fractalnavel

did you ever have to hack your way through your work projects ?  friggin' 99% undocumented "sdk"'s will do that to you.  or rather, me.  had to guess & crack my way to database passwords, and reverse-engineer some code to dig out a needed application setting.  after, of course, digging through the binaries, the data model, and the data itself scattered through two applications.  this was after spending days getting the crap installed and running in the first place.

so, finally, the sdk.  that needed a good deal of installation rearranging as well in order to debug the broken sample code.  no api docs.  gotta love the .net framework in cases like this, good (free) tools are out there to help.

nah, no specifics on this. feels like wasted time, but given the absent documentation it was still a necessary investment.  now it's my turn to do some knowledge transfer.

oh, yeah, went skiing sunday for the first time this season.  just locally.  got the top on jeep for that little trip, then too lazy so far to get it back off.  finally some reasonable weather, in the 20's. 

oddly uneventful, really.  met up with a couple of friends i hadn't seen in a while.

hmm.  emotionally flat.  i think it's because of staring at code like that lately.

i have to practice my evil laugh more.  where do you sign up for the evil laugh training ?

yeah, that's somewhat relevant.  no, i don't feel like explaining.

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didn't "flashback" used to mean revisiting a (bad) acid trip ?  anyway, a pic post test...

that price is without the monitor and mouse.  hell yes, that mouse expense will getchya every time !

odd, no mention of a hard drive.  those were about 30mb at that time for these "high end" systems.

i think this was the zenith of the desktop computer age, when the price / performance ratio was the largest (barring the earliest entries some years prior).  laptops were even more. 

passed on by craig.

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... until some folks noticed the blog resurection here.  jon dropped a note on that last post. disagree ?  why would anyone ever disagree with me ? ;-)  anyway, it seems he's moved over to "subtext" as his blogging engine.  looked at that, wasn't impressed, didn't seem to be going anywhere fast either.  now, if i felt like actually contributing to that open source project, that'd be different.  but i don't.  so there :-p

craig emailed that he would start blogging again too.  he has yet another blog on this server.  i can't manage even one.  neither can he ;-)

he also mentioned that he got a coworker looking in here:

I was talking to the guy (Brent) that sits next to me about you and
introduced him to your blog. Brent kind of did the same thing that you
did, spent an entire year pouring over philosophy and physics books and
like you started noticing patterns and memes that are everywhere. He has
a physicist friend that's kind of autistic that studies neurons. He
claims to have written a paper on opinion that free will does exist.
Well I said you hold that it doesn't but is an illusion. So now he's
into searching your blog for "stuff" :)

unfortunately, as i told craig, mostly what he'll find is discussions with those conclusions as the foundation.  the groundwork predated the blog significantly.  but there's certainly lots of "stuff" ;-)

no family showing up yet.

time to introduce a new category / tag: metablog.  that's quite a frequent topic here.  i should retroactively categorize a bunch of old posts.  then i need to stop doing these types of posts.  too self-referential.

speaking of categories and tags, even though community server uses the same data for both, they are handled by  completely different code branches.  one annoying this is that category lists dsiplay with the category description at the top. while the list for that same topic as a tag does not.  loked into what it would take to make that consistent, and forget it.  i'd have to either branch their codebase, or develop my own skin controls entirely.   i'm going to need some5thing like this for a customer as well, but i'm hoping someone will resolve this discrepancy in v3.x.  not likely; seems like the tagging world doesn't think in those terms.  i mean, i like the cloud idea, but the metadata is still important too, and these things are not in conflict.

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... if heat is molecular kinetic energy, does that mean a fast moving water ballon has hot water from some perspective ?  if so, what's the temp / unit of velocity ?  so very hot water can remain liquid.  sort of.

but this is true, think of things hitting the earth's atmosphere.

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mostly ate out the last couple weeks, but that's expensive, so i went shopping today.  passed the meat counter, and the big ol' t-bones were marked down two dollars a pound.  not a bad deal for good quality slab o' cow.  so that was dinner.  damn thing barely fit on the grill.  man, that stuff's good.  beats the crap out of the stuff you get at the steakhouse chains.  lotsa leftovers too.

once upon a time ...

i was cooking steaks one snowy winter day for a girlfriend and myself.  delmonicos.  she wanted hers well done.  so i somehow managed to cook what i thought was the perfect well-done steak, very thoroughly cooked, but still juicy & tender.  she turned her nose up at it - she wanted it dried out & tough.  that just pissed me off.  i think the steaks ended up in the trash.

i miss the 'free text box' control that was the old post editor in .Text.  i'd use live writer, but it doesn't let me change a number of post settings.  might be a reason to write my own plug-in.

so anyway, i was thinking, before my blogging hiatus i was kinda getting annoyed with myself for framing all of life's events and thoughts in terms of blog material.  do photographers do that ?  writers ?  to me it seemed faked somehow.  i'm going to try and not do that this time around.

i'm also going to try not to repeat myself, or at least say something significantly new or different on an old subject.  gets tough as more material accumulates.  our ruts get deeper and deeper.

was channel surfing last night (can't wait for all digital brodcasts - i won't update my set, i'll just let things fade to gray), and saw a peter frampton concert on pbs. still playing the same old crap.  and the audience is still digging it.  i guess it would seem strange to expect him to be doing new stuff, just as it would be strange for new people to be doing truly retro stuff (not faux retro).  it kind of got me thinking about change, adaptability, the truth of one's existence in a dynamic sense.  the same effects apply in any field, science being a notable one.  how do these same principles (which i haven't expressed here) affect me ?  my career ?  how does it affect societies ? 

and so on.  too rusty in self-expression at the moment to clarify all that very well.  that is still one of the reasons i want to keep writing.  damn good for that purpose.

i also decided that i will go ahead and post some retro stuff from the last several months, just to prove i haven't been entirely brain dead for the last year.  these will be from emails, still in reactive mode, but at least the blogging aspect will have been an afterthought.  pretty much in each instance the bloggability was discovered after reviewing what i wrote, and seeing that it was more or less soap-box stuff, talking at the recipient instead of to them.  nothing particularly earth-shaking.  well, there was one thread on pluto...

i kinda sorta also need to put my money where my mouth is, following up on some thinking and discussions about democracy and voting over the last few months.  suffice to say i disagree with the mainstream on things.  wow, big surprise.

wups, some scifi movie on.  missed a few minutes.... later.

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(not using "live writer"; i want to update our metablog.ashx first)

i have enojoyed looking back at past posts here, while i wasn't posting.  i was even thinking of posting some links to my favorites, writer's choice, but there's too many.  i'm also just a little bit self-intimidated [self: thanks!]  by some of it.  all that free time was apparently worth something, even if only to me.  can't just ponder indefinitely on random topics these days.  ah well, time to think forward again.  but it's just not the same quality...

so we finally had some snow today. a couple inches, maybe.  we just don't get the extremes fouund elsewhere.  but you wouldn't know it by talking with the locals.

am i a local now ?  over nine years.  far too long for a place that was never on my radar.  it's only inertia keeping me here.

just quiet.  count that blessing.  random incoherent considerations.  these days when i gaze at my navel, often all i see is lint.

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McNaught's Matinee

missed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_McNaught.  i'm usually more on top of things like this.

*kick self* *kick self* *kick self* *kick self* *kick self* ....

self: hey, what are ya doin' that for ?!  you're the one who screwed up !

*punch self* *punch self* *punch self* *punch self* *punch self* ....

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posted with windows live writer (beta) - why post the old fashioned way ?  i ran into this last night at work when digging around for other blogging related things (community server "shared links" implementations, i think).  man, it makes some stuff easy.  like embedding maps on the fly.  i like to do that for my trip log entries, and it's always a pain in the ass.  now, just click-search-click, and presto, instant map-in-post.  supposed to auto-upload & link pics as well.  supposed to; doesn't seem to be working on this blog,  i know that the metablog api handler needs updating; our installation of community server is a service pack behind.

yeah, there are other tools for blog posting as well, but this one just caught my fancy.  lots of plug-ins as well for this.  whether the quality is there or not, i really like the "windows live" stable of toys.

anyway, reminder-to-self to update my website index / menus.  just for kicks i created a fractalnavel myspace account, and i need to update what used to be an msn spaces account link with the new live spaces link.

i wonder if this thing can simul-post ?  you know, cross-post to multiple blogs transparently.  doesn't look like it...

lots of other limitations in terms of custom styling.  would be worth taking a closer look at the plugins.

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so, like, i started again without any real "reason".  which was the whole point...

i wanted to mention that in order to comment on posts, you'll have to sign up for an account here first.  see that link at the top right corner ?  yeah, that one.  trying to dodge spammers, that's all.  you'll get an email to verify your registration, then you can log in and do whatever it is you needed to do.

posting.  my goal this time around is to not be almost solely reactive, but to initiate entries due to internal motivations.  although i should start directing thoughts here rather than email, in the reactive cases that do occur.

but what is there but reactive ?  stimuli - response.  i guess i should attempt to interpose enough of a complex node to at least mask any obvious influences.  but then context is lost, and with it, meaning.  besides, how credible is it to just state "well, out of the blue i just began thinking x..." ?  although that does happen sometimes.

anyway, reactive mode:

being bad lately about eating expenses.  about the time i figured i should start getting in shape again, i also figured it was time to quit the fast food crap i've been pulling the last few years.  you know, shop & cook like normal people (?).  which was going fine until just recently. the last couple of weeks, while at least not being fast food, i've been just heading to restaurants.  just need to get back into the shopping habit.  probably this weekend.

anyway, stopped at the local pub for some grub, ended up talking to some young guy about the software industry, of which he claimed to be a part.  with about twenty years more experience on my end, i couldn't avoid, well, showing it.  you want answers ?  i got answers.  even if you didn't know there was a question.  there sure are a lot of myths about what we do.  probably one of the hardest things we i.t. vets have to face is dispelling the magical thinking that so many people accumulate.  that goes for many people inside as well as outside the industry.

unfortunately, ethics are hard to come by as well, and those slightly more in the know tend to prey on those less so, eventually just screwing things up for everyone.  like the guy at the bar, involved in yet another rip-off company (yaroc™).  using an open source package to do basic work for customers, then charging many time what the work is actually worth.  these are the dumbfucks that make my clients paranoid and impossible to work with, once they have been burned.  and this kid was proud of it !  didn't know better, i guess.

more reaction:

so i got back late, missed KoL rollover, lost some accumulated turns & stuff, no biggie.  i wanna play my games !

other:

was at work until almost nine, polishing some stuff off.  also playing with some windows live things.  one of 'em is a cool tool for blog posting.  i should use that here.  my thought is that it would be more user-friendly for the client to use with their weblogs.

from here it digresses into silly work detail.  suffice to say i've spent the last couple of weeks getting some stuff whipped into shape that has been seen as a point of contention - and no one cares to look at it !  even for a minute or two.  thats partly a good sign, but partly full of shit.  other issues behind that.

but that's it, enough writing for now.

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just so's it won't be more than a year since i last posted...  but blogshares dropped me, they have a three month inactivity limit.

lots of postable material has passed via email, but as usual, retroactive posting will be infrequent at best.  but it will be easier now:

news: this is no longer a .Text installation.  upgraded to community server 2.1 last october.  yeah, playin' with the tech, not writing.  even more perverse is that i re-created the same blog look on this new platform.  it was nearly trivial though, so not nearly as perverse as the concept itself.  so much for fresh starts.  or any start.

spent most of the summer playing spiderweb software games.  and part of the fall as well.  got quite out of shape.  finally got back to working this fall (which i hadn't done since june), and the pants were awfully tight.  time to quit the vegetation experiment.  so i've been working out.  have to make that decision now about either joining a gym, or investing in some additional needed equipment.  like self-spotting squat rack & bench.  even more extravagant would be a cable machine.  and of course more weights.  but not any of the variety of "home gym" systems.  those are for laughing at only.

didn't do any visiting this past year except for a nephew's first communion in april, and thanksgiving in maryland.  even christmas managed to get away from me.  i've gotten too used to the quiet.

the current time-waster is KoL, thanks to my eldest niece.  someone dropped a flyswatter on my desk this morning.  my first thought was "great!  a gnollish flyswatter!  i've been looking for one of these!".  at least i didn't say it out loud.  that sort of thought process is happening more and more frequently.  in case you're so inclined, my (primary) character name is the obvious.

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