programmi...

programming day today. came into work and spent the day typing trying to get my damn program to work. at around 11 it seemed to be working perfectly, i fed it the the complete dataset instead of the small test set that i had arranged, and suddenly it stopped working all together. an hour of debugging later, i discovered that either the database had suddenly changed an all uppercase table name into all lowercase, or the program had suddenly begun to care that it was lowercase. this irks me, the one thing i like to be able to count on is that the computer is going to behave the same way each time i run it. and i swear that this up and changed on me somehow. anyway, at 1:30 decided that i needed to eat, and grabbed lunch, in which the only notable item was a dove bar that i found encased in about an inch of frost ice in the back of the freezer. it was either that or the ice cream sandwich of approximately the same age, and i went with the dove because its in hermetically sealed plastic.

a story of joints and bush

picked the wagoneer up today from the shop, they replaced the right front u-joint. took the car to sams club in natick. it has a shake at ~55mph and resonates at ~65mph, which would not concern me much for a 15 year old car, except those are strikingly similar to symptoms i noticed aproximately 700 miles before a middle u-joint broke and dropped the axle onto the pavement. on the good note however, my copy of bush, 6teen stone and the science of things arrived yesterday. yay regression back to high school music. can't wait to subject the lab people to this.

i have no witty tag-line

today was a complete waste in terms of work. basically i've spent the entire past 24 hours trying to figure out how to swing the cost of the new car in a short term kind of tomorrow time-frame. the final conclusion is that all i really need is exactly what i want right now and cheap. as a compromise, i'll be getting something approximating what i want for slightly more expensive then i'd hoped, and not ready till thursday. hurumph. but, things are at least moving. it amazes me though that in a country as obsessed with speed as us that you cant complete the process of obtaining a car loan, insurance, title, registration, plates, and physical car in under 24 hours. i look forward to the day when all will be available through a vending machine. or maybe the car insurance would come pre-installed in the car. for an extra $2k to the sticker price you could plow over line of school children as you exit the car lot and ding a lexus making the left turn on your way to the highway, all hassle and guilt free. or maybe i've spent too much time perusing the world of insurance coverage. I'm having a hard time believing that most liability insurance covers only between $50K-$300K per accident. Considering that most people are driving around a several ton chunk of steel at roughly 60mph, i think it would be really easy to do quite a bit more than $300K worth of damage real fast (reference the line of school children and lexus above). too many hassles.ok, so the basic upshot was that i was really wishing to jump on a bus tonight and run down to nyc, spend the night with taybin, and pick up the car tomorrow morning. it seems that the insurance would be a royal pain in the ass to get covering by today, and there would be no car loan to cover it yet because the loan company moves at a pokey 24 hour decision rate. this all stems from the fact that the car dealership won't accept a credit card for the purchase of a car. urrr. i even had an overnight bag packed.at least this way, the main driver of the car may be able to come along.i think i'm still kind of incensed by the implication that the wagoneer is not good enough though. its got the heart of a good car, it really does, it just needs some work and upkeep and someone to be nice to it. oh, and i feel a little better, apparently the loan company requires only about 3 hours to decide i'm a legitimate risk. yay, i now have their approval to go into debt for three years.

escape from boston

after many trials and tribulations, finally managed to get out of the city for the labor day weekend. made it up to my aunt and uncle's place up on the island in lake george. and have basically been spending the weekend trying to relax a little before jumping back into the bloody frey. on the list of reasons why it was difficult to get out of boston, were that the u-joint on the wagoneer began to go, making it unsafe to drive on the highway (if it decided to drop while on the highway, one of the best things it could do would be tear out the transmission and other large pieces of the undercarrage of the car). so it appears that we are shopping for a used subaru outback. i'm still not sure how i feel about this. i'd really like to still keep the wagoneer, and maybe work on it myself some to make it a slightly cheaper car to own (while i can't repair the ujoint, i could rebuild the carb which it will need soon, and maybe replace the radiator). but the truth is, we're really not a two car family. there is almost never a time when both of us have need a car for seperate purposes. which means that the wagoneer is going to spend most of its time sitting out on the street not running. also part of the problem is that the wagoneer doesn't like emcicle, probably due to the fact that it can sense that she doesn't like it. the car has demonstrated that it works as a knock around errand car useful for some roadtrips, it is just not reliable enough for a daily commute of 60-100 miles. i guess my only decision now is whether i hold on to it and try to keep it running for me, or just let it go and say goodbye. on a related note, i find it very funny that on a printout of the info page on the outback we are interested in, there is a web form to get a price quote. on the printout emcicle has, in silver pen, filled out her first and last name her zip code, and circled the send button. idle doodle of course, but i'm entertained.

decided yesterday...

decided yesterday afternoon that if i was going to actually get any work done, i was going to have to stay home and work from here. this was after i resisted the urge to strangle loud annoying people who kept invading my office (granted its shared, so they have every right to be there) and breaking my concentration. I got maybe three lines of code written yesterday, and resorted to scribbling on the white board and muttering. so, today i'm staying home, and let me tell you, my god it is nice. i'm actually getting work done (current goofing off not withstanding), there are very few distractions, and i have all the iced tea i can drink. the weather here switched from blistering hot to cool fall like weather in about 3 days. its nice right now, but i'm beginning to feel like a puppy with a bipolar owner, i don't really understand the forces at work here, but i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. my main concern is that we are completely going to skip the long nice fall that i like and go directly into winter. or that we are already into fall, and i haven't had time to buy pants (all i own right now are cutoff shorts and a pair of wool pants designed to keep german soldiers from freezing to death while fighting a land war in russia.

things that go poof in the night

right now my head feels like i've taken one of those egg crate mattress pad wrapped it around several times and cinched it tight with a thick leather belt.oh, and my palm pilot glitched, a year of schedules and addresses went poof. i prostrate myself before the goddess of multiple backups in thanks for the blessing of redundant data archiving.

various ruminations (less in the ideas sense, more in the mixing chewed up grass with bacteria sense

breakfast this morning was flat dr. pepper and 20 oz of coffee served with the little spill retardant plastic lid that seems to fulfill some perverse nipple suckling fetish... though the thought of lactating black coffee is horrifying in its own sense. it seems to be assumed that whenever i'm sitting in the office working on the computer i'm not accomplishing anything useful, and thus welcome any and all visitors and distractions. this is however, not true. as i am currently trying to shift gears from project_1 which involves lots of bench work, to project_2 which is all programming. this shift has been significantly hampered by the fact that i just don't seem to want to get anything done today. i am jack's complete and total apathy towards accomplishment. actually, lets get back to the coffee. though i like 7-11 coffee, there is a general ill at ease that i find with it conceptually, having nothing to do with the actual coffee itself. I believe that this stems from its method of dispensing. 7-11 simply has a stack of coffee cups and several industrial coffee machines and warmers so that there are always several pots cooking on the warmers. You just walk in, pour yourself a cup, pay for it and wander out. apparently i have issues with beverages that don't emerge from a machine. soda, for example comes out of the fountain, being produced after you push the button. coffee, when served out of the large vacuum bottles seems normal, you press the lever, and coffee is produced. i just find myself put off by a beverage from the 7-11 not mechanically delivered. one comes to expect a comforting sort of detachment from the experience there, and having to interact with an actual coffee pot kind of ruins that.umm...car's not ready yet, may not be tomorrow depending on whether they get parts or not. grrr. mac os 10.2 released on saturday, and i don't yet have a copy. off my gameideas keep moving in and out of focus.trying to get a sample of industrial desicant for the lab... as of yet unsuccessful.