Damn! I missed the Kyushu cutoff

I've mentioned before that I partake in online Sumo games (kind of like Fantasy Football). I've been playing about a year but this is the first time I missed the deadline for the games. More specifically the one game I really prefer, Totoro's Sumo Hoshitori Game. Due to this I will end up falling in rank quite a bit. See, if you can't make a Basho you have to register yourself as kyujo, which the sumo glossary defines as -

kyujo, injury; injured rikishi forced either to skip a whole honbasho (zen-kyu) or retire from a honbasho due to an injury sustained during it (tochu-kyujo), see kosho seido, yasumi

Something I hadn't done. So now I'm looking at a free fall in the ranks. It's just as well, I guess. I've had less and less time to devote to things lately. I'm, like, 275 messages behind in the sumo list. And it's not what you'd call a high traffic list.

I'll just have to make a big run in 2005.

You load 16 tons, whadaya get...

Another birthday gone by. I'm 42 years old, as of the 12th. It still amazes me that I am this old. When I was in my mid-20's I didn't think I'd make it much past 30. OC, with the physical condition I'm in it's not exactly like I'm living in the tall cotton. This thing manifested itself in my early to mid 30's so maybe I was kinda right after all. Still I don't feel middle aged. Not in my soul. I feel crushed by life and pain but not age. My father was like that about age. It didn't seem to make a difference to him what the calendar said. He was as sharp and fun and intelligent and funny as ever (until he got sick). Man I still miss him.

We spent a weekend over at my brothers house. Kind of a sleep over with Grandma, really. I slept in her bed while my son slept on the couch (it's a really good and comfortable couch) while she slept in the recliner chair (she likes sleeping there). I got to get a mattress like she has. It was the best sleep I've had in a long time.

I have to say something about my son. He's really a wonderful kid. A few nights ago I had a really bad time and was hallucinating. He came in and took care of me, made sure I didn't walk into to many things (I know I walked into a wall and maybe some other furniture) and helped me to the bathroom and back to bed. I was not responding right and he knew it so he called my mother and she and my brothers came and got us. I really don't remember much of anything from that night but do I know that my son is on the job so I don't have to worry about that. Wish I knew what the heck happened, though.

What else... There's a lot of crap going on but I can't think of anything specific off-hand. The Steelers won. That's good. Go Black 'n' Gold!

Strange sleeping habits

For the last 5 or 6 days I have been experiencing some very strange sleeping situations. I get my son to bed between 2130 and 2230, depending on how cooperative he is and how much pain I have. Once he's asleep I come into the computer room to catch up on mail and other stuff. The very next instant I'm waking up in front of the computer and it's 0330! It seems that I am passing out in the chair and sleeping for 4 or 5 hours. Last night I knocked my glasses off during this sleeping time and it took a while to find them, especially since I can't see at all without them. Oh, and the funniest thing about last night was that I had been in the middle of typing something and, when I fell out, I seem to have left my hand in such a position that I typed 5 pages of the letter "z". Now that's funny. I even snore when I'm online.

Speaking of vision problems, my son needs glasses. It has become very clear that he is near sighted. I'm way overdue for my eye exam checkup so I'm going to plan for us to go together and get new vision some day soon (where soon <= 12 months). This should help him in school, too.

Ok, I have a bunch of things to get done tomorrow (today) so I'm going to try and catch a few more z's but in my own bed this time. I'm starting to fade out here again already.

Feel... Like... $hit...

$DEITY I am way to old for this all night stuff. I just got up from a quick hour of napping. But the reason I got up is because the bank was calling me and wants me to pay the past due amount on my CC. I got like $100 in my checking account and need to pay over $600 to bring the CC to under it's limit. Between that and the bills I'm juggling it's gonna be a fun few weeks/months.

My ex is dropping my son off this evening. I'm happy for having more time with him but I wish she'd have worked out her schedule a bit better this weekend. I could use another many hours of sleep to try and get my body back in rhythm.

The rest of my family is going out to this local sports bar for the Pittsburgh Steelers game. I'd love to go but I need to get laundry done and dishes washed. I'm on my third load of the former and have been putting off the latter pretty well so far.

I'd better go take my meds now. I'm about an hour overdue. This whole pain thing is really getting old. And now, since I missed the first scheduled appointment of babble-help. Now I'll bet that the babble helper will think I'm just a fruit with no real problems. Wouldn't be surprised if that happened. No one ever takes the time to get past my shell. Granted I don't make it easy for anyone to, but still...

Sometimes it sucks to be me.

A night to remember

Well, not really. Especially since I have the memory of a gnat. But it was still a good night.

I had another date with my Chinese lady friend. We'd talked about going to this restaurant down by where I live. It's supposed to be very good. I was going to drive up and get her then drive back down. Once I got there her daughter wasn't home yet from the library. If you ask me that girl studies to much. But then again, this coming from a Collage drop-out. Anyway, we wait for her daughter who was supposed to be home in about an hour. That worked out 'cause my lady friend had been painting outside so this gave her some time to get ready. I just watched some Steven Seagal movie that was on TV. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory I believe it was. So she gets ready and we spend some time chatting waiting for her daughter. The girl finally comes in about a half-hour late. This isn't surprising nor is it worrisome. What else would you expect a 16 year old girl to do? Now, the daughter and I get along pretty well so we spent some time talking then all three of us were talking and before we knew it the time was 1900. So we started thinking about dinner. My lady friend said that it didn't make sense to drive all the way back down just to eat so we decided to go somewhere around there. I said that, if she wanted to come, her daughter was welcome to join us. At first the girl was all about "No, I need to study" but we convinced her to come along. We went to this Lebanese place and had some very good food. I ate to much, that's for sure. The daughter tried the non-alcoholic version of Becks beer and we all shared a giant piece of cheese cake. It was chocolate brownie cheese cake. Then we went back to her place and talked a bit before her daughter went to her room to study. While my lady friend graded some homework (she does some teaching) we put on a movie. I fell out sawing some serious logs for half the movie. Got to see the beginning and end. After I woke up we talked for a few more hours which I barely remember because I was 85% asleep. However I was able to get home ok. I left her place about 0130 but when I got home I couldn't sleep. I felt exhausted but just couldn't sleep. So I watched some movies and TV shows I "TiVo'ed" and then went about catching up on some email and junk. Which leaves me here. I hope I can at least take a nap a bit later today. Still, it was very nice and comfortable being with her and her daughter.

Programming Paradigms

Just ran across this today...

Using Design by Contract in C by Charlie Mills -- Design by Contract is a programming approach that formalizes the interface between callers and callees, leading to more robust and disciplined code. If your language lacks formal support for DBC, though, are you stuck? No--Charles Mills describes the design and implementation of Design by Contract for the C programming language.

Design by Contract is a really great way to develop applications. It was first put forward in 1988 with the book Object-Oriented Software Construction by Dr. Bertrand Meyer (2nd edition published in 1997). This book was the impetus for the development of one of the best OO languages that exists, Eiffel. What is interesting about the article by Mr. Miller is that not only has he described a way of developing C programs under the DBC methodology, it's also that C is capable of using this mythology without becoming so convoluted and complex that the code is unmanageable and unmaintainable. It won't be a elegant as an Eiffel program but it will be something you can easily include in your systems development or any large project.

Ok, call me a geek but I think this stuff is fascinating. I am wanting to get back into programming so learning C and also DBC will be a Very Good Thing™. In another life I was a professional programmer. Between 1989 and 1995 I was a mainframe COBOL programmer (developing under MVS, for those who might know these kinds of things). I'm not going to go into my "Why COBOL doesn't suck" rant right now but suffice to say that it was a good and fun time. Then I accidentally became a UNIX sysadmin and web developer overnight and haven't had the chance to do any major development since. Oh, I do get to hack stuff here and there, mostly using bash, perl and php. But it's not the same as developing something that can be more than just a minor little tool or one-off. So I have decided to try and get back into being a "real" programmer.

The plan is to teach myself using some of the better books and web resources. So far I have worked out a program like this -

1. (Re)learn basic programming fundamentals using the book Programming From The Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett
   
2. (Re(re))learn C using the book C Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Michael Vine
   
3. Build on that with more advanced C using Linux Programming by Example by Arnold Robbins
   
4. Finally, GUI programming with GTK+ Programming in C by Syd Logan
   

I also have the books User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky and C Nitty-Gritty by Klaus Schröder as well as K&R 2e and a plethora of other books to draw on for information and help as needed. The only difficulty I have is that it's hard to do anything with a 7yo around. If I can get 15 minutes without hearing "DAAAAAAAAAD! Come here!" it'd a miracle.

Geek voting

Geek voting,
originally uploaded by x-nc.

I was wearing my Red Hat Official Mirror t-shirt when I voted. No one knew what the heck it meant but I figured I'd show a little spirit for the community.

Image hosting compliments of flickr.com.

I Voted

That's what the sticker on my shirt says. And I honestly didn't know who I'd vote for until that last second before I pulled the lever. It doesn't really matter, though. This election is going to be far worse than 2000 with the litigation and accusations and recounts. It's possible that we will not know who won the election until after Inauguration Day. This whole system is breaking down. We need a new way to run this country. Unfortunately there's no way to fix it short of revolution. I definitely don't want that extreme of a "solution." We should get rid of the electoral Collage at least. It served it's purpose once but that was a long time ago. Also, it would be good to withhold results of all the states votes until after every state in the union has closed their polls. These two things would help make for a better election process and also would be more accurate WRT who wins and who loses. Oh well... It's not gonna happen. There's way to much money involved in the current governmental process. None of the elected members of our government would want things to change.

The rest of the day was a total bust. I couldn't make it into work so there's another day or doom on my chart. [Side comment: The only reason I was able to vote is because the school is right behind my house. I was able to drag myself there and back but that's about all I'm good for today.] My mail server went down this morning. It's funny how much we rely on email these days. I feel like there's a big hole in my day. The server is my own so I know what the likely causes are. The only problem is that it's co-located in another state. Not with one of those big name companies but with a friend of mine. He's got a little business and he's been letting me ride his pipe for free. I just need to make sure that my mirrors don't suck up all the bandwidth. Got to throttle ftp quite seriously. I've been trying to get a pipe to where I'm living for over two years now but I can't get a decent line that works. Verizon(sucks!) is the only game in town as they have not let any other provider, like Covad, put equipment in their CO. I tried a Verizon DSL link twice. The first time it never worked at all. The second time it worked for a couple of months then went whack-o again. I was paying ~$100/month for 1.5M/128K and it was broken. Speakeasy(yea!) has a line that's, and I'm not exaggerating, 6M/768K for $115/month. Speakeasy uses Covad. Therefore I'm s-k-rude. Verizon has just started rolling out fiber pipes to end users. They are claiming 6M/2M lines. That's ungodly big and would be wonderful to get but who knows when (or if) it will be available in my area. I think they've done a test run in TX and the word is that some of the cities up north of me have it available. We'll just have to wait and see.

I only thought of killing myself once today. Doing the car wreck thing, you know, but that's to unpredictable and really messy. I'd have to drive off a cliff or something for it to really be viable but there's no cliffs around here. I must say that the thoughts of suicide are getting fewer and smaller lately. Maybe because I'm deluding myself into thinking that the nice Chinese lady (have I mentioned her?) might actually be interested in pursuing a relationship. Maybe it's the Wellbutrin. Who knows? I don't.

I guess that's about it. My son is with my mom and my nieces today (no school due to elections) so I should take some time to rest before he comes back home. I should watch some of the TV shows I've recorded. The last new episode of Star Trek: Enterprise would work. I doubt I'd have enough time to watch the Farscape mini-mini-series. One hour vs four hours and all...