I’m a little worried about knave. When he’s sitting on a flat surface (the desk, the floor, my lap) everything is fine. When I rotate it so the base is not parallel with the floor, it makes a noise. I mentioned this before, but now I know what the noise reminds me of: the sound that hair clippers make when they get jammed. It’s also interesting that this noise only occurs while I’m turning the machine. If I hold it at a 45 degree angle with the floor, and keep it still, it’s quiet, but if I constantly turn it side to side, the noise persists.

Gloria is off to a kickboxing workshop today, and I’m left to my own devices. I puttered around for a while, getting nothing much done, except for a backup. Note to self: burn backup to image, then image to disk. This reduces the risk of coastering a DVD. Finally, I let myself turn on the dreaded TV to provide background stimulus. With MAS*H playing in the background, I started to get work done. I feel sort of like Robert De Niro in Awakenings; I really just want to get to the window to look out, but I can’d do it without the pattern on the floor. (This analogy makes more sense in my head than on disk, I think.)

I really like Ruby. Working with it is just so much fun! I wrote my checkbook balancer in it, and everything else I do is pretty much just messing around because it’s fun. I need to find something more practical to do, but it’s usually easier for me to use Perl instead.

staring at my screen
I try to care
but accomplish nothing

The human race has produced many motion pictures. Many of them have been labelled as classics. I have seen many of these classics. Quite a few of them have irritated me. I will name a few.

the sound of a train
traveling through
the phone line

First off, I will not let the turkeys get me down. When someone above me on the totem pole gets stressed over something political, I will not. I will continue to work at the best pace I can, and I will not use my disgust as an excuse to slack off. Furthermore, I will not be disgusted. I will be filled with Tao.

It makes me sad that MSIE has no useful JScript debugger. There’s a debugger, but it’s horrible and approaches useless. There’s also no equivalent to Mozilla’s DOM Inspector, which is wildly useful.

First of all, I’d just like to note that I’m sad to see another year gone without jetcars. It’s almost A.D. 2005 and we have no practical jetcars, no practical videophones, no cyberdecks, and no rollerball. Get to work, people!

Racing Stripes - a young girl decides to jockey a zebra, and rides it to victory. Featuring Steve Harvey and David Spade as the voices of horseflies, one of whom swims around in a human’s coffee, farting. At the Snicket movie, also lousy, the audience laughed.