the alarm to greet him as he walks out the back door reminding of a neighbor either leaving or comming home. Wide steps shaking frame all the way to the stairs when then then it gets hard. 18 steps and the handle; A cat to wats, and then you.

Scott Adams frequently talks about free will, and how he thinks it doesn't exist. This conversation invariably leads to God talk, so he addressed that directly from the side of an atheist, in a written dialog. His point was that such arguments are futile, due to the no free will thing. I, on the other hand, was impressed by the argument "you can't prove god doesn't exist." I think that's probably true.

You can't prove the bagel fairy isn't real either. Go ahead and try. All the same arguments as big G God proof work with any made up creature that occasional unusual events can be attributed to. When I worked at PPC I often wondered who ate the last bagel (the one I was coveting) when there were only 4 people working and none had dusty chins. I just chalked that one up to the bagel fairy and went on with life. Now, who among you can prove to me that it wasn't?

On Tuesday I started CSCE 5150, computer algorithms. When I was at OGI I took the same course and got a gentleman's B. Prior to that there was a portion of Data to Information at TESC that covered the introduction, and I did pretty well. That was 9 years ago. Tuesday the professor started drawing stuff on the board and laid out a sequence of numbers, I recognized them but it felt like I was blowing the cobwebs out of my brain when I thought about it. He then asked for the next two numbers in the sequence and I swear half the class answered in unison. Other CS people reading this probably guessed it was a the Fibonacci sequence, but I hadn't seen or thought of it in years! The professor has made it pretty clear that if we don't know this old stuff by rote we better not be in the class next week. It's intimidating as hell, cause I'm no bozo but I never memorized the formula to calculate the nodes in a binary tree, but I can remember how to figure out how many levels there are if you already know the nodes (I think it's log n). I have some catching up to do. I can't wait to see the first homework assignment.

In other news, I might be getting a job in Fort Worth again. Dr. Mikler came in the lab today and handed me an email he got from a local medical group looking for coding help. I'm still composing the reply email, and I really need to get it out before... 3:30? Wish me luck, I am very excited at the prospect of coding professionally again.

I'm having trouble concentrating.  I've got a 5 page thing for DB due in about an hour and I'm not quite there... by about 4 pages.  This thing should be a slam dunk but I can't seem to get into it.  I'm compensating by filling the paper with humor.  I'm not quite 5 pages funny though.

John Isbell is brokering with me for a buncha antique scientific/musical/misc stuff at the warehouse right now.  It looks like I'll soon be the proud owner of a Heathkit ~120W poweramp that uses a large number of 12au7, 12ax7 and 6l6 tubes.  Lucky for me those are the ones I saved.  ;P  He's got some kind of solid-state bass amp for Lanie.  She's pretty excited about it.  It's huge.  A stack.  15" speakers, etc.  Woof.

Both my group projects are not going quite as planned.  In SN, of the 6 group members only 3 participate and 1 has done nearly everything thus far, and now it's my turn to make it perfect by monday. Barf.  In DS the model is finally in a state where it doesn't rely on real random numbers, and it _can_ be parallelized, but, jesus, that'll be a task.  All by monday.  Today is wednesday right? crap.

Listening to NPR today I heard a guy giving his opinion about Trent Lott becoming the RNC chairman. He used the phrase "Spending money like a pimp with a week to live." That is taken out of context since I was only peripheraly listening. I didn't expect to hear that come out of NPR. The new KERA program manager is a weird dude. I also heard a band whose name I can't for the life of me figure out on All Things Considered, who employed throat singing with relatively normal music resulting in what at first sounds like black metal (throat singing is pretty dark) but isn't.

I'm really screwed up by school right now. I have a huge thing due tomorrow, which isn't really started yet (but I TRY!) and Dr. Mikler is breathing down my neck for results from my kill-em-all model. That's a friday morning thing I think. I'm under a lot of stress.

Debian sucks! I can't get DRI going NO MATTER WHAT I DO. I have tried Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian with and without MESA/DRI BS and there is basicly no support online for anything but <300 radeon chipsets. I know it is possible, but the resources aren't available. I'm tempted to wait till the kernel supports this shit natively. I hate linux.

I found out my car cd player can play multi-session mp3 cds. I also learned I don't like the White Stripes later music as much as I hoped I would. The wikipedia says they are very collectable. I think that is irritating.

Patrick wants to introduce a `cowboy ghost' into the game somehow. He is full of good ideas but I don't think this is one of them. For one, it's a WW2 game set in either china or england/germany, and for two we're having enough problems staying focused as it is.

Speaking of staying focused, I drew the short straw in databases and am required to present my term paper this thursday (the 16th). This is 3 weeks before the paper is actually due, and IS the due date for the paper BEFORE the term paper (we have 5 total). I will be busy this weekend. The following week my project in Distributed Systems is due... and that is sort of scary. I don't even know if our mini cluster is running right now. I am a world-class complainer.

oblivion is back up again. Ben put me in the sudoers group, so if something like this happens again I'll be able to try to fix it. In the old days when the box was less stable my solution to a lot of problems was, more often than not, to reboot the thing remotely. That wouldn't have worked this time, but things were simpler back then and traffic was lower, so I could actually get away with that crap without anyone noticing. Rebooting is always risky, cause if something goes seriously awry I can't just walk over to the thing and fix it. It's 3000 miles away. Long walk. The silver lining to that cloud is that I finally cleaned all my crap out of oblivion and just left the important stuff.

I've been having trouble staying focused the last 3 days. This coincides with stepping down to the level 2 niccotine patch, and also some heavy rain that kicked a buncha stuff into the air.

Dr. Mikler says I need to have some results for my research project by the end of october, so I need to get my rump in gear. Good news though, is that I have a psuedo-support group that can help with some technical problems. He also signed my paperwork to be elevated to Ph.D. student status which doesn't have any practical effect for years to come, but makes me feel nice anyway. I celebrated that with a huge glass of scotch. I want a cigarette.

Dr. Frank's book isn't as bad as I expected. I feel like frank is writing about some fantasy version of himself a lot of the time, because of certain character details and all the weird music tastes.

I'm still trying to sell my subaru. If you want a subaru you should buy it. http://www.oblivion.net/~nemo/subaru/

Some process has filled up all the space on oblivion, so now I cannot send or receive emails among other things.  I have tried to contact Ben, three days ago when this all began, but I don't think he reads his oblivion email and it doesn't forward anywhere.  I left a comment on his blog too, but he hadn't updated it in 6 weeks, so I'm not holding out much hope.  I set up a gmail account in the meantime, since I don't have permission to do what needs to be done on oblivion.  I'm pretty pissed off about this.  Usually when an problem strikes oblivion it takes Ben a week to even notice it.  Last time it was something that just killed email, but despite my best attempts to contact him it took nearly a week, and a bunch of other users complaining, before he did anything.

School is awesome. I'm not even 3 weeks in and I'm already hooked up with a great research project, got my paperwork in to upgrade status from masters to PhD student, and I'm not quite overloaded yet.

The downside is that at least 2 days a week and alternating fridays I can't fulfill my obligations to retrieve Patrick from work, and family members are surprisingly unwilling to help routinely. I feel bad for this, but it is unavoidable! From what he tells me, a bus ride in Fort Worth is somewhat more colorful than a bus ride in Oly. Read his old blogs for details.

One class is a real stinker, but 2 out of 3 isn't bad. I had to present a paper by Jeremy Elson in sensors yesterday and it went a whole lot better than expected, though I have consistently forgotten since then to email it to the professor (gotta be home for that).

There are some computer admin issues in our little research lab, but I never seem to be around when the admin is so they are difficult to address, and non critical anyway. It'd be nice to have a slick latex editor on these ubuntu systems, but without any dependent packages installed and without the root to do it I am stuck with standard stuff. There's probably something in that I have overlooked.

I'm partnered with a fellow named Brett for the distributed systems project and we have already decided to focus on event driven parallel simulation. He says he can get time on either of the main campus' big clusters (I guess chemistry has one?) if we need some horsepower down the road.

A truck on the highway in front of me today spat a bunch of oil on the road and then erupted into a smoky smelly mess. There is oil like raindrops on my windshield now. It needed to be washed anyway. The truck got off the road ok.