Yesterday's accomplishments:

Read p. 32->end of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Composed two diaryland entries
Showered
Ate, although not well
Sent another email to the chyk from the personals ad, possibly setting up a datelet for Monday night
Received no confirmation from same

Today's accomplishments:

Walked to Adams Morgan, ostensibly for coffee and breakfast
Gave up on that idea when Tryst was crowded, bought a paper, walked back home
Read part of paper
Talked to Rob
Talked to rents
Watched some basketball
Got the wireless network up, finally
Watched Sunday night's offerings from FOX

I have now screwed around with the kernel on that linux gateway more than I ever would have cared to, but the wireless works, the wireless and wired subnets talk to each other, and I can get onto the net from anywhere in the house now without stringing any more Cat V. Yay. Now I just need to get the cables that are already there minimized and things will be relatively stable.

Until I move.

Today was apparently Hispanic Loitering Day in Adams Morgan, an ethnic culture thing I just can't get. There were just all these people standing along Columbia Road. Not talking, not participating in anything, just standing. Add those to the other groups of people (also hispanic, as it happens) who were strolling in that slow manner had by people who don't really have any concern for time, either theirs or anybody else's.

Now. One large problem in the DC area, and in the District in particular, is this particular demographic, which is not limited to any particular ethnicity it would seem but crosses all barriers except that of income. This demographic, due to the economic divide often caused by a lack of skills (communication and otherwise), is the one that ends up filling all the "service" jobs around here, because anybody who is capable of getting a better job already has. So I have to walk around the loitering or strolling people on the sidewalk along Columbia Road, and while it's annoying it's not a major complaint. They're entitled to spend their Sunday afternoon in whatever fashion they choose, and they're not doing anything wrong.

The problem, however, and it is indeed a problem (let me tell you), is that they're the same people who work behind the counter at the CVS, or who take too long and do a sloppy job changing the oil in your car, or or or. Now, service industry jobs like that mostly suck. I always make an effort not to be an asshole to those people since I know they probably have to put up with long hours of self-righteous boomer fucks yelling at them for the slowness of the line or the fact that they used the wrong oil despite the presence of four quarts of oil in the passenger seat and notes both printed on the work order and written on it beneath the printed one, saying "USE CUSTOMER OIL." And in the case of stuff like CVS part of the reason the line's so damned long isn't that the person behind the counter is particularly incompetent, it's because the design of CVS is hideously poor and doesn't take into account the way people shop in drug stores, and the management of CVS doesn't see fit to have more than one person on duty behind the counter at any given time, and since CVS sort of owns the market in most neighborhoods they're in people can't quite vote against their poor management with their feet. But I digress.

This demographic, the group of people for whom time is not important, make it very difficult to keep living in the District. There is a belief (or at least a willingness to believe) that things would be better out in the suburbs. Of course I've been to CVS in the suburbs and the lines aren't any shorter, it's just that there's no bulletproof window between you and the cashier so the experience is slightly less unpleasant. Safeway in Reston or Bailey's X-Roads is every bit as miserable as Safeway in Adams Morgan. You still can't take your cart to your car (which is why I drive to Harris Teeter for groceries). And out there in the burbs, you get to be that much closer to the self-righteous boomer fucks.

So it's a tradeoff. I can stay where I am, where the neighborhood is funkier, where the houses are more interesting, where there are bars I can walk to, but where the people drive me insane because they don't know how time works (to reference Kids in the Hall). Or I could move out closer to work, where the houses are made of cardboard, all look alike, and can only be painted one of seven colors (probably only one of two colors depending on what colors the neighbors' houses are), but where the people would also drive me insane because instead of not knowing how time works, they don't know how to take time off, and they're so wrapped up in themselves and how much of a hurry they're in that they forget how to be nice people.

Ehh.

I'm afraid if I move out there I'll turn into one of them. It would appear I've started to already, judging by the rant above.

Oh, and a coda on this morning's entry:

I woke up from that dream feeling desperately like I needed to call a person I haven't seen in a year (and who wasn't one of the women in the dream) to apologize for something I did the last time I saw her a year ago. I didn't remember anything from the dream that would have made me think of her or that I needed to apologize to her, but there could have been something else there that I forgot before I was fully lucid. Weird.

link (2000-03-19)

I was right. Second entry of the day.

So Emily and I have been talking a lot this week (we're siblings, that's what we do). And mostly, as with a lot of the conversations I have with people (I don't know if this is unique to me and my friends, or if other people do this too) we've really just been having the same extended conversation that resumes whenever we're back with a chance to talk more.

This week's conversation has been about tech work, money, housing, settling down or not settling down, and other "oh hey, I'm almost 30 and you're 35, let's do the overconsidered navel-gazing expected of people our age" topics. Okay, it's not like that, but I suppose someone listening in might think that.

Unlike the people I overhear in bars around here, Emily and I actually understand the things we're talking about. No marketroid sputtering about databases or B2B or stock options (that possibly because neither one of us has any to speak of) or The Capitalized Internet and how it's really a Whole New Paradigm, or a New Anything. We talk about getting things done, about the steps taken or the work required, about what it means to have a clue in a mostly clueless world.

So among other things that we mentioned (all of which I remembered most vividly until I started typing here in this white rectangle) was the comment that all this internet stuff isn't rocket science, whereupon we realized that most of rocket science probably wasn't what we think of it at all. Rocket science probably worked in its day about like the internet works now - a bunch of smart people said, well, it ought to work this way, so let's try it and see what happens, and then when it worked they revised it, and when it didn't work they fixed the most obvious errors and tried again. Repeat until you've got something that does all the things you need it to do, and wait until somebody needs it to do something new, different, or better, and then you're back to trial and error. In other words:

Rocket Science = Educated Trial and Error

So by that definition, a lot of internet work is indeed rocket science. It was good for a chuckle.

Other stuff discussed:

We talked about the house-buying idea, quite a bit. Em and Patrick have been looking for housing in Haarlem, and the market there is apparently more insane than the market in DC. Haarlem's full. There's not really any available housing, so when stuff goes on the market it's available to realtors to show privately for a week, then it's listed in the paper so people who don't have realtors can schedule an appointment the second week, then on the Friday of the second week everybody who's interested puts in a sealed bid. Highest bidder gets the house. This has led to an appalling increase in the sale prices of homes there. I don't feel anywhere near as bad about the DC area after hearing that. They're prepared to spend an amount of money it scares me to think about, and for what they'll spend they'll probably get something horribly cramped and with a bad commute (although what passes for a bad commute there is no worse, and possibly better, than what we have here). Yow.

And it's weird having these conversations, because with people you've known a long time (or, in the case of Emily, all your life) you mentally lock them into a certain age. Emily's been married five years now and has two kids, but to a certain extent my mental image of her is somewhere around age 22, finishing up her undergrad at Rice and picking places to apply for law school. I'm sure it's even weirder for her, as she's probably got me frozen at age eleven, two black eyes after losing control of my bike and ending up on my head, after she'd convinced mom that I was old enough to ride over to Jonathan Taylor's house instead of being driven.

We also talked about stuff I'm doing at work, and how I'm afraid to go into meetings and start telling people what I think out of concern that I'll irritate or alienate them. I'm involved in one project that's always been the responsibility of my department, and there's another project going on at the same time that overlaps a lot with what we're already doing, and we might be coming up with a solution for their problem while we're solving ours. I don't, however, want to go into their meetings and say, "your project is wrong, shut it down and give the budget dollars to us," but that's precisely what needs to happen.

So I relayed all this to Emily, who was reminded at that point of something that had happened years ago when I met an actor in a play she was directing. She had been giving him some direction on a scene he wasn't getting (he was Pozzo in Waiting for Godot) and it was mostly flying over his head, it would seem. So I showed up to meet her, and upon being introduced to me as her little brother, his first words were, "Your sister intimidates the hell out of me."

But wait, it gets better.

She's now doing web work for an organization in Europe, and has gone from being somebody who just maintained a couple pages to being an integral member of their web team. This is after not knowing anything about HTML at all before she started doing that first page. So now she's working with a couple other people, maintaining a rather large site, and she recently went on vacation. So somebody else who had just started helping with the site did a bunch of maintenance ... and her editing software turned all the links on every page she edited from .html to .htm, thus breaking something like 600 links over the course of a week.

Emily discovered this upon her return, ran a link check with Dreamweaver, corrected the changes, and sent an email saying what had happened and to look out for it in the future. A couple weeks later, the same thing happened on a smaller scale, so Em sent another email. The response:

"I quit." It seems that Emily intimidated that woman too. This is what I'm afraid of doing. We are both, apparently, born intimidators.

Emily's always accused me of being much worse about being smart around other people than she is, so I've learned to try to be careful when it's possible that I'm going to make people think I'm condescending or insulting or presumptuous or any of those other things people think of young people who actually have opinions that they'll defend. So I told her about my worries of going into these meetings, basically having to tell people that their project is going down the wrong path and they should give the project to me and the department I work in, that we'll be able to do it properly.

The good news is, I've talked to one of the people who's sort of in charge of part of that other project, and she's willing to steer stuff in the direction we're going, and I wouldn't be too surprised if she gives the project to us if we ask. It may not be so terrible after all. And I haven't had to show anybody up in a meeting yet. While I do get some satisfaction out of tearing stuff apart when it's done wrong, I can't expect to be able to work with anybody if I keep demolishing their projects in public.

So far, nobody I've introduced to Emily has said, "your brother intimidates the hell out of me." I guess I'm doing okay.

link (2000-03-18)

Today's lyrics of wisdom, from The Folk Implosion:

Never know what I'm looking for until I find it
Never know where I am until I leave
Not aware that I care until I'm angry
Never know what I'm thinking until I dream

In the second verse, the first line becomes, "Never know what I'm looking for until it finds me." Sneaky. Go buy One Part Lullaby, if you haven't yet. It's good.

Today was kind of a non day. Woke up even earlier than yesterday, continuing the trend of the week. I don't actually like this morning business. If I leave for work before 10 or so, I have traffic problems to deal with. Got to work, had more good coffee, ended up having to explain to a passing cow orker what the french press is. I think I'm going to be known on my floor as the coffee guy.

Had a meeting this afternoon with people from WebTrends. We've been using two older versions of their product (3.0 and 3.5) and they're up to 4.0 now. We have problems with their software, and they're aware of it. They're not, however, fixing it. Instead of making the software faster, or making stuff work better, they're adding more features. Some of the features are things we need, but what we really need is for the problems to be fixed, and speed of the whole thing increased since the biggest problem is speed, or the lack of it. We don't have the available time or computer resources to spread the stuff out so that reports that take six hours to run don't stop everything else. They think they can just get us to sign on the line for their very expensive and not-very-good product. I'm thinking at this point the answer is no. I wouldn't mind buying more horsepower if it were also going to run better software, but it's not better software, and I mind.

After work went to happy hour for another person who just quit, after being invited by Paul, who quit several months ago but is still on the email list for these departure drinkfests. I didn't know Tiffany at all, but she's leaving and I don't need much of an excuse to go drinking. It turns out Tiffany sees her role in life as matchmaker for all her friends, so she invited the guys at the table to a birthday party she's throwing for one of those friends next Friday. I might actually go, just to see if it is indeed possible to meet somebody in this town, except that's the night Emily comes in from Holland and I'll be picking her up at Dulles. I think the last thing Emily wants is to be dragged, jetlagged, along to a birthday party where she knows no one and to which her brother was specifically invited to mingle with single girls. I suppose I could be wrong, but I think not.

Of course there's a further problem with that assortment of people: get two male geeks in a room and they're going to talk to each other and not the girls in the same room, no matter how attractive those girls might be. This has not changed for geeks since, oh, junior high (merely the subject matter under discussion). I'd like to say that I'm not affected by this, but I'd be lying. Who wants to talk to pretty girls when you can figure out over a couple beers, and with the aid a few cocktail napkins and empty beer bottles as props, how it'll be possible to set up a wireless network in the office that'll make it possible to sit in nearby restaurants and use network resources?

There are plenty of single men in NOVA/DC. They just don't know how to talk to girls. FWIW, the girls don't seem to know how to talk to geeks either. The ones that do are already married, it appears. It also appears that technical skills are not selected for in the typical mating process.

Agh. Tomato sauce on pasta for dinner = heartburn after dinner. I think it's time for Alka Seltzer and bed.

link (2000-03-02)

Significantly less cranky. I was wrong yesterday.

Amazing what a good mug of coffee will do for you. "Good coffee too. And hot!" Which reminds me, I noticed Bravo's showing Twin Peaks again. They said when they did the marathon that it'd be the last time they showed it. I wonder what their justification was for caving.

Oh, and the snooty milk (organic whole milk in a glass bottle I had to pay a deposit for) is really good. Better than Braum's milk ever was. (People in Oklahoma will understand that.) Milkfat floating on top. Mmm ... organic whole milk.

In other news, I'm waking up in the morning again, and falling asleep around midnight (instead of sometime after 1:30). I have no idea why, it's just happening. I do this occasionally, and from what I know about DSPS this is an identifiable "feature" of the syndrome. Whee. I'm sure in a week or two I'll be back to wide awake at 1AM as usual.

Still didn't do my taxes or clean anything last night. The new Steely Dan CD is good though.

link (2000-03-01)