December 2, 2002

Father, it has been many a day since my last log. Fortunately, I haven't cared enough to sin... but what is sin, anyway? I digress...

I've been fulfilling my life's goal. I've been doing nothing. I sit around and play retarded computer games, play guitar constantly, and hit a practice pad with two drum sticks (I'm actually taking lessons- holy shit!). Other than that, I watch TV and sleep a lot. I don't work. I've long since dropped my classes. I hardly talk to my friends. I'm seeing a psychologist, who has told my mom not to put any pressure on me to do anything. I think he's pretty fucking awesome to do that for me. Life has been pretty sweet without any responsability.

If it gets to the point where I'm actually forced to do anything I don't want to do, there's a damn good chance I would kill myself. I can't say that I would for sure, because you can never know, unless you're in the actual situation. But I digress again...

It may seem selfish of me to not want to do anything. It may seem "wrong" that I don't get satisfaction from success and that I don't care about helping other people; I don't even care about other people. Not really, anyway. And if you don't care about doing anything and you don't care about others, then what else is there in life? Not a whole lot, my friends. Just yourself.

That brings to mind the question of why am I bothering to write about any of this... well, I don't have all the answers. I guess I hope that there's some chance that there is something wrong with me and that I actually am just like everyone else somehow. Maybe I really do care about people or about doing things besides just entertaining myself.

I wish it were true, but I grow more doubtful each day. That really doesn't matter, though, because I'm enjoying myself now.

The midday heat has driven many indoors, and a lazy city slowly grinds around. Businessmen with their expensive suits, ties lose and jackets open, scurry from shaded shop fronts to other shady patches. Sweat patches appear under the arms of those who have removed their jackets. Late 'teens free from school for the year, delight in the oppressive heat, smiling largely at each other. The boys in bright shorts and cut off tops, the girls tight shoestring tops and summer skirts.

My head feels slow and surprisingly I am in a dank mood. With my boss away for a few days, and with no immediate tasks or responsibilities I should be enjoying the summer afternoon.

My weekend was full and hectic, having taken my daughter to see the city shop Christmas windows - a bitterly disappointing animatronics '12 days of Christmas' display. Why do companies insist upon displays of snow and persons rugged up , in a southern land of oppressively hot Christmas, where shorts and a T-shirt, cold beer and seafood is the go from Christmas lunch ?

Whilst in the city, we ducked around to the nearby fairy tree and had a look. Although my daughter saw some of the magic, and girlfriend had brought bubble mix (to blow bubbles with) I think my daughter saw through the sham, and wasn't unhappy when I proclaimed 'time's up' . I suspect the light drizzle of the afternoon had a small factor in this.

Captain Cook's cottage is in the same gardens and we passed it on the way back to the car, but again, I think my explanation of how, 'Captain Cook didn't really discover Australia' was lost on her. She simply looked at me strange, wrinkled her face, and skipped off down the path.. heh.... kids.

She did however enjoy the large number of marriage parties that were having photos in the gardens, she shyly kept looking at the brides, and I wonder at the calculating look that was in her eye. hmmmmm .

Hopefully the weather will settle down tonight, and I can get some restful sleep, although the droning of a fan is pleasant as in your room, till the 3am 'morning chill' sets in and you wake up to turn the fan off, that is...

Surgery update: (see bariatrics for details. I still have a drainage tube and a little fluid grenade which must be emptied daily. I need sponge baths until I have that removed so that I won't get an infection. I'm glad I waited until I was married to do this.

Most of the pain has subsided, so now I have a willing, beautiful, female slave to care for my every whim. (insert maniacal laughter). Seriously, my wife has been invaluable in all this. She reminds me to do everything and constantly checks up on me. I highly advise people not to go through this sort of thing alone. My mom is here, too, and my best friend will be coming over to keep me company during the next few days.

So far I don't notice any of the psychological effects of not having food as a friend, as the doctor put it. I was always pretty popular, so maybe I didn't need food for that purpose as much as my body would indicate. Maybe the worst is yet to come, though. I had to get a psychological evaluation for a reason.

I'm moving about pretty well. I still have enthusiasm for cooking, but not for eating. I always feel full. My greatly reduced stomach is still swollen, and I sip water all day, so there isn't much room for anything else. It will be 4 months before I have an unrestricted diet. I go back to work in a week. The tube gets removed Thursday. I dose off all day. I get winded pretty quickly right now, and my body is still healing some pretty catastrophic cutting. I got both a stomach reduction and gastric bypass. Fortunately, I did not have to be cut wide open and everything was done via remote control. That helps the recovery time considerably, but the instestinal work is still the same.

I sometimes worry that I think too much.

That my brain is trapped in a loop of scattering patterns, and if i could just focus, I could solve the world's problems.

An Example of Madness:

Bottled Water. I remember the first time I saw bottled water. It was a 20 liter jug that my uncle made me drag up a hill from the dock to his cottage. It blew my pragmatic little mind. We just took a boat across A MASSIVE POOL OF FRESH WATER to haul this special water up a hill. hmmm.

This naturally leads me to think about other things I never expected to see on a store shelf. I suppose it is just the little northern community that I grew up in. Excess is luxury.

I bet you couldn't sell a bag of crap. I can. I can get good money for it. Impossible? If you can sell a bottle of water that ran out of a rock, I can sell a bag of crap. Manure makes people lots of money.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. A bag of firewood can fetch you a fistful of dollars, while in the bush, you would be lucky to get $20 bucks for 3 truckloads. People will just get their own.

A cattle farmer would never buy manure.

A bag of cedar shavings won't sell at a lumbermill.

Scrap metal is big business. The car you pay to get towed off gets bought for scrap. Ah the middle man.

I want to find the next big garbage demand. I can have a fleet of trucks sweeping masses of waste from the country where it is reviled, to the city, where it is worshipped. Think of the money I could have if only recycling was my idea.


Yup. I think too much.

Now that's odd. I seem to have one less write-up than I should have. Dear me, "Free Ticket Booth" seems to have disappeared, into that limbo that is quaintly called Node Heaven with scarcely a word.

But TheMouse is enviormentally friendly and recycles everything, so here for your delectation is the offending piece that caused some editor type person to reach for the delete button.

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Free Ticket Booth

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A Chance Card from Junior Monopoly.

Do not move your car. Look at the colour on your card and find the matching coloured Amusements on the gameboard. Can you place one of your Ticket Booths there?

If either one is free, move one of your Ticket Booths onto the space. If both Amusements already have two different coloured Ticket Booths on them, you may remove either one of them and replace it with your own Ticket Booth.

However if there are Ticket Booths of the same colour on each Amusement, bad luck, you cannot replace either one. In this case - and only in this case - you may discard this Chance card and draw a new one. Follow its instructions.

From the official Junior Monopoly rule book.

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Wait! You're not going to downvote this are you? Oh well, if you insist, but it's all information. Well OK, it's not very exciting information, but I can't help that. Junior Monopoly isn't really an exciting game, and I should know as I'm forced to play by my daughter. And she cheats. It's only fair you should share the pain.

And I know it's a little short, but there you go. Of course it would help if I had some pseudo quotes from General Pimpleface or somesuch to help pad things out a little. I thought of making something up, but inspiration deserted me.

And I know it doesn't make any sense taken out of context of the game as a whole, but no one else seems to worry about that sort of thing, so I don't see why I should either.

Next up I think I shall do Master Bun the Baker's Son as part of my ongoing work-in-progress Happy Families: The Game. This will be followed by my The Edge Chronicles Project in which I shall naturally node every single character, location, event and concept featured in this series of books, in order so that you may more fully appreciate these works of fiction.

(Actually, I'm genuinely surprised no one has already done this.
Go on. Just tell them TheMouse made you do it!)

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Noding for Numbers?. Pah!? You boys and girls haven't seen anything yet!

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Got that? Now it made more sense under its own little node where I could (and did) softlink it to one or two examples of those Magic: The Gathering, Warcraft III and Harry Potter type nodes. Of which there seem to be so many.

Perhaps I shall do Master Bun the Baker's Son. What do you think?

On how to feel lonely in a University of 10000

I'm spending yet another night in my room by myself, trying to figure out how to get out of the hole, as it steadily sinks deeper.

It seems that it's actually much easier than I imagined to blur your way out of people's minds into just another face, despite at least trying to reflect the unique person you are. I'm currently a first year in hall (dorms) which would seem like the easiest place to start.

Where I live
I live on a floor with about 14 people. I like two. Three have done nothing to offend me, three don't speak English and the others no-one is even sure they live there. It's ironic that the people you end up liking the most when you first join up are the ones that will let you down. Today's case in point (and definite straw on camel back): I wonder around the floor, pretending to like people, trying to make an effort and I see everyone has a ticket for the Christmas dinner. They didn't put them under our doors last time, and I didn't get one. "No, Katy got all of ours," I was told. But Katy lives right next door to me, my door was open and I've been in studying all day. "You didn't ask for one." Yes, but Katy, no-one else did either. "No, they did, we talked about it two weeks ago." Two weeks? Two weeks and you couldn't even ask me, even though I live next door to you? The anger that welled up meant I just left before I said something that everyone will regret. What annoyed me most is that the two people I do like also got tickets from her, so I might not even be able to go with them if the whole table is booked.

I've been the third, fourth, fifth and sixth wheel when going out to club nights with music I don't even enjoy, all in the name of effort, building bridges with my floormates. I'm the one that always gets the first insult when things don't go exactly to plan because "I'm holding everything up" or "Why would we want to go there?" or "What's wrong with you tonight?"

Where I work
I'm a computer scientist. It's not like I expected an abundance of geek girls. I've counted 4 on our course, and I'm pretty sure at least one is taking it as an open unit, and will leave by February. What I did expect was to find likeminded males, who appreciating the manly geek crap I do, action movies, games, eclectic music tastes. Except I can't meet them. The ones I have I'm not sure I like. Lectures are silent, boring things. There's no interaction, no personality and no soul. At school, each class had an identity. A group of people that created an image, being fun, being a nightmare for the teacher, being high-achievers. You could reveal yourself to the group through discussion with other people and through questions and answers with the teacher. Lectures don't provide that easy outlet. There isn't a central meeting place at my Uni as such, the union is ten minutes away so people just go home. There is no meeting, only passing by and facial recognition. The people I know are people who I met in the first week of term, when we did get a chance to sit and talk, when interaction just filled up the time. I would quite like to socialise with them and get to know them better, yet everytime I make an attempt to get everyone to go out, one of them will sink the boat and cause the whole mission to abort. I'm planning these things like military operations now, thinking who I'll talk to, pondering on how I'll approach them, where we can all go which makes everyone happy. Nothing works.

What I'm left with
Pretty much the same I had when I started Uni. I have no girlfriend (this is not a surprise given my shy with the opposite sex nature) but have yet to find somebody who I would even consider asking out to dinner (this is). I spend my day walking from building to building by myself, only talking to people for the brief 2 minutes outside the theatre, and then going our separate ways afterwards. I come home to people I don't like and another night talking to my friends on the Internet from school, the ones I still count as my best friends, the friends I have had the most fun with since I started, despite the fact I haven't seen them for two months. We're almost at the end of the first period. I've scored one good friend, two friends and 6 aquiantances. In a University of 10000, and seeing them only for a very tiny fraction of my day. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you can feel lonely whilst having all the opportunity in the world.

A normal workday in San Francisco. Since I'm away from home, there's little to do but work.

Today's project primarily consisted of reworking the code that finds urls in scripts, without actually parsing them as JavaScript or whatever. This is quite important when you want to deep crawl a web site, and not easy. I suppose for the next rev I might actually have to parse the JavaScript properly.

Also slightly changed the way I parse badly formatted robots.txt files, so as to better reflect my guesses as to the author's intentions.

Some good conversations with Brad about various plans for the Internet Archive, and ways to let normal people submit public domain content.

I even found a few spare moments to write up 180 in my continuing attempts to make E2 the definitive energy drink resource.

Brad and I grabbed some Chinese food, and caught the 9:30 showing of Solaris. It's a really odd film, which I won't even attempt to describe.

I got in touch with my attorney. It wasn't anything pressing; I'm done with the criminal case, FINALLY, and she's good about telling me if there's anything I need to know about the civil suit or anything else. I thought it would be a good thing to do, and I also like her on a personal level.

Hooking up with her wasn't easy. I'd email her, and then there would be a couple of days before I'd hear, and I was caught between wanting to see her and not wanting to see her. Indefiniton is more stressful than actually knowing, sometimes. We figured out what was going on about an hour before I saw her. C. and I were working on my new belt when she called. I ran around changing clothes and generally being nervous.

She came to pick me up after fighting traffic for a long time. A lot of my nerves evaporated when she showed up. Seeing her let me remember how much I like her, and how much of the stress is really just about being in court. Then we went to get japanese food, and she told me what's going on with my case in between talking about what her kids are up to and asking how things are going for me at home.

First off, my codefendant Sarah was released from house arrest a couple of months ago, as engineered by my attorney. I'm pretty relieved; last I'd heard, she was pretty depressed and freaked out about it.

Next, the whole point of this entry, which is what's going on with my civil suit. The suit itself was filed last April, before the statute of limitations expired in May. Recently, Long Beach has actually started processing it or something, and some funny things are happening with it.

The city of Long Beach has turned the suit over to their city attorneys, rather than hiring the case out to someone good. This is unusual, and there might be a conflict of interests having to do with my criminal suit. I'm not clear on how this works, so I'm skipping to the next part.

Typically, when police are being sued, the city will forward the filing to them. This time the city refused, telling my attorneys that they need to get the filing to each of the over 200 cops we're suing. Since the addresses of police officers are normally not published for obvious reasons, my attorneys requested the city provide them with the addresses they didn't have. The city was supposed to turn these over by the 30th. They haven't done it yet.

Further, the normal process for civil cases is that the plaintiff files a complaint, the defendant talks to them to see if they can resolve their differences, and then files a countermotion. The city attorney filed her motion to dismiss without talking to my attorneys at all. When they called her, she said she'd done it because she didn't think they could come to an agreement. Apparently her motion was half normal and half ridiculous. I didn't get details, but it looks like the city isn't making any more sense than they were over my criminal case.