I went to the doctor today because I have been having this pain in my side, and I was starting to fear of imminent death, or at best passing a kidney stone. While I was in the doctors office, they asked me to give them a urine sample. Normally, I am filled to the brim with such fluids, but I hadn't had anything to drink this morning, and I had expelled myself sufficiently right before leaving for the doctors office. I don't think I have ever had a problem relieving myself before, but I sat in the bathroom with that little cup for what seemed like hours. I ran the sink, flushed the toilet, but nothing. I started to have a small panic attack. Maybe I'm dying, and the first symptom is the inability to urinate. After many moments of silent panic, I took a deep breath, and finally was able to produce a sample that a farm mouse would feel embarrassed by. I was literally ashamed of the results, and felt for sure the doctor would mention something about my poor urinary performance. Needless to say, she mentioned nothing, and my test came back clean. Seems I had strained a muscle or something like that. I am not dying, nor do I have kidney stones, but it turns out in the clutch I freeze up like a garden hose in winter.
I was a little board this evening (I really don't think not having TV has anything to do with it, thank you), and I needed to look up a word. I brought up the trusty dictionary.com, and I then thought it would be nice to have a bookmarklet that would look up any word that I selected from any web page. And so here it is:
We are moved into our new apartment, and we have decided not to get any kind of TV viewing service. No cable, no satellite, no rabbit ears, no tivo (sweet tivo), no broadcast TV what so ever. We have a DVD player for movies, and that it is. After a few weeks of no TV I have realized one very important thing. I am nothing without it. How do I fill the hours of my sad little life without TRL? Tamara makes the bold assumption that I could read with this vast amount of free time left vacant by the absence of TV. "Or maybe go for a walk," she suggests. I opt for two to three hours of staring at the ceiling, and then a trip to the bedroom to stare at the walls in there.
To add to the que of free time recently allotted, we still have no DSL access, so I can try and while the time away over a dailup connection, but its just not the same. God forbid I actually do something productive in my spare time...
I have been working with the Minneapolis Teachers Federation on a project called Math Online. Basically, its a simple web site that allows students to post math questions, and teachers will respond to the questions and post them to the site. The site has been functioning for about three or four years now.
The coolest thing about it is that we have been capturing data from student teacher interaction for over three years. there are over 9000 answered questions in the archives, and it is growing everyday. It has become a very solid resource for highschool level math information.
This is the kind of thing that makes the internet exciting for me. Not just the sharing of information, but a dynamic, organic gathering of information that makes a resource become more and more useful everyday, and it is available to anyone who wants access to the information. I didn't really think about it in those terms when we started this project, but it has been interesting to watch it blossom.
It also has been a good example of how you can build effective applications using open source tools running stable and reliable operation systems and web/application servers for minimal cost. The total cost in hardware and software for Math Online was well under $2000.00 . Your really can't beat it. Its alway a hard pill to swallow when I watch companies spend tens of thousands (even hundreds) on hardware, software and operation systems just to run simple web services. It's like buying a SUV so you can drive to the corner store to buy milk.
I have returned from my crime spree...it only spanned one county, but it was a wild ride. I stole a Slim Jim from the local market, and ate it in the parking lot while the cashier watched.
A week and one half of work, and I have realized a few things:
I hate waking up in the morning. Like pulling teeth while inserting a hot poker into my nether regions
I hate florescent lights. I think a quote from Joe Versus the Volcano sums it up best, "They keep suck, suck, sucking...[the life out of me]."
People who work for large companies seem to be trapped in time. Like things stopped evolving in 1985, and they were left with a closet full of those colorful sweater (like Bill Cosby used to wear), a Flock of Seagulls CD lodged in their CD player, and stone washed jeans spot welded to their respective asses.
I could be on the verge of a six county crime spree...stay tuned.
We watched startup.com last night via DVD. It's like watching a car wreck in slow motion. It's sad seeing people trade in their humanity for money...Oh wait, I think that's the American dream, right.
To better the lives of the technology professional.
That was a part of techies.com's (my old company) mission statement. It loosely translates into:
To turn a gazillion worthless shares into a bazillion dollars.
We have finally shoe horned our three bedroom house worth of furniture into our new one bedroom apartment. Not a small feat I can tell you. We are now officially storage locker people. I always assumed storage locker people were wealthy, and had hoards of fine furniture and stuffed exotic animals that would not fit into there palatial mansions. It turns out they're mostly pack rats that just can't say no at a garage sale. I'm looking at you Tamara....
Number eighteen in the top twenty searchstrings for bitterpill.org in the month of December was "sexy stuffs". I imagine those people were pretty disappointed. Not that I'm not super sexy. I just don't show it here to keep the hits down. Don't want to overload the server and what have you.
We're back in Minneapolis, and moving stuff into our new apartment. Winter is great, and I can't believe I missed half of it. It makes Fiji seem crappy compared to a nice down home cold-ass Minnesota winter. I was a fool to miss the first half. A damn fool I tell ya!
My friend got The Song Remains the Same DVD for x-mas, and he threw it in the machine this morning. All this time I thought I was a mod, turns out I'm a rocker...
January 31, 2002
