Thoughts on newer Microsoft programs

There was a time (2002) when I thought The Linux Operating System* was Teh BeST ThinG EVAR!!! and a perfect operating system that would solve all of your computing needs, cure cancer, satiate world hunger and create lasting world peace, and probably invent cold fusion in its spare time.  I mean, it seemed that awesome.

Around this same time I started to avoid Microsoft programs like Word and Excel and Powerpoint and all that garbage.  Its not that these programs were bad--I mean they aren't great, but they got the job done, and they were as good as any other bloated office sweet.  The real reason I avoided them was, simply, they didn't run on The Linux Operating System, and were made by a company desperate to maintain its sad monopoly.

Turns out, karma is a bitch, because I've just been introduced to some office software that I really don't like.

Most of the time, a person is allowed to judge for themselves whether or not a computer program is good, and they are trusted to form an opinion that is true for them.  You open it up, check it out.  Maybe you like it, maybe you don't.  There is one group of software, however, where your own judgement is not to be trusted.  That software is the new-ass office software from microsoft, with its annoying flashy ribbon-shit interface.  You're not allowed to form your own opinions of this software, at least if they are negative, according to friends of yours that like it.  If you don't like it, they say, its because you didn't give it a fair chance, or you haven't used it enough, or you're not doing it right.  Its office software, people; we've had this stuff for more than a decade.  I once had this kid at one job who wouldn't shut up about it and wouldn't leave me alone until I opened up the new Word with the ribbon-shit interface and moused around in it for ten minutes.  I was so glad he worked in the other lab.  The experience gave me a renewed passion for vim and Notepad.

So, long story short, I've managed to mostly avoid the new office software, until now.  My windows laptop at work had XP on it, which they want to get rid of because it works so well, and I had to curb my normal tendency to blow it off and ignore them because I didn't want them to take an interest in me and realize how many desktops I have.  So I traded in my computer for one running some flashy new version of Windows where I don't have permissions to do any work.

It does have a fancy new ribbon-shit verison of Outlook, though.  So far, thanks to this fancy new interface, I no longer know how to use my calendar, and I accidentally deleted two days of emails, and, and this is the best part, writing a new email is now a game of clicking on all these words on the top and hoping that one of these rectangles that appears has words in it like "new" or "compose" in it, and then click on that, and see what happens.  The purpose of this design appears to be to rearrange everything so that the placement of things are as non-intuitive as possible.  But I digress.... If you are lucky enough to see a new-email window appear, then, well, all of the useful features from the old version no longer work.  Like the one where you start typing someone's name to address an email.  I used to rely on that exclusively, because I don't know anyone's email address, because Outlook deliberately hides the email address and insists on showing their name instead.  People's names are great, but they are useless for addressing emails.  The new Outlook apparently also wants to be like facebook, because now when I am writing a nasty email to someone I see their headshot in the corner.

Today I am going to take my computer down to the IT people, who, despite the fact that I am a professional programmer, occasionally treat me like I don't know how to use a computer, and seek their help in restoring some of the functionality I need on my new laptop.  Like having permission to run programs other than outlook.  That would be nice.







*BTW:  every time I write this, in my head, I'm pronouncing it "lin-icks" and NOT "line-ucks" so you should imagine hearing the former when you read this, especially if it bothers you

A Depressing Wikipedia Binge

It starts here:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s14e06-201


and winds through various places including:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/201_(South_Park)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Draw_Mohammed_Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controversy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivas_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Turkey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing#United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_a_Death_Foretold

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafkaesque


I don't know why I just spent two hours reading articles that made me want to cry, but I couldn't stop until I hit Kafka.  I think the most depressing article in that collection is the Sivas massacre.

[Edit]
TODO:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=&daddr=silverwood+theme+park,+athol,+id&sll=47.910,-116.704&sspn=0.762204,1.039581&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=47.91003,-116.70215&spn=0.379252,0.519791&z=11

P.S.

My acting friend told me she went to an audition for a power rangers fan film.  Surreal isn't quite the right word, but its close.  I can't even...wow.

For those of you who don't remember power rangers, it was a show many of us watched when we were children, half of which was made with stock footage from the same show when it aired in Japan.  The show was so bad it was actually worse than most fan films, which is why the idea of making a fan film for it is just...hi-larious.

The story about the rather unique individuals who are trying to make it was even better.

The Human Element

...do you ever wonder at what point you just got to say fuck it man? 

Like when you gotta stop living up here, and start living down here?

Dr. Dragon, or: Why you don't really want to meet the captain's daughter

Should I have a party?  No I should wait.  Should I wait?  I don't know.  I don't think I have enough friends yet.  Maybe I do?  No.  Yes.  No?  I don't know.  Maybe I have more friends than I think.  Maybe I have less friends than I think.  I should collect more friends.  Thats taking too long.  Should I have a party?

That's the kind of indecisive crap that has been rattling around in my head for a long time.  I have already droned on about the social benefits of parties, and why I think meeting cute, inebrieated friends-of-friends is waaaaaay better than being in bars with girls that roll their eyes when you say hi.  Some rather important decisions I've made were predicated on the belief that in time I would have a thriving social life with fun parties.  That's one reason why a huge chunk of my paycheck every month goes towards an overpriced 1-bedroom in a half-ghetto, half-wannabe-upscale part of town with mediocre bars;  it has marble countertops, party space, and a fountain.  The kind of place you'd enjoy visiting for a party or after a night of drinking.

The only element missing in this party equation was people.  I've been dragging my heels for two years on having parties because I didn't quite have enough people.  I decided, though, that I was second-guessing myself and I should just do it.  So I told my friends I was having a pirate party.  I figure, pirates are awesome, and everyone loves dressing up and wow I'm boring myself.  So long story short, nobody came.  I mean, two awesome people came, but it was not enough for a party.  A big-ass pile of liquor, mostly untouched, is still sitting there, mocking me from the spot on the counter where I usually leave clean dishes that I never put away before using them again.  Earlier in the week, it looked like my biggest problem was going to be that there were too many girls, like there was going to be 10 girls an only 2 guys, and I was going on and on about what an ironic problem it was.  Well, double irony, or something.

The three of us sat around for a bit, and then decided to walk to a big movie theatre two blocks away and see Sucker Punch while still dressed in our pirate gear.  Sucker Punch has nothing to do with pirates, and with the exception of a very loud dude who was either drunk or naturally obnoxious, everyone else in the theatre knew that the movie had nothing to do with pirates.  Still, they loved our costumes.  I was standing at the urinal in the bathroom explaining why we were dressed like pirates to someone behind me when I realized we were onto something, I just didn't know what.  What I do know, is when the new x-men related movie comes out, I want to get some friends and wear tuxes/evening gowns to see it.

On a completely unrelated note, I told a new friend at work my story about how I got yelled at for trying not to dance with a guy, and he was more shocked than anyone I've told so far.  His reaction was refreshing, and made me happy.  Ok, and then I just went on another rant about that, which I deleted because it was retarded, but I'll give you this;  it ended with:    ...and we can pretend everything is generic and passionless, and we can pretend that the fact that I am dancing with someone is for some other reason than deep down what I really want to be doing is pushing her chest into mine while we play tongue tennis.  Couldn't let that one go.  Anyway.

Awesome

Sucker Punch was awesome.  Sucker Punch is awesome.  Now, when I say awesome, I don't mean it was a work of art, to be held lofty by people whose cinematic opinions are useless to me, which is pretty much every other human on the planet.  No, when I say it was awesome, I mean that it was just awesome.  Not perfect.  Awesome.  The person who made that movie knew that I wanted to see girls in fully laced thigh-high boots and scant other clothing shoot a dragon from a gatling gun mounted on a WWII-esque multi-engine warplane and then stab it in the head with a katana, and that person knew what it would take for me to watch those things guilt free, without letting any little details about reality bother me.

Normally I am insulted when anyone writes a story where a dragon gets slain by some random person, but this movie was so good I didn't mind.

In grade school they told us that "porn" used to refer to sex OR violence.  Nowadays, but some process I have too little interest in for even a web search, that word is intimately (<-- word choice, people;  notice how its the way I used a particular word, and not the fact that I dumped a bunch of SAT words in a sentence, that matters*) linked with videos of likely STD-ridden people having sex with each other in a suburb of Los Angeles.  I want to take back pornography.  Forget sex;  I don't know if you know this, but you can do that in real life (unless you have -10 points of charisma...we'll get to that soon).  Anyway.  I want the violence.  I want to watch girls fight giant samuari robots.  I want to watch Scott Glen give random wise man briefings.  I want to watch flying fortresses battle dragons.  I think we should make movies that are literally all fight scenes, which save screen time by ommitting things like plot, character development, and sex.  I don't understand why movies get made about villains who can't die to just go around murdering people the whole movie, like Haloween and Final Destination and Saw, which I will call murder-porn, but we can't have movies of hot chicks fighting zombies or something.  I know, you're probably thinking "hot chicks fighting zombies?  what about resident evil?"  No.  I mean the whole movie is just hot chicks--multiple hot chicks--fighting zombies, the whole time.  No exposition, or breaks between fighting, or plot, or movie cliches, or even a single second of soundtrack that goes unpunctuated by gunfire.

Tales from the Trenches

I phone screened a guy who did not understand the difference between  NP-Complete and NP-Hard.  These complexity classes are like the only two classes that I know, so I tend to make a big deal out of them.

My aforementioned piloting-related debt, which admittedly is mostly philly and vegas-related debt by this point, has made it difficult to afford things like a Starcraft2-capable computer or a 600cc sportbike.  However, I found some people to tutor in programming via craigslist.  Craiglist has some seriously creepy and orwelian requirements for posting in the "tutor" section of its classifieds, and I am still too creeped out by the fact that they want more than my phone number (which took a lot of work to fake!), however there is nothing they do to prevent me from responding to ads where people ask for a tutor.  I'm getting two lined up now.  If it turns out that I really like teaching...well, all I have to do is have no life for two years while I go back to school and work my ass off for a masters.

I've gotten to the point with 3-sat where I literally sit around and think about it to amuse myself.  I do this at work, in part as an alternative to playing Unreal Tournament, which would be far more obvious.  I also occasionally think about 3-sat while taking long walks, like the 30 minute walk to salsa.  3-sat has basically become like my own personal drug.

The Human Element

Well, this paragraph was melodramatic.

My next move is...something about simply focusing on other people.  I don't think it really matters which activities or places you choose, if you know how to connect with people, and I don't, yet, not quickly enough.  I can fake social skills in many situations, but I'm a bit of a novice still, and think I'm missing a critical element.  And...well that just turned into another melodramatic paragraph.

Ok, here's the deal.  The playing field is sucky and unfavorable.  I've complained about that enough---waaa there's too many men at salsa, waaa there's no girls in the computer industry--waaa I hate competing with other men like we're all a pathetic pack of wolves.  I'm done complaining.  At least, about that.  I'm going to continue complaining about these morons here who can't cross the street, and the morons who stop their car in the middle of a four-lane road because I need to cross and they are trying to kill me, but I'm done complaining about this pathetic, degrading, social competition.  What I'm going to do instead, is step up and kick their collective asses.  I don't know how I'm going to do it, but every resource is on the table.  I have no pride left--except that which I plan to channel in order to fake an excess of confidence.

The people in the apartment office wrote a bitchy note telling people to stop driving through the courtyard in the wrong direction, and claim that they will stop the radio-controlled gates from being activated from a certain direction, a feat that I consider unlikely and intend to challenge by experiment.  Upon further reflection I wanted to grab a sharpie and ride the elevator in my boxers just so I could write "fuck you" on their stupid little notice.  I didn't do that, because at the moment I'm too shy for that kind of stunt.  There will come a day, though, when I won't be.

*a common mistake made by narcissistic, unpublished writers is to liter their writing with rare, esoteric words with many syllables that raises the reading level above college professor and forces constant use of a dictionary onto the reader.  These idiots seem to write only to inflate their ego with words, and miss the entire point of communication.  Clear and effective writing, to them, means something about "dumbing it down" for the "masses," and their lack of writing ability seems to come with a lack of listening skills as well.  Such overdone bromides have become a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and I am engaged in a continual effort to discover a more effective means of persuading them to pull their heads out of their asses.   <--like see that sentence?  Imagine something 1000 times worse.

Pentadate

Look what you made me do

look what I made for you
Knew if I paid my dues

how will they pay you

New Office

Ok, so, first, things were looking pretty good after a couple of weeks in the new office.  Yeah, we moved.  I can walk to the new place, and there are bars and stuff, and...I'm done complaining about the old office.  Anyway, I was walking there one morning, and I could see the lake, and blah blah blah something about realizing that this would be my year.  I decided that I was going to have an awesome year, and that I would write an enourmously long-winded blog post about it.  I didn't, because I've had a life recently (AAAHHHH <-- forshadowing), but don't worry because it was mostly doing to be a list of fun things to do in Seattle that I googled.


Whistler

I went up to Whistler a few weekends ago.  It was so awesome.  The mountain was so enourmous it was...awesome.  And amazing.  I mean, whatever word you want to put in there, go ahead and do it.  I've never been on a mountain that was so big I actually wanted a break in the middle of a run.  I'm used to runs being so fast that if your mind wanders a bit you miss the whole thing.  Not so at Whistler.  I want to go again when I am more in shape.  Oh, and borders.  Fucking borders.  (full disclosure:  the short form of snowboarders, boarders, is going to be misspelled all over the place because this retarded-ass spell checker kept bitching at me and I wan't really paying attention, and I'm not fixing all that)

Snowboarders.

Let me tell you something about snowboarders.  They bitch about everything.  I'm not going to make a statement about which genre of this sport is faster, or who has more skill, but I will say that when it comes to the perceived quality of the terrain snowboarders whine way more than skiiers.  They like to spend the entire ride up the lift deciding which runs to take to get to the "untracked pow" and change their minds every two minutes.  Alpine sports, for them, becomes of a quest of finding that one spot of the mountain that no one wants to go to, maybe because of chilling winds, or dangerous glaciers, or because you have to take 4 different lifts to get there, or because its roped off for avalance control, whatever.

This clashes with my alpine preference, which is to go up some lift--preferably a fast one--and then ride down.  Repeat, like, 2 or 3 times, then get some food.  Do another 4 runs, get food again.  Repeat this entire process until the lifts close or you are so tired your technique starts to suck.  The snow that I prefer is the packed kind, maybe groomed.  Whenever we do one of these runs, I tell my friends I liked it, and they wrinkle their noses and go "that was too tracked out."  They have their own fucking jargon just for being picky about which runs they do.

To make matters worse, all they want to ski is powder.  Pow pow pow pow thats all I hear about.  Pow and snowgasms.  I hate powder, because it is deep and tiring and in fact a single powder run can drain almost all of my avaialble stamina--stamina that I could have used to enjoy a full day of skiing.  My snowboarding buddy does not understand how I can't like powder.  Literally.  He doesn't understand.  When I tell him I don't like powder...man I don't know what happens but that message most definitely gets garbled by the time it reaches his brain.  In fact, I think "I don't like powder" gets turned into "please use peer pressure and guilt trips to coerce me into doing powder runs that are above my technical difficulty."  Oh, and technical difficulty.  Yeah, I'm a pretty good skiier, in my opinion.  Not great; just good.  Having taught myself to skii pretty successfully, I happen to have a damn good sense of exactly what my ability is, what runs are difficult but helpful to learn, and what runs are so fucking difficult that I don't learn anything but instead spend twenty minutes stumbling down them.  I describe these runs by saying they are "too difficult" for me.  I figured that would be clear.  Its not.  But I digress.

We should have split up.  They didn't want to, until the very end, when I had stopped at the side of the trail to look at a sign that had the word "glades" on it.  I have been wanting to try glade skiing pretty much as long as I've been skiing, so I stopped to check the run out.  Skiiers can do that.  We can just stop when we want to.  Suddenly, my borders friends caught up and stopped with me.  I had surveyed the trail, determined that the tree's were closer together than I wanted and that, thanks to a couple powder runs we did earlier, I did not have enough energy left to shred the powder dangerously tossed inbetween those tree trunks.  So I passed.  My snowboarder friends were not happy, because the trail we were on was kind of flat.  Not flat, but too flat for them to start going again.  Yeah, thats what you do when you're a snowborder, you have to worry about your momentum, trying to keep it up as much as possible if the trail has any sections that are anywhere near flat.  So they took the gladed trail, and shredded their damn pow, and I just kind of glided down the trail I was on.  Then I realized why the girl we came with had spend the entire trip avoiding us on the mountain.  She was kind of weird--at least, my friends thought she was weird.  Its an interesting inter-personal story, I'm sure.

Anyway, here are some pictures.

Here is the moose that stared at me while I slept:

This is us on a giant skiing mountain, looking over at the other giant skiing mountain:

this picture made me feel like I was on top of the world:

They have a gondola that goes between the mountains.  Its actually not as scary as it sounds.  We waited forever just to ride the special silver one that sacrificed people space for a glass hole in the floor:

That is where I slept.  Don't remember why this was newsworthy.  Maybe it shows off how nice the cabin place was.

More views from the inter-mountain gondola:

The last couple I'm pretty sure were right before the run we did through the cloud.  It was awesome.  Visibility was in the tens of feet, and you had to have your wits about you in order to avoid the terrain.  At one point visibility was reduced to about zero, which created what I call surprise terrain.

So anyway, whistler is awesome.  All of you reading this should plan a trip to fly out here and rent a cabin with me.  I actually spent half of the trip thinking about how awesome it would be if my old friends were with me ::sniff::.

Anyway, its pretty affordable.  We did it for like $300 something a person, and (sales pitches goes here).  Parking sucks though.  Plan on only being able to park a single car nearby if you are renting a condo.

And...I think thats it.


When it Rains....

I'm beginning to notice a pattern.  I either have no girls (as prospects, or dates, or whatever) or I have multiple possibilities at once.  This time, I went from zero to five, and it was exhausting.  In fact, girls are exhausting.  I don't remember my relationships being like that.  Not the ones I liked, at least.

So here's the scoop.  The first girl, r1;  I met her in real life.  Yeah, I think I'm about to be even more nerdy than you've ever seen.  Anyway, r1 is pretty cool.  We like her.  P1, I met her on plenty-of-fish.  That leaves f1, f2 and f3, who I met on a niche dating site that I will not name nor show my face on (its not that interesting, really; everyone--or at least all the guys--seem to be  giant nerds, and not the cool kind).  We'll get to them in a second.

R1 is actually normal, attractive, and sane, and not crazy, and I can't tell if she wants to be friends, and I've tried to ask her out, and we've gone out, but I'm still getting more of a friendship vibe from her.  Let me guess.  You think I should be more...whatever.  Aggressive or something, right?  Fuck you.  And just wait until I tell you about some other girls.

P1.  Wow.  Check this out.  She received a full volleyball scholarship to go to some creepy religious school in one of the datokas.  Now, when I say creepy, I need you to know the full force of my meaning.  I was a member of a hated organization at Drexel called "Campus Crusade for Christ" for like, three or four years, until I had a graphics class that was held on the same night and realized I did not miss it at all.  Yeah.  My official religions is Christians-think-I'm-an-athiest-and-athiests-think-I'm-a-Christian-so-would-you-all-please-go-bitch-at-each-other-and-leave-me-out-of-it.  The point of this, is that the aforementioned club I was a member of did not creep me out.  This school, though, the one my date went to?  Holy shit.  Yeah, I thought that worked on two levels.  Anyway.  And again.  College.  These are normal, college-aged college students.  The people at the college went through their rooms and stole ("confiscated") rated R movies and any clothing they deemed inappropriate, every day while the students are at class.  Who does that?  I don't care what religion is part of the premise.  I can't concentrate in class if I know some smelly middle-aged lady is fingering her way through my stuff.  I think I have psychological trauma just from thinking about it.

Anyway, she turned out to be kind of annoying.  Like...just annoying.  And I didn't notice at first.  But girls seem to love texting you all the time.  I don't understand why.  Not sure what I'm going to do...probably should give it another shot with her.  Although, getting sick this weekend as well as dealing with f1 (foreshadowing!) may have hurt my chances.


F1.  Girls.  Can.  Be.  So.  Incredibly.  Annoying.  Like.  When.  People.  Punctuate.  Every.  Word.  In.  A.  Sentence.  For.  What.  I.  Call.  Emphasis.  Overkill.   Although, admittedly, thats the only way to replicate in text the way some people talk.  Anyway, this girl, wow dude.  Wow.

We went on one date.  One date.  Later she actually implied that it wasn't even a date.  In all this time, I have been in near constant communication with her.  Emails, ims, phone calls.  Like, there would be text messages in the morning, and then I get to work and have to explain to her that I can't im back and forth all day because I do actual work, and when I come back from a meeting and type "sry was in a meeting" she accepts that as a heartfelt apology.  Then, if I take a while to walk home, I find a bunch of text messages on my phone and like a missed call, and then she's talking to me all night, wondering why I'm always doing something else other than giving her my undivided attention.

One.  Date.

She wanted to be privy to my most intimate secrets.  I'm not even kidding, and she's not the first girl to expect this.  She actually got mad and frustrated when I wouldn't divulge whatever she wanted to know.  I tried to explain to her that most people are lucky enough to know when my birthday is, and she reminded me that she could find out my birthday by doing a background check.  This is the same girl that told me that having a round table in my living room means I'm open to communication.  She also got annoyed and said I was grumpy the night I was sick and cooking dinner for myself when she called me up to tell me that the only other girl i'm friends with on this niche dating site, F3, is totally weird, and proceeded to list of a bunch of details and comparisons about how the other girl was weird that I ignored while waiting for my ramen noodles to break up.  In addition, this girl has an aggressive personality.  Like, my brain has to constantly try to keep up with her.  She's constantly misinterpreting what I say, and she always manages to ask questions that I'm not sure how to answer and make me think really hard.  For example, she asked me to explain why I and my closest guy friends don't regularly all share every intimate (and possibly sexual) detail of our relationships.  I honestly never thought I'd have to justify not doing that.  So, wow.  Oh I trailed off.  Yeah.  Does this look passive aggressive?  This looks passive aggressive, doesn't it?  I tried to tell her that the constant communication was a little much.  I really did.  I did not phrase it with one of my incredibly precise "my desire to not to go a party..." statements, but I did say exactly how I felt.  She told me something about establishing trust, and being open to communication, and holy fuck we've been on one date.  I don't want to establish trust after 1 date!  I want to go on another date.  After that, I want to go on another date.  Sure, we can make out in the meantime.  Great.  Or not.  Maybe after date 5 or 6 you can start using the word trust.  I don't know.  I rarely make it that far.  I've noticed that every girl who wants full access to all of the skeletons in my closet within 24 hours of meeting me is the kind of girl that gets offended when I like to not divulge that kind of thing right away.  Maybe there's a pattern there.

So I'm exhausted.  Literally.  I had some kind of plan for making this year awesome...something about making a Lego mosaic of a calvin and hobbes picture...idk.  Wow.  This girl was like a computer process that steals extra time from the scheduler by doing a bunch of unecessary I/O operations.

Fortunately, I have been through all this before.  With who, it doesn't matter.  What's important is that I know the tricks of the trade.  For example, if you have gmail open on a linux desktop, you can ctrl+alt+arrow over to that desktop and see if you got any new emails from people you want to talk to without accidently sending a mouse event to the browser window, which would reveal your presence by turning that little bubble next to your name to green.  All you have to do is not release the ctrl and alt buttons--you just switch over to that screen, look at your gmail window without letting go, and then switch back to the screen you were on.  Anyway.  I just told her that I am not romantically interested in her.  I had to explicitly tell a girl after a single not-a-date that I am not interested in her.  I've done some pretty pathetic things to get a date--like really pathetic--and each of those were less work than this.  I actually found myself longing for a night hiding in my living room watching old SNL reruns, alone.  Normally I would consider that a complete waste of my life.  This time, it was sanctuary.

Moral of the story:  I put less work into this one than I did with the girl in real life.  Less work!  And look what happened!  So fuck everyone and their advice.

Oh, and I forgot:  I wasn't even trying to date this girl.  She was going to introduce me to couple of her friends, until she found out about the secret lego collection in my closet and got all interested in me herself.  There's some irony here somewhere, I just don't have the mental faculty to spell it out right now.



F2.  Oh yeah.  This one was actually pretty cool.  We hit it off.  I took her climbing--thats always been a great date for me.  Got mexican (fast-ish) food across the street.  I made her laugh.  Like, really laugh, like everyone in the joint knew I said something funny.  Then we took a walk on what passes for a beach around here, said high to one of the groups with a fire pit, and later ended up down at the docks.  Why can't my life be more like th--oh right, it was.  Yeah.  She was cool.  I've probably missed my chance at a second date with her, on account of spending all of my time talking to f1.  See my bit about stealing scheduled time with extra I/O ops.  I haven't even gotten my chores done.  I don't know how this girl did it.

F3.  Actually, this one might not be a girl.  If she is a real girl, she is super hot.  This is the one that f1 didn't like for reasons I don't care about.  I played the exhaustive game of trading emails with f3 every day or two, trying to do whatever it took to actually meet up with this girl for realz without looking pathetic.  She kept up the game until it came down to...actually meeting in real life.  Then she stopped responding.  Its kind of awkard for me on that site now, because my only friends there are the girl that went crazy over me and the girl that tastesly ignored me (seriously, after a week of emails?) and also every time I log in I am faced with like twenty facebook-style "updates" of things this hot girl did on this site.  I think she just messes around on that site all day.  And then I start looking at it, trying to guess what makes her tick, if there is a way to tune my chameleon ability to make her fall in love with me...and the world moves on.

I hope that a store sign falls on this girl in such a way as to inflict unpleasant pain and non-sexual humiliation but without causing permanent damage.  Normally, in these situations, I hope that a girl falls face first in the snow, but we don't have any of that here.  So I hope she gets hit by a sign.  Or I could just have like a week's worth of my free time back.



In Conclusion

I am so fucking exhausted.  And its mostly mental and emotional.  I got sick over the weekend, too.  I have stuff to catch up with at work.  I'm going oncall for my new team wednesday, thats going to suck.  One reason in particular that this while suck is that I have been unable to sit through the documentation that I need to read because it is so incredibly boring.  Oh, and this morning I got yelled at for not raising the alarm for a problem that was already fixed.  Picture this:  you're the captain of the enterprise, or whatever.  someone wakes you up to tell you that we're being attacked by a klingon bird of prey.  Those ships are so cool looking.  Anyway.  By the time you get to the bridge, the bird of prey has already been destroyed.  There's like, nothing to do.  You say "hey whats up" and they're like "we got it" so you just sit down in your captains chair and look at the damage reports, make yourself a latte, or whatever.  Then some bitchy admiral gets on the line and you get yelled at for not going to Red Alert the moment you stepped onto the bridge, which, remember now, was after the problem was taken care of.  Yeah, I know red alert sounds cool, but in this analogy, it makes a lot of nice people that aren't corny actors have to get out of bed all worried-like because they think there is a real emergency.  So, I'm real happy about that.  Procedure my ass.

Whistler was Feb 25.  Thats like a little more than two weeks.  Two weeks and I need another vacation.  What am I going to do about it?  Power through, and either manage a vacation or another job, and just try not to thinking about girls for a while.  I'm anticipating that the 5 will go all the way back down to zero again, like it always does.  Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, I had no intentions of playing anyone, I just think it is ok to go to dates with other people, at least for the first couple dates.  I know everyone has their own esoteric but fervent opinions on this topic, but since one girl just tried to pass me off to her friend a month ago you can just keep them to yourselves.

So.......this is dragging on too long.

Seriously.  I'm exhausted.