The Big Mo’

I don’t know why I think this, but I believe John Kerry’s Presidential campaign is gathering steam. Bush is static, while Kerry and Edwards (particularly Edwards) seem dynamic and vibrant.

Kerry has done well to include Edwards on the campaign. Vigorous, engaging, and personable, Edwards softens Kerry enough to make the ticket appealing in the heartland. Combine that with Americans worried their jobs are going overseas, and we may have a repeat of 1992: People voting their pocketbooks.

This is day 3 of me quitting coffee. I have splitting headaches and irritability. The smell of coffee itself is both arousing and sickening to me, because I can’t have any.

Why do this to myself? Really, it comes out of my reading of The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs, who publishes Simple Living magazine.

A dense, wordy tome, the book talks about all sorts of way to simplify your life, live better, have lower stress, feel more fulfilled, be more “in the moment”. It’s about 100 pages worth of advice slopped into 400 pages of dull prose and hippy “case histories” about people who’ve applied these techniques. There are some gems there, but it’s work finding them.

And now some gloss to go with the illustrations.

My weekend in Sparta. Two days of autocross, or “How burnt-out can you be?”

I’ve autocrossed for the last 6 weeks. I haven’t been to my home church for a regular Sunday service since May 9th. »sigh« It’s something I love, but it’s really taking over my life.

…and I didn’t do so hot at the races, either. Not being whiney, just realizing that I feel like I’m driving the wheels off my MINI, but I’m still not catching Scott. Beating him requires consistent excellence and a bit of luck, and I’ve only done it once. With the condition of my Victoracers, that’s probably not happening again, at least not this year.

Pics from early August

The other day, I was an honest-to-goodness spy photographer

That’s a lightly disguised 2005 Ford Mustang.

She’s got huuuuge…..tracts of land

It’s been a very…uneven…week here in the Bluegrass.

First, a comment on the weather (yes, it’s going to be one of *those* blogs): Though the week began with sweltering temps in the high 80’s with lots of humidity, it was chilly this morning. I’m talking 60 degrees F, in AUGUST. It feels like late September out there.

The cool weather has been a boon to my exercise. I’ve jogged 2.5 miles each of the past two days, and I’ve drunk plenty of water, and I feel marvelous.

In the past 3 days, I’ve driven roughly 500 miles.

Saturday, Susan needed me to come down and fix their wireless router so that it would interoperate with their library card catalog server. Basically, the way I had it set-up, there was a D-link 614 4-port switch that sat between their DSL modem and their network, doing Network Address Translation (NAT) and defining a private network 192.168.2.0 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. On THAT network, I had their wireless router sitting on 192.168.2.5, also doing NAT and defining its own private network for wireless clients 192.168.0.0, netmask 255.255.255.0.

A retrospective on my day off.

(sorry…first a pic)

VW of America is totally clueless, and the legion of people that bought cars in 1998-2002 have pretty much rotated out of ’em. Bad build quality, terrible customer serice, and hearing the answer “Oh they all do that [leak oil, fail to start, creak, groan, ride like a buick, blow ignition coils, flake off their paint]”

* * *

Anyway, I arose yesterday surrounded by the insane mess of my apartment, and then I smelled the 57 degree air outside and I had a Ferris Bueller moment, “Cameron, I’m TAKING THE DAY OFF”. Whitney’s dad’s offer of free tix to the Louisville Bats (Triple A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds) sealed the deal. Three phone calls later, I was off for the day.

Harvid brainfart moment of the day:

So, I’m coding up this fix that AT&T is demanding, and I’ve solved the problem with a little hack WAY down inside this one module. Without going into too much detail, what I have to do is invert the array that I was returning from this one function (I said it was a hack!)

In java, to do that, you need to use a java.util.Comparator class inside the Arrays.sort() method call. Inside the comparator, I need to change the sign of the return value of the java.lang.String class’s compareTo() method.

GAA! National Faggot Week?

Warning: British false cognate content!

The weekender blog:

Spent most all of this weekend up in and around Louisville. Friday night, I went up for dinner with Whitney and Joey, then Saturday we found ourselves in sunny New Haven, KY:

Where we found ourselves at the Kentucky Railway Museum to ride Thomas the Tank Engine on his tour of America.

The start of Saturday was a disaster; Joey hid Whitney’s keys inside the laundry and we didn’t leave until a few minutes after 11, when we had tickets for the 12:20 train. It takes a little over an hour to get to New Haven via US 31E through Bardstown. On the bright side, we got to take the Pup and the drive was a blast with Whitney and Joey in his car seat in the back.

Pics of the EKU autocross

Suddenly, Central Kentucky is the Scottish Highlands:

The high today was ~70, with tonight’s low expected to be 61 degrees, and a low cloudlayer blankets everything with a diffuse, gray light, and a mist hangs low.

>>cue the Hound of the Baskervilles. :D

Some hellacious thunderstorm blew through Georgetown at around 6am. I was so desperate for sleep that I put my pillow over my head to muffle the thunder and turned off my alarm.

So, after getting up at the crack of 9 am, I didn’t make it to work until around 10. »sigh«

Totally spent today…

Hand clap of praise: I was a good boy and went jogging last night around the subdivision across from my apartment house. Only got chased by one dog, and a little pug at that :-)

From the automotive newsletter that I read every Wednesday:

Lessons you learn in life

Fav quote:

Suffice to say, Nadine is my “ex” - the fiery redhead with an equally fiery temper who is comfortable around firearms and who, in a drunken rage, inadvertently shot me, twice, when she found out I was leaving her for Ms. Jolene.

Sleep is such a good thing.

And such a bad thing when you’re not getting enough.

Kudos to my wondermous girlfriend who, after hearing about the powerlessness and depression of my team at work, set us a snack basket with 10 pounds of junk food: 3 kinds of pringles, gummy worms, doritos, devil’s food cookies, hard candies, salsa + chips. I asked her if she ordered the “Programmer’s Special” :-)

Way to go, honey!

Let’s face it, Morning Drive is a time of extremes for radio listeners in America today: You’re stuck in your car for a few fleet minutes or monotonous hours as you and 10,000 of your closest friends who eschew public transportation wind your way to work. To escape, you flick on your radio and you get the complete spectrum from Howard Stern to Bible-thumping Baptists to Classic Rock.

And so much of it is just crap, isn’t it? Most of the Howard Stern wannabes continue to disgust us, and shows like Bob and Tom feature the same tired jokes and made-up group dynamics year after year. NPR is a respite from the canned laughter and naked lesbians, though it seems broadcast from Communist China.

Heard complaints lately that the ‘Blog is a real bitter pill to swallow. As in, “Harold, you’re frickin’ depressing, man!”

So, my hand-clap of praise for the day: My mom found the watch I “lost”, my Eddie Bauer watch that was a graduation present from my father. Awesomeness!

Also, a small report from the autocross at EKU yesterday. Short course, with lots of sweeper elements and good flow. Not very technical. With the low turn-out we had 3 heats with 6 runs apiece. (I would have pics, but Whitney absconded with my Nikon digicam.)

What follows is me whining about my job. You’ve been warned.

I am so bored with my job. It has a crushing sameness that I cannot escape, and when I do, it seems like the inertia of this corporate black-hole pulls me right back. I’ve done exactly the same job for 3+ years, without much variation nor change in skill set. Got a new machine yesterday, and tried to go against the grain and install SuSE Linux 9.1 on it. Well, because genius me ordered it with a windows-only hard drive controller (Promise FastTrack…don’t go anywhere near it, people!) I couldn’t get it to work.