Despite all my Rage I'm still just very tired...

... wow that was pretty bad.

So today wasn't terribly exciting, I slept then I went to work, though
my sleep was frequently interrupted by the telephone.

I have said, and will continue to say, that I will consider going back
when the nightmares stop. They still keep coming, though not quite as
painful and not quite and often. In this last series (must be brought
on by the season) I was attending all the wrong classes on the first
day because I was late and didn't get my schedule.

I was awfully bad at the whole "student" thing, and much better at
screwing up, avoiding work and drowning my guilt in sleep and video
games. I never liked anything about school until I got old enough for
teachers to talk to us about things instead of spouting them at us,
but all those years of squeaking by stripped me of that particular
context's work ethic. In any case I still fear school more then
anything else... probably.

I really need to get up earlier in the morning, for one more reason in
fact... I dream less when I am awake, and have more opportunity to
read.

I have yet another idea for a story to write. These arn't very
common, usually I just tell myself I have to write and just do it.

I really enjoy roller blading home from work, but I am glad my new
place is in such a position that I will not have too do so anymore...
because I really can't do so in the cold anyway. I don't like the
cold very much at all.

Benjie

The second part of my big ugly blog post...

I started with introspection... I don't know what the opposite of that
is so I'll just start writing now.

Thursday I woke up sometime around noon, give or take a few hours. I
didn't have to work, and I'm pretty sure I really didn't really end up
doing anything at all until my mother decided we should pick up a
pizza and drop in on my sister for a game of Settlers (the Settlers
was my idea, I admit it)... oh I know what I did that morning, the
night before (or some time there-about) I had found a computer in the
garbage and it didn't work, so I took it appart as much as I could,
then I put it back together again.

Anyway, one of the pizzas was really good (if you live in Ottawa,
fida's on sunnyside is really good), and when my sister showed up I
got down to teaching everyone how to play the Cities and Knights
expansion... I think they all had a little trouble with it, it not all
that much harder to learn, it's just hard to figure out the
significance of all the new rules. In fact everyone got sick of it
and I was declared the winner. Next time people will get the game
from the start and not whine so much maybe.

When I got home I called Rob and he showed up at the house and between
a couple extra large triple triple coffees I ended up carting my
computer over to Rob's and playing Warcraft III till 11 am Friday.
We've decided that Warcraft is just plain wrong and that the whole
concept of RTS is flawed. We will probably keep playing it anyway. I
have personally decided that the campaign editor is way too
limiting... that or I want to change the nature of the game with it
and they don't want me too.

Friday I slept, got a call from my fiancee and slept some more, then
got up and did something for a couple hours and then went back to bed
and got a ride back to work for 7am from mom.

That afternoon I got a call from Ryan and we went to see "Sky Captain
and the World of Tomorrow" around 6:45. Then we went to MacDonalds
and ate and talked and discussed alternative sources of energy.
Nuclear power is the answer as far as we can tell, at least for now
until we figure out a better way. The energy costs associated with
the production of solar cells don't make them a viable idea and only
20% of the worlds energy could be reliably covered by wind generation,
any more would either be unreliable or would harm the world by
changing the wind patterns. Heat energy from thermals and sun and
direct sulight channeling for indoor lighting is useful, but only for
heating and lighting. What we need to do is get a way to either use
the gamma radiation from nuclear waste to produce significant energy
or figure out a better way to harness sun energy and heat energy...
that or fission... something like that. In the short term however
nuclear power is the safest source of electrical energy for most
things. Maybe we could run big fiber optic cables to move light
energy from places that don't have light to places that do have light
and then use that light directly as energy, heating thing to move
them, heating food, in light based computers, lighting houses,
possibilities are enless if we stop having to turning other things
into electricity before we use it... Man, I'd have to see me on
anything stronger then coffee, I'd probably figure out world peace and
ruin everybodies economies by feeding the poor.

Benjie

Indecision is to Procrastination as ________ is to Lassitude

I will say it again, GET FIREFOX http://www.SpreadFirefox.com !!!

So I really need to get back into writing. I was meaning to do so
over the weekend (by weekend I mean Thursday and Friday, the days I
have off) but instead life got interesting so I've again put it off.

I think I need some introspection. Introspection is when I talk about
what I think instead of what I do, or at least that's what I'm going
to do, once I escape this infernal preamble (that's the completely
useless bit that goes before you start saying what your going to say.)

I've been reading a lot more the last couple weeks. I tend to read
very slowly, but I read for big bits of time so I end up reading books
just a hair faster then the average person. The last book I read was
"On a Pale Horse" by Piers Anthony. It's about death, and it's in a
series about the embodiments of things like death and time and evil.
In true Anthony style he did an excellent job of writing the devil's
attempts to change deaths mind, an excellent metaphor for someone
playing devil's advocate. I used to do that a lot myself, bending
truth and pointing people to the "logical" conclusions of their
actions and beliefs. Some stuff just makes sense, and sometimes you
can say something in a certain way and it just makes sense to the
person you are talking too.

Problem is, sometimes I think a lot of my beliefs and opinions are
cleverly stacked on other things I've convinced myself of and kinda
balancing on each other. If that's the case it could be that someday
I'll come across something that doesn't fit into my universe and
everything will collapse. However I've convinced myself that this
won't happen because I am an open minded person and I would simply
plug the new information into my universe and everything would adjust
itself naturally. If this is the case than it would logically follow
that if I didn't know some key piece of information that would
rearrange my whole world and make me abandon some key component of my
outlook on life. Too bad this isn't what I was trying to talk about,
I'm not sure if that makes me a bad writer or not. What makes me a
bad writer, I think, is that I don't write enough. Usually I blame
motivation, but I think it's a patterning thing. I'm not sure what to
call it but sometimes I do feel motivated, and if I give my self
orders and set up a schedule I will follow it until my schedule is
interrupted. Sometimes I interrupt it myself and then it can't really
be lack of motivation, it's a change in priorities, however brief that
breaches my schedule, and then I don't have that spark of motivation
to get myself on track. I guess the best plan is to use the next
burst of motivation to get myself on schedule, but I usually try to
use that motivation to do something silly like replace my keyboards
LED with a blue one (as it turns out, it didn't work, and I don't even
know if the LED I was trying to use was blue or not, the box said
"clear" when I looked at it again and it wasn't making any light that
I could see). As it turns out that's not what I was trying to talk
about either, though it may be useful. I'm off track again but it
always seems to be useful to try to work out why I'm doing things,
like the pastors sermon last week that sometimes the things we do
don't match our stated beliefs and that's why it's a good idea to
express them explicitly. Anyway I'm trying to talk about death. I
didn't realize I was afraid of death, actually to be more specific I
don't like it when people die. I also don't like to see people suffer
and loose their faculties and go crazy in old age but my solution
would have been to make people not suffer and not loose their ability
to think in the first place. Also I don't want the world to fill up
with people who live forever, but it's heaven and hell being filled up
with people who live forever as it stands now so it doesn't really
make sense for people to get bored on earth then to got bored in
heaven, and I wonder if you could ever get bored in heaven. Probably
not. In any case I miss people when they are dead, and I fear losing
people I care about and not seeing them again... I'm planning on being
happy in heaven no matter what so the thought of seeing people I miss
in heaven is really a mute point... I miss them now.

Taking too many breaks.

So today my "boss" (more of a mini-boss, they call them TLs, meaning
"team leader") calls me out and tells me to punch for team meetings.
Apparently I had effectively told a customer they were an idiot by
saying "I don't have to argue with you and try to prove I'm right"...
in a mean way... I'll have to be careful now or I'll get put on this
probabtion like thing. Been here two years and this is the first time
so I figure I'll just do what I'm doing and hope for the best.

Yesterday I had a bit of a nap after waking up and then as I was
waiting for the bus my friend picked me up and took me to work, he was
moving a car from one side of the street to the other and had decided
to drive down to the Tim Horton's on the corner on the way, instead he
detoured with me to a Tim Horton's near my work and we got to talk
about all our crazy ideas and video game concepts over coffee for an
hour before work.

Work wasn't too bad and I've been keeping up with my comics and
hanging out around the www.spreadfirefox.com site quite a bit.

Incidentally somehting in my diet is making me have to take extra
breaks to relieve myself. I should probably lay off either the
caffeine or the Soy Milk... but they are just oh so good... *sigh*

ARGH!!! Stupid phone, I clocked out for break and the dumb phone
logged me back in and took a call, then when I sat back down I tried
to tell the computer that I was still on break and it gave me a call.

Today sucked and I have the next two days off so I'm taking the offer
to go home early.

Benjie

Strange Fluids

I had to mention that I had the oddest thing happen yesterday.

First I have to restate that since they changed the bus schedules
around and started giving me evening schedules (they being the
faceless forces that work tirelessly against me) I have been Inline
Skating the last leg of my trip home from work. Last night as I was
getting off my last bus I reached to open the bus station door for a
woman coming up behind me and I got some kind of strange liquid on my
hand. I'm not sure what it was and it dried instantly and pulled all
the moisture out of my skin aswell. I had to roll home and when I got
there I was unable to wash the stuff off. I tried soap and hot water
even... I also tried rubbing alchohol and hydrogen peroxide but there
was no reaction. By the end of the day today I gues that layer of
skin had flaked off so it's gone now.

I really wonder what kind of fluid it was and how it got onto the bus
station door in the first place, my best guesses are glue or nail
polish and some jerk who thought they were being funny, respectively.

Benjie

P.S. Firefox 1.0 Public Release was launched recently, spread the fire!

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.

Well, not everybody... well nobody really... especially not me.

So I woke up at 7:45 this morning even though I don't have to work
till 4:00PM. I did take a nap after breakfast, like a 3 hour nap. I
probably wouln't have woken up if my mom hadn't wanted me to hang up
some laundry and move some pictures off the digital cammere. I havn't
gotten my burner working again yet but I'm pretty close now I think.

I started writing a Kung Fu musical, I think it will be funny to have
critics call it a Kunfusical. Though so far I only have the general
synopsis of the first half of it, and a general description of the
songs that will go in that first half. I might have to change it
around a bit, the concept of a Kung Fu story inside a technical
support call center is pretty limitted.

Other then that my life isn't any more interesting today then it was
yesterday. I updated my comic again too.

You Spin Me Right 'Round Baby Right 'Round

... or so my winamp alarm clock would have me believe.

As it turns out the problem with the alarm clock I had installed was
that I had the master volume set so high that I jumped out of bed and
turned it off and then went right back to bed, as it is now I lie in
bed and the music wakes me up but doesn't make my head explode.
Ideally there would be a lot more options, like slowly boosting the
volume or a panic snooze that cut the sound for a while and then
blasted it again, or choosing a random song, or having to type in a
password to stop the music... I don't know, I suppose it's okay as it
is.

Anyways... yes, the most exciting thing in my life is installing a
winamp alarm clock plug-in.

Saturday was the HUGE Ottawa South Porch Sale, I got a couple N64
games and this great toaster that I'm going to have to fix... or make
into a computer, either way right? The best purchase was the Tetris
Board Game I got. Not only is it cool official Nintendo memorabilia,
but it's also fun (not that it would have mattered for 75 cents, but
being fun is a good bonus). Basically you have a little tilted tetris
board and you draw pieces and compete to fill up your field with the
least number of empty spaces possible as fast as possible. Maybe I'll
post a picture of it when I get around to it, but I did find it on
eBay for arount 15$.

So, like 17 days until I move into my own appartment for the first
time. I think I'm excited.

This morning I made a new comic, I usually feel better about myself
when I've been making comics for a couple days.

I really need to get back to writing again.

Benjie

Stupid

So today I was a moron. My mom asked me to to "take the film out of
the cammera", so I opened up the back of the cammera and I'm looking
at exposed film. I was like, "Mom, the you didn't roll the film back
in!", and she was like "That's part of opening up the cammera, I
thought you said you knew how to open it!" and I was like, "No, I told
you I didn't and then you told me that I just had to pull up on this
thing, and when I did that the cammera opened"... I'm not sure whose
fault it is but I ruined a roll of pictures from the familly trip to
algonquin... grrr.

Anyways, other then that I've been switched back to the stupid evening
schedules. My days are stupid and I hate having to go to work
again... I just want to sleep, and then yell swearwords at customers
because they are morons, and then yell at my mother for making me do
something I didn't know how to do and then yelling at me and making me
feel guilty for it. We have been getting along real well and I really
need to have a good emotional argument in the near future before I
explode, I spend all day, every day in passive friendly mode and I'm
going to kill myself from pent up frustrations... that or I haven't
had enough caffeine today... something like that at least.

Life is a big competition made up of different games. The problem is
that most of those games aren't very much fun. I'll describe the
technical support game.

Setup:

You need at least two players,
- one is the designated as the support technician (the agent) and is
given extensive training about the products and services he is
supporting, high speed internet access to reasearch pretty much
anything he doesn't know, and given a well defined support boundry
- one is designated as the customer and has one or more problems


- the agent's job is to get off the phone with the customer as quickly
as possible without breaching support boundries while trying to
achieve certain service and quality goals.

- the customer get's to decide their goals and can change them
whenever they want.


Gameplay:

Starting Phase:
The customer is trying to get the agent to fix their problem without
revealing any information about themselves or their computer or their
problem and is also trying to do as little work as possible.
Alternatively the customer is trying to prove that they have done
everything that is possible to fix their problem and that they don't
need the agent's help.
Meanwhile the agent is trying to determine the nature of the problem
while simultanously taking notes, bringing up the customer's
information, and again doing the bare minimum without breaching
policy.

Phase Two: The customer is trying to convince the agent that their
problem is with the Road Runner Service while the customer is trying
to convince the customer that it is a problem with the customer's
equipment.

Phase Three: If the customer has convinced the agent that the problem
is suppported by the service agreement it is the agents job to
redirect the customer to a different department as quickly as
possible.

The winner is either the company who manages to retain a customer,
otherwise everyone loses


Most of lifes little games end up with a lot of losers.

Adventures in Rollerblading

So, as it turns out, today is Labour Day. Which means
I get paid twice as much but I can't ride the bus to
work.

This story is better if I start it on wednesday...

So sometime last week I decided that my life wasn't
going the way I wanted it to so I set up this set of
rules to make my life work better Friday night I got
home from work around 1AM and instead of going to bed
like my schedule told me to, I made a blender full of
of home-brew leftover coffee inced cappucino... and
then because I didn't have room in the freezer I
decided to drink said pitcher, which I followed with a
coke, which was followed by a mountain dew, the
american kind, with caffeine in it.

So, being too tired to acctually go crazy snaky like
caffeine usually makes me, I entered a hightened sense
of semi-conciouseness. It's what I used to refer to a
becoming tetrisised (speaking of which I need to start
playing tetris again).

In any case this particular case of zoning was spent
on trying to make a unit detroy itself aftrer it
creates a building, or for a unit to become a
building. Then I got friustrated and made up a bunch
of custom merlock units. I think at one point I may
have acctually played a level of Warcraft 3, and I
think I might have written a poem. In any case I
hadn't slept when my fiancee called me at 9 in the
morning. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up, ate,
and played around with some of the exta scenarios in
WC3.

Then I went and minded my pastors kids for 4 or 5 or
so hours. It was relatively uneventful aside from the
pizza which was very good and playing set which is a
very fun game of finding pattern in the... well you
should get it anyways...

Then I went over to my sisters placed and crashed
intending to get up in time for church, which didn't
work out... woke up around noon and played some zelda,
went for a walk with my sister and then went to
evening service, had a nice talk with someone there
then went home and foolishly didn't get to bed till
3:30 because of WC3 again... Then I woke up and went
out to catch the bus to work at 5:40.

Now, today is labour day so at 5:55 I strapped on my
rollerblades and started the relatively long 30-45
minute blade trip to work. Now, it's pretty dark at 6
in the morning, and my brain wasn't acctually working
yet but suddenly I was rollerblading along a dirt bike
path, and then I realised that I was so far in that I
wasn't going to be able to turn back. It acctually
ended up cutting out the dangerouse chunk of Conroy
that doesn't have a paved shoulder so it was pretty
good in the end. In fact just like most stories the
end sucks... you would have had to be there... and
that why my writing skills need more work... I should
have been able to express the curving twisting
tripping trip, the noise of possibly wild animals, the
constant light at the end of the tunnel feeling and
the repeated "I'm not done yet?" feelings, the sound
of cars that made me know I was getting close. It was
one of those little everyday adventures that make life
interesting.

Anyways, work is very slow today, people must not be
calling because it's a holiday and they don't expect
me to be working... poor dilluted customers...

Anyways, feeling very Zen,
Benjie



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So Long, so very Freaking Long...

Today is a long day, my efficiency has gone up
apparently. Getting a seat, fixing the settings on
the computer the way I like them, blogging, emailing
my fiancee, installing firefox and the extensions I
like (tab moving and mouse gestures all in
one...http://v2studio.com/k/moz/ and
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/ext/extensions-en.html)
and then configuring it the way I like it, then
reading the news.google.com until I've read everything
of interest and then read all the web comics in my
list (I'll post that some other time). All the while
taking calls and such.

Well, anyways, by my lunch break I've started randomly
searching for different things on the internet, or
following links from other sites, or posting extra
questions on Q&A sites... or in this case blogging
again. In any case this week I have had 8 hour
shifts, 3 to 11:30 every day except that one day from
2:45 to 11:45, and days have been getting longer and
more annoying.

The last couple days I had been using the extra time
to study HTML/XML/CSS and stuff at w3schools.com...
actually I've been doing that less each day and days
are getting longer... I guess that's why people write
things like diaries and blogs... so that they can
recognize obviouse paterns in their behaviour and act
on them.

Well anyways, I really still don't want to be at work
anymore, and it's almost the weekend so I suppose that
I will feel better after a few days off.

Benjie

(next week=

Sun 9/5/04  
OFF  

 Mon 9/6/04  
07:00 AM  
03:30 PM  

 Tue 9/7/04  
07:00 AM  
03:30 PM  

 Wed 9/8/04  
03:00 PM  
11:30 PM  

 Thu 9/9/04  
03:00 PM  
11:30 PM  

 Fri 9/10/04  
03:00 PM  
11:30 PM  

 Sat 9/11/04  
OFF
)


		
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Make friday part of the weekend and give every new baby chocolate eclairs.

I think that quote is short enough to not require atribution.

 

So Day 2 of my plan to fix my life is underway. I got home at like 1:00 this morning and I was very hungry and the house doesn't have any snack vegetables in the fridge so I have a leftover hamburger so I'm either going to have to alter my rule set or buy some veggies... meh... mom's note said that there were greens in the fridge but I can't find them.  I beat another level of warcraft 3 and wrote another 600 or so words in yet another short story.  I keep starting new ones, I hope that eventually I'll figure out how to write the rest of a story.

 

So today I started at 3 again, but tommorow I have off.  I was going to do something with Ryan tommorow but then I agreed to babysit for my pastor's kids while he's doing a wedding from 4:30 on so I hope Ryan will be able to do something in the morning. He's going to let my fiancee move her (and I guess my) stuff into the appartment on September 30th and that means, in theory at least, I will be moving in on the first of October.

 

My one sister and brother in law are moving out of town, and my other sister and brother are moving in to town.  My coming back to the city sister is saying we sould start a board game society or something. I like board games and lot's of my friends do too so maybe it will work out. I like winnning settlers.

 

Benjie

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Day One of Plan 1a

It's still under revision but my plan to change my life is in it's first stages, I have set up a preliminary rule-set that outlines my day to day and week to week behaviour.  The first version is not ready for public release for a couple reasons,  basically I don't want to be held to rules that are unrealistic so I want to be able to change them around for now.

When I've established a working day to day routine, step two will be to set up specific goals, short/mid/long term kinds of things, with deadlines and such.

Youn see:

 

I work, at most 40 hours a week, and I should be sleeping around 56 hours a week.  I commute and average of about 12 hours a week which could be used at least a little more productively which leaves 60 hours a week which could be used a LOT more productively.

 

Now I know that it usually spend about half an hour a day eating, and a couple hours playing video games and watching TV a week but I figure if I budget my time (like they taught us to budget money in those business classes, my preciouse)... ahem... then I will be able to see where I'm wating it and have more time for the things I want to do... so I suppose the second part of my plan would be to find out what, within my schedule, I do everyday and make a schedule that balences that.

 

I am pretty sure that spending half my waking life working is not making me happy.

 

Benjie

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