Archive for October, 2001

Weezer is Plastic, literally

yakk, ishamael: I don’t.

I used to date the former girlfriend of Peter Kitts (now Rivers Quomo, lead singer of Weezer – both the same person, interesting story there) back when I was on the East Coast and the band was called Avante Garde. He went to EO Smith in Mansfield, CT. I remember them before they got signed by Rick Ocasek and Geffen several years ago. He hasn’t changed much.

He is.. how shall I say.. “plastic“. His music and lyrics are also. No depth. No substance.

Oh yeah, lots of new things going on at work, home, headaches, and in general.

More for another time, I guess.

The headaches have returned

Headaches

    The headaches are back. After a day of lapse, they’ve returned. The danger with these persistent headaches is that my pain threshold and tolerance for them goes up. Not good.

    There’s probably a reason it’s painful. I just have to find a doctor skilled enough to be able to determine it, and not by shoving more useless pills down my throat.

    Dizzy spells, rusty tastes in my mouth, sweet smells, and bloody noses after a bout of head pain indicates something, and no pills are going to stop that.

    I can’t even concentrate on code.

OW!

I broke something. I blame Debian.

gar! I broke something. I blame Debian.

Can we survive another round of layoffs at Linuxcare?

Tue Oct 16 01:57:51 PDT 2001
Round #5 looms. Mark the date.

Enormous World Trade Center image montage

WTC Image Montage

    I was given an image to add to my collection (now approaching 1,200 images) from a person who shall remain anonymous of an aerial view over the decemated WTC location.

    What’s unique about this image is that it is a 9372×9372 jpeg image at 1016dpi at 1:12 ratio. I can literally zoom in and see the color of the pants that the construction workers are wearing, clearly. The file itself is 16 megs. It’s painful to zoom with gimp on this PIII/850 w/256 megs of ram (the gimp swapfile is over 1GB on disk).

    I should stop panning around and zooming in, I might see something I don’t want to see. Even the 300×300
    thumbnail
    I created of it is 87k. The original file is 31 times larger than this thumbnail.

Wow, can these headaches get any worse?!

More crippling head pain. Can barely stand up without getting hit in the head with this invisible shovel being swung at me. It’s been one full week, 24 hours a day, of this pain.

I’ve dumped about 11 ice trays of cubes into a garbage bag, and I’m using that as a pillow right now. I can’t relieve this pain. It’s a good thing I’ve got some high tolerance.

Look Ma, more headaches!

The word for this week is headaches. Lots and lots of crippling, fall-to-the-floor, excruciating headaches. The doctor-prescribed Maxalt and Imitrex are not helping.

I don’t think these are migraines. Time for a second opinion.

Studying for security certifications

The acronyms for this week are: CISSP, GIAC, CCIE, XML. Training begins.

Stay focused. Stay Sharp. Relax, You know this material. Think

What would Nostradamus do?

nymia: As you know, there’s a lot of FUD out there about the interpretations of Nostradamus’ quatrains (not including the faux ones popping up recently), but here’s a page that seems to take a fair “academic” approach to dissecting the particular verses dedicated to naming the antichrists.

[addendum: It’s important to note that I have absolutely no belief in a “God” or “higher power” at all. My beliefs lie more along the lines of Zen or Buddhism or Wicca than “Christianity” or “Catholicism”]

In other news…

A lot is going on in a lot of areas, but I’m just focusing on training, learning, and lots and lots of reading. I’m trying to sharpen my “hard skills” a bit more.

There’s a lot of code to be written, and much of it is outside my abilities at the moment, but not for long. I have a lot of open projects sitting on my plate that need some attention. I just need to get back to coding, and worry about the other stuff going on at $JOB later.

The headaches continue to get worse. The dizzy spells come almost daily now. Erika thinks it could be my sugars, but I’m not so sure. As I type this, I’m having another one.

The Parallels between Dark City vs. The Matrix

…finished off Dark City a few minutes ago on the
portable
. There’s some very interesting parallels between this movie, and The Matrix. See them both in series, it’s quite obvious. Even the taglines are somewhat similar:

Dark City
“They built the city to see what makes us tick. Last night one of us went off.”

The Matrix
“A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against the controllers of it.”

So much to do these days. So much to do.

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