Category: Stress

July 26, 2004 /
  • Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
  • Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
  • Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
  • Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
  • Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
  • Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
  • Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
  • Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
  • Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
  • I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as

    The Greatest

    SKETCHBOOK

    Ever In The History Of Time

    which basically means I win.

I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.

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.

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.

April 23, 2004 /

Did okay on the final, I think. And it stopped raining. Today is back but on probation.

April 23, 2004 /

In forty-five minutes, I have to walk a good half-mile from the bus stop to my dreaded Prob and Stat final. In the pouring rain. Today is fired.

None of this, of course, applies on Tuesdays

April 22, 2004 /

We’ve developed a pretty good collective work ethic, really. Maria and I both get home around 6, lounge for a bit to recover from the stress of the day, and probably change clothes. I’ll hit my RSS feed, friends page and email. We decide what we’re having for dinner (almost always pizza, beans and rice, or leftovers of the above) and heat it in some fashion. We sit at the table and eat while watching an X-Files episode (into Season Three and going strong). We dump the dishes in the sink.

This is the point where we discuss getting some work done, and I usually go in and at least sit at the computer, where I do the email / friends / rss dance again. We talk for a while about how we should be studying, and sometimes Maria will actually study. I basically just talk about it. I brush my face and wash my teeth while Maria takes a shower. Most days we read aloud–we finished Small Gods a little while ago, and have started on Neuromancer. We bring up the subject of homework; Maria, because she is diligent and responsible, actually does some. As for me, you know, by now it’s past 2200 hrs and I have to get up early, is it really even worth starting at this point? I usually get a phone call or call somebody around then, and Maria talks to Graham, Bee, Michelle or somebody via phone or IM. We’ve both likely crashed by midnight.

Like I said, it’s a pretty good work ethic. Except for my work.

March 30, 2004 /

Oh, and Dreamhost sent out an announcement last night saying that the downtime / slowdown was caused by a DDOS attack. I guess I believe them, but I don’t understand why NFD shows up while the front page completely refuses to load. Did they somehow break PHP?

March 29, 2004 /

Grr. I like the fact that I have an insanely cheap deal with Dreamhost, but apparently the site’s been really slow lately, and until about ten minutes ago it was completely dead. If it doesn’t stay up, my apologies. If it looks like the downtime is enough for me to consider switching hosts, you can check my LJ for updates. Bleagh.

I should thank Aleeezon for very kindly putting me up this weekend, post-bacchanal. Will’s wedding was nice. Nobody fell down. And now back to the sweet, simple work that is failing my classes.