Archive for May, 2001

02 May 2001

May 2, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized 

  • "I am Izik from ISRAEL
I wont to develop in the open source
I have study to the M.C.S.D Visual Basic And SQL
Thank You for your help"

  • Today was beautiful, almost too beautiful. Almost 30 degrees in the shade, sunny all day, too warm really. My apartment is pretty well shaded and very well insulated, so it’s often 10-15 degrees cooler inside during the summer. My father’s house in Ohio was the same way, inexplicably; in almost every other respect we bought a house that turned out to be under-insulated, under-specification, and, in some places, unfinished.

  • I sent a modified version of the CIBC “settlement” agreement back to the woman at customer “care”, modified in that I blacked out the confidentiality clause. I predict that our next phone call will go something like this:

    Cora: I’m sorry sir, but this is just a good-will gesture, something that we’re doing to try to help you, and you cannot modify the settlement.
    Phil: Go to hell.

  • I accidentally used NS4.x to check the formatting today; boy does it ever botch its attempt to render my CSS. Back to Mozilla, and I should really fix the launcher.

  • I really identify with Jamie’s portrait of the hacker at home today. I will identify somewhat with this soon, too, but I suspect only peripherally.

  • I hate my oven. Unless I’m extra careful to turn it on extra slowly, the gas blows the pilot light out. That’s incredible! And incredibly dangerous!.

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03 May 2001

May 3, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized 

  • "Dear Sir, Dear Madam,

It is shown in our books that our recall of bills stays without any answer from you.

We stay at your service for more information.

We trust the above to meet with your satisfaction."

    A hospital is to write this to me. Very education are translators for them.

  • Went with Mike to pick up his new bicycle (!), and then we watched Toronto even the series with New Jersey. A well-played hockey game, until 7 seconds remained.

  • We’re really weird, so we went for a bike ride around 01h00. We looped around downtown, going nowhere in particular, hitting Parc Jeanne Mance and Parc LaFontaine, when we realized “Hey, we’re right near Deb’s!” There was a light on inside, so we rang the bell; she was suitably surprised to see us, but invited us in anyways. Dunno how long we were there. An hour, maybe?

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04 May 2001

May 4, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • I remember, now, the problem with spring.

    The fucking elementary school a couple hundred metres north of here.

    Jesus are those kids ever fucking loud. It sounded like a small girl was being murdered every 10 seconds. Never, not when I was in school, not when my sisters were in school, have I ever, ever heard this much high-pitched shrieking. I wanted to call the school and yell at them, “Get a grip on your kids! What kind of school are you!?” but instead I closed the window, put a pillow over my head, and fell back asleep.

  • We had a nice dinner to send off Janice, Steph, and Tyla, who are all departing for various places this weekend.

  • Mike and I played PlayStation 2 games for probably 8 hours after dinner. The subway was running again by the time I went home…

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05 May 2001

May 5, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Happy birthday Harold! Don’t let them break you tonight.

  • Spent most of the day cleaning up the apartment, paying bills, blah blah blah.

  • We watched Toronto take a terrific game 5, setting the series up for a home victory on Monday. As I’ve said before, the incredible quality of the NHL officiating, especially in comparison to other professional sports, never ceases to amaze me. Those referees don’t have the benefit of video replay (excepting certain goal scoring situations), and they consistently make the right call. Today was no exception.

  • Chris, Mike, and I played some 3-player Age of Empires. Not bad, though I wouldn’t mind a fourth person to open up some more interesting team game options.

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06 May 2001

May 6, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Wow. Linuxcare still lists me (along with at least 11 other people that no longer work there) on their gurus page, despite having left there almost a year ago. I should send a note to someone.

  • Now we got small cakes.
    We got tall cakes.
    We got brown cakes.
    We got round cakes.
    We got fat cakes. Uh-huh.

    For goodness sakes! Just look at those cakes.

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08 May 2001

May 8, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Work was somewhat entertaining today. I fixed 0.01% of the brokenness.

  • Zach and Mike and I went to Zach’s for dinner and games. Later we went to Mike’s, played games until dawn. Oog.

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09 May 2001

May 9, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • We went from Mike’s to the office; I figure I’ll put in a half day and then crash.

  • Zach was auditing some badly written code that the company didn’t need to write this morning, and reading me bits. It’s hilarious. I started to say something like “I can’t believe that we both reinvented this wheel and did it incorrectly.” but then I realized that I totally believe the former, and that the former implies the latter.

  • Slept from 11h30 to 19h45; got up, made dinner, watched Toronto blow game 7 just like they blew game 6, and went back to bed.

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11 May 2001

May 11, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Moving day at the office. Questionable goals, poor planning, poor execution–it’s the Zero-Knowledge way!

  • It just started pouring outside, and the air has been full of that wonderful spring pre-rain smell all day. Humid but not too hot, fresh and clean smelling. Perfect. I hope we get some lightning.

  • Did a small amount of work on Cassis, then got bored and went to read. I doubt it’ll get much attention from me this weekend; I need to start cleaning and packing up the apartment.

  • Hmm. I wonder why font-style: italic isn’t working. I would upgrade my Mozilla, but the new RPMs were made with RPM v4, and rpm.org is down, and this machine needs reinstalled anyways, so fuck it.

  • Looked through the referrer logs; found that someone on a message board (containing mostly bad puns centred around the word “off”) thinks that the root of this web tree is from “the slightly juvenile unfriendly folks at off.net”. Wow. If he thinks that’s unfriendly, he should read this.

Comments

12 May 2001

May 12, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • The world weeps. He was one of the most genuinely entertaining and imaginative people that I’ve ever seen speak, and I would have travelled anywhere to see him speak again. He will be missed.

  • The beginning of a conversation at dinner the other night:

    Adam: That reminds me, I’m going to Heslinki…
    Us: Helsinki?
    Adam: No, actually, Stockholm.

  • Shit. Critical hit on the stirfry (big yum), but I totally failed my rice check. Rice: check. Water: check. Plug in the rice cooker: check. Push the button: argh.

  • It’s the year 2001 and people still can’t be fucked to send email that’s properly spelled, punctuated, or capitalized. Blah blah blah blah blah.

  • Federico’s right: read this. I don’t always (or indeed often) agree with what Richard has to say, but he makes compelling arguments that I wish more people would make.

Comments

13 May 2001

May 13, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

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14 May 2001

May 14, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • The move failed, but in ways that are totally different than I expected. We resolved most of them, but I did see someone stringing a 20m ethernet cable down the hall because IS’s estimate to enable his port was a week. Our monkeys fling the very best shit.

  • Busy at work trying to see if there’s anything interesting left there for me to do. Shopping around for contracts at the same time; I’m pretty flexible, it’s mostly a matter of figuring out exactly what I want to work on next.

  • Went to Zach’s for some yummy pasta and impromptu Breakfast at Tiffany’s watching. Now I’m very sleepy, it’s my bed time. I got absolutely no packing done today.

Comments

15 May 2001

May 15, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Happy Census Day, Canada!

  • I spent most of today learning about law schools, the LSAC, the ABA, various state bar associations, and so on. It turns out that, despite the LSAC’s assertion to the contrary, not all law schools require a bachelor’s degree for admission. It also turns out that ABA-accredited schools aren’t the only option, even if you intend to take the bar. The whole thing, like most university admissions, really, has a big “Welcome to 1900” sign around its neck.

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16 May 2001

May 16, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Reinstalled my laptop today, since it’d been over 2 years since I last installed. I’m pretty amazed that I still have this laptop that I bought in January 1999; I didn’t expect it to age this well.

  • I installed SGI’s XFS-enabled Red Hat Linux 7.1, which scares the hell out of me, since I have code in XFS. XFS, as revolutionary and awesome as it is, was not a very clean port to Linux, at least when I was working on it, and I’m pretty impressed that it’s as robust as it is. Very impressed, actually.

  • Zach, Alice, Deb, George, and I watched MST3K’s presentation of “12 To The Moon” last night, which is one of my favourites. Afterwards I picked up a taxi-trunk full of boxes from Deb’s house. She’s awesome.

  • Must pack must pack must pack. If my scheming comes to proper fruition, I’ll be able to move a whack of my stuff in the next few days by borrowing Janice’s trailer before I drive her stuff to North Carolina. Must pack.

Comments

17 May 2001

May 17, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Like Deb, I’ve still not really come to grips with the fact that Douglas Adams is really dead. Really really. Forever. Sigh.

  • I called our bitchin’ real estate agent today, and I expect that he’ll find someone to live in my beautiful apartment pretty quickly. Must finish packing.

  • My newly installed RH7.1 desktop at the office hangs pretty much every night. I’m not very impressed.

  • I can’t believe that the fileutils maintainers (or, plausibly, Red Hat) broke “ls” so badly. Somebody, may he burn in hell, made it sort the listing case insensitively by default, and provided no option to disable that world-changing behaviour. I had to revert to 4.0x-3 to restore sanity to tolerable levels.

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18 May 2001

May 18, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Bleh. No internet at home until I move, I think. Sympatico finally realized after 5 months that my old credit card no longer works. Instead of billing me, or calling me, or sending me email, they just shut it off. Retards.

  • I should get a haircut today, but the way things are going, I bet I’ll never be motivated to do so. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week. I’m such a loser.

  • Zach gave notice yesterday. It’s sad that he’s moving away, but it’s really for the best.

  • We celebrated George’s birthday with yummy food at Mike’s. I saw Bust a Move for the first time too, and although the name is totally dorky, it’s really fun. I watched George play a PS2 Star Wars game, and it looked pretty decent, too. It reminded me a lot of Wing Commander, in certain ways, but I like WC’s dogfight engine a lot more, I think.

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19 May 2001

May 19, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Went to the office to pay some bills and tidy some things up; tried to play AOE with Chris and Mike, but the office masquerading setup prevented that.

  • Went to Zach’s place for yummy “food” and about 8 hours of Bust A Move 2 on the N64. Aaauuuggghhh, all I see are little coloured bubbles.

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20 May 2001

May 20, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Called Sympatico, got them to re-enable my account. It was as I suspected, and nobody bothered to call or write.

  • Seen in the LVM code:

    #ifdef MODULE
                while (GET_USE_COUNT(&__this_module) < 1)
                        MOD_INC_USE_COUNT;
                while (GET_USE_COUNT(&__this_module) > 1)
                        MOD_DEC_USE_COUNT;
#endif /* MODULE */

    Uh. Jesus.

  • It’s Adam’s birthday, I found out this afternoon; people are gathering at Lezvos for a small celebration, but I need to stay home and pack if I’m to have any chance of moving tomorrow. My eating schedule wasn’t really in line with a 20h30 dinner anyways.

  • I had to clean out the refrigerator… oh boy. Some of the items in there were already lobbying the UN for recognition, and some leftover stew was granted Most Favored Nation status by the US… big yuck.

Comments

24 May 2001

May 24, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Holy crap. All moved. Wow. I have so much shit, and there were so many stairs involved. George is a real trooper, and did all of the driving and much of the carrying, so I owe him a pretty nice dinner, and maybe a car or an island or something.

  • Our place is a mess, everything in a temporary staging location until the TV is moved today. Once it’s gone, we can fix the new office room, which will let us fix my bedroom, which will let us fix the den, and bam, it’ll be like home, just in time for us to drive to North Carolina.

  • Chester peed on my bed last night. We accidentally locked him in the living room, where my bed was being staged. God damn it. Ah well, couldn’t happen to a nicer cat.

  • Simon’s going to the vet this afternoon, after which (as long as he hasn’t contracted any sudden contagious diseases) we’ll introduce him to his new home and friend. That should be exciting. I think it’ll work out well, since they’re both kinda restless and bored cats, but now no clothing of any colour will be safe from the light and dark hair combination.

  • My landlord is being totally paranoid about the fact that I’ve moved out, and seems to think that I’m moments from skipping town at any point. He wants June’s rent in cash. What a freak.

  • Joe updated his diary after a 5.5 month sabbatical. Hooray!

  • I’m not sure I like the bullet point format anymore; it makes it hard to tell any kind of coherent story, something I’d rather do. Some day I’ll reformat a few months of old diary entries from another places, too. La la la.

  • Alice, please, it’s “head for the goat”.

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25 May 2001

May 25, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Stopped into the office for a couple of meetings, one frustrating, one refreshingly honest. The latter gave me strength to battle through the idiocy presented in the former.

  • Borrowed Janice’s Cherokee to run a bunch of errands; took Simon to the vet, moved more things to Mike’s, took Deb her filing cabinet and tree, got some chairs from Zach, blah blah blah. Phew.

  • One of these days–soon!–I will do something other than move.

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26 May 2001

May 26, 2001 at 04:00 · Filed under uncategorized

  • Drove to New York with Janice to pick up the rental truck. You can’t, apparently, rent 17′ trucks or auto transport trailers in Canada, and you can’t do one-way rentals to the US. Sigh.

  • That was fraught with peril of course, and took us 3 hours longer than we’d expected. We ate and eventually picked up the gang to help pack her house.

  • Tomorrow’s going to be, er, exciting. I wish it’d stop raining.

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