Trending Heavily Toward the ’Spitting’ End of the Bar

One Man's Battle Against Mediocrity 

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"Mr. Hamlin - judging from the last half hour of conversation I am torn between two conclusions. You are either A: *astoundingly* intelligent but so incredibly burdened by the weight of accumulated jade and cynicism that you've determined to withhold the full benefit of your benevolence from those of us who have not yet transcended mortality, *or* B: the most singularly gifted bullshitter I've ever had the dubious pleasure of spending time with.

Come to think of it, the two prospects aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. "

I think I'm in love.

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segfaults

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Ngah!

I *hate* mysterious and intermittent segmentation faults!

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Getting off my lazy ass

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I've often said that you can tell how depressed a person is by how often they update their blog. The way I see it, if you're happy with your life, you're going to be out there living it instead of writing about it. My life's been pretty busy, and I'm happy about it.

ATLAS IS SHRUGGING

In light of the recent economic collapse, I've been reading Atlas Shrugged again. The way reading Atlas Shrugged goes for me is that I get to the bit where Dagny decides the hell with it and heads out to the cabin and toys fruitlessly with the stepping stones and shingles, and suddenly I start feeling empowered, and I start nailing negotiations with clients, etc...

...for about a week, until I finish the book. Then I relax again. I should just read the last half of Atlas Shrugged over and over again. I'd never get any sleep, but I'd be a business *dynamo*!

Fortunately for all concerned, I'm invested heavily in precious metals and won't lose too much of my shirt as the economy corrects itself.

THE CAT CAME BACK

My emergency backup cat disappeared a couple of weeks ago, and there was no consoling my wife and daughter. I was somewhat easier to console, but since I live most of my life downstairs, I began to notice almost immediately that all manner of vermin moved in to fill the power vacuum left by the disappearance of our hunting cat.

Our main cat, Llwnefryddh, also known as 'my dipshit cat' has an odd relationship with vermin, that being that she likes to point them out to me. She'll come into my office and set up a loud complaint until I follow her, at which point she leads me to the spider or mouse, etc... looking up at me expectantly. Clearly she expects me to do something about it.

The emergency backup cat has a microchip embedded in the muscle of his left shoulder. This came in very handy, as the people who he eventually landed on were conscientious and took him into the veterinarian for a check-up, at which point they were told that he was owned.

We figure he hopped into the back of someone's car, settled down and took a snooze, because he showed up several miles away. When we took the call from the people who found him, the guy was *pissed* and wanted me to explain to his twelve-year old daughter why she can't have her kitty. Oy.

Anyway, he's back now, and the vermin are once again running scared.

In other cat-related news, there is an orange tabby cat which has been hanging about the house for a number of years, but has recently decided to get into a pissing contest with our emergency backup cat for dominance over the hunting ground immediately surrounding our house. She's a little smaller than he is, but she's opened his face a couple of times. They're working it out.

I've been letting her into the house, so long as she maintains her manners, and I think she's starting to mellow, but we'll see.

RITALIN IS EASY... RITALIN IS GOOD...

I was recently called into conference with the principal at my child's elementary school. This was not a fun event.

Let's back up a moment:

Event 1: Frantic message is received on telephone to the effect that my daughter has been in a fight at school.

Event 2: I speak with said daughter about the incident where she assures me that it went as follows:

Her friend approached her and asked her to play a game with her. She said no.
Her friend then grabbed her arm and asked again. She repeated her no.
The bell rang.
My daughter tried to go in, but was held fast by her friend.
My daughter stepped on her friend's foot, pushed her off, breaking her hold, and ran for the door.

Under the circumstances, I was proud of her - I've been teaching her self-defense for three years, and this is exactly the response I expected from her. She could have taken that kid back to the factory if she chose, but apparently didn't.

But THEN...

I went into the school on the following day to speak with the principal, who told me a different story. Apparently it was my daughter asking about the game, and when she got a no, she *punched* the other little girl in the stomach hard enough to cause her to double over, then grabbed her ears and brought her knee smashing upwards into the girl's nose.

So. My daughter is not learning self-defense any longer, in addition to some other changes in her environment and lifestyle as a consequence.

She's extremely unhappy with this turn of events. So am I.

P.S. No, we didn't (and won't) put her on Ritalin or anything else.

LEAVE ME BE, I'M CODING

I've finally got a handle on Berkeley Sockets as implemeneted in x86 assembly language under Linux, which is *fantastic* as it opens up the way for a lot of projects I've been wanting to do but haven't been able to because sockets at the bottom level were stumping me but good.

I'm still working on the disassembler as well, but progress has slowed down some as I've had to re-evaluate some of my assumptions before continuing. If you're a programmer, you've got a pretty decent idea of just how big a pain in the ass that can be, especially on a large-scale project.

WELCOME, EARTHLINGS

Looks like I've picked up a few more readers, which always makes my head swell. Shouts to nischal, nicholaspatter, and clementine.

That's about it for this post, time to go back to living my life. Happy reading, and until next time, check out http://www.eidolonai.com for some twig-out madness.

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My dipshit cat comes out to meet me whenever I get back from wherever I've been. Then she flops down in front of my truck and starts to roll around in the dirt, forcing me to stop the truck, get out, and move her disphit ass out of the way so I can park.

Whadda maroon.

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HYAH, MULE!

In today's news, I've been asked to perform the most boring assignment ever. I can literally feel myself aging as I work today; my only consolation sometimes is that I still own the business and still get to work in the buff if I don't feel like getting dressed.

See, one of my clients has a client of their own who is trying to come over to them from another provider of a similar service to the service my client provides. Say that ten times fast with no mistakes in earshot and I'll buy you a beer.

Normally when this happens, I get the inevitable request to write a tool to methodically go through the data for the client-once-removed and clean out copyright claims and bocked-platform specific graphics, etc.

However, these guys are using a really incredibly convoluted data scheme which doesn't hold to any consistent formatting guidelines. This means that while a tool could conceivably be written to do the job, it would take a hell of a lot of time, and would more than likely involve more effort than just removing the offensive material by hand.

Which is what I'm having to do.

Kill me now, please.

BEHOLD OUR FIERY GOD OF SLOTH

My wife's raise kicked in, which is helping both of us relax some, and we've celebrated the occasion by buying a whole bunch of edging bricks, some lawn fertilizer, and five big bags of white marble chips. The ostensible plan is to edge the flower garden and scrape out the horrible bark to be replace with the marble chips.

Thwarting us in our efforts is the sun, which has chosen the last two consecutive weekend to beat down upon our fair land at temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which has dulled our enthusiasm for yardwork considerably. Forecast for this weekend involves light rain, so we're optimistic.

SO YOU THINK YOU WANNA BE A STAR

My daughter's been listening to me play the ocarina for some time and decided recently that she'd like to learn, so I ordered a small twelve hole transverse for her to learn and practice on. She picked up the basics very quickly, but now that she's got the fingering down and can play simple songs, her interest seems to be edging off. I'm disappointed, but I suppose the ocarina isn't for everyone. Oh, well.

NEW SUBSCRIBER

Looks like I've attracted someone's attention - welcome Garry Tan. I don't post often and much of my stuff isn't all that interesting, but if you're of a mind to read my schlock I'll be happy to feed it to you.

That's about it for now. Back to hand editing third-party client data.

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YAY!

My ocarina arrived today in the mail. It's a lot browner than I anticipated, and sounds kind of airy, but from what I'm able to gather on the ocarina forums that's to be expected the first couple of days with purple clay, so my excitement is not dimmed.

The finger holes are a good deal closer together on this one than on my english style ocarina as well. Gonna take some getting used to.

I also finally got my PERA check in the mail, which was a real plus. I didn't expect that for another couple of months. It was for more than I expected, as well. Good day.

Saw 'The Dark Knight' in IMAX with my wife this afternoon. I don't know what all the fuss was over - reviewers kept saying this movie was dark and intense, but I didn't really see that it was much more so than its forerunner 'Batman Begins'. Maybe they were comparing it to the earlier works involving Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney.

Ledger definitely stole the show, though. I though the Joker character seemed like a really intelligent and charismatic fellow - I'd have enjoyed buying him a beer if I didn't have to worry about whether or not he was going to shoot me under the table.

In other news I drank the last of that horrible Old Chub tonight. It seemed like a celebratory occasion, and I wished I could have been drinking something I enjoyed to celebrate, but then that would have defeated the purpose.

No assignments for school tonight, but I *did* solve one of the major problems with the disassembler this morning, so maybe I'll put in a little more work on the heavy lifting surrounding the instruction set tonight before bedtime.

That's about it for today. Go see 'The Dark Knight'.

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According the the parcel post tracking website, my ocarina has arrived in town and should be here by tomorrow.

YAY!

In other news, I'm *really* having a tough time understanding how r/m / SIB works in terms of decoding x86 instructions. *howl*

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Today it turned out that the data I sent in to my client wasn't in fact the data I thought it was. The tool was going through all the motions, but due to a small change in the way the input data was structured, the output wasn't what was expected.

Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Unfortunately, I have to do the generation process all over again, which takes a good chunk of time. Fun.

In other news, I have managed to really piss off my wife; we were talking and I made a flip comment about something that happened when I was little, and she didn't apparently think it was a joking matter.

Also purchased one of the neato purple clay ocarinas this morning. Now I'll be keeping an even closer eye on the mail than I have been.

Almost out of beer - I'll have to fix that sometime soon. No school assignments, so I guess that's it for today.

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Maybe

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I wonder how many of these first posts contain the 'first post' instructions?

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