This mid-mid-life crisis, or quarter-life crisis, as some may say, is something that I think a lot of post-grads are experiencing, but not frequently acknowledged. We’re ready to take on the world with our diplomas and sense of freedom, but realize that maybe our goals are a little bit further away than what we thought, our future just a little unclear, and out path not quite clear yet. The sense of regulation and controlled order, once disliked, is something that we occasionally look back with longing.

<insert generic ending statement here>

I’m running into just about everything all at the same time. Work has been, as expected this month, absolutely insane busy and I’m finding it impossible to disengage myself in the evening. It’s hard to think of anything else when I know that if I get more done now, there’ll be less tasks when I come into the office tomorrow. My work-life balance is pretty far out of whack, but it’s not going to get better any time soon.

I have this sneaking suspicion that my immune system is fighting off a virus and is working overtime to keep me up and running because it knows that if I stumble, things won’t go well. I’m keeping it reinforced as best I can with sleep and vitamins, but I just hope it can last out until I can pay proper attention to myself again. On a normal workload, I usually have one mug of green tea in the morning. Now I’ve switched to multiple mugs of black tea and coffee a day. It’s not a good combination.

My lease is up at the end of July, and I’m already freaking out about finding a new place to live. I know I’m going to be moving out, but the prospect of searching for another place is terrifying. It’s one of my least favorite activities ever, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to fit that in. Cancelling sleep, maybe? Weekends?

I’m supposed to be planning vacations, concerts to go to, and try to do normal human things to try and get away from work and de-stress. But it’s almost impossible to get myself up to the task, and when opportunities do come up, our upcoming project schedule have already nuked plans. And even if those are clear, my co-workers have already planned things for the same days and I’m stuck covering their loads. And, of course, once I do find something, everyone else I want to go with is completely socked up and unavailable.

As per usual standard operating procedure, dating is going terrifically terrible. Whatever I can get scheduled usually results in awkward interactions followed by a lack of any further correspondence. I’m not looking for anything serious or long-term, but I would like something at least resembling a relationship. Clearly I must come off as a complete jerk with the personality of some primordial ooze, and I have to admit: my self-confidence is starting to take a hit.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that please don’t take it personally if I’m not very responsive or unusually terse, even for me. I’m just trying to save some sanity. I’ll be back soon to the world of the living. I promise. Right after I flee to Alaska for a week. Or Vancouver Island. Or anywhere. Eventually.

This is shaping up to be one heck of a month, and I don’t feel like being creative nor verbose. So we get to see one of my awesome “throw things at the reader” posts that everyone loves!

April will kill me

Work is just super busy and filled with projects this month. I’ve known that it will be a fun April, but there’s an issue when I’m already burning out and turning to coffee and it’s barely the second week.

Ruby

My first Ruby script is in production use! I was looking to replace an aging Perl script at work that basically sends bulk email in a handy way, and keeps nice logs to track it all by. It’s certainly not a complicated script, and I know that there’s a lot I can improve, but I always feel like the first working script from scratch is the hardest. Sweet.

Emitown is AMAZING

The new comic I started reading after ECCC was Emitown. And it. Is. Super. Her seemingly random observations about life really let you get a glimpse about what’s going on inside her mind, and her drawings are adorably awesome. This is my new favorite thing.

Android 4.0

After finally getting completely fed up with Verizon being buttholes and not updating the 4G Xoom to Android 4, I got around to learning how to unlock, root, and install a custom rom on my tablet. 4.0.4 is running silky smooth, and ICS looks beautiful on a tablet.

Cool Story

I rate this post two out of four stars.

Wee Rex!

I got a bunch of awesome comics at ComiCon yesterday, but perhaps best of all, picked up this guy:

Battlestar Galactica (Re-imagined) Was a Disappointment

I know this is doing to disappoint some folks, and I’m sorry. But I don’t like BSG. I tried to like the new series. I really did. The first season was, for the most part, great television. The special effects were spot-on, the plots had healthy doses of science fiction elements, the characters were well done, and the cinematography was wonderfully gritty. Then the second season started, and the writers basically admitted that they were totally out of ideas. The awesome idea that their ancestors left behind relics to help their race eventually go back home was blown to pieces in favor of some religious adventure. Baltar was an embarrassment, Starbuck’s character development was a utter joke, and the story eventually spiraled into a cylon hunt. And not even a good one. First season? On par with the great Sci-Fi series of our generation. Seasons two through four? A drama that just so happened to be set in space.

Dogs + Cats

While walking to Trader Joe’s today, I noticed a few dogs leashed up outside restaurants on the Hill while their owners were presumably inside. The look on their faces led me to conclude only one thing: our canine friends are completely and utterly sad when they aren’t with their owners. Cats, on the other hand, don’t seem to really care who or where the owners are.

Chris Jude is an Asshole

At the Emerald City ComiCon yesterday, Serene and I made it an absolute goal to see George Takei, so we went to the room where he was going to have a panel plenty early. And by “early” I meant “arrived at 4:10 for a 5:00 panel.” The current guest was Christopher Jude, who was in Stargate. Now, I’m not a huge Stargate fan and only watched the first few seasons, but I respect the show as a good science fiction series and it did a lot of really cool stuff. I just never really got into it, so I didn’t really have any vested interest in SG1 or his reflections on the series. However, I thought that listening to him may have inspired me to pick up the series again. Turns out I was really wrong. He came off as a swarmy jerk who insulted his fans and tried to play it off like he was kidding. It takes a lot of courage for nerds to actors of their favorite shows questions, and to totally belittle them was an absolute disgrace.

George Takei is Awesome

Takei is just a righteous dude. He’s intelligent, insightful, and it was a real pleasure listening to him.

Flowers

Flowers are awesome. If you don’t like flowers, you’re not a human.

Strawberries

The best food known to mankind are organic Strawberries, and I will fight someone if they say otherwise. YOU HEAR ME? IT’S ALL ABOUT STRAWBERRIES.

Quote I’ve been Thinking about Today

“I’m not afraid of pain anymore. It’s the days I don’t feel a thing I fear.”

Youme Landowne; Anthony Horton

Pitch Black isn’t a particularly long graphic novel: only clocking in at roughly 40 pages. But its power comes from the messages that radiate out from the text. The poignant story reveals just a bit of what it’s like to be a homeless man in New York who chooses to live underground in the abandoned rooms of the subway. Anthony Horton recently died in an underground fire, which prompted me to find and read this work of his life. I don’t have too much to say on this novel, as I think it is one that should be read and understood individually.

Check Pitch Black out from your library. It won’t take more than an hour to read, and you’ll get something from it. I promise.

(I really shouldn’t be writing anything on a Friday evening.)

Notwithstanding my foray into TI-BASIC programming on my TI-83+, I got started with coding in the glorious language known as Perl. There’s no real particular reason for this choice, other than that it seemed cooler than PHP at the time. With its esoteric mannerisms and increasing levels of disuse in a technological culture, I started shifting away from my Perl-maintained sites and scripts. The natural successor was PHP. I’ve always gotten along with PHP relatively well, but after doing procedural work in it for so long, shifting to the new OO paradigm in PHP hasn’t been as awesome as I would have liked it to be.

Post-Graduation Project

Realizing that I’d quickly become bored after graduation, I decided that it would be a fun and useful project to start picking up a new language. For consideration I looked into Python and Ruby, but for various reasons that I won’t go into much detail: Ruby was the winner as it was elegant and seemed to be a worthy successor to the strong text processing abilities that made Perl relevant for so long.

Unstable Progress

Whenever I have a free day, I’ll pick up a Ruby tutorial and start going forward on learning before quickly hitting a wall known as “something else to do” or “I need to do this now, so I’ll use PHP/Perl instead of learning Ruby.” Clearly this needs to stop and I should get my head in the game. I was always distracted when working on my desktop, and one of the main reasons I went for a new laptop that has such a high screen resolution is so I can easily have multiple terminals and a reference document open at once.

The laptop is here, and it’s time to begin the journey for reals this time.

Bug Me

I’m keeping a repository of whatever I’m working on with Ruby on my Bitbucket account. Eventually it will be cooler, until then, annoy me if it hasn’t been updated in a while. I’ll respond to annoying things.

A major water leak on C3 at the UW Tower is forcing the temporary move of
Service Center (“help desk”) operations to the 4545 ERC.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time. We’re located across the hallway from the service center, and they’ve had problems with localized leaks before that have disrupted their operations. After hopping on the bus and silently entertain myself by watching people get their umbrellas blown inside out, I amble through the rain and into the tower. Making up to our floor, I see that the problem was just a tad larger than I expected. There were large pools of water of water spanning across the aforementioned hallway, and there were ladders, fans, pumps, and maintenance workers everywhere. You know that scene from Office Space at the end, where the building is on fire and everyone is outside watching it? I was distinctly reminded of that. Except with water instead of fire.

Poor photo of the corner of the water source.

Seems the issue was a little worse than I anticipated. The sender of the email was like “oh hey Nikky. Looks like you’re working from home today. Check your equipment and get out of here.”

I wonder in and check on my plethora of equipment. It seems someone stacked my footrest/server on top of my desktop, and both were placed on a side table. My switch was suspended in mid-air, and cables were all over the place. Yet somehow they were still powered and networked. Hunh.

So I left.

Followup

We were out of the office for two days for cleanup and recovery operations. The office area across the hallway, where the flood started, sported about 4 inches of water at one point in time. It seems a radiator burst at around 7:00am and it took about 2.5 hours to safely shut off the heating system and stop the leak: otherwise the entire pressurized system would have burst. My systems weren’t impacted, and minimal water actually entered my castle of awesome.

Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo Journalism With a Political Twist

I like Thompson’s work. He’s insightful, intelligent, and overall just a really entertaining guy to read. Fear and Loathing is really no different in that respect. He follows George McGovern throughout the presidential campaign in 1972, and is writing a series for, who else, Rolling Stone. Starting in the primaries, he traces the campaign through interviews and friendships with those who are involved in it. Thompson makes no bones about his support for McGovern and his intense dislike of Nixon: neutral observer he isn’t, to the surprise of absolutely nobody. It reveals the campaign trail at its most raw, and all the emotions, work, and dedication that goes into a presidential campaign.

Specific Appeal

As much as I liked this book, it only appeals to a certain audience: the historically minded folks among us who also appreciate good political journalism.

Grain of Salt

Sometimes he likes to accuse various candidates of taking various forms of speed, which is a very subtle joke. It’s easy to miss this and others he places in the text, so I wouldn’t call this a book of record for the election.

Passage of the Day

I just really liked this specific passage in the book, and I’d like to share it with you all. While covering the Republican convention and protests surrounding it, he observes a group of Vietnam vets against war silently marching towards the convention hall:

But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets… They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots… a few carried full-sizes plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow-moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches… But nobody spoke: all the “stop, start,” “fast, slow,” “left, right” commands came from the “platoon leaders” walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals.

One look at that eerie procession killed my plan to go swimming that afternoon. I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march… No, “joined” is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and “joined.” Not without paying some very heavy dues; an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue… all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens through the heart of Miami Beach.

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

 

A few favorite photos, in no particular order.

View the Full Photo Album on Flickr

William S. Burroughs

My uncle always has found really interesting books for me to read. No genre could be excluded from the books he lends me: obscure sci-fi, dense fiction, or subversive texts are all expected and subsequently consumed by my “innocent” mind. I had received “Naked Lunch” for my birthday last year, but finally came to it in my reading queue. It’s something that’s hard to describe, so I won’t spend too much time talking about it, because I simply can’t put it into words that would do it justice.

This Book is Insane

Essentially, the plot is “a dude in the 60s takes far too much heroin and has all sorts of wacky and oftentimes disturbing stories to share.” But I’m not even sure of that. Some of it focuses on the depravity and desperation that “junk” addicts experience in their quest for more drugs, but “Naked Lunch” also takes frequent sidetrips into “the interzone,” which is where odd and thoroughly demonic creatures exist.

This Book is Disturbing

I don’t mean disturbing as in “OMG WE NEED TO CALL CONGRESS,” but in a “I’ve never been exposed to this kind of content” before kind of way.

Plot? What Plot.

There’s some semblance of a plot, but not really. Don’t focus too much on the overarching plot and instead narrow down to each individual story contained within. Otherwise your brain will explode.

This Book is Great

Burroughs created a masterpiece. Read it. Learn from it. Enjoy this oddly amusing and dark set of half-truths and prose known as “Naked Lunch.” You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will. But really, it’s only 200 pages. And if you hate it, you can just write a book like this and make me an evil character in it.