Commentary, Rants, and Raves

Happy New Year! 2001 was an incredible year. For me, it was the year that saw me living in the one place on Earth that I thought I'd never ever have to call home. One down, two to go.

I don't know where the fireworks show was, but it was awful close. It was like a tremendous lightning storm descended upon my house. Very bright and very noisy. Fortunately, it was also very short.

After I finally got up (an incredibly difficult task on vacation), I went out and scheduled an appointment with the Personal Property Office to take the rest of my stuff out of storage (before it gets declared abandoned property).

Today was the day to pay rent and bills. (Not fun at all, because now I'm close enough to broke.)

After the sun came up, I couldn't get a wink of sleep if I tried. It wasn't too bright outside; I got a bunch of phone calls. Between panicking bosses and telemarketers, Mom called. Seems that everything I had done to try and get my property out of storage was in vain, because they told her that unless I contacted them they'd declare it abandoned property. I called right away to straighten them out.

It turns out that the lady I had been dealing with no longer works there, and she had never once touched my file or read the emails I sent her, contrary to what she had told me over the phone. The new person I'm dealing with found my emails, as well as the accounts of what I'd been doing to try and get my property out. Hopefully it won't be long before it all gets down here, and I won't be without such necessities as a TV and VCR.

The mostly nothing day. I did as close to nothing as I could get away with. I read more of "Lord of the Rings," and I've found that the book needs to be managed. There's only two ways to read such a long book: either one chapter at a time, or in a single sitting spanning days and nights without stopping. Chapters are only about 20 pages each, but the words are thick. Most authors could never cram so many events into so few pages as craftily as Tolkein did.

I had planned to get further in my projects, but I was distracted with the bliss of doing nothing. ^_^ I was fully engrossed in the book. I'm just two chapters from finishing "Fellowship of the Ring," the first of the book's three volumes.

Laundry day. While doing laundry, I finished "Fellowship of the Ring" and started into "The Two Towers."

Having now read the book, and seen the movie, I can say clearly now that the movie was not as faithful to the book as it should've been. But there's no way any movie can possibly faithfully follow the book in less than 22 hours, so for staying under three hours it did a magnificent job. A lot of events and dialog were rearranged more than rewritten, and I think that was the best way to deal with the time pressure. The movie was as faithful to the story as it possibly can be for a three-hour movie.

The book has me. Nearly without stopping, I made it two-thirds of the way through "The Two Towers." I won't spoil the surprise for those of you who've seen the movie but not read the book, but I'll tell you this: A terrifically unexpected chain of events is going to dominate the second movie. If they were even the least bit faithful to the book, it's going to be a sight to behold that'll surpass the first movie easily.

I found out that there's a lot of work I need to do to the domain that I hadn't forseen, so that means another behind-the-scenes overhaul to the site. That's about 80 files to wade through and touch up. Fortunately, because of the plan I went with, it's only a touch-up that I need to do. Straight HTML coding or using a WYSIWYG editor would've required tons of writing. A macro language that doesn't try to be a programming language (*cough* vba *cough* virus haven *cough*) is a surprisingly powerful thing, easy to use, and safe.

Today was the day to get the property office out here into action. As soon as they wanted me to explain some of the answers I gave them, I knew that i fell into a crack. They've never dealt with anyone in my situation before, but they were still able to get me the stuff I need. I'm one step closer to having a decent place.

I brought my book to read during the waiting time, and that perked the interest of the lady hepling me. She hasn't seen the movie yet, but wants to. I told her that she wouldn't be disappointed in either the book or the movie. She was kind-of shocked to hear that so much had been cut and still be a three hour movie.

The last quiet day of my vacation. Tomorrow, I've got things to do, though I'll still be on leave. So today I spent relaxing, reading, and working on my LiteStep book. It was well after 1:00 AM when I finally went to bed.

Got back into sort-of weekend mode. I went out, took care of business, and got a haircut (so I don't look like a castaway when I go back to work).

I saw my neighbor for the first time since before Christmas. She was out mowing her tiny yard and kind enough to mow mine. She loves yardwork, which works out great for me since I'm the indoor type. But the reason I hadn't seen much of her is because she was in the hospital, laid up from a car wreck. She wasn't hurt bad, just a broken arm, but bad enough that she couldn't come home. Nobody but her family knew. I expressed my sympathy when she told me about it. Thankfully, she's just about fully recovered, going through the same kind of things I went through when I broke my arm, and faring better than I did.

No weekend for me: night duty tonight. I hate night duty. It's not that it steals away my weekend; I can recover from that. It's that it ruins my sleep pattern for the next five days, which also destroys my productivity on both work and home projects.

Slept all day and worked all night...

...on the PC problem from Hell! I can't reveal much about it because of my line of work, but I can reveal this: I spent the entire night from dusk to dawn, literally, troubleshooting, reinstalling, repairing, and eventually replacing the entire PC system with known-good properly configured boxes, and the symptom was still there: the PC froze. And it wasn't even using Windoze. When my relief came, I left a madman convinced that the laws of physics had been suspended.

Breakfast, sleep, football during sleep, dinner and email, sleep.

I woke up late and ran late. I arrived at work on time, but I was late getting dressed and ready. This last weekend messed me up something fierce. I had 18 hours of sleep last night, and I was still drop-dead tired. A variety of small fires kept us all late.

I got paid today. What's better is that I got paid my regular amount, so the Navy still thinks I'm in.

I found out today that the reason I went mad on Sunday morning was because of a flaky interface unit clear across the hall from the system I replaced. How a simple piece of hardware a hundred feet away could cause software to hang it up is beyond me. Government software: if not written by the Government itself, then written by the lowest bidder, and in either case probably by a "programmer" who can't even program a VCR. I'm convinced of that.

Another duty night. Thankfully, nothing eventful happened, so I finally finished that enchanting block of wood by JRR Tolkien. I can't wait to see the rest of the movie series, but I'm also worried about what they'll leave out. There's no way Lord of the Rings can be properly shown in less than a 60-hour marathon.

Sleep and email. That was it.

This morning was the meeting that wouldn't end, including a rousing discussion with my new department head. I may have a PHB above me, but now I've got a good guy above him. I know that it's not just hot air because he's already made changes to restore the department's credibility and reputation of old.

The PHB still managed to surprise us all, not just me, by revealing drawings related to my work projects that I had never seen before and claiming that they were somewhere that I had already scoured. I'm not worried, though. The evidence and witnesses are on my side.

I slept in, then went out and enjoyed myself. After these last two weeks, I needed the time off.

Why can't people leave me messages? I do exactly what they claim to have done from the same phone they claimed to have used, and I get my answering system.

I came in to work believing that I had day duty. I didn't find out until I got there that I had been switched to night.

I found a 10 x 15 inch flatbed scanner compatible with my system for only $60. I looked all over and I couldn't find anything under $100 except used, and this was a new one, so I snapped it up. Until today, I was using a scanner cartridge for my printer, but that limited me to single sheets of paper.

Night duty was boring.

After sunset, when I finally woke up, I went out and had a huge taco salad bowl, the likes of which I hadn't seen since Diego Garcia, but crispier, fluffier, and far less greasy and oily.

I tested my new scanner. It works beautifully. Here's the result ("Don't make me slap you..."), reduced to fit even though the original pencil is only two inches tall. mIRC, an Internet Relay Chat client program, has a command that lets you slap other IRC users. For example:

*** ArielMT slaps 100zer around with a large trout

This morning, I scoured every possible location for last Friday's mystery drawings and came up empty. This afternoon, after a great deal of effort in logic, my PHB emailed me the drawings. They had been on PowerPoint the whole time. When I got the email, mere seconds after it had been sent, it was too late to delve into them today. Peachy.

After work, I hung out on IRC (irc.openprojects.net's #litestep), helped LiteStep users, and learned a few things myself. For example, the Windoze 2000 LiteStep Installer/Uninstaller works in Windoze XP as well. (This link points directly to the file on Shellfront.org, run by rootrider if I remember right.)

No more Del Taco for me! They have a huge burrito called a "Macho Burrito" (now you know where Spanglish came from) that I thought for sure was going to give me a heart attack. The symptoms were relatively minor but still kind of scary after eating Mexican fast food. The symptoms eventually went away and nothing more came out of it, except bad gas for the next two days.

Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Office Web Gallery hereby officially suck. I wasted the entire morning trying in vain to put in a simple cloud shape. PowerPoint has sun, moon, lightning, snow, and star shapes, but no cloud. And I never did figure out how to make new shapes without adding megabytes to the size of the slideshow file.

First, the bad news: I was late for a meeting across town, one I knew nothing about until 15 minutes before it started. I don't have a car, and the duty truck was out. But I made it, only a half hour late. Now, the good news: It was for the transition of all San Diego's bases to the Navy and Marine Corps Intranet, and I'm now involved to represent my department.

Night duty was not fun. I wasn't able to get anything meaningful done.

On my way home, I found an abandoned check card in the gutter. It was intact, clean, and as far as I knew valid. I did the right thing and turned it in to the police. Those kinds of things could make me look very bad, and even hurt my own credit, if I simply hung on to it or even delayed in reporting or destroying it. Even though I couldn't see any sign of life for a mile in any direction, I can never know who sees me or what they'll think. (No, I'm not paranoid. As far as I know, nobody's out to me except freedom-haters, and they're just out to get everyone.) Nonetheless, the police took info from me that I haven't had to give out for anything but my clearance. Only in California.

I got struck by an idea a few days ago. Most of the problems the LiteStep community fields are complaints from users new to LiteStep but self-proclaimed experts in everything else Windows, about how LiteStep messes up their computers so bad that the only way to get a shell back is to reinstall Windows. (Something, by the way, that you never have to do if LiteStep is misconfigured, no matter what Windows tells you.) The biggest legitimate problem is that a good smooth installation of the LiteStep program requires simple yet intimidating hacks to precious system files. A simple feat for genuine Windows hackers, and one discussed indepth in every copy of LiteStep's manual.

Yet self-proclaimed "hackers" (wannabees, actually) who call themselves 1337 ("leet" or elite, which I consider 14/\/\3 ["lame"]), they constantly bombard genuine hackers with questions that are answered in all the documentation, frequently asked questions, and manual. Sadly, this isn't restricted to the LiteStep community. It actually predates LiteStep, and even the Web, and so does the standard answer: RTFM. RTFM stands for "read the fine manual," although most people substitute another F-word.

Thus was born LiteStep: The Comic Strip. A few members of the community toyed with the idea of a LiteStep comic, with the intent on making it like The Matrix, but something like that would actually end up as a hacker-centered clone of Clerks. At any rate, I am now only the second host of a LiteStep comic strip in the history of LiteStep. (whytheluckystiff beat me to it by at least a year.) Here it is.

I also tried to find out what kind of shape my credit is in, through one of those free credit reports on the Web: ConsumerInfo.com. They promised my credit report after I receive both an email and a posted letter containing passwords. We'll see.

Added on Tuesday, June 21, 2005: I saw all right, and it wasn't pretty. It wasn't pretty at all.

I spent a good deal of the day writing my LiteStep book. I'm using WordPerfect, a program that I've found converts documents much better and cleaner than Microsoft Word, while having features right on par. When the time comes to publish the book, WordPerfect gives me a variety of choices for any publishing route I take.

I spent all day at work on duty. The good news is that nothing broke or needed my attention. But that made my day very boring. Once I got home, I checked my email and went straight to bed.

I was kept busy most of the morning and afternoon. Not under a lot of pressure, but the day wasn't boring either. After work, I stayed home and chatted in Web chatrooms on other topics.

I felt tired and run down all day long, in spite of a great many cups of caffinated coffee. I was late getting up and out the door for work, but that meant I was on time instead of early like I normally am.

I got my W-2 form today, and immediately hopped on TurboTax.com to file my tax return online. They have this thing called the Tax Freedom Program, where they'll prepare and file a return, free of charge, for anyone reporting less than $25,000 adjusted gross income. I qualify, but I don't know whether to feel happy or sad. It needed some info I didn't have, so I had it save my return. These guys know how to write programs. TurboTax.com isn't a Website; it's a smooth, well-written Web application.

Theoretically, I'll have more time off starting tomorrow, but since I work in tech support I don't quite see that happening. Oh well...

I had an even harder time getting up today. At work, in addition to my regular duties, I got more of my tax work done.