The Major

Category: Blatherings

  • A Strange Week

    I’m a little thrown off right now. Things just don’t feel normal. It’s probably because so many things are different this week.

    I am in Santa Clara for three days this week. Yesterday, I woke up at 5:55, took the bus to work, got a couple things, took the bus to Caltrain, took Caltrain to Santa Clara, and took VTA light rail to Foundry Networks headquarters. And then sat in a class for 8 hours and did almost the reverse on the way home.

    Also yesterday, I started another diet. It is my “sprint to the end” diet. Since being about 167 pounds (and that one marvelous day when I was dehydrated and the scale read 165) I have put on about 5 pounds and am back to 172. I want to make a habit of completing my New Year’s resolutions, so my goal is to lose 7 pounds by December 23. That is about a pound every four days. So I’ll be cold turkey from the following until that point (except for one night with some friends, which was already being planned):
    – red meat. Just my luck – the caterers today at Foundry served meatloaf! No main course for me!
    – sweets. Just my luck – All the soda and junk you want for free at Foundry!
    – cheese. I <3 cheese.
    – fried things

    So yeah, that sudden shock to my body (I think it was mostly not having the fat content I am used to, but it may have been the sugar, too) gave me an annoying headache yesterday. It was no migraine, thankfully, just a run of the mill headache that happened to last the whole damn day.

    And then last night after I got home from that long day I had to flesh out and practice my speech that I am giving on Chomsky’s ideas in speech class tonight. Another thing that was out of the ordinary.

    And then today, so I can get to class on time tonight, I took City CarShare to Santa Clara. And let’s just say I don’t miss ONE BIT sitting in stop and go traffic. That has to be like the 7th circle of hell or something.

    Tomorrow is the last day of training, and then Thursday and Friday should be back to normal with the usual wake up, work, do something after work (class, some event, etc.), go home, sleep, repeat routine. It may not be the most exciting thing in the world but it makes me less stressed, I think.

  • Bike Ride

    My buddy Peter is letting me long-term borrow his bike. It is a single-speed road bike. I definitely like it…I’d rather have a multi-speed bike, but beggars can’t be choosers!

    Today I took the bike for its first serious ride. I’ve already bragged to a couple people about my ride…but I’ll post it here anyway. I mapped it out in Google Maps. From my apartment, to the main library, to SFSU, and back to my apartment. 17 miles in all! Very tiring, but it was nice, too.

    I am looking forward to my next ride, although it may not be 17 miles. I think I’d like to ride along the coast. Also, I am not sure how practical the bike will be for trips longer than a couple miles, because I worked up a serious sweat. It was great, though, just getting to the main library to start with. It’s the fastest I have ever gotten there, I think, and by the time I got there I wasn’t terribly sweaty.

  • God Damn

    It’s only Tuesday. It’s going to be a long week…Maybe it is just my speech that I have tonight for class that is making it seem long. Or maybe it is the remarkable speech that I saw on Sunday night.

    More later. I’ve had a lot of stuff that needs to be written down, and not enough time to write it.

  • STFU – The Finest Education Around!

    I was telling Ben about my awesome new email address – [email protected] – and he was saying it would be better if it was [email protected]. Well, now I have a new life goal, to start STFU – Southern Texas, Falfurrias University.

    My main email address remains the same – [email protected] simply forwards to it.

  • 🙁

    🙁 No more Barleycorn 🙁

  • Copper Thieves Ruined My Saturday Morning

    Friday was a good day, overall. I got to come into work late because I had to stay a couple hours late. Some super-easy after-hours network maintenance needed to be done. I got home at around 7:30 or 8 and chowed down on a store-bought rice, cheese, and bean burrito. Then my new buddy Alfonso gave me a ring, we went out and had a couple beers, shot a few games of pool, and called it a night. I came home, talked online and read for a bit, and hit the hay at 2am. I love not having a strict wakeup time on the weekends – it makes the previous night a lot more relaxed.

    Well, so much for that. At 7am Saturday morning I got a call from work. “Union City is down.” That’s where the paper is printed. Three separate circuits went down at the same time, and the phones. Well…that is a little strange. I did the troubleshooting that I could, and chalked it up to a power outage. Not much else I can do, I thought, so I stopped working on it at 8am. Surfed the web for a little bit, and then right when I laid down in bed, my phone rings. “It’s not a power outage. Could you go into the San Francisco office?”

    “Sure, I’ll be there in 45 minutes,” I said.

    45 minutes later, I rolled into the office. We managed to find a spare T1 that wasn’t being used, patched it in, and at least now the paper could get printed. After sticking around for a bit longer to make sure there wasn’t anything else I could do, I headed out.

    Come Monday morning, I found out that our circuits, which were running over fiber optic, were cut. By copper thieves. After cutting our stuff, they realized it wasn’t copper, went across the street, and cut someone else’s copper.

    DAMN that pissed me off. It would be one thing if it was some equipment failure at the telco, but someone scaling the phone pole and actually cutting the fiber? That’s crazy.

    At least I get Friday off this week for this and other weekend work. Should be a nice break.

  • SFSU, Finally

    As some of you know, I am taking a couple of classes at City College of San Francisco this semester. A couple of snoozers – Critical Thinking and a Speech class.

    But because I am taking those classes, I am now able to attend SFSU next semester. Woo! I have been looking forward to taking some History classes for a while. Also, I am guessing the campus will be a bit nicer, because the CCSF campus is kind of old and falling apart (especially the bathrooms).

    Some downsides: It is further away. The night classes start at 7pm, which means I will get home no earlier than 11pm two or three nights per week. And it is more expensive. Time to start saving…

  • Truly Off His Rocker

    The worst of the worst…here is a recent installment of the daily comic Marmaduke:

    Really. This truly makes no sense whatsoever. The comics are almost never funny but they usually at least aren’t completely absurd.

    Thanks to Joe Mathlete for bringing this and all the other Marmaduke comics to my attention in all their awful glory. As Joe Mathlete points out, Marmaduke is hopping up and down on two legs for some unexplained reason. The dog catchers, who are in their truck which is floating in mid-air, somehow confuse this with the moonwalk.

  • 2.33 Terabytes

    My personal computer storage is now up to 2.33 Terabytes. Sweet…

    But I could totally use about another 3 drives.

  • Yay For Mornings

    One of the few good things about the morning is when I wake up I can almost always count on having new email to read. Wheee how fun!