ASD LOG FILE.

11-30-96. . . . It's Grey o' clock

I'm in the Residence Inn in Portland. I get a whole room with a massive Queen size bed all to myself. It's not as cold as I thought it would be, but it hasn't snowed yet... and I've got dialup, finally.

Living here has sort of cut me off from everything. I can't make long distance phone calls without a credit card, and I don't have one. I am not doing so good because of this... I miss Kim a lot.

My dad came down from Seattle to meet me here. He's unfamiliar with the roads. After I had dropped off all my junk at the Inn, we went off to look for a place to eat. We made a seemingly innocuous right turn, and suddenly noticed a whole bunch of cars coming toward us. And a police car. With all it's lights on. Directly in front of us.

Darned one way streets.

We pulled over and the cop car just drove off.. whew. And we're not all dead.

Just really really really really really lonely.

11-28-96. . . . Happy Thanksleaving

Mom in the kitchen cooking 7 tons of meat

Siblings keep on quibbling over who will get to serve

Relatives and guests wander aimless in the street..

and Andrew's in his bedroom disassembling the Nerve

I'm yanking out it's Hard Drive so I can carry it on the plane myself. Trust no one. See you in Portland.

11-27-96. . . . Argle Bargle Flargle

Okay, I depart for Portland, Oregon at 9 am on Friday. Two days. I guess I should finish packing all my stuff.

Moving is change. Change is good. Leaving all your friends behind sucks gross buckets. Who else am I leaving behind? Why, OpheliaZ and Jay, open-pages webring members and co-journalists. I haven't really spoken much to either one of them, being the massively sociable tyrannosaur that I am not, but I actually e-corresponded with jay (twice) and naturally I sent a letter to Ophelia asking her to add me to the webring. I suppose if I had gone the traditional route and attended UH manoa and taken all my ICS there and blah blah I would probably know them better (maybe). They seem like interesting people, from their journals...Jay is a web-wangler at UH, and his journal contains enthusiastic stuff in a kind of conversational style (with lots of "dammit"s!). Ophelia is the person who runs Open Pages (the ringmaster? ahhh I dunno) and her journal (called a 'diary' since she's female) combines a chronicle of events and cross-sections of her thoughts and feelings. Kinda like a diary. Both of their pages have been around much longer than this one.

If you're reading this, you probably already know these two people anyway. I may as well summarize my own web thingy too. My Log file contains coredumps. From my brain. When UNIX has a program error, it dumps the contents of memory into a file called core. This process is called a 'coredump'. When my brain has a brain error (which it does all the time) it dumps a partial image of brain into here. I wish some big brain administrator would read it and figure out what's going on.

Anyway, back to leaving. I'm not sure what this page is going to do. It's taking up masses of space on the server. It's probably the most obsessively maintained staff page. I'll have a new page in portland, maybe. Naah. I'll just do it remotely.

Wait! Wait! There's so much stuff I still have to do here...

Hey, maybe I can do it all tomorrow! No sleep tonight.

11-26-96. . . . Blue smoke technical Support

First off, let me say that having a quiet "boop" repeating in the background is an interesting form of psychological torture.

11-25-96. . . . Don't touch me again with your 9 volt tongue

Allright, I actually started writing CGI scripts which actually work. That means: soon the Lame-o-tron will actually do something more exciting than email me.

11-24-96. . . . 19996

I move to Portland in 4 days. It's actually 11-25-96 right now, but it's 3 am and I still feel like it is yesterday. And I if I think it's yesterday, it's going to be yesterday. Huh. Well, and it's almost yesterday somewhere in the world. Ah forget it.

Today I was going down the list of online journals reading everyone's entry for the day (it makes me feel saner knowing that it is indeed today somewhere else and that someone recognizes that) and I started thinking about the way in which people will write about or emphasize certain things consistently. These things are obviously either important to them or just keep coming up in their life. Now I guess the initial reaction upon seeing something that seems really banal being mused on (see entry about naming chairs, below) is to internally recoil and say "That's so stupid!" (I suppose, for most people. I seem to enjoy inanity.) but then you start thinking about the relative importance of everything, and how things are so subjective that your life is inconsequential compared to the importance of say, choosing a color of pencil. Well, to some people anyway.

(above paragraph is typical of 3 am)

"Microserfs" (by Douglas Coupland) is a really great book. It's written in the form of a journal by a software engineer at Microsoft. And it's more interesting than it sounds. I thought about it while typing the date for this entry because of this excerpt:

"Thought: sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e.,

19993 and you add 18,000 years on to now, and you realize that the year

19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed."

Yep... been wrestling with a lot of time-related things lately.

11-22-96. . . . "Ultra"

11-21-96. . . . The Eternal Doctrine

Everything smells and tastes like simple green. I have chemical burns all down my throat and in my nasal and sinus cavities. My arms are stiff and sore and if I smell lemon pledge again today I will lose my ability to think rationally.

Yup, it was THAT day. The day where you clean up your house real good so your landlord will give you your entire deposit back. Except that this day already happened twice already.

First day, I did a routine cleanup of my room and mopped and swept the entire house. Ed's things were still in the house. Mine moved out.

Second day, Ed moved his things out and HE cleaned up the whole house. Swept, Mopped, etc. I came in later and swept up my room and mopped the entire thing again with Pine-Sol. (Oh god, pine-sol flashback.)

Then the landlord came in. He pointed out the (gasp!) dust in the corner of my closet! "Obviously no attempt has been made to clean up...it's dirty here...this wall...filthy! Just everything is filthy!"

So. He wanted to play the pickiness game. This is a game you don't want to play against me OR Ed.

After we got off work that day (at midnight) we went into the house with murder on our minds and scrubby sponges in our hands. (and paper towels and simple green and pledge). We spent the next 8 hours (yup, till around 8 or 9 am) SCOURING THE HOUSE OF ALL LIFE. After the first few hours I could no longer feel my tongue, my mouth had gone numb. Ed had similiar symptoms. Neither of us could smell anything except lemon and (I guess) Sassafras (which is what simple green is supposed to smell like).

We were using the Texaco down the street from Punahou (on Wilder St.) as a supply house. The first time we went in, we bought lots of paper towels, simple green, and pledge (and coffee). The Texacoans looked at us and said "cleaning today, huh?"

Second time we went in, we were both covered in dust and pledge and we bought 2 more rolls of paper towels and more coffee. The Employees said "Wow, doing some heavy cleaning huh?"

The third time we went in... we both looked a lot like survivors of a nuclear pledge/Simple green/Paper towel war. We bought more paper towels. more simple green. The Texacohorts simply stared at us. Maybe they said something. I'm not sure if either one of us understood english at that point. The house was so clean, any movement would cause it to get dirtier.

I am now at work again. The only other person here is Ed. Technical support tonight is very strange. Also, it's goofy thursday. Something is going to catch on fire, I bet. Well, I'm moving to portland in 7 days or so... I'm going to need a coat. I think Kim is getting a really cool one for me (yeah I'm going to pay her back later. hee hee.) so I'm not going to buy one here in HAwaii...Well, ed just passed out on the floow I better get his phone.

Oh yeah...We won. We got our whole deposit back. Supercool.

11-19-96. . . . Sweet merciful crap

You want to know WHY our web server was so fricken slow? It's really stupid. It's not our fault, it's one of our spimey users'. Grrr. Net abuse is highly irritating. I don't even know if I'm allowed to say that.

11-18-96. . . . All our circuits are functioning perfectly

Okay! Web server has returned to usability. Unfortunately right now Nerve is caught in the middle of a 4 hour raytrace (I'll post the finished trace later) which will be it's last act before i disassemble it for travel. Yup. Gotta move out of this brick before wednesday, when the landlord comes to assess the damage.

11-16-96. . . . Never is shorter than you think

If you're reading this today, I'm impressed because I'M not even gonna read it today, because the web server here is FUCKING slow. We're talking, www.ancient.slow.site in pakistan coming up ten times faster than MY page sitting on the server in the next room! Sometimes it even times out. Grrr.

Other bad things happening include Thing 1, Thing 2, and Thing 3. Hmm. That's not what I was trying to type. I guess I'm still a tad shy about telling all you total strangers every personal detail of my life. My log was so much more specific when it was on paper. Oh well. Part of learning HTML seems to be fighting stagefright.

Yup, when you write pages, it's almost like performing, except you can't see the people who see you, you don't know what kind of reaction you're getting (not right away anyway), and there's about a thousand times more people doing the same thing.

Well, lousy mood today. Can't wait until tomorrow. Uh..oh. It IS tomorrow. I guess I should go to sleep or something like that.

Here's hoping the web server gets fixed soon.

11-13-96. . . . The Cow Book

Yesterday on the way home I got rained on (hard) for a while (half an hour) late (midnight). My jacket was wet from inside out. EVERYTHING I was wearing was saturated with water. And my supposedly waterproof bag let in a whole bunch of water (through the ZIPPER). Since it's so waterproof, it kept all this water inside, ruining a bunch of books I was carrying. One of them was the valued COW book.

Ah well. Moving to portland in 10 days. Plan 10 successful. Thank you, thank you. Now that I've got everything fun set up here, I get to move and start again.

Oh, since my shoes got all wet (water was actually leaking OUT of the holes in the bottom) I went and got some BOOTS today. Manly boots! Steel toe! Huge! Black! They make me feel like running over small people. I've been transformed into a monster truck or something.

11-12-96. . . . Phone Rubber

Someone left a message on my answering machine:

"Hello, this is fuckin' Dennis from fuckin' New York, is fuckin' Andrew home?"

??? Well I called back at the number left. Yup, I got Dennis all right. Hello Dennis, this is Andrew, I'm returning your call.

"Is Andrew home?"

This is Andrew

"Is Andrew there? This is from Hawaii, right?"

Yup. This is Andrew.

"No, the Andrew I know is a girl."

Oops. Well apparently he wanted to make a good impression on her, considering the language used in the message. Kind of curious as to how he found my phone number and connected it to the name "Andrew", starting from New york.

Also kind of wondering what kind of girl is named "Andrew"

11-10-96. . . . If you're quadraplegic and you know it clap your hands

Hmmm.

11-8-96. . . . I was proven in darkness

Well, here we go with the not sleeping for days and days daze thing again. No big deal yet...but I know. noon today will mark about 24 hours.

Oh yeah...quickcam in effect boyeee. Check back here at about 6 pm HST(-1000) when I set the infernal thing up at work to fulfill its deadly purpose.

It is done. Uh oh.

11-7-96. . . . Terrain Monitor

11-7-96. . . . Breathe Lies

Um, whatever I do today, I am certain nothing on my agenda involves shady activities with tech3

But I think I might reset the system clock so that it doesn't think it is tomorrow.

11-5-96. . . . Riot Nrrrd

Today, I don't even have to go out to meet all sorts of people.

They seem to just be showing up at my door.

I was going to go out and find the landlord so I could pay the rent... then there's a knock on the door, and it's him. In his US immigration officer uniform. Which was sort of confusing to me when I peeped through the paranoia hole in the door. Now there's a cable guy crawling around in my living room. Did I ASK for a cable guy? I guess they just show up in case you needed some cable installed or something. Nothing's broken. He just showed up.

And these people are seeing me outside of my heavy environment suit! Normally I have time to tie my hair and put on some ordinary clothes. Now they're seeing me with weird tufts of hair jutting out at random angles from my head. and wearing semi-disintegrated evil band shirts. And they can see my room, all my electronics crap lying everywhere, NERVE (with PC boards dangling off it)... I haven't cleaned up for these people.

So who gets to know what I'm REALLY like? The strangers who barge into my house without warning, of course. Grrr. Don't touch me or I'll TEAR your arms out of their sockets.

11-3-96. . . . Urk@urk (I'm @ wurk)

Lots of broken things today.

Even though I'm supposed to be really cynical or something, I find myself being constantly disappointed by people because I expect them to be more than they are. I overestimate people.. now, is that because I am optimistic, or because I am stupid? Or maybe in a really weird way I WANT to be disappointed, so I set my internal expectation level to unreasonable levels. People also seem to like being overestimated. More than being underestimated, anyway. I like being underestimated. It means that I have exceeded expectations. It also means people look a lot more surprised when you kill them.

I betcha didn't know I used to be in marching band. I used to wear a strange purple outfit with lots of gold things on it and walk very stiffly for miles and miles while playing a trombone. I guess it's a good thing I don't smoke. I would get light headed and dizzy as it was. The concept of marching bands is so bizzarre. You don't have marching actors, or marching operas or anything. I guess the military produces weird things like that.

True story: Woman speaking to Zia at work. The woman was getting a 'Type Mismatch Error' in Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). This error occurs when you try to view certain sites (like the MSN home page, most notably) using older versions of MSIE. The woman was very angry. "It says type mismatch!" "So I keep typing 'mismatch' but it won't go away!"

11-1-96. . . . ISDNV