So, there's a reason why I was doing so much better 3 weeks ago.

I got a verbal offer for a new job. ^_^

I started yesterday, April 14, 2008. And, already, they need me in the thick of things! (Speaks highly of their confidence in me (eep!).) The original plan was to give me 2 weeks to get settled in and learn the code. Now, I need to figure out how to measure the performance of code I've never set eyes on.

It's a great opportunity for me to succeed … or make an @$$ of myself. :nervous: It's Go Time for candide!



[Hopefully, I can get my work computer functioning and settled enough to get some real work done!]

Current Mood: busy

I'm doing better right now.


^_^


That is all.

Current Mood: happy

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics describes just how out of touch with reality Hollywood actually is.

It doesn't take that much effort to get the science right.

Current Mood: annoyed

Ha!

BoingBoing reports that one of the victims of the RIAA's extortion lawsuits is contersuing, and intends to drag all of their behavior and tactics out into the open and before the courts.

HA! I say.

Current Mood: pleased

Well, sometime around the 6th or the 7th, I stopped backsliding, and the fog of despair lifted. Dunno why it left, any more than I really know why it started.

I just felt totally lost and devoid of a future for about 8 days. Yay messed-up neurochemistry. -_-

Right now, I have a purring Frannie in my lap, and I'm waiting for the tile&grout sealant to dry/cure. Will take about 15 min., then I get to buff it off and apply a second, heavier coat to just the grout.

See, we had the stairs redone late last week.

epinoid and I own a raised-ranch, which means the front door opens onto a landing a half-staircase between the 1st and 2nd floors. At the base of the stairs is the door out to the garage, which is what we typically use day-to-day. All of the stairs, the landing, and the downstairs were covered in the same dirt-grey carpet. (It's probably the original carpet from when the house was built 25 years ago.)

Well, we had the landing and the downstairs entryway tiled, and the two half-staircases resurfaced with oak. So, I'm now sealing the tiles & grout. The end-result looks nice.

It looks very nice. Brightens up the entire stairwell. Definitely worth the $5500 we paid to get it done.

Current Mood: cheerful

Well, I'm backsliding.

Back in December, my unipolar mood disorder came out of remission, for the first time in over 10 years. I was in pretty bad shape most of that month. A few bits of luck buoyed me through it.

I've been stable most of the past 2 months, with an occasional day or two where my mood crashed. The past week, however, I've been backsliding.

My motivation is shot. My hope, gone. I feel like I have no future. It's hard for joy or love to penetrate the Grey miasma I'm currently stuck in. I no longer care about living, though I'm not yet so bad that I want to die or want to take my own life.

epinoid is keeping me going. He and corgisrluv are why I keep moving, keep hanging on through the misery and despair.

I just feel like The World is telling me to die, telling me that I have no purpose, that I have no place in it. I've been trying to resist, to fight back, but I'm wearing out. I'm so very tired.

Current Mood: depressed

Seems that the lead singer who introduced "horn hands" to the heavy-metal scenewas actually using the ward against Malocchio, not making some "Satanic Gesture," as the Fundies would have you believe.

Malocchio, for those who don't know, is "the Evil Eye," and has its origins in Italian superstition. It was never a thing we did in my family, but for many, the "horn-hands" gesture, held out horizontal, is to block the malevolent effects of the Evil Eye. Read the BoingBoing article for more.

I just find it hysterical that, yet again, the Fundies get it totally wrong, and decide that a ward against evil is really something "satanic."

Current Mood: amused

Uncle Joe was actually my mom's eldest cousin. He was actually older than my mother by about two decades.

He was godfather to one of my brothers. He and his wife of some 30 years, Aunt Chris, were actually my parents' choice for legal guardians of my brothers and me when we were kids. (My parents didn't want a custody fight between grandparents.) Aunt Chris & Uncle Joe were always a constant of my childhood.

When I was in college, I used to make my way to NYC, then to Queens where Aunt Chris & Uncle Joe live. My dad would then pick me up there. What's odd is that their house in Queens is right around the block from the former home of my great-grandparents Sims, where my dad and Grandparents Weiss lived when my father was a small child. Small world.

Uncle Joe had a rough start in life, but he turned it around. He worked in construction for many years, and with the leftover tiles, flooring, pipes, etc. from jobs, he and his friends renovated one another's homes. Aunt Chris & Uncle Joe own a 3-story semi-attached home. They rent out the upstairs, live on the main floor, and keep the basement, which could be rented out as another apartment, for their own uses. Uncle Joe worked hard, was an honest, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is guy with a Brooklyn accent so thick you could spread it on a bagel. And he did well for himself, later in life, and could enjoy himself after he retired. He used to make the lasagna for the pasta course for Thanksgiving & Christmas. The past few years, he wasn't able to, due to health problems.

I saw Uncle Joe at Christmas, then again on the 29th at my cousin Rosemary's. He seemed to be doing okay, healthwise.

Aunt Chris will still be a part of my life. But there'll be a hole left by Uncle Joe.

Current Mood: sad

… is nil, considering the behavior of the financial markets today.

Shrub is soooo big on letting the markets decide. Well, they
have: all last week, during the economic downward slide on Wall St., the foreign markets held their breath, waiting to see what the Fed. and the President would do. They got their answer on Friday. And today, though the US markets were closed, the international markets made their decision about W.'s "stimulus package".

They tanked.

Yep. I'd say it's now complete. The rest of the world, from the average person to the financial markets, has lost confidence in the US.

Current Mood: cynical

The subject from this post is taken from a BoingBoing article about Michael Pollan's latest book, In Defense of Food. Here's a bit of sage wisdom from that book, as described by the BoingBoing article:

Pollan has a set of simple rules for eating that really resonate: "Shop the edges of the grocery store, not the middle," "Eat things your great grandmother might have eaten," "Eat nothing that bears a health or nutritional claim," and so on.

Current Mood: contemplative

I can't take credit for this title.

I came across this article on BoingBoing about an article on the Motley Fool, a site with articles on investing.

I won't repeat here either the BoingBoing article or the source from Motley Fool. But the basic idea is this: Any company that offsets sagging sales by suing its customers with tenuous or false accusations is dying.

Now, as for the "sell short" part. That, I'd like to explain.

You all know how to make a profit from a stock that's doing well: buy low, sell high. When you do this, you're basically assuming that the stock will rise in price. But what if you believe that a stock is going to fall in price? There's a way to profit from that, as well.

It works kind of like a loan. When you take out a loan, you borrow money, agreeing to pay the money back, in predetermined chunks, every month over the course of several years. You also pay back "interest" — which is just a fee you pay to the lender for their services
(namely, loaning you that money).

When you short-sell a stock, you "take out a loan" on that stock: you borrow the stock from someone who already owns it, paying them a "lending fee" of some sort (just like interest when you borrow money). You also agree to return all of the shares you've borrowed at a specific point in time in the future.

Now, here's where the "selling-short" comes in. You take those borrowed shares and sell them, safely tucking away the money earned from the sale. Time elapses. You wait. Then, shortly before it's time to return the borrowed shares, you go to the stock market and buy them all back, using the money from the original sale. If the price of the shares has gone down, you have cash left over. That, minus the fees for borrowing the shares in the first place, is your profit.


The companies that are members of the RIAA are:

• Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG
• Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG)
• Vivendi Universal (EPA: VIV)
• EMI (OTC:EMIPY)

Current Mood: devious

… the Lakota have declared all treaties with the US null-and-void and broken away from the US.

No. Seriously. Here's another link. And here's the BoingBoing article about it.

Current Mood: confused

( I'm In UR Mangerz )

Image from www.kittenbreak.com … all credit goes to the original photographer by way the creators of Kittenbreak.com

Current Mood: silly

( Can I haz Cookie?  )

Image from www.puppybreak.com … all credit goes to the original photographer by way the creators of Puppybreak.com

Current Mood: depressed

So, I discussed what is wrong with the current e-voting machines. Even assuming non-malicious intent on the part of the manufacturers (and I don't… can you spell, "Diebold," boys and girls?), the machines are still have next-to-no security. Nor do they have any audit trail.

So, I have a proposal for an electronic means of vote counting that also has a paper trail:

1. Each voter gets a number-2 pencil, a resealable ballot envelope, and a paper or card ballot with an oval next to each candidate's name.


2. The voter goes to a voting booth, which can just be a portable cubby or desk, and fills in the ovals with the number-2 pencil. Each voter can use the envelope for privacy, or not, as they wish.


3. The voter then casts their ballot.
   You hand back the number-2 pencil, walk into a booth with a reader, and feed in the ballot. The reader has some way to tell the voter what it read (if anything), and ask for approval or rejection. Approved ballots are saved.
   
4. Upon leaving the booth, the voter hands the envelope to an election official or assistant.


5. If the voter (or the emachine) rejected the ballot, the voter and ballot are directed to a special table. The worker there shreds the rejected ballot, and follows a secure procedure for giving the voter a new ballot to fill in and cast.

Current Mood: contemplative

For nearly a decade now, the ACM and IEEE, two professional (and somewhat academic) computing societies I belong to, have been publishing articles about electronic voting machines. Technical articles. With rigorous academic analyses. Especially regarding the types of machines mandated by HAVA, the "Help (steal) America Vote Act".

In this month's Communications of the ACM, there is a short article at the end by two professors of computer science. ("Risks of E-voting," Bishop, M. & D. Wagner, 2007/Vol. 50, No. 11, p. 120) The Secretary of State of California asked them to assemble a team to independently audit the e-voting systems that The PolitburoCongress required. The article describes what they found.

And what they found is pretty much what every other ACM & IEEE article found.
( The Grim Details, behind the cut )

The upshot: the e-voting machines are riddled with security holes, they're easy to tamper with, and there's no paper-trail that could reveal tampering. They're a stolen election waiting to happen.

Current Mood: cynical

Well, it seems some things worked out…

The oil-burner maintenance? No charge, since the first guy they sent out here didn't do his job & fix the problem. We get the replacement circulator as part of that free repair call.

As for my dead Honda Insight … gone. At the Honda dealership where I took it for examination, the mechanic who worked on it asked if he could take it off of my hands. He needed a new car, it seems, and since he can install a new engine himself, this works out great for him. He even took care of my towing fees for getting it to the dealership and the cost of diagnosing the problem. So, it worked out well for both of us.

What was funny, though: he was just as mystified about what caused all of this as me. He said that the first 2 cylinders clearly had no oil going to them and burned up the rings, IIRC. The 3rd cylinder was okay, but it was on the other end of where the cam shaft broke. He thinks that something caused the oil pump to stop delivering oil to the engine. But, as I told him, I had the oil changed in June, just a little over 3000 miles ago. If someone had put in the wrong oil, that should've shown up a while back.

Now, I need to find another car. Hopefully, delivering this good news hasn't jinxed it... ;)

Current Mood: relieved

So, it took just shy of 3 weeks for the auto-body shop to finish my car. 3 weeks.

I picked up the car in the evening. Had to return the next day to (a) collect up stuff missing out of the back [that they never put back into my car]; (b) have it checked out for loose wires. The front parking lights wouldn't turn on. Seems both bulbs were burned out. Odd.

The very next day, exactly 3 weeks after the accident, the engine loses power. On an interstate. 20 miles from home.

I'm pissed.

I get towed home. Monday, I get towed to my local Honda dealership. This is a Honda Insight Hybrid we're talking about here. They're kinda eccentric little guys. I'm figuring the auto-body shop, screwed something up.

No. Not only that, it's bad. The cam-shaft is split in two.


As best they can tell, a solenoid or switch in the oil system fried itself, stopping all oil flow to the engine. The engine didn't seize, but it did snap the cam.

Cheapest option is replacing the engine. $3700, with a 90-day warranty.

Considering that this happened right after getting my car back from 3 weeks and $5000 of body work, which I had to get because I got in an accident the very day after I had the car inspected and the windshield replaced (for $260) … I'm just not feeling that lucky.


So, now I have no car, and need to buy another. Greeaaat.


As if that wasn't bad enough, my situation at work isn't too stable.


And, to add insult to injury, a zone-valve on our boiler went. The guy who came to repair it Sunday night (a $500 job, I might add) — he botched it. Today … we lost heat. The repairman's still here. Seems the cirulator, the pump that, well, circulates the water from the oil burner through the baseboard registers, is dead. Fried.

The repairman also took a look at Sunday's job. The more he looked, the more he found wrong. He ended up pulling out a blowtorch and removing the entire old control valve (part of which is, of course, copper, and soldered between two segments of pipe). He is not pleased. And neither am I.

Current Mood: drained

Well, given my previous rant about people DWY (Driving While Yacking) and not paying attention to what's going on around them…

On the way home from a massage yesterday, I ran a red light. I didn't know it was red. I didn't see it change. I wasn't paying attention.

All I remember is moving with the flow of traffic one minute, then, literally one minute later, swerving from a car crossing the intersection I suddenly found myself in. The traffic behind me was stopped.

Nobody was hurt, physically. The poor woman who hit me was both furious and near tears. A cop arrived on the scene to investigate my f***-up. Since I'd been at a pottery class yesterday morning, I had my cell-phone with me, and called my insurance from the scene.

I felt, and still feel, like a complete ass.

To make my humiliation complete, though, as the cop finished his investigation and told me I could go, he said, "I bet you were talking on that thing," pointing to the cell-phone. All I could say was, "Actually, no. I just spaced-out for a moment." I doubt he believed me.


And, naturally, this happens after I took my car in for some repairs. I even took Friday off to get the repairs done. Now I'll need to take another day off this week (Monday, probably), to get all of this taken care of.


Oh — and, next time you hear a report about how driving when drowsy is extremely dangerous? Take it seriously. It's true. The wrecked driver's-side of my car can confirm it. ;_;

Current Mood: depressed

YaKnow, I'm really sick of the idiots out there who yak on their cellphone while driving. Especially the ones who do it while merging onto a highway, changing lanes … pretty much anything that requires their attention.

Which is why I absolutely love love love this strip from Vinci & Arty by husband & wife team, Candy & Ryan Dewalt. Here's a snippet:

[All images are © Candy & Ryan Dewalt. If the Dewalts want me to remove the snippet I made, all they need to do is contact me and ask. ^_^ I just put it up 'cuz I'm a fanboy.]

Current Mood: cranky