Coffee and Code

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One looks to the other and says, 'This taste funny to you?'

I've been fighting sleep every single day this week, because every time I visit my parents in Wyoming, my caffeine threshold rises quite a bit (due to the fact that they drink, like, 5 pots of coffee a day). Then, upon returning home, I have to let my body readjust to my slightly more moderate level of caffeine consumption.

Saw Transformers on Monday at the new theater in Santa Fe (name slips me right now; way down on Zafarano street at the end of Cerrillos Road). Overall, the movie kicked ass because 1.) It was about the transformers and 2.) There were enough special effects eye candy to make me cream my proverbial design-happy jeans. I mean, some of the sub-plots and, let's face it, the romantic plot part of the movie were pretty weak. This doesn't mean shit, though, when you see a bunch of Transformers (and Decepticons) lay waste to hoover dam, some freeways and a whole city. That was cool.

There was a scene at the end when the leading human characters were making out on Bumblebee's hood. Is this considered group sex? I dunno.

OK, I gots ta go cook some hamburgers now. Later, people!

I received my first issue of Make magazine this week(thanks for the subscription, Claudia!). Pretty cool stuff - It seems to cover do-it-yourself tech projects running the gamut from building your own electrical circuits to home automation. I haven't had time to read the magazine in depth, but it's a good hefty size and looks promising!

I've pretty much got a working prototype of what my new weblogger will be!!! I made the decision today to go ahead with the final project, which will be forthcoming very soon (Now that I've got all of the architectural quandries sorted out....).

Whew! I will be glad do be done with that and moving on to something else. I think it's ironic that I've spent all of this time writing a weblogger for this site when, in actuality, I'm not that in to blogging, per se. It's a convenient way of updating the website content but I'm not that into online culture and I'm not a very compelling blogger, he he. Anyway, I'm prattling on, so I'll say good day!

Now: Coding, drinking coffee.

Later: SOCOM 3, Tekken 5, gyro sandwich.

It's Saturday morning here in Santa Fe, and I feel unusually energetic. My girlfriend had a class this morning, so I'm killing time by playing some loud music and drinking plenty of black coffee. (By the time she gets out, I will be so caffeinated that I will be able to taste the air around my face.) This afternoon, we've got loose plans to do something that involves not being at the house. That's about as far as our little planning session went this morning. I'm thinking about lunch at our favorite sushi bar, and possibly a trip to Best Buy to gaze longingly at gadgets that I'd like to buy for myself, but won't, due to guilt over not buying any Christmas presents yet.

I just finished a week at my new job, and although I might be speaking too soon, I think I made a really good move. The new position is much more focused: I will write web applications in ASP.Net (C#, of course) and SQL Server and that is pretty much it. Big change from the last job where I pretty much did anything that had anything to do with the internet. I kinda miss the extra responsibility, but I needed an environment where I could focus on programming. It doesn't hurt that the other programmers at my new job are a lot more experienced than I am - having Yoda-like mentors nearby is always a good thing. It also doesn' t hurt that the new job pays a lot more! Hell yes.

It is now the 9th of December, and I've yet to do one single bit of Christmas shopping. I am so BAD at Christmas. I tend to hide out in my house and pretend that there IS no holiday season. I wish I could just hibernate from October 30th through January 1st (yes, I hate Halloween, Thanksgiving AND Christmas AND New Year's Eve). Wake me up when Christmas is over, man! Seriously.

My apologies to all my friends and family who will probably receive their Christmas presents in February... but hey, by now, veryone should be used to it! Bah Humbug!

So last night I get this bright idea: Wipe my new Dell computer's hard drive and install WinXP Pro. No big deal, right?

I got to the screen that allows you to format partitions. I noticed a large 80 GB chunk formatted as FAT. I deleted the partition.

STUPID! Stupid, stupid. I had just deleted all data on my external hard drive (I wasn't expecting it to show up with no OS booted, I guess). Well, bye bye, backups. Bye bye years and years of accumulated photos, textfiles, webpages, etc. I almost wept.

If I had a samurai sword, I probably would've committed Seppuku last night. ARRRGH!!!! But, on a lighter note, I realized that most of the backed-up information existed on one of my older PCs which had been decommissioned. So now I'm in the process of recovering what I can, and trying not to hate myself too much...

Never attempt a major computer operation without Coffee!!!

Does this mean I'm addicted to caffeine?