It wasn’t a long weekend, but it really felt like one. Today it was a little hard to get my mind into my work, but I still got some things done. I am just completely burned out on this project, and I want it to end. I want it to be over, and then I don’t want to think about it for a few months. My burnout is making me worthless, which is making me depressed.

[ You, dear reader, are getting this before they are. They’ll get it once I LaTeXify it. ]

I just got back from 7-11. Gloria is having lunch with one of her fellow instructors from the gym, so I decided to slum it up and get a hot dog. This is also what I did last week when she was at a kickboxing workshop. I got a “spicy italian sausage” and a can of Red Bull. The sausage was pretty good, although a little greasy. It would’ve been good if patted dry and impaled on a stick. I had an empty water glass on my desk, so I poured my red bull into it. This was the first time I’ve really seen red bull, as I usually drink it right from the can.

Visitors to my apartment may be astounded to learn that there are no longer any CDs, DVDs, or video games piled on the floor. Gloria has long been saying that we needed to get them into shelves, and I finally got around to taking her advice. I ordered three “Atlantic Oskar Multimedia Storage System” units from racksandstands.com, and we’ve installed the first two.

Turn a phone number into a regex by replacing numbers with classes of its letters. The number 2 becomes [ABC]. Zero and one become space. Concatenate these together and grep the dictionary for matching words.

At the LUG meeting on Tuesday, I saw that Brian R. was using the Google bar in Firefox. It’s 2005 and people are still using the Google bar! The guy giving the presentation had the default Google widget still on his address bar. Why is that damn thing still there?

Last night I finished reading Don’t Think of an Elephant. I did not enjoy it.

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.