Memories

New chapters and new homes

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Lately, I’ve had a lack of free time and probably enough pressure to take a few years off my life expectancy, but I’ve finally hit that sweet spot where I’ve handed over my apartment’s keys and all my crap is now moved to my new home, although I suspect it will be closer to Labor Day that anything resembles sanity.

Thanks to a friend putting me in touch with an awesome realtor, I was able to find where this new chapter of my life is taking me. I think, I’m officially in debt up to my eyeballs now, but at least it’s for good reasons. Especially as cost of rent is effectively my largest cost of living, and retirement is another thirty years out, the timing works. It’s just not what I had expected to be doing for a few more years, but life decided on other plans.

I now find myself experiencing something that I’ve rarely experienced in a home: having space! It’s technically little things that make me feel this, but they add up. Things like having enough bathroom drawers to organize things instead of everything on the counter. Being able to create a separate study to use as my computer and game space instead of a desk that’s either crammed next to my bed or into a living room. Things like that really add up after a while especially when you’ve spent most of your life with space as a pure premium in fairly tiny apartments.

When I moved last time, I felt like Paul Atreides in the arc of Dune where he notes that they have entered the time where many will come and seek their life. This time, I feel more like I’ve arrived at Sietch Tabr, an orderly place of refuge. Actually, I’m tempted to incorporate an Atreides banner into my decor, if I can find one I like.

Moving is a process full of many little things. But I’ve generally found it a positive opportunity to revisit how I do things and let my inner pain in the ass out. Yeah, I’m the kind of nut who will go around measuring rooms and planning where things should go and building a vision of what the space should look like and how to mold it to fit desired use cases. I have a feeling, if I ever had a wife she would need to be patient to put up with me, or the same kind of pain in the ass that I am who enjoys bringing order to the chaos of “How will I use this space?”, enough not to stab me with a tape measure 😂

Ahh, it’s going to be fun having a study 🙂

A photographic decision

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While brushing my teeth tonight, I have come to a decision about how to limit the ways my mother can pain  me. When I came back from vacation, my mother took great effort to see my photo album distributed however she pleases. That was generally met with forcing people to go straight through me if they want to see anything of mine, which is obvious if you want to see my stuff. Well, due to my mother’s unresolveble nastiness and her constantly using that as a form of leverage to attack me through, I have decided the following:

From this date forward, anyone who is currently related to me by blood or marriage is blocked from viewing any photo’s that I have taken in the past, currently have stored, or will ever take in the future, except where posted publicly. Likewise any violations by future generations shall be met with aggressive sanctions to match. In plain English that means, I have just banned my kin from ever seeing a single solitary photo that I ever take or have ever taken.

To match this decision, any web albums of mine currently shared with “Family” have since had that access permanently revoked. Any kin contacting me will accordingly be linked here in the future and any currently open loops will be e-mailed linkage to this decision. If need be this sanction will be expanded past the scope of kinship.

My mother has proven nasty enough to me over the past ~23.5 years that I choose to close this case in this manor, rather than allow her any way of attacking me in the future. I also have no concern what so ever just how unkind or inconvenient this decision may prove for kin that deserve my kindness—because being nice to you in about this, is not worth the cost my mother adds to it. So don’t bother crying if you feel this is harsh or unfair. It’s the price we all share for being related to my mother.

Decision is final for the length of my life or my mother’s life, whichever lasts longest.

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I guess like many, this morning I learned that the world recently lost one of it’s biggest contributors. I do not mean Steve Jobs, a man with his own important legacy. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie has died, he was more commonly known as ‘DMR’ or just ‘Dennis Ritchie’. A G+ entry by Rob Pike is the earliest reporting I’m aware of, but I can’t say I expect this sad news to be found on TV.

Dennis Ritchie has a place in history that few men have ever achieved, because his work helped change the world. I am a young man compared to the late DMR but I does have an interest in history. If it wasn’t for this mans work, I doubt that I could be writing this journal entry, because he helped to enable so many elements that make it possible.

His most famous programming language, C, was so pervasively popular, that I knew of it before I learned to program. My first programming language (C++) was derived from it. A big part of how I fell so deep insane with computers was learning about how C and Unix became self hosting. That  means you could make C and Unix using C and Unix, in laymans terms. Back then that was  almost like revolutionary – today it’s like sliced bread. We take it for granted but someone had to help show us the way; then people started to use it everywhere.

Through C, we gained countless programs. Most Unix operating systems are written in C, most other operating systems are written in C or finally grown from one that was. Unix, DOS, Windows, Linux, OSX, your iPod, your iPhone, your iPad, our Android. None of it would exist just like it does. Most of the stuff we do every day involves C programs, be that reading e-mail, playing games, surfing the web. It is even normal for other programming languages to be implemented in C. The defacto standard Perl, Python, and Ruby included. It is so normal that writing a language implementation in itself is not so big anymore. C is so pervasive that it is also inescapable in other languages: their is almost always a way and a need to interface with C code. Hell, today you might even have C code involved in your toaster. It is that important a programming language. If you ever used a computer or an embedded system, you have probably used software written in C, or are old enough to remember what it was like before punch cards.

C is perhaps the single most important language since programmer’s stopped writing in raw machine code. In fact, sometime after that we stopped writing in assembly and I know no one who goes lower level than reading the machine code. A common portion of C syntax is practically our linga franca—even if C is not a shared language, the syntax (which grew from prior languages) is also widely used and an alternative to pure pseudo code.

Maybe a lot of young programmers don’t know C, or skip it. I love it. It is one of the most beautiful languages that I know, despite it’s trappings. Perhaps some of the greatest lessons I learned about my craft, was that learned from C. Perhaps another was the humility of it’s creator.

Somehow, I doubt his other works will ever be as well known as C, or things he was a big part of (like Unix), but maybe people will study them and see what they can learn from the work of a legendary hacker, like Dennis Ritchie.

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In cleaning out a hard drive, I stumbled across a personal DokuWiki I was running. It has various stuff in it, ranging from stuff such as a guide to making Live Operations and tryout info. For momento’s sake I guess, since [SAS] was such a big part of my life, I’ve adapted the Service History part of my own wiki entry.

It can be found here.

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I think, I just reached a new level of insanity but in a very happy way :-/

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Every so often, life gives you a reason to be glad you learned something. Well, one for me was being stuck without working arrow keys on my server during early boot—and smiling because I knew vi well enough not to need any!

Today, I just got another lol. Setting up a bit of a server install here using some scavenged hardware. The keyboard I’m working with is both one of those annoying ones with the pipe (|) key missplaced in favour of a larger enter key—and having most of the keycaps in the wrong places! Well, unless they make a “<>PYF keyboard layout and the hardware see’s it as QWERTY :-D.

Where else but technology, could you have this much of a chuckle and life still be great? Haha!

Birthing Pains

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N.B. written  April 2nd.


Yesterday was a matter of loading Noelle full of stuff and driving ~70 miles to Duluth. Driving around it and th neighboring for a couple hours, then getting the paper work done over lunch. After driving back to Newnan to meet some Relatives for dinner, I started loading the car and did another round trip. That’s like 300 miles / 500 kilometres worth of driving, and going almost non-stop at packing/loading/driving/unloading from like 0730 to after 0300. U-Haul called while we were signing the lease, to inform us that we had to pick up the truck in Lagrange instead of Newnan, that’s about anm hours drive.

So 0740 my pastor (Steve) drove me down to get the truck and I drove the truck from there to Newnan, taking US-29 up until the I-85 access near grantvile. I wanted to make sure of the trucks handling before having to get OFF the Interstate. Steve split off and went to get a couple of guys to help, and I continued on to the apartment to get the truck ready. The original plan was for my mother and a friend to get the animals packed in an SUV with some stuff and drive up to the new place, so we could get to loading w/o having to worry about the dogs. Well, of course it took like two ******* hours to just get as far as getting a dog in the vehicle, with me having to hold Willow for most of it in order to keep her from running off. Guess what? Misty got OUT the door and went running around before we got her. No one ******* listens to me. After finally seeing them off, I got to start helping with the truck loading; that also saw interruptions, for having to pick up a cell phone and eventually hit the corner drug store: if I didn’t have some surger in me, my old running on three hours of sleep ass was gonna pass out. They did most of the loading, and did a brillant job. Which really is saying something because my mother can’t pack for ****. Relatives also took some stuff up in their van and supplied victory-pizza.

Tonight was the first time I ever drank a “Normal” Pepsi. I’ve had the caffeine
free version; that stuff has so much surger that you can almost feel your teeth
rot. But being from a Coke Cola family, I never got straight Pepsi lol. Being
disllowed Caffeine in soda until like 15, also helped. I really do not want to
know how much caffeine I have consumed tonight, let along the surger, but pizza
and pepsi with a little bit of sitting, helped recharge my batteries enough to
drive everyone back to Newnan and get myself home alive. I also had to drive
point for the truck on the way in.  Unloading that truck almost made feel like
trying to bribe management to get ma to throw more stuff out. It’s tempting…

I’m sick as a dog. My noise is like a constantly exploding cherry and my eyes are filling like I need to scratch them out. After living there 13 years, loading/unloading all the crap has totally destroyed my allergies. My room was fairly clean but the living room essentially looked like a bomb hit it. Many of the things we had to load/unload came with years of dust, cob webs, and I don’t even want to continue thinking about it. Somehow I wonder, if she ishn’t being paid, if my mother even knows what the concept of cleaning is. I have no ******** idea how I’m going to drop off the truck tomorrow if I can’t ******* stop sneezing my **** brains out.

It was after 2000 when we got the truck done and it was after 2230 by the time I started driving home from Newnan.  The nice plus, sarcasitly putting it, is that the paper with the dropoff number is AWOL, and the contact number for the truck went to an already full voice mail box. So in the morning I need to  call again and try and get the dropoff number o/.

I can’t fucking breath through my nose right now.

It is done! -> This Journal Moved To Blogger

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Right, I’ve just finished something that has taken me almost two years to finish by hand, since the available tools couldn’t keep up with the content. Hmm, makes me think of a line from one of my favourite films! But at long last, and vastly overdue—my journal is now totally under the Blogger roof. 2009-12-05, I posted on LJ and Blogger, that I had moved things here. Well, 2011-03-27, it seems to finally be complete. Even noticed half a months extra posts after I was finished lol. Since beginning with Live Journal back on 2011-09-09, I’ve made 2,039 entries, assuming that I have not missed any of the 1,537 entries that I was supposed to import &gt;_&gt;.

In honour of completion, I think I’ll post the stats of that count to date, something I originally planned to do at 2,000 entries, along with a little celebration, but hey, I didn’t expect to notice my two-thousandth post anyway lol. Right, anyway here is the table!

2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006
January

12

26

61

46

16

0
February

15

26

40

33

27

0
March

28

23

69

55

26

0
April

0

48

68

62

20

0
May

0

108

47

41

20

0
June

0

69

49

28

16

0
July

0

58

43

49

25

0
August

0

37

46

50

28

0
September

0

26

45

62

24

24
October

0

26

23

45

23

4
November

0

26

40

44

31

17
December

0

16

32

52

42

18
Total

55

489

563

567

298

63

This shows that until getting into the whole job thing, the trend has been for my level of blogging to stay fairly steady. I would say an average of 1 1/2 entries per day at its height. Generally, I’ve been most active during the first half of the year. 2011 and 2006 being very slow, as one is when I started and one is little more than 25% into it, inverse-respectively.

One thing I really do hope for, is that after this move is sorted, I’ll have more time to update my journal more frequently than I have these past few months. I really don’t update things here about my present line of work (as a matter of personal policy), and anything interesting really is the subject domain of my notes anyway.

One thing I do know, it’s better to have a journal than nothing but memory. And that’s saying something, since 2008-2009 are still pretty much in my `recent` memory, and my trail of memories largely go back to the early 1990s!

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Well, it is pretty much done: my life packed. There’s just a few things here and there that are essentially, stuff it in a bag at the last minute and go. It does make you think a bit, seeing over twenty years crammed into a normal closet worth of boxes and bags. Or should I say, compared to many people, a micro-closet lol.

Excluding computers and related crapola, just about everything I’m taking is a book of some sort. I must have like three and a half pieces of luggage dominated with books; mostly Fiction. Something that isn’t technically a book but not far off, is my fathers old photo albums. There’s not much that I’m taking.

I wish I could say that I had a lot of happy memories, but I don’t. I’ve known for quite a while now, that when it would come time to open a new chapter in my life, that I would close this one by singing to a Taylor Swift song.