Category: Angst

June 30, 2004 /

Spider-Man 2 is out today! David Koepp didn’t write it, and Michael Chabon did! Life is considerably better than it was five minutes ago, before I learned that.

I loathe David Koepp, in case I haven’t made that sufficiently clear before. He’s written screenplays that adapted three of the icons of my childhood–The Shadow, Mission: Impossible, and the aforementioned Spider-Man–and all of them were pretentious, humorless, cliché-ridden claptrap. I haven’t read Michael Chabon yet, but he won a Pulitzer for writing about comic-book creators; I strongly believe this is a better qualification than, say, Snake Eyes.

June 2, 2004 /

The query still won’t run right. There are like five people on the database and I guess that’s just too much. I wish they’d leave. I’m going to have to come in on Saturday now.

June 1, 2004 /

I have a new cell phone. I’m not really happy about this.

On the one hand, my family and I have had a chronic problem with going over our minutes, partly because we were all sharing the same plan and Ian and I used a lot more than Mom and Caitlan. We only had 800 minutes between the four of us, which didn’t work out that well. So it’s nice that Ian and I have our own plan, so Ian can ruin my credit instead of Mom’s. Also we have twice as many minutes to use, and now that I have Cingular unlimited wireless-to-wireless, I should be using significantly fewer minutes anyway.

On the other hand:

  • I have to transfer all my contacts from Layla. Manually.
  • This new phone is not Layla; it seems flimsier and less shiny, and definitely can’t be used as a flashlight.
  • One nice thing is that it doesn’t have a broken extendable antenna. Then again, it doesn’t have an extendable antenna at all, so when I have bad reception there’s not a lot I can do.
  • Oh, and the new phone is not red.
  • Plus its keypad buttons are that annoying two-in-one rocker style, which makes it more difficult to use without looking.
  • And there aren’t as many of them, which means reduced functionality.
  • But I can google from my pocket! Which is something I’ve always wanted to do.
  • But that’s going to end up costing me a lot of money, at a cent per kilobyte.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll learn to like it. I did with Layla. I still have Layla, in fact, although she doesn’t connect to anything anymore. I’ll probably take her battery out once I’ve got all my contacts and stuff transferred, to use as a backup, since it’s the same kind as the new one.

In many ways I still hate having a cell phone, but I’d grudgingly accepted Layla. This newcomer is not so easy to handle. I feel like a friend has moved away, and a smaller, more annoying person has taken her place.

The new phone does J2ME apps, though. I better get cracking if I’m going to port rfk.

May 30, 2004 /

(This entry is posted as dated in my pocket notebook.)

I’ve passed the Waddy Peytona exit probably a hundred times. For the first time in my life, I’m actually in Waddy, at a somewhat sleazy Citgo truck stop, in a back room with no windows. Ian is asleep on one end of the beaten couch; I’m writing at the other. By all accounts, we’re within a few miles of a tornado.

There’s a scattered copy of The Trucker, a half-sheet format free newspaper, on the floor. It appears to be largely concerned with rising diesel prices. Maria called two minutes ago to say that the heart of the storm should be where we are in about three minutes. The rain just slacked off a bit; it sounds like there’s hail mixed with it now. There’s a thick skylight over our heads, which makes me nervous, but it beats the big window-walls out front.

There’s a large TV back here, which is turned off, and a smaller cycling-ads set which is on. It’s connected to some kind of truck load monitor with four large buttons. Every ten minutes or so it shows “local weather,” by which it means the highs, lows and actual temperatures in five parts of Kentucky. Amusingly, it shows nothing related to storm or tornado status.

Maria just called again. Apparently the funnel clouds have dissipated just before reaching Waddy. It should be safe to drive in ten minutes or so.

May 28, 2004 /

Given the cicada invasion on Bardstown Road as of late, plus the enormous and doomed Fourth Street Live revitalization project being advertised all over, well, Fourth Street, I’m pretty sure today’s Mac Hall takes place in Louisville.

This is pretty gross

May 24, 2004 /

Before I was born, my father had surgery for periodontic disease. They gave him a local anaesthetic, cut his gums open, pulled the flaps up above his teeth, and used metal tools to scrape away the dead tissue underneath before sewing them up again.

I’m a six-year veteran of badly administered braces, and I’ve had five regular teeth pulled plus four badly impacted wisdom molars. I am no stranger to dental horror, but I really want to avoid the above experience. Thus it was that yesterday, I began flossing.

It makes me feel old and boring, and when I swish water around in my mouth, it feels like my teeth have shrunk.

May 18, 2004 /

If anybody knows why TSQL has ten thousand date formats and the ability to guess how much two words sound alike, but no capacity to find and remove one character from a string, please tell me.

May 17, 2004 /

I forgot to mark down a deposit a while back, which means I have about $350 more than I thought I had, and that’s nice. According to my checkbook, though, that’s now about $150 less than I should have, and I haven’t missed another credit or debit in at least seven months. I must have screwed up something big last fall.

The annoying thing is that thanks to the Interweb, I can always see my current balance in relatively real time, but that’s inaccurate because paper-based checks still lumber around like elephants (not that electronic transfers are in any way instant, but there’s no chance of them getting forgotten in somebody’s pocket). The whole point of my check register is that it’s supposed to be more accurate, because I record all transactions as if they took place instantly; since it relies on a human agent (me), though, it’s fallible, because I am fallible and my arithmetic doubly so. I’m tempted to just reset my check register balance to what the bank tells me it is, but then I’m sure some transaction that’s in the register but hasn’t yet posted online would sneak up and blackjack me. And anyway, it’s bad policy to trust the bank blindly.

If I could find the error–either online or in my register–this would all go away, but I’ve tried several times and I can’t. I’d go back all the way to the beginning of my account history, if I could, but the Interweb only lets me go back six statements. I’d use my paper statements, except I immediately rip them all up and throw them away on principle. After all, they don’t tell me anything I don’t know!

This problem would also not exist if I wasn’t a moron.

May 13, 2004 /

Ever since late Tuesday night, it has been Sick Days here in our apartment. We’re both sick. Today we have been forced to semi-clean the place, since we let it go for too long before we got sick and now it’s a complete junk heap. Cleaning while you’re sick really sucks.

May 9, 2004 /

Have I mentioned yet that I’m done with school? I’m done with school, as of the day after my birthday. I ended up with two Bs and a C, balancing the two Bs and an A from last semester, and finish my first year of postgraduate education with a pristinely average 3.00. I did some complete crap work, in places, this spring; I got thoroughly and undeservingly rogered in others. It all balances out, in 3.00 Land.

One more year of this and I’m done with school forever. Whoof. I am ready for that.