Bad omen or coincidence?

Something rather odd just happened to be about ten minutes ago. I was changing the dogs potty pads, when one of my grandfathers paintings on the wall, literally tilted to one side, going crooked. In my family, I reckon most people would call that a bad omen, but me, well, I have fewer superstitions, normally.

Took a step up on the step stool, and tilted it back, when I noticed that the hanging cord sliding on the hook, looked ‘thinner’ now. So I took it off the wall, remarking that I’m too short for this stuff, and examined it. Sure enough, the old wire cord was badly frayed, practically looking like barbed wire; the spot where it’s been hanging from for years, was quite noticeably narrower then the rest. I reckon the picture probably dates back to the 60s, give or take a decade; not sure when he did most of them.

Coincidentally, the painting is of Christ on a hill top with his arms out.

Why I ****ing hate my life here

I don’t know what it is about coming home from work, that gives me a feeling of doing nothing: probably an intimate knowledge of how many interruptions I’ll have if I do work on anything :-S.

A lot of thoughts have been on my mind lately. Hasn’t been a very nice couple of days. Much of my time has been spent contemplating large portions of my life, and the future outlook. Really, it is probably a good thing that I can’t update my journal from work, other wise I might actually survive to get things off my chest. When I’m at work, I’ve always managed to have the most focused thoughts: it’s just that time of day, but alas, by the time I get home, there’s too much to worry about to retain most of them for long, until they’re lost to the interrupt storms.

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of life here and how to describe it, I managed to think of, what would be equal to several type set pages :-/. Too blasted tired to pour over that again but it would vindicate what I feel. The only concise description that I can think of, is emotional torture; I’m not sure if there is actually a definition of that, but it’s what things feel like here, a subtle form of torture. There’s no better way I seem to be able to describe it then emotional torture and people who don’t care, nor are capable of understanding the things done. Any other way of explaining it, I think would require treading incredibly more painful grounds then that, and I’m already well aware of the differences between my and my families definitions of most concepts 8=). I operate on my own, more “English language and logic driven” definitions of things.

From thinking back through the ages,  I can recall a time where I was actually happy in life: the only worry in the world being that my brother would pop the final cork and our mother would leave us holding the bag. Spanning ~90% of the range of memory I have been searching through, hell, I can even remember a time when my family was borderline on becoming homeless, and being far better off on the inside. Since, I guess the mid ’90s, things have been increasingly bad. The price of progressing from being a pawn in their games, to being an appetizing target to punt around the line of fire.

No one has dared lay a finger on me in years, at least a lustrum or more. The only place I fall under assault is where nothing can ever show through but my eyes in the dark. Last time anyone tried getting violent with me, my mother ended up with sore wrists for a few days: because I had locked her hands together until she finally “Chilled out”. All I had down was bump into something in the hallway and it sparked firsts flying. I have no problems with disciplinary action when I do wrong, but ahem, just being pissed enough to try pounding at me doesn’t cut it ;). Under normal circumstances my reactionary back then (cica 2003-2004), as it would be today if someone started up like that, would be my old triple combo followed up by a point-decommissioner to put them flat out on the deck before they could counter, but I only restrained her from doing harm. I spent enough years of my childhood, hearing my mother going on and on about how her first husband beat her, that I am incapable of ever striking a woman: my mother included. So obviously no intent of harm was in my heart, only a forceful deescalation. Looking back at the past, it is ironic, because the impetus for developing my combative-knowledge was to protect my family in the event of emergency, not to protect myself from them lol. It’s been almost that long, if not longer since I’ve been involved in any brawls, but the muscle memory is always sharper then the muscle.

After that incident in the early-mid 2000s, I think is when my family figured out that I had learned much to much about fighting, to be vulnerable to any blow they could dream of landing without my permission. Since then, at least in my mothers case, she knows how to dig in by other means. It’s like being ripped apart without taking a blow.

Perhaps it’s probability that my families crazy sign-of-weakness thing, would likely making me a target the likes of a bleeding fish in a shark tank, or that *hammering* just what this shit does to me through anyones head, would be much more painful then dying inside… but all the same: I rarely make an issue of it. I’ve learned through experience at trying, that it does no good, save to give more ammunition to hit me with again. Life here has allowed me to develop one hell of a poker face, because any sign of cracking would likely be like putting blood in the water, and that means being dug into deeper. Whatever I feel on the inside, you won’t see it cross my face unless I put it there, or I’m ready to keel, and it takes a lot of hurting to get me there.

I believe that you can try to build people up or ripe them down, through your words and actions. For the most part, I believe in building people up instead. Because I know all to well how it feels to be ripped down and torn apart by the wolves. The only time I do widdle away at people around me, it’s in jest to cause a chuckle, and my friends know it’s a joke: other wise I wouldn’t say any of the negative remarks I do make. That’s how I am, I don’t believe in inflicting the same pain upon others arbitrarily. My mother on the other hand, is a master of making me feel miserable…. an absolute master compared to anyone else. Never underestimate how your treatment of another person, can impact them, that’s the one thing I’ve learned from my family.

Over the past couple days, I’ve looked at a very large portion of my life. The only thing I can say, is that they don’t care as long as their agenda is archived… because I don’t know if I can emotionally tolerate another explanation. It’s impossible to hit me but it’s easy to strike me in the heart, that’s what they do. Nailing until it hurts inside, and any attempt at making that known, is just going to see things get worse.

The other day a friend asked me if I was ok, I told her I would probably be fine in a couple days; I was at a bit of a loss for words. In the past decade’ish, my family has pushed me hard enough. Three times in my life, I’ve come close to a nervous break down and bounced back from it. Once contemplated suicide and never will again, period. I’ve also had several depressive episodes (IMHO anyway) and enough periods of “bleeding out” from this place. These fucks will never kill me.  It even shows in my call sign… like a spider, if you want to crush me, you really have your work cut out for you.

Today I was remembering a song I used to sing to myself silently as a child, whenever my family managed to hurt me where the sun doesn’t shine. In thinking about it, it feels more like an slaves song, something no one else in my generation is likely to comprehend (the history majors aside). How much has really changed since then? They still do it, only more often and with greater skill.

All I can say, is my D-Day is coming….

Inspecting an old decrepit mouth

I took “Stock” of my teeth tonight: it’s been a long while since I’ve inspected them closely, because their just simply hopeless lol.

The top two front centre teeth, what I call “Rabbit teeth” for the obvious cartoon reasons; are notes in the history book. The right centre top is long gone years ago, just the empty socket there, and consequentially it never bothers me lol. The left centre top, is broken with the back of the tooth still protruding a wee bit out of the gum line. Other then parts of what looks like tooth-interior visible at the edges of the damage (or tarter from hell), it doesn’t look that bad.

To their immediate flanks, the teeth next to them are ones that suck. To the right it’s a broken tooth, that protrudes further (about half normal length) then the left top centre. The principal difference being this one looks black while the other is mostly white. On the left, is a spot from the base to about half way down to the top of the tooth, that looks like a poster board for tooth decay :-(.

On the bottom, the front centres are in good shape as ever, although (as have been for many years) I can see part of the teeth quite a distance down, where the other teeth I would see gums, I see the teeth; I’m not quite sure what significance that is. The way my teeth are settled, is probably a good example of what happens if you don’t have braces (as my brother did in his youth), but hey, I would probably have to flash back to my 5th birthday or something, if I wanted a nice looking smile lol. The teeth directly adjacent the bottom centre pair, are in much better shape then their mates on the top; the only thing going against them is thick tarter build up.

It would take a closer inspection then I can do without tools, to tell more details but most of the other teeth on the top or bottom look fairly good, just highly unaligned. The hot spots are on the right, third bottom tooth from the back: there’s just a wee bit of tooth visible toward the outer edge of the socket, other wise it’s a KIA; I can remember spitting out chunks of it a couple years back. On the left, about second from the back, the tooth is missing about a third of its visible mass, on the inner (tongue) side. That’s the area where I usually get a toothache every now and then. I would bet an x-ray of that tooth would make a dental person upset. On the upper right, while I don’t see anything, there’s a hard spot in the gums, that I would guess is probably part of the teeth or something protruding from the gums.

My gums don’t bleed often, so I hope that’s a good thing; although they did when I first started brushing them on a semi-regularly basis, that was ages ago. The only time they bleed, usually is when eating certain kinds of food, like a sandwich; then there’s usually a bit fo blood from where the top front portion of my gums would’ve met the bread.

The reason for my fresh interest in my teeth, is because last night I noticed a dull throb to my lower left side of the jaw (around that one tooth), and this morning I noted the gums on the lower left are swollen. While I don’t think anyone else noticed, I can both  feel the bulge and see it in the mirror. Took a nap for maybe 45 minutes and the swelling seems to have gone a little bit, but it’s still feels like an Everlasting Gobstopper is sticking out of my jaw. Before logging on, I flossed and brushed teeth as usual, and tried rinsing my mouth out with saltwater for good measure.

This is what I call the “Folly of youth”. Unlike a few other avenues in my life where things are miserable, this one is purely of my own causeing: because out of the 7,800 or so days I’ve been alive, the number of times I’ve brushed my teeth in the past 21 years, are probably closer to 1,000 times or less. Some years ago I started brushing my teeth and using mouth wash at a dentists orders, although that was of course a lost cause; it was even on the news last year, that the medial stuff we were on back then, weren’t covering anything worth a fart for dental and people were shouting about it. After that fiasco ended, I tossed the brush back to it’s corner and gave up, until some months back when I “Restarted” after a killer toothache—reequipping myself with floss, brush, and paste about the time I left doctor Cook with a bandaged toe. Since then, well let’s just say I’ve only started the second tube tonight… lol. My routine is generally a nightly floss & brush, since mornings are just disasters anyway…

I have a bit of aheadache now, and still a throbbing  where the gums are swollen. Then again, I’ve had a headache most of the damn day, between these gums and a parakeet screeching my ears off all freaking day. Going to skip most of the tasks I have for the computer tonight, and just try and get some sleep, after a wee bit of snack.

These teeth are what I get for being a stupid ass.

The Blogger Experiment

I spent much of the afternoon manually importing my posts from Live Journal to Blogger. I have all the posts in LJs XML export format, but efforts to convert that into something workable have proven, shall we say to great a lossage to put forward.

LiveJournal2Blogger was only able to download a portion of my posts, importing about ~63 od them to Blogger :-(. Thus, I deleted all of those and started doing it the Old Fashioned Way. At first I figured I would just do something like this:

$ cat *.xml | vim -

but that quickly proved in efficient, due to the nature of LiveJournals XML export format: it rather wreaks havoc on any HTML entities used in posts. Simply put, I have used a heck of a lot of pre and blockquote tags, between code/command snippits, song lyrics, and quotations. Fairly regular use of strong/em and more anchors then you can shake twenty sticks at, this is not a good thing. I also tend to use angle brackets as part of my asciibody language >_>, so it is rather important to avoid the pain & anguish, if you get my meaning.

All across the web, I’ve seen shotty looking snippits in blogs, and well, for as much as I hate those, I am not interested in having them in anything I call *mine* so no content mutilation will be tolerated.

LiveJournal has an excellent system for browsing archived posts, at least until you want to actually /search/ for something. So I merely started at my first journal entry and began working forwards through the archive. Whenever you edit a post on LJ, at least when you composed it in raw HTML mode, as I always do 😉 you get back just what you put into the editor way back when.

So copy/pasting that into Blogger’s snazzy editor, in “Edit HTML” mode, works like a charm :-D.

Most of 2006 is transferred, and the word verification limit wasn’t even reached until entries from late November or early December were processed. Later tonight I’ll finish up on that. The operation has however been lossy by nature: things encoded into LJ posts have been omitted for speed. So they no longer carry information such as my location, mood, or music. I have tried to keep the date/time accurate with respect to the numbers on LiveJournal, which is the slowest part. One good thing though, it lets me walk through my journal, “Label” entries accordingly for recollection, and it really does help put things in perspective. I’m good with faces and objects, bad with names and times, lol.

In some cases, such as my Vi User How To, I have elected to copy the comments along with the entries, by adding them in a singular comment of my own. But for the most part, I’ve left the comments behind as part of the lossy translation from LJ to Blogger. To be honest, I rarely get comments on my entries, so it is not to big an issue with me. I think between 2006-09-09 and 2009-11-13, I’ve only received about 150 comments or so.

Later tonight I’ll experiment with the look/feel and informational aspects of this blog. When the experiment is complete, I’ll set up a self referential link between the relevant Blogger and LiveJournal entries: it should appear seemless. Well, the comments and misc meta info aside.

Right now, I am off to SWAT 4 for a few good games :-).

Been searching my journal to try and find when was my ‘last’ vacation, which was a working vacation. Last time I actually got even that much of a vacation, I kept a blog file: http://sas-spidey01.livejournal.com/73102.html as memory serves, it was basically 3 days of antangonistic-hell. It’s been so long, I don’t remember if that was the year I had to unload a packed-to-the-freaking-brime-and-beyond car in around a 110 degree (~43 Celsius) heat or not… but at least I know, soon it’ll be at least 2 years since my last vacation of any kind. I don’t remember what the last time I had a ***real*** vacation was, only that it was a long time before I began journaling.

In searching through my journal for the date, I’ve found numerous links that have brought back memories:

2007-06-09, Ich bin muede (en: I am tired)
2007-06-11, A Troopers Call
2007-07-09, A little BattleTech
2007-07-19, The day that Macy died
2007-07-30, Techno Nightmares (of Screamers)
2007-08-02, How old am I? (an old post about my age in SAS, including a list of people I saw in make Rct; outa update that someday in a new post)
2007-08-12, A ROLF moment
2007-08-12, Right or Wrong? (dark memory)
2007-08-23, Bell Tower Sniper
2007-08-23, A collection of jokes
2007-08-26, Relating songs to life
2007-09-16, Raged Spiders (massive fiasco)
2007-09-26, I like (a new/profane phrase)

My first pair of glasses

Yesterday my glasses were ready for pick up, but eh, who wants to go right back out after they get home for work? So we picked them up today on the way home; it’s only a few miles in a perpendicular direction .(^_^)/./

When they had me try them on, it was like, in the words of Clark Griswald: hallelujah and holy shit! I found it initially very unstabling to turn my head and gaze about like normal, but I reckon that is normal at first. The difference however in vision, is tremendous. I’ve spent most of the day wearing them, and now they are fairly comfortable, more so then naked eyes lol. I only worry how wearing glasses regularly will impact my un-aided eye sight in the long run. I can see very crisp and clear, it is like someone jacked up the resolution a few orders of magnitude! On the way home, I could see license plates and street signs clear; hell I could see the specks of dirt on the road instead of just the dirt!!! Coming home it felt almost like the ground was under a microscope, so much finer detail. It’s like I could count the hairs on the dogs back, leaves on a tree at 30ft, and can see the crap between the individual blades of grass! Just walking into the apartment it was unsettling, I can now see the carpet so finely, that it’s better then when I used to sit on the carpet as a kid with action figures littered all over :-/. It’s a huge detail hack, man I think I could even read the little-bitty display on the VCR across the room, if the clock was set, ha!

Up real close things are a bit blurry with the glasses on, perhaps I need bifocals for that lol; I’m just happy with the current improvement. And really, the choice of lifting my glasses up or moving my head back a little is not a bother. So far the only irksome issue, often whenever I yawn I tend to get a bit teary eyed (always have), but now obviously I have to remove my glasses to wipe it away, so I can see clearly again lol. Even on the computer, it’s very different. I run my 19″ monitor at 1600×1200 and a custom DPI setting of 144dpi (150% winsucks normal). Most things are set to fairly large fonts because I find that Google Chrome renders fonts a hell of a lot smaller then Mozilla does; the difference being defaults in Fx have always been fine, but in Chrome I have things set to like 22pt rather then a more normal size. With my glasses I can see to read the mouse type things render on daemonforums, with chrome+my monitor. Without, I had to increase the size to be able to read it without zooming my head into the screen -> which I *hate* doing. Right now it’s become very easy to read even my LJ without jacking the font size! sasclan.org and facebook only need 1 increment of the size rather then 3 or 4; and then only in order to be read ‘at length’ rather then momentarily. Just now, I’ve tested changes to Chromes settings. I can set the fonts as low as 9 or 8 pt and be able to see them excellently in most fonts; and very comfortably around 11-12 pt period. The problem is, that results in microscopic text compared to the rest of my windows desktop – like looking at 5pt text instead of 12pt text. So I have Chrome set to 24pt now, and am reading the text in LJ’s text area – at what appears to be “9pt” text when judged against how fonts render in Chromes selection dialog.

I was playing SWAT 4 today, and found it easier to read the texts, usually I have to be careful of my cam placement in order to read team messages; grey on grey/white/black mixtures suck. The big shocker though, was it felt like I could see the threads on the enemies hoods :-/. With RvS, I’ve had a problem reading chats since I started with this 19 inch monitor; the texts far away. Now, maybe I can start reading it again like I used to on the old 15″, instead of having to stop and open the console xD.

My word, if this is what normal vision is like—what have I been seeing all these years!? Oh, in case I forgot to mention it, they are really thick-ass lenses lol.

Wow it’s been a wildly long day!

Fell asleep on the couch last night, so I couldn’t get to sleep early (nodded off after 0300Q), woke up around 0600Q and decided that was just TOOOOO early even for me! The doctors appointment was for 0945 and we had to be in the office NLT 0915, so I’ve been awake since around 0830.

The doctor was very kind and seems to know what he’s doing quite well; personally I like people with experience ;). He examined the toe during the usual questioning. He removed the lump of dead tissue with an angled scissors, something I had to previously convince my mother that it wouldn’t be a good idea to do at home with a table scissors. For better or worse it actually was more painful for him to get the thing in position, then cutting it away; and at least I can say, I have nice red blood lol. The Dr. then decided to put a small piece of cardboard underneath the (clipped) nail to keep it away from the injured side, leading to it falling out when he tried wrapping it in medical tape 8+). He proscribed some antibiotics, *not* slamming the damn thing anymore (haha!), plus the usual cleaning and bandaging. I’ve also instructions to pry up the nail several times a day to keep it from damaging anything, really not sure what is worse: that I have to do such a thing or that doing it doesn’t bother me in the least. The nurse was also kind enough to “pad it well” just in case, when she dressed the wound. There was errands to run afterwards and the pharmacy tor drop by, so needless to say it wouldn’t have helped to crack it apart *again*.

Got it filled and picked up some stuff while waiting on the pharmacist; dressings, tape, etc. Since by then the bill was starting to add up, I told ma if she would cover the proscription, I would pick up the tab on the other supplies; I also snatched a small pound cake on sale for like $2 before we left the store. Hey, if I’m spending money, may as well buy something to gnosh on too!

I’ve spent the rest of the day largely trying to NOT slam this freaking toe into anything else, and playing a lot of SWAT 4. It’s nice to see Rct Cara progressing well; think I owe Duke even more gratitude, for what he accomplished with [SAS] “SWAT day 2009”. I’ve been playing a lot of SWAT 4 lately, between my own operations and watching over the Trps/Rcts. At night sometimes I pop in and join the night crew (mostly fellow Americans and Canadians) for some games on our Raven Shield servers. But really, RvS has been pissing me off a lot with the bugs lately. SWAT 4 is as buggy as RvS, yeah… but at least most of the bugs are not combat critical in SWAT 4 o/.

During my break times and tonight also, I’ve been studying more bits of the DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK). So far DirectX itself seems to be an alright way of getting things done. I can’t stand the ridiculous influnces of Hungarian notation that permeates so many aspects of Windows programming interfaces… the concept is sound but the implemetations I commonly see in code, is just a load of bollocks. Naming identifier well and placing good information in them is a tricky thing at times (gets better with experience) but encoding type data in it, oy. The most useful of which I can think of is adding a ‘p’ in front for each level of *pointing used in a C app (or comparable). In one of the DX samples when I saw a variable named something like pbNoFurtherProcessing or something similiar, I nearly fainted from the stupidity of it all. The pb tells you it’s a pointer to a boolean (bool * in C++), by the time you see it’s being used with the arrow operator (->) and bears an obviously boolean name, that kind of makes it useless information. Not to mention anyone with a *decent* code editor for the last 20+ years can just make a quick jump and look up the variables type if they totally forget it – which shouldn’t happen often.

I’ve also been abusing Visual C++ Express 2008 into cooperating. Right now I have it setup, basically to just be a project and build manager – all the actual code editing is being done in Vi IMproved. MSVC/VS/etc are very very good Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and I would recommend them to anyone who wants an IDE for serious Windows development (along with a cat scan). However I am used to having UNIX as my IDE, which means powerful tools ;). With more time off work I could probably get vim semi-integrated with the IDE via the +clientserver feature in vim and maybe a plugin of some sort. Non essential though, since right now all the IDE is helping me with is not having to hand-write a makefile for nmake, which would probably have been less trouble then using the IDEs concept of solutions and projects lol.

Life’s been good to day.

This morning H.R.P. scheduled an appointment for the cheapest eye place in town (listed in the yellow pages of course) and canceled work for the day. I reported last nights findings and we ended up instead at what is likely the most experienced of the two most ‘suitable’ places I looked up. On the upside of using the Internet rather then the yellow pages, was finding a coupon, haha! Plus being able to download, print out, fill out, and therefore skip filling out the paper work in office. After everything was sorted, ma went out shopping (I refused to comply), whilst I tended to trying to enjoy what little time remained. Personally, I think she likely took more joy in going shopping then she would have in getting paid from work lol.

It has been maybe a decade since my last eye examination, so I knew what to expect but not quite the level of outcome. The doctor was exceptionally nice and I would recommend the place to others here. One thing that I very much like about people practicing locally over a franchise of some sort, you know if they are horrendous they would be out of business quickly. I found them professional and easy to communicate with; it’s also nice when they have a sense of humour :-).

The general outcome, my vision sucks for distance but they have yet to figure out why. Once my glasses are ready, I do very much wonder just how big a change it will make, these are the eyes I was born with: there is no other form of vision I can compare them to, unless someone wants to loan me their eyes for a few days o/. 2 weeks after getting the glasses, I’m supposed to go for further testing, which I *hope* happens. Then again, I also hope my toe eventually gets medical attention… :-/. On the subject of frames, that basically took all of 3 minutes. I don’t care very much about how they look so much as how well they work! You could say, I strongly believe that form follows function. The glasses are fairly plane, and I most likely rather then having the super geeky brain, I will now also look like a dateless nerd lol. Then again, I’m not sure if one can avoid that with glasses, unless you are dumb as a ….

My brother who was not even present, has succeeded in making my mother feel like 2 cents (a family super-power), ragging on the doctor and his practice, and bitching about the frames without even seeing them. My response to that? Well, to quote Doc. Holiday as portrayed in Wyatt Earp: all you can kiss my rebel dick! I make my own decisions, period – don’t like it, then put up and shut up.

😉

Goodbye toe, hello pancake!

Ok, so far my toe has been slammed into a couch and healed… then slammed into a step at work, and healed improperly. Last week I showed it to an acquaintance who is a nurse, and she came to the same conclusion I had – time to see a doctor (and have the dead tissue removed).

This morning when getting ready to leave for work, 12 hard cover books fell off the table and landed on the same damn toe lol. I’m lucky they weren’t novels 350-450pg thick, or there wouldn’t be a foot left let along a toe! No serious damage added, if there is actually anything more to damage… just a bit of blood flow. Cleaned it up and threw a bandaid on it before heading out the door, it likely stopped bleeding by the time we got to work.

In some ways, I think I now will look at Spaceballs with an extra chuckle: whenever Barfs foot gets crushed under a Yogurts statue…

2 Razor blades, 3 years? Oh my

For the first time in a long time, I’ve a sort of smile on my face. I think age has somewhat taken away my grin (the spitting image of pa’s smile, mixed an even bigger shit eating grin lol), but it feels quite nice…

It’s been 3 years since I’ve had a resupply on razor blades, with two cartridges that have passed their end of life marks a few times over, to say the least! I hope these fresh 4 won’t have to last 6 years, but either way I am thankful. Haven’t had this smooth a shave in a very, very long long time: not to mention the speed factor lol.

Thank you GOD, at long last fresh razor blades! And thank you ma, it is better late then never!