause me no end of frustration some times, and they constantly complain that everything is slow.  Granted, a lot of our equipment is ancient.  Often times, things are slow.

However, my problem is that they've all fallen into the Basic Computer User's practice of thinking everything is always slow.  Even when things are moving along at a good pace, the user still sees it as being slow.  They're frustrated, and understandably so.  Lodging complaints when they aren't warranted or just telling me how slow something is is generally as diagnostically relevant as saying metal is metallic.  There just isn't much useful information there, and it doesn't provide any insight into what may be causing it.

Oh well.  Perhaps that's just part of the job of being a network administrator:  One part geek, one part guy, and one part dartboard.  Ouch.

Pig Flu Makes Me Hungry

That's all I'm saying.  Every time someone says "swine flu" I have two reactions.  First, I get the negative connotation associated with "swine", but then the secondary meaning of swine meaning pig floats in.  Then pigs being the source of pork floats in.  Bacon.  Mmm.  Sausages.  Also mmm.  Spicy pork from the local Chinese buffet place?  Mega-mmm!

I'm completely at everyone's mercy every time they say swine flu now.  Perhaps this is an abnormal reaction to the events happening now, but what can I say?  I'm not normal.

Looks Like Spring

It's finally spring.  Not just in name or time frame, but in actual observance.  Just yesterday I was talking with my grandparents after church, and they put forth verbalization that everything has started turning really green rapidly over the last few days.  I'd noticed the same thing just last week.  Our season has started somewhat slow this year compared to the last one.  The grass has been greening for a while, but until this last week trees were primarily bare.  There also hadn't been much rain to help facilitate the new spring growth.

Right now I hear the rain pouring on the roof outside.  There have been storm clouds for weeks, but they've been mostly a tease.  Perhaps ironically, the rain that is so important to plant life in the spring has until now been partially responsible for a slowing of growth.  The constant cloud cover slightly reduces solar energy available for photosynthesis.  That's largely irrelevant now, however, as the rain continues to fall.

Yesterday I was also hit with a random thought, triggered by all of this extrospection about new life and spring time.  I'm still getting older.  The spring semester is almost over for school age kids, and once it is I'll be completely removed from the experience.  My arbitrary metric for determining this is that in the time I've spent thinking about how much I've missed high school and how much better life was back then, I could have relived it.  That's right, I graduated in 2005.  Not a single person there (starting this year)  was there when I was a senior.  And after this semester, an entire generation will have passed through the classes and halls since my absence.

Spring works both ways, I suppose.  New life is both refreshing and depressing.  Either way I still need to find a way to get over this perceived loss of mine.  It has lingered longer than any other period of grief I've experienced, though notably less this season than in the past.  It's apparently a common thing.  They call it the "quarter-life crisis", and I guess I'm not even one of the worst cases of it. 

Oh well.  It's spring.  Time to focus on the neat stuff like interesting cloud formations.

Life is Like a Box of Sockets

You never know what you're going to get.

It's interesting--I've been using my sockets class in programs I've built for the last three years.  Over that time, the code was mostly unchanged.  It worked and it worked well.  This tried and true code was a threaded, synchronous sockets class that was laden with graceful error handling and offered ease-of-use as well as high performance and scalability.

Until my latest project, anyway.  There are apparently some issues with using synchronous sockets on highly-threaded code, especially when it comes to event timing and delegated processing.  My file transfer service application exposed these issues because it uses a lot of concurrent sockets connecting and disconnecting and connecting again very rapidly.  Normally, when a single connection or two connect and then disconnect when finished, nothing bad happens.  This new app is different.  Very quickly I started getting conditions where the app would just stop altogether.  Deadlocks, occasional exceptions, etc, I had them all.  After fighting with it for a day or more, I decided to hell with it and began a new sockets class.

My new sockets are a hybrid synchronous-asynchronous design.  Sends for both the client and server remain synchronous so as to guarantee that data is sent in the order it was submitted.  I could create a queue and do the sends in an async manner, but there's no point when a synchronous send gets me the same effect.  Receives, connects, and disconnects are all asynchronous.  This has brought me no end of grief while figuring out the unique quirks of the delegated callback system in the .NET framework.  One of the earliest oddities ended up being a savior--all callbacks fire when the source object dies.  As such, if a socket disconnects, the callback for datareceived fires with 0 bytes.  Since it's impossible to actually send zero bytes on a socket, that's basically a good way to tell "hey, the thing on the other end died--disconnect time!"  As such, there's no need to actually poll sockets on a timed interval anymore.  Goodbye, threaded loop.  That's one less synchronization problem to worry about.

Perhaps my biggest failing was to take so long to figure out that my events would fire randomly on the server side until I synclocked the globally-accessed resources such as socket profiles during both connect and disconnect events.  Until then, something like this could happen:  Client on socket 3 disconnects, connects, and sends a message.  When that happens really fast, it's possible for the asynchronous callbacks to all fire at different times.  The client may well reconnect and send data, caught in two callbacks that fire simultaneously.  While one is busy servicing the disconnect, the incoming data gets processed and all of a sudden the socket gets yanked out from under the data receipt handler.  Whoops.  Your socket encountered an access exception when not expected!  WTF?

Anyway, things are looking up.  I've been running a test for a while now, sending sequentially numbered messages on 24 different client instances all constantly connecting, sending, and disconnecting to the server in random order.  Guess what.  70GB has been transmitted so far without incident.  Not a single out of order packet, miss-matched socket ID, or anything with packets of random sizes ranging from 10 bytes to 64KB.  Excellent.

Hopefully I make a good backup before I manage to break it again.  Heh.  This story isn't over yet.  There are still more things to test and more things to go wrong.  I'll surely run into something.

Taxes are Hard

For the first time in my life, I've had to prepare taxes.  As a kid I always knew that adults hated taxes for some reason, and I grew up with a reflex to the word.  Just hearing "taxes" put a negative connotation into my mind that could go as far as to evoke a frown.

Now that I'm actually doing my own for the first time, things are different.  There isn't any reason to hate them because of money.  It's pretty much like doing a little paper work and them mailing me a check for a grand and a half.

Taxes are hard, though.  Perhaps they aren't in and of themselves difficult, but as I try to prepare them I always find something that comes up to stop me before being able to.  Currently, this is due to not knowing how much financial aid I received for my last semester of college during Spring 2008.  It was under a thousand bucks, but I have no idea how much.  They also want me to tell them how much of it was used directly for schooling related expenses.  I don't know the answer to either thing.  It's not like I kept a log of receipts for everything I required and marked if each item was a requirement of everyone in the class or just useful for school.  They want to tax you on as much as possible.

Oh well.  I'll have to try and work it out as best I can.  Later today I will again be calling the college to see if they have a record of how much was distributed to me.  I have no way of knowing.

Taxes suck.

Return of the Curse

I should have known better.  I just HAD to do it.  Yesterday, I spoke with a friend about the possibility of going to Applebee's this Thursday.  It has been a few weeks since our last trip, and they make a really nice burger.  Thursday seemed like an arbitrarily good day for the event since there won't be a weekend crowd there, and Friday is part of the Lenten no-meat tradition.

So what happened?  Today I find out that one of my friend's (who usually goes with me to Applebee's on these trips) mother's siblings has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and may shortly expire.  I really just don't get it.  It kind of started as a joke, but lately it seems like every time I so much as externally communicate a desire to go, something increasingly bad happens.

Yes, I know it's all pure coincidence, but it still sucks.

The Difference a Weekend Makes

Here's the strange thing.  Just last week I was going on about how nothing seemed like it could be worth my time due to the limited nature of the duration of life.  This simple fact is pretty well a universal truth, but I don't think most people really confront that issue on a daily basis.  It is more of a question of weekend reflection or semi-annual career examination.

Today I feel worlds apart from how I did just last Thursday.  While the truth of the matter hasn't changed, I simply don't care.  I'm back to general operation mode where I'm living for the moment and not spending all of my time in the past or present.  This is a great place to be.  It's the normal place people exist that keeps them sane enough to operate effectively in society.

There is a punch line to this joke, however.  If past experience has taught me anything, this moment of clarity will pass and I'll be back to one of my two extremes:
1)  Not letting go of the past
2)  Trying desperately to figure out the future

Oh well.  That doesn't much matter at the moment.  More important things are aloof...things such as Applebee's on Thursday.  =)  Yum.

The Secret of Time

Not long ago, I realized that there was another force at work on me regarding my general sense of post-childhood depression.  In earlier posts, I've explored some of the concepts regarding how it seems I've come to this position, but this is something completely new.  Only today did I even realize what it was in a way that could be put into words.

Simply put, there is a secret truth to time that is hidden from people when they are still children.  Children know that they'll grow up, get old, and eventually die, but it's not something that really gets processed.  It's just random fluff knowledge like knowing the names of different kinds of apples.  It's information and it is there but it doesn't really impact one's life.

The secret of course is the realization that time is truly limited.  It runs out.  By the time someone gets to their early 20s, they have used between a quarter and a third of their likely time on Earth already.  That's a big portion.  That's a scary portion.  I can remember back to around 5th or 6th grade where I had a mini-realization that I would eventually die.  Somehow, I managed to push this from my mind but it happened during story time after lunch one day.  When it hit that "I", as a concept, would eventually cease to exist at some point, I was completely paralyzed.  It lasted for about a minute.  That was the first time I'd really discovered the fact that time is limited, but it didn't really bind.  It was just a five minute eighth-life crisis similar to what I suppose I am going through in my quarter-life one except in terms of duration.

Now, the problem is primarily that nothing I seem to do or don't do but could perceivably do really seems worth it now that it is so clear time is limited.  That must be a major part of the discontent I've felt over the last year.  I do the same thing every day, and I fear that I will quickly find myself on the exiting end of youth entirely having wasted it.  I won't have done any of the things that people my age supposedly do, done things that mattered, etc.  I'll be completely unable to return and still marching forward toward eventual expiration.  THAT is depressing.

Perhaps now that I realize what it is I'm up against, there is a chance that I can come to terms with it and proceed.  After all, it's a bit ironic that the very fear of not using one's limited time wisely causes a person to not do anything at all.  Cosmic irony rears its head once again.

The Life of a Service Provider

When considering who I am, I tend to define myself as the sum of what surrounds me.  I'm a network administrator because that's my job.  I'm an overclocker because it is a hobby.  And I'm a service provider because it provides a feeling of usefulness.

Specifically, I've been hosting Particle's Custom RPG since the early months of 2001.  While the exact date I started hosting has long been lost in the confusion of history, I celebrate the server's anniversary on Valentine's Day each year.  As such, it just recently turned eight years old.  During that time there have been a lot of ups and downs.  Today, now that I finally have come to appreciate the feeling my server provides, I realize that it is probably coming to an end.  It would figure that I wouldn't appreciate what I had until it is beginning to wane, but that's just how life works most of the time.

In my case, the Tribes master servers (the place the Tribes game looks to for a listing of game servers) shut down late last year.  Ever since then there have been very few newbies.  What does that mean for my server's future?  It means that player counts are pretty low right now, and once the people who already knew about my server have their fill and move on there won't be anyone coming in behind them to take their places.  The end.

It wasn't that long ago that we still had a lot of people playing.

It's funny how these things can effect a person.  It's not like the server is a family member or close friend, but it may as well be a beloved family pet--faithfully there and often out-of-mind until it is gone.  I suppose I need to find something new to host now that my importance has diminished so far in the Tribes community.  That's not easy to do.  There are way more hosts for everything than there ever are players.

Today is a sad day.

To use a quote from Scout:
"The grass grows, birds fly, the sun shines, and brother...I host things."

The Applebee's Curse

One week ago today, I wrote about something I like to call Applebee's Day.  I also continued and went over how every time I get a trip together, something comes up to ruin the fun.

In a bit of cosmic irony, last Thursday such an event did occur.  The driver's mother's best friend's son had killed himself between when I posted about the curse and when we were supposed to leave.  Our driver ended up taking us anyway, and I don't blame him.  I'd want to get some room and have a chance to get my mind off of it too.

The point, however, is that Applebee's Day does usually seem to be accompanied by The Applebee's Curse.  Today we are supposed to go again (and with another friend tagging along), and I just have to wonder what horrible punishment the universe is coming up with to nail me this time.

Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll just be something like my meal being excessively salty again.  I can live with that.

Geoff's Secret Book of Computer Truthiness

I've started a miniature book today that I will carry around in my coat pocket.  It is called "Geoff's Secret Book of Computer Truthiness" and contains a set of "rules" that dictate how one's job as a network administrator is to be fulfilled.

Today saw the addition of the first two rules.  The first rule is that being a network admin makes it necessary to adhere to a set of rules for one to be successful.

The second rule is more interesting.  And, for any potential coworkers reading this, realize that this isn't addressed to any of you.  It's a genericized rule for "net admins" when dealing with problems that "users" report to them.  It goes something like this:  Assume all users are idiots.  Never take for granted that a user's description of an issue is even remotely accurate.  Investigate and find out for yourself before acting (or deciding not to act)!

This second rule is very important.  It's basically the generalized "do your job" rule for net admins.  It's not that we can't trust our users or that they're trying to deceive us (though there exists a special class of user who DOES try to), it's that we have a level of expertise and users generally can't relate the problem accurately even when honestly trying.  So, part of the job is the personal inspection of problems--even seemingly clear ones.  This prevents serious problems from being ignored or mis-scheduled for later attention.  It also prevents minor issues like the caps lock key being on from being given undue priority over the mail server being on fire.

I'm dating when each rule is added to the book.  This might become rather interesting...maybe it will even expose a part of me to myself I was previously unaware of.

A Bit of Old, A Bit of New

Yesterday I added an FN Herstal FNP-357 to my collection of zombie-stopping devices (pictured below).  This should be an absolutely exciting event, but I noticed something...I was barely excited at all.  I don't know if this is because I've done this whole process before and thus the newness and excitement surrounding it is gone, or if it is something else entirely.  The point is that I'm finding out that hobbies are increasingly difficult to stay interested in.

What do people normally do in a situation like this?  Hello, bit of old.  The problem makes me draw upon my earlier experiences through grade school and high school to try and gain some insight.  Instead of shedding light, I'm left with the feeling that this is a post-school phenomenon.  Just like how I can't seem to get into MMOs or RPGs of any type now that I can finally afford them, I can't seem to stay interested in hobbies.

I have to wonder if part of the problem is that I'm just too rich to be having fun.  I know that sounds weird considering that I don't make a lot of money, but stop and think about it for a second.  The actual process of getting something one wanted is a lot more satisfying when the desire phase was very long.  As a child I experienced this a lot since I didn't have an income.  Every time I got something I'd wanted, it was just incredible.  These days I can just buy reasonably-priced toys at regular intervals.  Fun factor:  Meh to Meh+.

This applies to my long-time hobby of computers as well.  Back in the day I couldn't afford to upgrade it very often.  These days there isn't much left on it to upgrade in the first place.  So how much fun is it now that I'm on top-class hardware?  Not a whole lot...there's little left to yearn for.  It doesn't help when there hasn't been a push for more powerful hardware in years.  Crysis, a (late) 2007 game, is still the most graphically challenging game on the market.  It has been a year and four months since that game came out.  Where are all of the new titles that push the limit?  They are nowhere.  Most games either aren't pushing the envelope or are just console ports.  That's business, I suppose.  What it isn't is entertaining.

If life is this boring with an income of $32K, I can't imagine how bored millionaires must be.  That isn't to say being poorer is better.  It isn't practical once a person has to support him or herself.  It's just one more reason why being younger seems like more fun.

Today is Applebee's Day

There is a tradition that I exercise from time to time. This is the so-called "Applebee's Day". This is a holiday that is so amazing that space and time itself tries to collude in order to prevent me from being able to experience the celebration of such a day. I speak of course of the trip to Pittsburg and subsequent feasting at my not-so-close "neighborhood" Applebee's.

It seems that any time such a trip is planned, something always comes up. Either someone gets sick, someone has no gas, a meteor has destroyed the Applebee's building, or something along those lines. If there's a way for the plans to get messed up, it happens.

On the off chance that such a trip does happen, I am excited beyond reason. I always seem to get the same thing, and it's delicious every time. The meal generally starts with an appetizer of hot chicken wingy things. These are quite good and not bad for you. They aren't breaded. I didn't even realize that until it was pointed out to me because the pieces look and taste breaded. Sure enough, an entire order of these things is like 500 Calories.

My main course is usually the Brewtus Steak Burger which I'm pretty sure is code for The Fat Man's Burger. It is a 10oz burger with chuck made from sirloin steak. While I'm sure the steaks that go into this burger aren't the best cuts in the world, it does tend to come out with a very nice flavor. Grilling preference for me is typically medium-well, and it still comes out juicy and loaded with savory goodness. They also include an order of "meh" fries that look like typical fast food fare, but they're good regardless.

The last time I managed to consume this meal, everything was uber-salted for some reason. It was the first "off" experience I've had with the Pittsburg Applebee's to date, so I hope this doesn't turn into a repeat. It was good anyway, but it could have been magical.

I guess we'll find out.  :)

Working 3D at Last

It looks like cosmic disarray can only keep a person down for so long.  After fighting with DirectX all weekend starting on Friday, I've finally got a working Direct3D engine with natural-looking, smooth terrain.  As you can see from the image below, there is no longer an issue with random triangle patterns and terraced terrain stepping.  It's just smooth, buttery goodness.  =)


I've also modified the engine to use pre-processed meshes in a custom format.  This allows us to directly load in the verticies and indicies without any real processing on the part of the client.  This is good since there is about a 30-60 seconds pause due to terrain processing on my 3GHz Phenom II to get a nice, natural mesh from a simple heightmap.  Now that we're in pre-processing land, it only takes a couple of seconds to load up the terrain.

More on this in the future, providing it retains my interest now that I've solved the main technical challenge.

Fishy Terrain

Not all is well in 3D land.  I've been trying to get into DirectX programming for a few days now.  More accurately, I've been meaning to get into it for ages but until a few days ago I never put in any serious effort.  With XNA & Game Studio 3.0 (which is really a misnomer since there's not really anything particularly gamey or studioy about it), things are a lot more organized than they used to be.  Five years ago my only real choice was to use C++ and access DirectX directly.  Boring.  I hate C++ because it over-complicates even the simplest of tasks.  It's also not appreciably faster for most tasks than the generic .NET framework is these days.

Enter my recent progress.  I started by ripping the art assets from a Microsoft terrain tutorial and re-wrote the game engine in my preferred language:  VB.NET (3.5 pref, but anything 2.0 or newer is fine).  It ran great and I was excited to expand.  Unfortunately, everyone is eager to give away art but not explain how it can be produced, so I had to quickly abandon the thought of creating a bigger terrain mesh, etc.  Instead I've had to rely on generating terrain meshes based on programmatic means.  Today marks my first successful result:  Using a PNG as a heightmap, I've created an engine that will generate a grid and apply the height information from the image.

As you can see, something is awry.  Theoretically, this is what should be happening:
- Grid of points on the X and Y axises with Z info from bitmap
- Two indexed triangles created from each point (excluding the last row and column of points)

While I'm certainly getting terrain, it's haphazard.  Instead of smooth hills I get something like SimCity 2000 where everything looks like it is terraced.  Very fishy...hopefully I get this ironed out soon.

Racist Cartoon?

For any of you who haven't observed the controversy yet: 
New York Post Political Cartoon

Apparently, Al Sharpton and the rest of the attention seeking Racism Alert crew are all getting worked up about a cartoon depicting two police officers having shot a monkey with a caption lampooning the stimulus package.  For those of you who aren't familiar, a few days back a woman was mauled by a chimpanzee that went berserk.  When it tore the door off of a responding officer's cruiser, he shot the chimp multiple times with his 9mm service pistol and it ran away, dying shortly after of its wounds.

For those of you not familiar with the linguistic custom of mindlessness to be equated to monkeys, I'd like to remind you of that part of our heritage.  If you put a monkeys in a room with a typewriter blah blah you'll get Shakespeare.  Is that saying about black people?  No.  It's about monkeys randomly banging on a typewriter producing Shakespeare, eventually.  Mindlessness.  Code monkey--slang for the job of low-level programmers' jobs writing boring, tedious code.  Is it slang for black programmers?  No.  It's slang for the mindlessness of the position.  What does it mean when you are monkeying around?  Does it mean you are pretending to be black?  Hell no.  It means you're not being productive, you're just mindlessly doing whatever.

So now that you're familiar with these non-racist concepts, it should be fairly obvious that the cartoon (which you can see at the link provided at the start of this entry) is meant to combine the two current events together:
- Lady mauled by chimp being shot
- Stimulus package that conservatives consider...you guessed it...misguided and mindless

The cartoon is only racist if you are looking for it to be.  Every time anything can be twisted or seen in a racist light, in come the Anti-Racism Brigade being as loud as possible.  Guys, chill.  Your cause prevailed like 35 years ago.  I'm 22 years old and I cannot remember a world where race was a big deal unless old people were actively making it one.  Just because you folks are living in the past doesn't mean that you share the same relevance in the present.  Are these jokers just addicted to the lime light or something?  Have they been crusading for so long that they're just blind to realizing the world they wanted is the world we're largely in?

If they're going to continue to make a big deal out of everything, we'll never be able to completely move on.  Seriously guys, there's no big deal with this article.  Why make a soap opera out of it?

Friends Are Important

If there is one thing that this most recent episode of social drama has pointed out to me, it is that friends are important.  That's the general realization.  There is also one thing that this situation highlighted specific to me, and that is that my friends are a rare resource.  I simply don't have many of them.

This is a radical departure from how I existed all throughout the public school years.  It simply wasn't possible for anyone to go through grade school and high school without making friends...lots of them.  Even if I didn't talk to everyone on a regular basis, it was clear that I knew everyone and that they were only an arm's reach away should inspiration for conversation be encountered.  I like how this felt, but I didn't realize it until post-high school.  During school, I always imagined how nice life would be if I could somehow move to a deserted tropical island.  The point of this was that I would be away from people entirely and would be free to relax and do whatever I wished unencumbered by the impedance of social contact.

Today is of course a different matter entirely.  Once I began my college career at Kansas State University, my contacts were much more limited.  Only a few people I had known my entire life at school were present, and I struggled to maintain an adequate level of social contact.  Suddenly I had my island and instead of being a tropical paradise, it was a tropical prison.  I imagine that this is why I've become less introverted and less anti-social in recent years.  In order to maintain that same level of contact, I had to open up and try harder.  It wasn't an issue of avoidance to maintain the proper level anymore.  It was an issue of actively seeking out enough contact due to scarcity.

It's harder to make friends these days.  I think this is primarily due to my location and not my age group.  My old friends are still young enough to be largely unmarried.  Marriage, of course, being the point when old friends completely quit hanging out with their other friends.  Location-wise, I work where I have no age-based peers other than the chemical department, and I'm still anti-social enough to have problems even talking to women I'm not seeking a relationship with.  I don't even know why that is considering the origins of that problem were with the initiation of puberty.  I've established who I am and I exercise control over that aspect of my life since I'm 22 now, but that legacy of social problems remains.  heh  It is kind of funny really.

Back to the incident from the weekend though:  These things have made me realize just how valuable friendships are.  I need a minimal level of contact to remain in a non-depressed state, I think, and I'm barely running on fumes as it is.

Maybe things will shape up once my friends complete college and move back to town for a while.  I don't know how many will end up staying, but there will surely be a few that don't go to random, far-away locations.

I could only be so lucky.

There is Always an Option C

Curve ball.  It looks as if real life is not as exciting as movies are after all.  Larry messaged me last night inquiring what my Facebook status meant.  I had set it to "Particle is pretty sure he's been played and should probably seek new friends," earlier that day.  I explained to him how I thought I had been played and was upset about it, and he told me that there had been a grand misunderstanding.  Yesterday I talked about how I could wrap this whole thing up, but it looks like I was hit by Option C instead.

Of course, I was suspicious about this since he'd been ignoring me for two days already and had gotten so mad at me for nothing.  He told me that he and his girlfriend were pseudo-wrestling and things got out of control a little bit when Kate had fallen off of her chair.  He'd pushed too hard and knew that so he apologized and everything, but she got upset and left.

The story seems simple enough, but it is at this point that one always has to apply the test of logic and previous experience.  Here I will be going through the check list of my thoughts on the subject and why I currently believe him:

1)  It is simple.  In my experience, I've found that lies tend to be overly complicated compared to real life and they almost always have lots of small plot holes that make them not line up quite right.  It isn't always easy to prove it, but one often gets that feeling of "something isn't quite right about it."  That leads us to #2:

2)  It lines up perfectly.  It explains all the weird parts that existed already in the story delivered to me by Kate.  It explains why she didn't know if he was mad at her following this incident.  She had told me a story where if someone had done what she said, there would be no question of if the person was upset with her.  She also didn't have the expected reaction in that case of being mad at him.  She was just concerned if he was mad at her.  She also continued to stay at his house following the event instead of trying to leave.  This all fits with a recreational activity gone wrong.

3)  Apology.  Kate has since apologized to me for having told people the story she told.  She didn't admit lying, but that's not what really happened.  She had delivered the story without any context.  In that case, it comes across as an assault and not what seems to have actually happened.  Oh, you were wrestling?  Yeah, that makes a pretty big difference for the story.  Larry had also apologized for blowing up at me.  He was just mad that she was telling people what she was telling.  I'd be upset too if people were telling others I'd assaulted someone if we were just playing Twister and I fell on them.

One and two really should be together for it to mean much, and they certainly are for this case.  Number three is just icing on the cake for the believability front.  So tentatively I believe that this was all a misunderstanding.  That's good for the meat of this story but what about the other peripheral information I covered?  I still need to find out what the deal is with:

- Pushing Dane's dad and slashing his car's tire.
- These prior assaults as they were told to me.
- The Applebee's incident.  That really seems messed up.
- The dodging me thing I can live with.  I don't subscribe to that practice, but lots of people operate that way.

The first two points came from Dane.  I'm great friends with the guy, but he understandably has a biased view against Larry here since his wife is dating him.  I don't know if perhaps these stories are without context, exaggerated, lies, or completely true.  I'll just have to try and find out.  In the mean time, I'm content to just know nobody is angry with me.

Life is not a soap opera, but some times it can get damn close.

Post-Chaos Resolution

An odd feeling overcame me today as I sat down at another computer I hadn't touched since Friday.  I saw that the person I had called a friend on Friday was still on my contact list.  At home I had removed him already since he had taken the liberty of removing me from his Steam Friends list and had been ignoring everything I'd said to him over MSN for days.  Every time I would open my contact list at home, I'd get excited to see a friend online which sucks since immediately after I always had that "oh wait" feeling of disappointment.  Even if I wanted to talk to him, it isn't like he'd reply.  So that's why his contact card ended up in the trash.  I can re-add him later if things change.

What is there for me to do in this first post-chaos day in Normal Time?  Let's go over what my fragments of consciousness have to say:

My internal optimist is inexperienced, and it shows because it wants me to somehow reconcile everything and get back to being a big happy group of friends.  Since my friend (which I will continue to call Larry) won't respond to me, this means I need to talk to the one I will continue to refer to as Kate.  This is not an easy accomplishment since calling or messaging Kate is likely to end up as a communication intercepted by Larry.  They have that kind of relationship to where they're both extremely distrustful of each other and read each other's emails, message histories, text messages, etc.  Larry even makes a habit of keeping Kate's phone for days on end and pretending to be her on MSN and email.  She is equally nosy but does not have the penchant for masquerading as the other person.  As you can tell, it will be difficult for me to get in contact with her even if I want to.  Should I be successful though, I'm not sure how she'll respond.  She has clearly played me out to do exactly what happened, but she has a vested interest in being mad at me for the same reason that she played me to begin with.  Chances of success:  35%

My internal pessimist is old and tired by this point in my life.  It complains about low wages and long hours, but that's just the kind of guy it is.  It wants me to cut these people off from my circle and throw away the key followed by a "good mad" that propositions a snarl from my face every time I so much as hear their names.  This is impractical and would be ultimately futile because this is not the kind of person I am.  No matter what a person does to me, I have a hard time staying angry at them.  I always just want to make up and go on because that internal optimist in me has such a loud mouth at times.  Chances of success:  15%

My internal realist likes to *surprise* be realistic and level-headed about things when possible.  It draws from both my internal optimist and pessimist and takes the middle ground.  This isn't always a good strategy, but some times it is still the best one.  What it wants to do with this case is uncertain.  It has two distinct ideas:

1)  Forget about the people but without the angry connotation.  Just move on and look for new ways to exercise the social tendencies like watching movies and playing games.  It remembers that it wasn't me who did anything wrong to begin with and that the only people who are sore here are the drama movie team.  Chances of success:  85%

2)  Try to make up as well as is possible but then write them out of future interaction.  It realizes that these aren't the kinds of people that I should be around in the first place since they obviously don't respect me.  This would provide some closure and still accomplish the same end result of disassociation.  Chances of success:  45%

So those are my options as I see them.  Current predictions lead me to believe my inner realist is going to try its #2 idea first at this point.  If that doesn't pan out, it'll probably be down to its #1.

The spot light has kicked on and I'm standing here holding the bag.  At least I learned something about who I was hanging out with.

My Friends Love Drama

It isn't always easy to talk about one's friends with complete objectivity.  Everyone has their own character flaws, so it always ends up making whoever is to be discussed sound worse in description than they seem in day to day life.  Some times there are exceptions to this.  Today's topic, for instance, discusses a few of my friends.  In this rare exception, the description does their respective characters justice.  I'll try to be as straight as I can about it all, but it may be difficult considering that this is a story about how I've come to realize that my social-stuff-like-food friend apparently isn't the person I thought he was and how his girlfriend appears to have played me out.

For this to make sense to any of you, you must understand a few pieces of background information.  I will be using name and location substitutions to protect the players from any relationship with this account of what happened (to prevent harassment by potential readers, reputation damage, etc).  Anyway, the story starts last year:

My friends Dane and Kate got married after years of courtship.  They had a child and moved to Detroit shortly afterward since they both liked it much better there than here.  Kate decided she was no longer happy with Dane since he didn't "appreciate" her enough and moved back to her parents' house with their child.  Within a week or two of being back another friend of mine, Larry, decided to make his move on her.  Within no time, they began dating...secretly at first but later openly.  Kate is still married to Dane and all this time has refused any kind of troubleshooting procedures as well as divorce (sorry, I'm an engineer).  She also believes she should have full custody of their child despite not being able to (or even trying to) hold a job, but alas that is all another story.

So fast forward to today.  Larry and Kate's relationship has been one of those where they break up faster than anyone can keep track of it, probably literally averaging about once every week or two.  A few days ago, Kate messaged me on MSN and asked me if I had talked to Larry.  I told her no and asked why.  She told me a story about how they had got into a fight and he had physically assaulted her.  She then tacked on a request for me not to tell Dane about it.  I told her that I'd have to think about if I would be morally justified to withhold that information from him since it's kind of a big deal.  It's not like she had told me the guy had eaten her sandwich out of the fridge without asking or something.  She then told me she understood and rapidly changed the subject.

Now, I didn't think much on this.  The next day Dane messaged me that Kate had told him to ask me about the situation.  This made my moral decision much easier since I knew it was the right thing to do to tell him and she must have really accepted that I would have to tell him since she herself had told Dane to ask me about it.  He wouldn't have known to bring it up unless she had mentioned it after all.  Because of all of this, I didn't think twice about sharing the story Kate had told me with Dane.  I didn't exaggerate or stretch the story to make it juicier gossip or anything.  I just told him the story as she had told it to me.  Dane then filled me in on some history that I hadn't yet known:  Apparently Larry has made a habit of anger management issues.  This is supposedly the third girlfriend he has assaulted in some fashion, and even the same day as the Kate incident he had shoved Dane's father and slashed his car's tire.  This is where I begin to realize that Larry is not the person I had thought I had known.

Later that day, Larry got on MSN and started harassing me about having told Dane the story Kate had shared with me.  He insisted that she had told me not to tell anyone and that I must not value that.  He also claimed that what I had told Dane was inaccurate.  He then proceeded to harass me some more about how bad of a "friend" I must be and that what I had done was really wrong and it makes me a bad person.  Yadda yadda.  I tried to reply (he'd messaged me while I was watching Rambo with my father), but he has ignored me for nearly a day now.

Reflecting on what must have transpired, I realized that one of two things had happened:
1)  Larry became really angry and what he messaged to me was inaccurate due to his emotional state.
2)  Kate had played me.  She understood that I would need to tell Dane and even told him to ask me about it but had told Larry otherwise (that she had demanded I never speak of it).

The first one seems unlikely.  The second one makes sense considering the type of person she is.  She must have set me up...she wanted Dane to know about it but didn't want to tell him herself so as to spare herself from Larry's inevitable angry response.  She then used me as a way to tell him about it and is lying in order to spare herself from any kind of angry response.  Instead, he is now pissed off at me.

Some "friends" I have.  The first one may very well have a chronic problem with anger management leading to assault among other things.  The second played me in order to spare herself from her boyfriend getting angry.  If that is the extent to which she respects me, I want nothing more to do with her.  Larry, while having been my socializing friend for the better part of a year now, is also not the person I thought I knew.  I don't see myself wanting to do much hanging out with him anymore after all of this.  Mentally, I need some closure though.  I need him to not be mad at me for having done not a damn thing wrong.  He doesn't see it that way.  The way I see it is perhaps he shouldn't have assaulted her to begin with if he's going to be upset that her husband finds out about it.  Of course, I can't hardly expect that to make sense to either of them.  They're having a relationship when she is married to another man to begin with.

That reminds me of another fun fragment about Larry from long ago (it's all starting to come together to paint a picture of what he truly is):  Once when the three of us were out at a restaurant eating, Kate went to the bathroom.  Her child (that she'd had with Dane) was there and began to cry.  I didn't know what to do about it, so I asked Larry.  Larry had had a child of his own for over a year, but instead of doing something he just ignored the child.  He shrugged and said "not my kid".  While at the time it disturbed me, I didn't really see it for what it was--a glimpse of his true character.  It also makes sense (here's another fragment) considering that I've known for a long time that he lies to me any time it is convenient.  If he doesn't want to fulfill a commitment he's made for a meal or such, he makes something up about why he can't go.  I've many times caught him in his lie by being able to disprove his story, but I never confronted him about it.  I had just accepted that he was going to be a little shitty to me from time to time.  I needed him for social interactions like meals and movies since my friends these days are sparse (everyone is away at college and new jobs and what not).

I think I'd have been better off just ditching the pair of them and looking for new friends a long time ago.  Now if only that were easy.

Purpose is the Spice of Life (Also)

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea that experience is the spice of life.  I was originally going to title that entry "Experience is a Spice of Life" but that came out sounding much weaker than using "the" instead.  The truth of the matter is that there is no single ingredient that will make life interesting or not.  Just like any real recipe, there are multiple factors at play.  Today I will mention the second major one that I keep coming back to:  Purpose.

Finding purpose in one's life and activities is not a given in adulthood.  This is unfortunate for people around my age (early 20s) because up until this point everything was given explicit purpose by external factors.  Life had purpose in school because of the superior authorities present in that environment.  The teacher assigns homework and the student either does or does not do it.  Either way there is a reaction.  If the student did the work their performance would be rated in the form of a grade, and this feedback would be largely responsible for the student's sense of performance and purpose.  If the student did not do the work, he/she would be punished for not fulfilling the obligation.  This also establishes a feeling of purpose and direction.

In a post-school environment, there is no external entity instilling a sense of direction or purpose in life.  There is no teacher telling you what it is you should be doing, and there is no gradebook anymore.  One is left to find their own motivation and this often is completely dependent upon a feeling of purpose once again.  Self-motivation can be difficult for people around my age, once again, because up until this point motivation was given to us.

So what hope is there for those of us in this situation?  Unfortunately, the answer appears to be years of struggling to adapt to the newfound vacuum of superior authority in adulthood.  Every person is likely to find his or her own way to cope with this fact.  There are no absolutes.  For me, it has meant depression.  I didn't even realize what was really missing until just recently, and the truly sad part about this is that until the problem is realized there can be no hope of resolution.  I've found that my job helps take over the role my school used to.  I'm still left to self-motivate for the most part, but it helps to have at least some kind of structure even if it is minimal.  My work helps to give my life purpose, but I still lack direction.

Purpose and experience are not the only spices of life, but they are two of the biggest.

Experience is the Spice of Life

It may not be the only "Spice of Life", but I certainly believe that experience is one of the most important.  As I continue to try and define my post-childhood life, one of the things I keep coming back to is the realization that life genuinely feels less exciting than it did as a child.  When I try to explain to myself why that is, I always find myself resting on one major reason:

Experience, specifically new experience, is what keeps things interesting.

That's a major problem for us as individuals since our culture is geared toward codifying everything and "settling down" into a routine.  Think about that last sentence.  It is a simple way to describe how we live and it isn't possible to go five words without tripping over a description of anti-exploration.  That's a real obstacle for someone who wants to continue that feeling experienced in childhood of continual discovery.

Life as usual (man, don't we have enough expressions to describe sameness already?) for most of us consists of:
- Wake up
- Get ready for work
- Go to work
- Have lunch
- Go back to work
- Go home around 5:00
- Do whatever it is we routinely do
- Sleep

Realizing this, I began to contrast the above routine with what a childhood routine is like.  Children go to school, after all, and the only real difference in schedule is that children go home at 3:00.  So if it isn't a difference in schedule that makes life more or less boring, what is it?  I think it is the state of being ignorant.  I don't mean that in a degrading way at all.  I just mean that children haven't yet experienced or experienced as many times the things that we as adults have.  Somewhere around that 3000th game or so, somehow first person shooters seem less exhilarating than they did at first.  Endless variations exist on the central FPS theme but the familiarity with that type of activity dampens the excitement even for FPS games not already played.  This same principle of familiarity applies to things other than games as well.  You could apply it to meals, shopping, television, and even sex.

Repetition is a major component of that which kills what makes things and experiences special.  Just think about your favorite music.  Somewhere around the 250th time you've played a track that really felt special to begin with, it somehow seems less exciting, doesn't it?  That's just another example.

Knowing this, it's really too bad that our society's culture depends on repetition and burnout for normality.  Granted, there are only so many things that one can actually do in life, but it might just make things more interesting to be as diverse as possible instead of purposely living in a rut.  Now if only that were easier.  When we were children this took no effort as we were blank slates.  Everything was new and exciting regardless of what it was.  Now as adults it takes an active effort.  That's why I think that experience is the spice of life.  Now if only it came in plastic shakers instead of being so difficult to maintain.

The Slorge Mystery is Over

In retrospect, I think I may have actually enjoyed the mysterious ride on this one.  It all started about a year ago when Slorge stopped posting videos as often.  He had been doing a sort of video blog for over a year by that point and had done so with reasonable frequency.  I always enjoyed watching his videos, and it was that process that allowed me to get to know him on a personal level.  He was just another person I knew by that time, just like if he'd been a friend who lives here locally.  Anyway, his infrequent posting eventually became no posting at all by about 9-10 months ago.  This by itself wouldn't be so strange as I imagine anyone would eventually reach a point where they feel burnt out.  It was when his Youtube account completely closed that I began getting worried.  His Flickr account also closed.  This was a man who had been well connected on the Net for years, and I found it strange that he would totally disappear like this.  I feared that something bad may have happened.

It was with this motivation that I began to search in earnest for what had happened.  I emailed Slorge through an address that I found on an old email from him, I searched around, and I found pretty much nothing.  He never replied to the email and all activity from him everywhere seemed to stop altogether at the same point ~10 months ago.  I began to contact other people that had known him and didn't receive any replies from them either.  Looking around for context clues, I started a thread on the PCRPG forums about it.  I eventually (along with another member) found this bit on his old band's Youtube profile:

"UPDATE................We are getting back together ......It looks like it will be all of us except Scott Goodhart.....I will miss that voice and bass."

This bit didn't really answer any questions--it just made things more mysterious.  Had Slorge (Scott) declined to rejoin or had something happened that would prevent him from even being able?  The bit was worded in such a way that made things more interesting but less certain.

Josh (a PCRPG member) then heard back from someone he had messaged:

"I haven't heard anything from Slorge for months, myself. I was curious as to why he closed his account, as well."

This reinforced the firm position of "nobody seems to know anything" which is a little worrying in itself.  Why hadn't anyone heard about this?  Had anyone but us noticed?  I started to look at videos from others who were in the Slorge circle for clues.  I quickly discovered two things:  First of all that Slorge had effected more people than I ever knew and secondly that others had noticed too.  Brick72 had posted this three months ago:

"where is slorge gone?
I NEED SLORGE!

Is he on other sites?
His Account is deleted.
I NEED SLORGE"

A month later, whuffie posted this in the same video's comments:

"I see slorge is missing, too. Account closed?! ACK!"

Considering that these people's comments had gone apparently unnoticed for months, I didn't figure there was any point to posting, but I did anyway just so anyone in the future would have that much more to go on.  Unexpectedly, I received a reply from egglooke to my comment just a couple days later:

"Well, i know him personally.
he lives around the corner
his account got banned when someone posted a responce to a contest video.
but before he could deleted youtube kiked him off!"

This was a promising development.  It seemed that Slorge is alright but had probably just decided to heck with it all.  Questions remained though since this didn't explain why his Flickr account had closed simultaneously.  Not more than a couple days later Josh and myself received replies from Slorge's wife that confirmed all was well.  Her reply to me was as follows:

"Hi Geoff,

Yes, Scott is fine. He decided to go off-line and, basically, quit all of it in one day. I don't know about emailing him. He still has his account, but I don't know if he checks it regular.

He's changed jobs, spending more time with the family, and has become more involved at church - so, he's still in the limelight. It's just a different kind.

Scott is terrific and it's nice to know that other people appreciate him too! I will let him know that you are trying to reach him, as well as, others. If you don't hear back from him, please feel to write at this address again.

Sincerely,
K. Goodhart"

So that's the end of the mystery.  It seems that when his account got banned for whatever BS reason Youtube came up with, he must have decided he was done with the whole online thing.  It really sucks for us because he always had such interesting content to post.  After over a year of it, I really felt like I had come to know the man and I regarded him as a close friend.  If going offline makes him happy though, more power to him.  I'm completely satisfied just to know that he's alright.

Some times stories do have happy endings.  I'm going to try to remember that.

Depression is a Funny Thing

It's true.  Depression is somewhat of a funny creature.  It's primarily fickle, but it can be humorous as well.  First of all, it's something that I imagine most people don't ever tell anyone about.  Being depressed is like being crazy, and it isn't really that much of a stretch considering that it is in fact a mental unbalance.  So, instead of cluing anyone into the fact that there is a problem, the depressed person just holds onto it.  Maybe they vent about it on a random blog online *looks around* after desperately wanting to tell someone...anyone about it for ages.

Well, here we are.  My last post was about getting over the depression by starting to forget about yearning for the past and instead looking forward.  It is true, too, that I've been successful in doing that to an extent.  The most important thing I've found is that childhood probably doesn't have as precise of an ending as I previously thought.  These days I find myself still watching Nickelodeon shows like Spongebob or iCarly and Jake & Josh.  The first one is fairly normal for people in their 20s I think, and I don't hesitate to mention that I watch it to people.  The second two are a bit tougher to admit, but I don't think it falls into the category of weird.  That's good considering that simply trading passive nostalgia (missing the past) for active nostalgia (being that sad guy in his 50s trying to re-live high school) is probably even less healthy.  I just find the shows enjoyable since they're just like every other sitcom--absurd plots that would never happen in real life and end up with funny rivalries.

Another part is that I'm actually beginning to feel again.  The warmer weather helps here, too.  It has become rather clear that in the years since 2005 I had developed a sort of callous that prevented me from really "feeling" much of anything at all.  There was a phrase that I liked to use from a song periodically to describe how I was feeling:  "I don't really feel anything, anyway"  It's interesting to go back to feeling things after not for so long.  I've began to feel that sense of anxiousness again, and that's a big part of how life always used to be.  The sort of anxiousness I'm referring to isn't so much a negative thing, it's just that feeling that there's something ahead of you at all times even when there isn't a particular plan of something you're waiting for.  It's that sense of future where you know there is something waiting for you even without any idea of what it is yet.  I'm happy to have reclaimed these things without having to resort to active nostalgia.  I wouldn't yet consider myself completely out of the woods, but all the time I can feel myself regaining what life must mean to most people.

It's a good feeling.