Meat & Greet
So far, this has been shaping up to be the Summer Of Meat (with apologies to my one remaining LJ vegan). Since last(ish) post, there’s been a sweet housewarming/BBQ at DE’s*, a semi-literal sausage fest at GJM’s, and more raw fish than I can shake a chopstick at. The annual lamb roast with the work crew is also coming up in the nondistant future.
Altoids – cheap project case with built in hinge; comes with free mints.
I woke up last night with a clever, CPU- and memory-efficient way of layering multiple visual-effects algorithms on the wearable blinkenlights project I’ve left sitting on the un-lit back burner for months due to lack of time and give-a-damn. This is important, since the micro has only a couple kb of RAM (which has to be dynamically allocated depending on what’s attached, what effect(s) are in use, etc.) and every clock cycle is sacred. The display management stuff will have to coexist in real time with other CPU-hungry tasks such as FFT, etc. Much as I would looove to spend my saturdays writing a multithreading realtime OS in assembler for an 8-bit micro ;-) there are only 52 saturdays in a year.
Also had what turned out to be an attempted “how’s life, let’s stay friends” chat yesterday while intending to have the “come pick up your crap” chat with She Who…well, she who I still find myself unable to harbor any ill feelings for, despite what turned out to be the worst relationship experience of my life to date (no pun intended), and what I thought was a very good friendship degrading into unexplained fear and distrust (of me) literally overnight. Most any normal person would just say “fuck that biatch”, ebay her stuff** and try to forget they ever knew one another, but I’ve never had an easy time of that. What’s it been…almost two months now. Part of the trouble is I’m one of those people who comes across a problem and has to either prove it unsolvable, or solve it–this is a case where I can do neither…it makes no further sense on the 100th mental replay as it did on the first. That, and the way everything in my mind is exhaustively cross-linked***. Sounds and smells have colors; numbers have genders. Bizarre and obscure associations abound. “Hunter” refers to one who hunts; it also refers to a specific column width of water streaming from a faucet. Everything connects to everything, and this girl was an element of the set of all everything. (Of course, having to walk by that uncollected, un-ebayed Mountain of Stuff on my way to my room each day doesn’t help matters, either.)
reshape(strrep('no rain forest',' ',''),4,[])'
On the night I knew all hope was lost, and that my best course of action was to have no further involvement, I tried to failness it explicitly with a very public rant (which told more about the situation than it probably should). Kind of like how a smoker, upon resolving to quit, dunks his last pack of cigarettes in the toilet before throwing them away. He does this because he knows his resolve will not last.
Now I can’t help feeling like that hopeless addict after digging those soggy toilet-sticks out of the trash and carefully laying them out on a radiator to dry. Hoping there might be something left in them to give me that good feeling again like old times, I gathered up all the patheticity I could muster and made contact, possibly–perhaps hopefully–for the last time.
Anyway, dear bloggg, this is the last mention I’m going to make of the subject; as that song goes, I’m breaking the habit tonight. (So says I as cigarette smoke drifts under my door from my “trying to quit” housemate’s room.)
Nailed by Murphy
The last week has been a ritual of adding air to one of my car’s tires every couple days…Why? A brief feel-around revealed the nice nail-head sticking out of the tire. Can’t decide whether to blame this on Murphy’s Law or not; it’s in the only remaining original (oldest) tire, but it’s also the only one not covered by any kind of road-hazard warranty/insurance. I’m pretty sure of how it might have gotten there — the careless bunch of (de)construction folk tearing up hunks of a house and throwing the remains over a tall fence into (or as often as not, “in the vicinity of”, and picking them up later) a Dumpster parked on my street — but would have no way of actually proving it’s one of their nails. Anyway, I’m mildly pissed and being procrastinatory about getting it fixed.
It’s not really a matter of expense – I expect to walk out of e.g. Pep Boys for well under $100, unlike starter**** or exhaust system replacements. It’s the two hours waiting around in a noisy waiting room, with bad fluorescent lighting too dim and flickery to read in, making decisions on meaningless cost vs. service life tradeoffs (30K mile or 70k mile? Well, since I’m averaging less than 10K miles and one nail per year…), and trying to remember again whether my engine is a 1.6L or 2.0L when the doofus at the point-of-sale terminal needs to know, as if it actually makes a shred (again, no pun intended) of difference when replacing a tire.
Anyway, once work quiets down (sometime after next week), I’ll probably try to organize a little more summery hanging-out and barbecuing.
* “What? All of the sudden everyone’s looking at me like I just raped a nun.” – Me, after word of the homebrew USB vibrator leaked out during a long and beerful game of Asshole.
** All kosher if it’s been there abandoned for more than 45 days.
*** Great for finding the obscure associations in a raw haystack of data; not so great for most everything else.
**** “I know, who better to take it to than the Nissan dealership? They should know their own engines, and be able to source parts without excessive markup…”
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