January 28, 2001

Diesel, dirty ice.
Bloody tears. Bus, green white black.
Crying becomes sleep.

This haiku brought to you by The Experiences Of The Day. Thank you.

I recieved a high complement. Someone used their very first C! on one of my write ups. This is better than Queen For A Day!

I understand that bitching about things in E2 culture are discouraged due to the Ouroborous problem, and I may very well get my eponymous ass nuked for asking this question -- but why in the world would anybody bother downvoting a Day Log? I mean, isn't the Day Log intended to be a snapshot of our dayly lives?

Anyway, downvote this if you must, but I make a personal pledge to never downvote a Day Log

I am mulling over my deepest desire(s). I mean, what are they? I like my day job, but don't know where I want my career to go. I have a lot of possibilities in mind, but none motivate me, not quite yet.

I guess that I am still enjoying life after divorce, this new-found experience where life is not full of daily crises. I can sleep the whole night through. I do not dread coming home from work. It is still wonderful.

However, (and this is a good thing), all of this is starting to feel normal rather than a continual surprise. And thoughts of the future are starting to creep into my consciousness. The thought that I am only 31, I can still do something great with my life..

What a contrast, because only one year ago, I was still thinking is this all life has to offer? and what a stupid mistake I have made. (Although I thought this a lot, for some reason, the thought was most common when driving down the road or taking out the garbage).

I am not yet beyond the fear that I could make the same mistake twice. But I am to the point where I could see myself getting beyond that fear someday.

So, I think that I will be satisfied with recent developments, and be patient with myself.

There are three hundred thirty seven days left in the year.

Fifteen years ago today, the seven members of the space shuttle Challenger were killed seventy three seconds after launch when a failure in the right SRB caused the boosters to explode.

The members of the crew now deceased are:

• Francis "Dick" Scobee
• Michael J. Smith
• Judith A. Resnik
• Ellison S. Onizuka
• Ronald E. McNair
• Gregory B. Jarvis
• Sharon Christa McAuliffe

I went to a party entitled "Inbetween Days." My friend had called me yesterday about it and I didn't really want to go (I'm not a real party person). But then he said that the flyer had Robert Smith's name on it and I was all up for it.

We got to the party around 8ish and left because well, it would suck to be there early. So my friend and I went to Burger King and we talked for a good hour and a half about television, religion, and many other things. It had been a while since him and I had hung out. I missed it.

We left to the party and got there around 10. A band was getting ready to play. I don't remember the name of that band, they were a spanish band. Well, both of them were. The band had a girl singer and they covered "Do The Hansa" by The Cure in spanish. I smiled. The second band was a band called Viuda and they covered a Tool song, a Stone Temple Pilots song, and a Cure song "Inbetween Days." They kind of messed up with the lyrics and well there was no keyboard but I heard that in my head so it wasn't a big deal. I smiled yet again. All in all it was alright, though it was a Mexican party and my friend and I decided to bail.

We went to a friends apartment in Edinburgh and knocked on her door, no one answered. My friend saw that a Direct TV sattelite had fell and said, "Hey let's take it." He said that only because he thought I wouldn't. I took it. We drove home after that, tired and wanting to sleep. And I now have a sattelite in the trunk of my car.

If you must know......yes I drank.

Early this morning saw me leaving leaving Do Re Mi Karaoke in an angry mood. We were in the place for three hours and we sang a total of less than ten songs, because their machines kept screwing up and putting on the wrong songs. We had an argument with the owner because we said that we shouldn't have to pay because we had waited a lot more time to sing than we had actually spent singing- we got a small discount, but ended up paying $70 anyway. We spent the whole ride home in my friend's car talking about Boston's lack of a good karaoke- I am going to change my write-up based on last night's experience. We were all thinking about "Cash Box" and we talked about going there next Summer when I am out of school.

Anyway, they dropped me off at BC, where I stayed with my friend and played Tekken Tag, which is a great game even though I forget all the moves. I won twice out of about 10 matches with my friend, but he was totally goofing of fand doing wierd moves, but once I remembered how to play I used Law and Lei to wipe the floor with him. We played that until about 3:30 and then I went to sleep on the couch. I woke up at exactly 8 AM, and promptly called my dad because we were going to meet up in Boston and go to Amherst together. While I was waiting for my dad at the corner of the common some bums came up (there is a shelter on Boylston Street right near there) and asked me if I had any change, which I, having just bought myself a bagel, did. The question sort of caught me off guard, and I was listening to music besides so I just sort of handed the money over without saying anything and kept standing there.

Anyway, my dad came along and picked me up and we went to the 88 Super market in South Boston, where I bought my suply of instant noodles for the next month or so. I also got some pickled bamboo shoots to put in the instant noodle, a bag of rice, some lychee jellies and a lot of canned fish. Originally I just went in for some rice, instant noodles and bamboo shoots, but I ended up spending almost $50! Every time I go shopping for myself I seem to spend a lot of money. My parents say that I should learn the value of money, but I always tell them that there is no value of having money unless you spend it On the other hand, I have only 35 cafeteria meals for the whole semester, so I am going to need a lot of food to cook with.

My dad was tired, so I had to drive the Jetta out to Amherst. I am not really so well-acquainted with the nuances of driving standard yet, but I managed to get away with only mild embarrassment when I stalled at at the toll booth when I got off the Pike. Nobody is back in the dorm yet, so I am up in my room on my computer and waiting for my roommate to get back. In the meantime, I moved into our considerably more spacious new room, and because I was bored, I moevd all my roommate's stuff in too. Oh well, I'm gonna go use napster, I haven't been on in a month so I think I am going to get some new music. My friend says that there is a new Wu Bai CD and I want to see if I can find that.

How does one requite?

I mean, I can get the origin of disillusion (because while you weren't illusioned, you did have illusions), but I can't understand the etymological semantics behind unrequited love.

More importantly, why am I thinking about it? Well, in case you haven't guessed, this is a Nodeian Slip - I'm putting up something personal in a day log. So here goes.

There's a nice guy in front of me in my world history class. Okay, more than nice. He's incredibly cute, incredibly smart, funny, charming, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Problem: I have absolutely no clue if he's gay. So what better to do than direct my romantic quandry at the poor, dejected readers of Everything2? I'm going to invite him to Requiem for a Dream (which just now opened. gawd.) this weekend, and hopefully, I can find out more. I mean, it's better than my friend Amy's plan.

"Well jeez, Fritz, it's simple. I'll flash him in the hall, and see if he takes a grab."

Time to do some requiting.

Adventures in Windows Networking:

Ok, today was quite an adventure with Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). I started out great this morning. Everything was working fine until I inserted my Asus CD that came with my motherboard to install the optimzied drivers for I/O and such. Then my machine refused to boot up.

I tried everything. I even re-installed windows in another directory to see if I could get online to find a fix. Then I realized that I didn't have the complete set of files needed to reinstall my ADSL card. So the deal was that I could only get on the network if I could get the original OS installation to boot.

I spent most of the day trying to get that working, and finally around superbowl time I got it to boot once I realized that I could run SCANREG and restore an old registry configuration. ScanReg saved my ass.

When I got the machine running with the restored registry, everything seemed ok, except I was having trouble with the network connecting consistently. I finally got it to connect once and had a chance to download the newest driver for my ADSL card.

I installed the new driver, but then when I went to layer ICS on top, the network stopped working again. The host machine (windows) would not connect to the internet whenever ICS was installed. I finally got the notion to try adding a second dial-up adapter, becuase I remember reading somewhere earlier today that some related product required the VPN support which is added when you install a second dial up adapater. I just tried that about 10 minutes ago and it's working perfectly now.

By the way, I found a cool program while I was messing around with getting my linux box to connect and came across a site called analogx that makes some interesting applications, most of which seem to be free. I tried their portmapper for a few minutes to see if I could get to IRC from my linux box and it worked fine. I might move my web server or maybe an ftp server over to my linux box and portmap it from my windows box. *shrug*

Anyway, it's good that I had all of this today even though it was frustrating. It kept my mind off of Sara all day, which is probably the longest I've gone so far not thinking about her. I should stop now before I start.

Tomorrow I have jury duty, but I'm not really very happy about it. I want to go to Japanese class, but that's at the same time. At least I don't have to go to work, I guess. It's 1:24 am now, so technically it's today, and since I have to get up at 6:30, I should go now.

Memo to me: Write up a HOWTO on everything I did to fix the network problems I had today and put it on my website.

Today was the Super Bowl. I could care less... most professional sports hold no interest at all for me.

Three of us (Myself, Andara, and Amidala-chan) went to Magic Mountain.

We got off to a bad start... I forgot the discount coupons, and Seamus (Andara's husband), who was supposed to go with us, decided that sleeping was better than going. We started late, and ended up arriving over an hour and a half later than we originally intended.

Andara tried to buy the tickets using a computerized kiosk, to avoid the ticket lines. The kiosk shut down in the middle of the transaction. However, when we got in the normal ticket line, we were given a discount coupon by the people in front of us - a coupon just like the one I forgot!

The day started getting better from there on. The crowds were nonexistent; the lines were absurdly short. The longest we waited was around 45 minutes for Batman and The Riddler's Revenge, which were both running only one car each due to yearly maintenance.

We made funny faces for the on-ride cameras, and some of them came out so well, that we ended up buying them. That's the first time I've ever done that. At the end of the day, we deliberately pretended to be asleep on Goliath. That picture is priceless!

We managed to go on every single roller coaster in the park except Ninja and Revolution which were shut down, and Gold Rusher, which we felt would be too tame after the newer coasters.

After the park closed, we had dinner at Vincenzo's, the best pizza parlor in California. The Super Bowl was almost over, so we ended up suffering through the first episode of Survivor 2.

By the time we got home, I was so happily tired, that I fell asleep mere minutes after my head hit the pillow.