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  Heck, by the time it actually gets here it'll be out of date even though it wasn't when I ordered it.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.