- Got a new IBM T40 yesterday. Very sweet.
- Might be purchasing 300+ linux boxes for work. Novell is really pushing this, and I think that it is great. I can stop doing HP-UX programming and move over to Linux. Yea.
Got up feeling really tired, not sure why. Getting hot all day - maybe it is menopause or something.
Wrote a bit of a tiny, tiny xml-rpc server for work. We need a notification system here for our thousands of servers laid out accross the US and xml-rpc seems like the best route to go for alot of what want to do. The company is going to let me GPL it so when it is done I am going to set up a mailing list and put the code somewhere for people to view.
Originally we planned on using another project we found on SourceForge but the developer was not accepting any major patches, and in order for it to work for us it would need some major changes. Oh well, the system I am putting together right now, thought the core is written in C, should allow applications written in muliple languages to communicate with eachother.
None, for about two weeks. Okay, this might not be a big deal to any of you, but it is to me. I was a serious coffee drinker - multiple POTS a day. Yes, multiple.
If you are tring to get off of caffeine, here is some advice:
1. Stop on a weekend, or a really slow holiday. I stopped on a Friday before a long weekend.
2. Sleep. Let yourself sleep in. If you drank as much caffeine as I did, you will be pretty useless - and you don't feel the pain when you are not awake.
3. Water is your friend, and drink lots of it. You will be fiending you liquid, and it is not the perfect solution but it fills at least some of your need. Plus, water is good for you and will help clean you out. I was drinking about a gallon and a half a day.
4. Non-caffeinated teas are almost like coffee and have some flavor. Great.
5. Multivitamin and extra B multivitamin. Okay, not sure if this really helps, but it couldn't hurt to get some extra vitamins in your body.
That is all I could think of. I had hardly a headache the whole time - every other time I tried to quit I went back because I could not take the insane pounding in my head. This time was much easier. Hope this helps someone.
New Box for Work
Just got off the phone with HP and it looks like we are ordering an RX2600 loaded with Red Hat Linux AS 3.0. This is a pretty big deal for a pretty much HP-UX-only shop like the one I work at. It was HP-UX or GNU/Leenucks and Linux offered extra flexability that we couldn't get with the HP-UX box. It's a smaller system, but it is a start. Finally, a system that will come installed with the tools that I use.
Mark Finlay
We exchanged a couple of emails, and he seemed like a really cool guy. I was supposed to work on a project with him once that got sidetracked by work and school, but I kept it in the back of my mind to get with the guy and start hacking it out. Pity I will never get the chance.
Four days and no caffeine. Four days and no caffeine.
Okay, if you are going to do this be warned: you will ache. Drink A LOT of water, take your multivitamin, and (you will do this anyways) sleep.
I am so damn tired. I thought that giving up caffeine would just give me a blistering headache, but I have already fallen asleep one today at work. Yea, mild headache when I got up to heat up my lunch in the cafeteria upstairs. Also, my mind is really muddled - I had a tiny meeting with someone about a problem he was having and it took all of my effort to just follow along.
You know, I know already I am in for a world of pain but I know that it will be worth it. I didn't plan on quitting right now, but that article on /. really pushed me forward. I figure if so many other people can kick coffee, then I can.
Slow day at least.
----
Read this on Lou Reeds Book Pass the Fire:
Read this to your kids? You've gotta be kidding me.
Reviewer: Dan DeBonis from Washington, DC USA
(excerpt...) Read this to your children? Are you kidding me? Do you want them to grow up to be self-hating, smack-shooting "street poets," or worse -- pretentious hipster narcissists? They'll hate you for it someday.
----
Though the best review ever has to be on that ego-driven piece of crap A New Kind of Science:
A New Kind of Review by "a reader"
I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself.
Bigger than infinity Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately, we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated by "internet" technology and stored on "digital media", allowing current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters.
My place in history My review allows, for the first time, a complete and total understanding not only of this but *every single* book ever written. I call this "the principle of book equivalence." Future generations will decide the relative merits of this review compared with, for example, the works of Shakespeare. This effort will open new realms of scholarship.
More about me I first began writing reviews as a small child, where my talent was clearly apparent to those around me, including my mother. She preserved my early writings which, although simpler in structure, portend elements of my current style. I include one of them below (which I call review 30) to indicate the scholarly pedigree of the document now in your hands or on your screen or committed to your memory:
"The guy who wrote the book is also the publisher of the book. I guess he's the only person smart enough to understand what's in it. When I'm older I too will use a vanity press. Then I can write all the pages I want."...
It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.
---
But, I bought the book when it came out, so how smart does that make me? Wolfram has my money and I have a book full of pretty Mathematica pictures.
yea!!!
I love cigarettes, The way they taste, the way they smell - the way that they make me feel after I take that first, second, third drag. I am not a smoker but if cigarettes were better for me I would smoke ALL OF THE TIME.
I don't understand people that say they hate cigarettes - or at least hate the way cigarettes make a person feel. Long day full of frustrating crap and that drage makes all of those problems go away - like sex but not as much of a public taboo.
So, there are a whole lot of smart people around here - invent something that gives me what I want in a cigarette without all of the nasty side effects. Come on, you will make millions of bucks and have a life-long friend.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
