ASD LOG FILE.

1-31-97. . . . Hedgehog Sonics

6:56 pm I have to take care of Ed's hedgehog while he's away. I feed it weird little worms and hedgehog food, which seems to consist of various crunchy things. It's a hard animal to take care of. Mostly when I get near it, it curls into a ball of spines and starts huffing. "ffff! ff, ffff, ff, fff-fff-fff-fff." That's apparently hedgehog slang for "fuck off". Well eventually he calms down and uncurls and sticks his WHOLE HEAD into his food bowl, with his legs and back half hanging ridiculously off the edge. He clings there tenaciously, even when you do things like pick up the bowl and wave it around. Not that I ever tried that.

1-30-97. . . . Without me you're only you

8:27 pm Schedule has been shifted to allow for lack of tech people. So I get off today at ten. So far today I have taken 49 calls. That's almost a record for me. Without Ed here to participate in the call game at night, I can take call after call with no competition, hardly.

Since Ed's gone I have the house to myself. Now I really don't know who to hang out with. I don't know anyone here. All the people I meet who are my age are asking me for change. I guess I get to wander around by my perfect self. Oop, call.

Anyway, ow. Headache. I bought contact lens solution on my lunch break. I messed mith my latest putpixel until I got colored, moving froth. I think I've been distracted from something I thought I was gonna do.

Oh yeah, Javascript. Well, it isn't that challenging actually. Still gotta learn it to be in web.

1-29-97. . . . Return to dust

2:16 pm Chris resigned. Ed left for vacation. My staff page is getting smaller and smaller. Pretty soon there will be one person in charge per person not in charge

1-28-97. . . . Marimba Banana

1-27-97. . . . Technology. No place for wimps.

1-26-97. . . . Andrew, did you order a hooker?

3:50 pm Here I am sitting at the console of Nerve, drawing a graphic to use on one of the other pages I maintain, when i hear a woman's voice outside my door. "Ah," I think, "Justin or someone is here in Ed's room talking in a goofy falsetto." So I walk out of my room, not wanting to miss out on the company. What do I see?

An ENORMOUS bleached blonde woman ambling through my house, trailing Ed. Ed looked as bewildered as I, and was strongly urging her towards the door. ("Get the fuck out of my house you bitch!"), but she insisted that since we had left the front door unlocked, she had every right to be in here: "YOU Bitch! You left the door open, I just walked in!". I then thought: "Oh, Ed's taking care of it, I can keep drawing." and went back into my room and continued drawing. Then I thought "Why is there a towering blonde woman in my house?" and wandered back outside my room to see her poking through my fridge, saying that she had come to see "Warren Prinz", a former resident of this house. At this point Ed was in a frenzy, trying to (impolitely!) get her out and convince her that you can NOT just walk into someone's house at 3 am, even if the door is unlocked (not open, mind you). Somehow, she left and we just stood there in our violated house, wondering if this was still the same reality that we were so accustomed to. After about 2 minutes, it struck Ed that it was a little more than odd to walk into someone's house and insult them, so he walked outside to kick some ass.

When he came back, I learned that she had apologized profusely to Ed and offered to "smoke some pot" with him. Ed, being sane and all, refused.

Apparently, she was "trying to be a friend" to ol' Warren, busting into his house and actually, right into Ed's room. I guess one of Warren's pals or something had bought him a cheap present. Or maybe it was his awful, ugly, fat macho wife. In any case, all of Warren's mail now goes straight into the garbage.

Okay, back to drawing.

1-25-97. . . . I keep thinking "Lego"

1-23-97. . . . Computers:Pattern:Chaos:Beauty

3:01 pm Thank goodness for weekends. My weekend is on Thursday and Friday. Things broke at work so calls were coming in at pretty much 1 every 3 seconds last night. Well, it's my day off, nice time to get away from the terminal for a while, go outside, look at some trees or something, get lost in central Portland... I'd buy a bed, but I just got a new 3.1 G drive for Nerve. I needed that more than a bed, OR a desk.

You think maybe my life revolves around computers? You COULD say that. But then if you caught me at a different time, you could say that it revolves around music. Or whatever I happen to be doing at the time. Electronics. Skating. Writing. Uh, The SCA. At one point or another my mother has accused me of being addicted to pretty much all of these things.

You see, around when I was in 3rd grade, my parents divorced and my mom blamed it on my fathers drinking. She then attended a lot of those Ala-whatever anonymous groups and picked up a lot of extra jargon and a fun mindset that I have to deal with. If I become involved in something, I MUST be addicted to it. "Andrew, you're addicted to that thing" was one of her catchphrases during intermediate and high school. Wow, apparently I was addicted to lots of different things.

HEY LOOK MOM THAT ADDICTION TO COMPUTERS PAID OFF, HUH? In my current job, I make more money than she did when she became employed after she got her degree from Harvard. I am annoyed that she would take the computer (or whatever I was working on at the time) away from me to punish me for coming home late, doing bad in school, not cleaning my room... I would probably be somewhat more skilled now in the areas of Music, Electronics, Computers, and Video Game Playing (okay, I understand that last one) had that not been the case.

Now that I live away from home, I can finally concentrate on something for more than 45 seconds without someone knocking on my door and asking me something inane. I actually am picking up TASM. Want to see what I'm doing? It doesn't crash ALL the time anymore... and it's smaller than this entry, byte-wise. Well. I'll put it up.

1-21-97. . . . A DOT.

4:36 am

mov  AX,0a000h
mov  ES,AX 
xor  BX,BX

Okay, so guess which programming language we're learning now. A-sem-buh-lee. It's slow going. What can I do so far? I can make a bunch of colorful triangles that rotate for a while and then crash the computer. Wanna see? It's only 8 or 900 bytes. To put things in perspective, I think I will include a demo from an experienced coder.

2:42 pm Tech Cam received. Box unopened.

1-19-97. . . . Line Break

5:35 pm I've been assigned a break now, since the phones are slow. This is a really great way to prevent phone burnout. You see, if you're talking to people all the time, you get really sick of being on the phone. So management gives us something called "project time".

Project time is for working on projects, like CGI scripts which would be useful to the company. OR perhaps writing documentation. Or if you don't do either of those, Calling people back.

Of course, you can't just have project time whenever you want. If the phones are really busy, you're expected to stay on the phones. Thus, you can only really have burnout reducing project time when there aren't any phone calls coming in.

Wow! How did they come up with this? If there are no phone calls coming in, I don't have to answer the phones? Or maybe I get to Call people back!

Okay, okay, it's not that bad. I'll stop talking about my job. Instead I'll talk about, oh, gibbering freaks on the bus.....nah. Maybe well dressed kids begging for change? Nah. Been done. How about a bleak and hopeless existence in which the only possible progress is your inevitable tumble towards death? Nah.

If things are good, you can always contemplate how good things are and how insanely lucky you are not to be a cow. If things are bad, you can always look forward to them getting better. If things are going downhill, you can count on the cyclic nature of (whatever) to make you ricochet off the ground and go back up again someday. I like it better when life features lots of interesting changes. When it sucks, it sucks real bad. When it's good, it's almost unfair. I guess there is a certain attraction in stability, but after abandoning trust, change interests me the most now. Maybe that's why I always end up with psychopaths.

I'm not complaining!

1-18-97. . . . Reboot

2:57 am

#9FX Motion 771
[BIOS A16 LOADED]
Memory test... complete.
Adaptec AHA-2940U PCI Ultra SCSI
id 4 iomega jaz

1-16-97. . . . The Search for Madness

5:18 pm DEACTIVATE

1-15-97. . . . Hello Estrayk

8:26 pm Okay! Kim's gone again. Unpredictable, her. She may never come back.

But I knew that a long time ago, so I'm not surprised. Anyway, work is getting really weird. Examples if things heard around the office:

"No coffee... Hat!"

"You just don't like your nips."

"I need a MIDI interface in my head."

1-13-97. . . . Show Stopper

12:16 pm Well, Kim arrived in Portland Yesterday, so of course all work on wstat halted. It will probably start again when I go to work today. I've requested a vacation as soon as humanly possible so maybe it will start sometimes this week. Then again, maybe I won't hear about it again until sometime in March. "Okay, your vacation was approved for July 1998!"

Anyway. Teaching her how HTML and UNIX and things work so she can maintain her page on her own.

Did I mention Ed got a hedgehog? Well he did, a few days ago, and he was letting it roam free around the house and it somehow got lost. So we turned the house upside down looking for it. We finally figured out that it was merely PRETENDING to be a stupid hedgehog that can't find its way out of a corner when it was actually performing an extraordinarily subtle psychological experiment on us. I went to sleep at 5 am or so, wondering if the hedgehog was going to end up being in my bed (that is, the rectangle of floor where I sleep) but when I woke up, I could hear the annoying high pitched sqeak of the hamster-wheel spinning, as if from a hedgehog running in it. Yup. I don't know who found it or when, but it got found. Stupid hedgehog.

1-12-97. . . . Chair and Keyboard

1-11-97. . . . I feel like flying

6:20 am

Concentrating as hard as possible on wstat project. finished coding cggraph module, parser, rewrote arindex, rewrote specification, am in process or rewriting main... something better happen soon or I'm going to run out of things to do.

1-10-97. . . . Power Tool

4:02 am

So, I'm concentrating on a bigger CGI project than previously attempted. When I say concentrating, I mean I've got 4 open books on my cardboard desk and a notebook in my lap and 4 documents open on the screen and 2 copies of netscape running and an FTP session to my test server open, and I'm using all of it. This is a pretty good way to keep your mind off of disturbing thoughts and thoroughly occupied. When finished it will be a tech support statistics tool which can graph calls or time on phone versus hours of day, day of week, technician, specific problem type, etc. It can take data from one day, a week, all time, or a specified range of days. It can compare 3 ranges on a single graph too. This doesn't sound very thrilling does it? Well maybe not to you experienced CGI coders or you uninterested end-users, but to me (mediocre-learning-cgi-coder) it's a worthy project. I won't be able to post the end result here, because it is actually confidential information. Too bad.

To get it to run on the main server, I have to submit it to the web team here. Now, one of the things I'd like to do is get into the web team proper so I could do this all the time instead of just for special projects or hobby stuff. Submitting this project to them will be a little like giving them a sample of my work. As such, I'm working on it to make it as refined and professional as I can manage in a few days.

Agh what if Kim calls while I'm online. like at 4 am? maybe I shouldn't be on now! Anxious anxious anxious

1-8-97. . . . As if you are listening out there

4:49 am Been playing with tables today, as the boxy new index page indicates. Also been reading more about JavaScript. Hoo boy. In the same way that CGI can dynamically create web pages "On the fly" (At time of execution) it can write JavaScripts... this combination is extremely powerful. Ever more so when used with Java applets.

Here's where I run into problems, and it's the same problem I have with art or writing or music. When you are able to do EVERYTHING, how do you focus yourself enough to do ANYTHING? I can write structured poetry, writing with rules... or music that must be written in a digital format. But when you remove all restrictions, suddenly I am paralyzed by indecision. It's like walking down a narrow corridor and coming to the end, and all you see is flat open space out to the horizon. Where are you going to go next?

Enter perfectionism. If I'm able to do ANYTHING, obviously I should be able to make the ultimate __ (whatever it is I'm making). So with that in mind I set out to create, but with such an unrealistic goal, the end isn't ever even barely in sight. This breeds frustration, procrastination, and eventually despair/apathy. This explains many unfinished ambitious projects.

My recent life has been spent reconciling my expectations of myself with what it is reasonable. I don't feel so bad about releasing useless garbage to the world. Like this page. It's obviously not in its final form, but I resisted sticking any "under construction" pictures on it because that would imply that in its current configuration it is like a scaffold or a framework. My stuff doesn't really get built from the ground up. It sort of evolves from ugly little amoebas.

1-7-97. . . . Meh

1-6-97. . . . Post no Bills

1-5-97. . . . Worse than nothing

0:00 m Rats! It's been busier than I thought it would be. Anyway my house has furniture and stuff now. Very housy bleah bleah...

I feel like I'm writing crap. Who cares what my house is like? Or if I'm busy? I won't even care by tomorrow! So I'll do a different project. One of the first things I did after I joined the open pages webring is notice that the logo kinda clashed with my pages' color schemes. (green and red is just a bad idea. add orange and purple and yer getting into migraine territory) so I made one that would match my page. Since then, I've noticed that it seems to be a common modification. SO, for my really irritating project, I'm going to get EVERY open pages logo off of every page that has changed it in some way, chuck them into a directory all together, and put them in a big table with names and links. Well, maybe no links, there are 70 pages now, and it's getting difficult to read them ALL every day. But I try! Due to limited time (and phone lines) I sometimes don't get to them all, so I appreciate those O.P.ers who have archives, or at least recent entry caches.

A more ambitious project would be to make a link to every page along with a summary or some other info. "more ambitious" is a nice way of saying "completely insane". SO, I'll probably get around to it within the next month.

1-3-97. . . . Packet Loss

4:18 am All right! I feel more at home now that all my stuff is scattered all over my room. I even felt like fiddling with some MIDI junk. Haven't taken it upon myself to painstakingly edit big lists of controller changes in a long time... But with all my stuff here it's so much easier to concentrate. Maybe my motivation was packed in there somewhere. Maybe I'm an unstable basket case having some big attention span fluctuations. Well in any case, I sat there staring at cakewalk for hours and hours creating (in MIDI) one of the songs I always write to test the medium I'm using. (no not midlife, the other one) anyway when I'm done I'll post it here. Mind you, if you're not playing it through an AWE 32 with a DR-660 hanging off of channel 10 for drums, it's not going to sound like it sounds to me, but that's okay. I'll sample it and post that, if you're THAT interested.

Gosh, I should go to sleep. But look at all this fun stuff! I haven't had all these resources in a month or so! My rack! My precious guitar! Dust-bot! I'm amazed how much more fun it is just sitting around with all my toys here. Hmmm. Ultra-64 isn't much fun without a TV tho. Gotta buy one -o- those.

1-2-97. . . . Severed street, heads on the left

6:08 am I feel like doing nothing more than lying motionless on the floor. I suppose lying on a bed would be nice, but in this case, lying on the floor and lying on my bed are remarkably identical. I'll buy a bed this week.

Oh, happy new year! It's a time to change everything around so it's the way that you want it to be! Okay, I resolve for everyone to stop worrying about becoming unpopular and do the things they want to do. Sounds good huh?

What? Oh, I can only resolve stuff for myself, I see. In that case, I resolve to buy a bed because I'm real sick of waking up with my arm devoid of circulation and having to lift it up with my OTHER arm so I can carry it into the bathroom so it doesn't flop around and hit things when I'm walking there.

Ohhh, I'm supposed to resolve to implement some sort of long term behavioral modification! Like, "I resolve to stop explaining things to myself."... well I don't. Hmmm... Well, I only drink (alcohol) on rare occassions, such as New Years (or nuclear war) so right now I'm feeling very tired, slow, and muddled. Bad time to make grand, life-altering changes in personal policy.