• 8 : 28 A.M. PST
  Been awake for 3 hours

Get ready! For the super... fun... YEARGH

I'm not sure why I'm awake. I'm a little nervous about upcoming job interviews. I mean, I think I know a lot about perl and HTML and scripting and programming and computers, I guess. But then, I thought I was able to speak intelligently, and I was apparently wrong about that. SO. Self confidence a little shaken, wondering what it is that's gonna trip me up. What kind of questions am I going to be asked? Perl questions? What the hell can they possibly ask me? They could ask me about formats, I never use those. "LOTS OF LESS THAN SYMBOLS, ATS, AND BAR THINGS!@#%!#%". I know what value is returned by print commands, I know how to deal with lists in lots of interesting ways. Are they going to quiz me on the relative efficiency of different techniques of doing the same thing? Big-O notation? Am I gonna have to know the technical details of how each regular expression works? Frick. They're probably going to ask me things about HTML that I never cared about, like MARQUEE or BLINK or something. Or, I know, they'll want to know my opinion of the HTML standard or some nebulous bullshit like that. My opinion? I'm glad there is one. It's stupid that tags are officially supposed to be lowercase. That's all. See? I can easily sound like a complete dumbass! McFUCKING TERRIFIC.

This anxiety is gonna kill my chances there if I don't figure out how to kick it.

• 11 : 48 A.M. PST
  Batter Matter

Hmm. Noon. Should I make pancakes or waffles? Or should I eat more chicken? That's one bummer about cooking for one: recipes that make fifty servings guarantee you highly uniform meals for the next 3 weeks. In fact, I've started post-processing my baked chicken to get more variety. Baked chicken sandwich, baked chicken with rice, baked chicken next to a waffle. It actually winds up being about the same price as ramen, over several meals. This thing of chicken cost me something like 6 bucks for 12 pieces. It's a good thing, because I remember the days of eating nothing but ramen. I never really thought about it before, but I haven't cooked pasta in my house since. It would make sense: I was seriously prejudiced against noodles by the end of that time. I wonder if I'll still be able to eat fowl when I'm finally out of this financial crunch.

I was looking for information on pepper mills just now. Specifically, why is it good for them to be 3 feet long? "Pro" pepper mills all seem to be at least 12 inches. The facts behind this design are surprisingly obscure. As far as I can tell, the only advantage to having a really tall pepper mill is that it can hold a hell of a lot of peppercorns. And I guess if your job is to wander booths and help customers to huge amounts of freshly ground pepper all night, you probably want as big a reserve as possible. Thusly, there is no reason to get such a tall appliance for home use, unless you like eating just a bowl of pepper from time to time.

I notice that the "pepper enthusiasts" mentioned here and there on the web are exclusively the hot-pepper kind. I guess there are no, like, ground black pepper enthusiasts (except for Ed).