Here are actual journal entries. Generally day to day stuff that only stalkers and the unemployed are interested in reading. I originally started doing a blog to keep an open diary of sorts for all to see, like most blogs. I decided to push this off of the main page when I realized my day to day activies are as boring as most peoples. Since I don't want to give up writing an open journal thingy I decided to give it it's very own home on the site, I don't expect anyone to actually read it since all the good stuff is still on the frontpage but it makes me feel good so what the hell. At the moment a lot of cruft that aren't proper journal entries are being displayed here and in in the journal archive, this is because I used to use the "journal" heading for most random stuff in the website and I need to plow through the archives re-labeling stuff, maybe II'll finish and maybe I won't, it's a mystery :) Last five entries on display here for more check the archives.

Visit from Fast Eddie
Entered: 2008-08-05
Edited: 2008-08-05
Type: journal

Thanks to this guy:

Coming into town uninvited I get the day off from work today! Yippee!

The best part is that late last night it took a slight turn to the north before making landfall, which means we're getting lots of rain but not much wind from it. So we're just hanging out enjoying the heavy rain and not going to work. So far we haven't had much wind but it is supposed to pick up in our part of town around 1pm this afternoon and get into the 30mph range. Less than we saw from the glancing blow from Rita a couple summers ago.

I'll be spending the day working on this:



With any luck we'll have some flooding in the low intersections around our neighborhood and have to stay home again tomorrow ;-)

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A day in the life
Entered: 2003-07-07
Edited: 2003-07-07
Type: journal

Ever have one of those mornings where you were up way past your bedtime the night before and were expecting to sleep well into your alarm clock's attempt to rouse you but suddenly find yourself awake and alert about ten minutes before the alarm goes off? Then you decide to just lay your head back down for the ten minutes left before you're supposed to get up and next thing you know your alarm has been going off for half an hour and you're groggy as hell? Do you then begin to question whether or not you really did wake up a few minutes early or if you just dreamed that you woke up a few minutes early? Because that's how my day started. One other thing I want to know is how is it possible to be dreaming, and to feel totally rested and alert in the dream but if you're awakened mid way through you're all groggy and disorientated?

In any case that pretty much set the tone for how I felt all day. Not exactly a bad thing mind you, as a result of being in a groggy dreamlike state all morning I got a lot of work done an was surprise by how quickly lunch time snuck up on me. Lunch consisted of getting a sandwich from Subway to eat while sorting out various and sundry bills that required my attention. I was a good boy today and paid every single one of them all in one sitting: cable modem, phone, Linux Fund credit card and my National Geographic credit card. Unfortunately the movers finally caught up with me and realized that they never got around to charging my Visa check card for the second half of my moving bill. So I had to pay that today, about a grand even. On top of that on the third I had a notice on my door from the apartment managers office kindly informing me that they'd be cutting off my electricity on the 9th if I didn't pay the $400 power bill that had been acruing since I moved in, apparently there was some sort of SNAFU when I filled out the paperwork to transfer the power bill to my name. This annoys me to no end. Fortunatly all of this has occured after I became un-unemployed, so this is merely annoying as opposed to life-threatening. My life has been remarkably well timed as of late.

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Things I did today
Entered: 2003-06-24
Edited: 2003-06-24
Type: journal

This is yet another attempt to keep the journal portion of the site updated more often than the main page. Since the whole point of adding the seperate journal section was so that I could have a place to write about mundane details of my daily life without crowding out more interesting and timeless works of modern literature displayed on the main page.... I forget where I was going with this sentence but I rather like the way it sounds so I think I'll just go ahead and leave it in[1]. Anyway I just thought I'd pop into the much neglected journal and babble on for a bit about what I've been up to the past couple days. In theory I could go waaaaay back to the last time I updated the journal and fill in sort of a daily report card but that would take a while and quite frankly I don't trust my memory further back than lunch today so it would be a rather pointless exercise. For no particular reason I feel like talking about what I did today, and maybe a little bit of yesterday too.

I'll start with today because I just remembered this morning and want to get it written down before I lose it again. This morning got off to a rocky start, for starters I woke up, which is a bad way to start the day. Not only did I wake up, but I woke up an hour later than I wanted to, which threw off my rythym for the whole morning. Ideally I like a good two hours to myself in the morning before going to work, this gives me a chance to drink some coffee in peace, check my email, read comics and news online and generally prepare myself to face the world. When I oversleep I'm denied this luxury and it really throws off my whole day and if I'm too rushed I sorta forget things, like bringing black socks to work, or a shirt, little things like that. Since I woke up early than expected I had to rush and decided to make up for lost time by taking a quick shower before doing anything else. By 8:20 I was showered, had my bike clothes on, had my work clothes packed up in my bag and my coffee was just about ready, I was doing pretty good. This gave me 25 minutes to drink my coffee and get caught up with the world before I needed leave for work. Then my entire world was thrown into chaos when I discovered that my cable modem was down. I stared at the monitor in shock for a while, after I recovered my wits I starting troubleshooting trying to determine if any of my equipment was at fault and if so, how quickly I could fix it. Unfortunately nothing was wrong on my end, the problem was entirely in the hands of Time Warner. I felt doomed, depressed, isolated and cut off. More importantly I hadn't had but a few sips of my first cup of coffee and it was already time to leave for work. I couldn't bring it along in my thermos this morning as I was carrying my framed print of Jin's The Universal Turning Machine to work and didn't have room for both the print and the thermos, and more importantly didn't have time to repack without being late. So I rode off work sans coffee. As a result of this drama in the AM my rythym was off all day and I mostly wanted to just go home. I still managed to get some work done, even though my mojo was running pretty low.

Then I dodged a bunch of traffic, outran a Jeep at a traffic light (on my bike), dodged some more traffic, bunny-hopped the speed bumps in my apartment complex and rolled into my apartment. I could go on but I'm bored of writing about stuff that just happened so I'll stop now.

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[1] I suspect that Tolstoy used a similar approach when writing War and Peace , those that have read it unabridged will udoubtably agree and if not are probably lying about having read the unabridged version.

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Ouch
Entered: 2003-05-06
Edited: 2003-05-07
Type: journal

I've been exercising lately, quite a bit actually. I've also lost a lot of weight, this a good. I'm not sure how exactly it happened but I went from being about 140lbs or so when I graduated college to something like 170lbs eighteen months later when I got laid off. As best as I can figure here's what happened: While in school I wasn't eating out a whole lot and had such a hetic schedule that I wasn't eating on a regular basis in general. I'd often get busy and forget to eat, or would be too busy/lazy to go groccery shopping. Plus I was walking a lot on a daily basis, I was in the habit of parking the car once when I first got to campus and then just using it as a locker, I was probably walking a good 2-3 miles a day w/out realizing it. As a result I was always thin and fit looking. Then I got a real job. I'd drive to work, park my butt in my chair for eight hours then go home and veg in front of the computers. To make matter worse we had free sodas in the fridge and free hotpockets (or similar) in the freezer to snack on. Plus for the first time in my adult life I could afford to eat out whenever I liked and order as much food as I liked! Wow! Despite the fact that this was the time I was also getting seriously into cycling I was still consuming far more calories a day than I was burning, maybe during the summer I was breaking even for an average week, but during the winter the most exercise I was getting was in lifting the pint glass to my mouth. See where this is going?

What really did it for me was when I last had my DL renewed and finally had photographic evidence (mirrors often show us what we want to see) that I was turning into a fat ass. My solution was to start exercising during the winter! I bought a training stand for the bike, put my pull-up bar back in the ceiling and dusted off my dumbells. By the time the weather forced me indoors I had a nice little routine of stationary biking, pushups, pullups, situps and dumbell curls going. Then I got laid off. This was actually a good thing, for my health at any rate. Since I reverted back to college eating habits pretty quickly.

Fortunately I don't eat when I'm bored, or depressed or lonely. Sometimes when I get bored I like to cook (baking is fun!) and then enjoy my creation, but that's an exception. In general when there isn't a social aspect to my meal I view eating as a nuisance and only eat enough to stop being hungry and then get on with whatever it is I was doing. Also I don't much like fast food, and in fact had given up on it until I discovered Jack in the Box after moving here, I'll grab a sandwich from them maybe once every other week or so. Just by eating less and following my moderate exercise routine I lost between 15-20lbs from the time I lost my job and the day I arrived in Houston. I'm currently back down in the 140's, have dropped all the fat from my face and neck and am fighting a slow war of attrition against what's left of my love handles.

Since moving into my new place the exercise habits have only gotten better. There's a "fitness center" here that's free for residents to use, it's really just a collection of nicer home workout equipment. Some stair masters, some statioinary bikes, a treadmill and a home-gym thing for weight lifting. The stairmaster is just stupid and I'd rather just hop on my real bike instead of the stationary ones but the weight machine and the treadmill became my friends. I turned to the treadmill because the biking situation near my place is pretty sad, actually it's pretty sad all over town compared to Anchorage. Long story short biking is now more of a weekly activity for me instead of a daily one. I really wanted to fill that aerobic gap so there was the treadmill. I gave it shot and noticed to my surprised I kind of enjoyed it. The last time I tried running was several years ago, before I had taken up biking, and it fairly well kicked my ass. I couldn't run a mile without feeling like vomiting blood and collasping from exhaustion. This time it was different, thanks to all the biking (and hiking) over the past couple years I was actually in quite good shape under all that fat, especially cardio-vascularly and in my legs. I slowly eased myself into treadmill running before the damn thing broke. I'd been using about a month, just long enough to get hooked, and rather than wait around for management to replace it I started running at a nearby park.

My first week of road running proved to be an unbearable agony, then I bought better shoes and life became good. I had been under the mistaken impression that my cross training (or trail running) shoes would be fine for pavement. I figured that if they were good for running over rough terriean, rocks, roots and mud they'd hold up great on pavement. Big, big, big mistake. After buying a pair of light, springy running shoes most of the pain and discomfort stopped. Now I'm a happy runner.

My weekly workout schedule goes like this:
Mon-Tues-Fri: Run three miles in the morning. The course at the park I run at is almost exactly three miles and is pretty pleasant for running. My morning run breaks down into three segments. First 3/4 mile is treated like a warm-up, if any aches and pains don't go away during this stretch I'll abort the run to avoid hurting myself (hasn't happened yet.) I start out around 5mph and speed up to around 6.5-7mph when I reach the milage marker I stop at and do another round of stretching. Then I take off for my timed mile, just a measured mile on the trail that I carefully time. My fastest mile is 7:30, which puts me at 8mph. Not bad I think for someone who's been running for all of six weeks. From here it's 1 1/4 mile back to the car which I run at a more comfortable pace than the timed mile but still pretty quick, usually takes me about 10-12 minutes to reach the car, this leg also includes about 100 yds of walking for a cool down. It's hot enough out already that I never fail to completely soak my shirt with sweat when I'm finished. After running I also do situps (30ish) and pushups (25ish, except when a weight training day falls on a running day, then only 15)

Weight training I do every four days, this seems to be a good recovery time for my muscles on the routine I'm on. Here's what I'm able to do with the equipment available. I do four sets of each, trying for 6-8 reps per, since I'm working on building mass now. Eventually I'll switch to a higher rep routine when I reach certian weights.

Bench press: 90lbs currently, goal 140lbs
Curls: 50lbs current, goal 100lbs.
Butterfly Press: 60lbs current, goal ???
Lat Pulldown: 100lbs current, goal 140lbs
Tricep exts: 40lbs current, goal ???
Shrugs: 80lbs current, goal ???

The goals that are at 140lbs were just arbitrarily set at my body weight. Curling is at 100lbs because I figure once I can curl that much I'll be able to, quite literally, sweep any woman off her feet and carry her around, that's just something I've always thought a man ought to be able to do. Thanks to leverage I figure my carrying capacity is roughly twice that of my curling capacity, so petite ladies are already in danger ;-> I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever be able to reach my 100lb goal though as even 50lbs hurts right now. Not my muscles or joints but the bones in my forearm, just behind my wrists, like the bone is flexing a bit because of the weight, or because of the force my tendons are applying where they connect. If this proves to be a barrier in my training then I guess the big girls are just out of luck, as my newest criteria is that if I can't carry you, I can't date you! Any wonder that I'm single? Once I'm all buff and sexy looking I figure it won't matter if I'm shallow and rude, I mean that's the way it works right? ;->

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One life packaged and delivered to my door COD.
Entered: 2003-03-02
Edited: 2003-03-02
Type: journal

Music:
Miles Davis: New Trails
Thelonius Monk: Monkism
Soul Coughing: Irresistable Bliss & Ruby Vroom


Ok so I know I promised I'd be updating the journal section of the site almost daily in my last update and once again I've proved myself a big fat liar. However I do have a valid reason this time: my shit got here almost two weeks earlier than I expected, only a few days behind the shit I had FedExed here. So between dealing with the boxes from FedEx and unpacking all of my other flaming worldly possessions I've been rather busy, too busy in fact to bother with updating the journal.

Other than the arrival of my material possessions nothing exceptionaly noteworthy has happened this week, except that I also have a cable modem and local phone service. So I'll just write about my stuff tonight. First the casulty report.

Wounded:
The (formally) free standing headboard/hutch thingy for my bed. Damage: right leg broken clean off, it's currently propped up on a cooler that's almost exactly the right height.

KIA:
One 10GB Hard drive from my server. This happened to be the system drive for the server, losing it is a bad thing, mainly because the server had been doing NAT duties on the network and I was hoping to just drop it in place with only a few tweaks because of my new IP address. I had to spend a few hours building myself a new router out of the former webcam server, which now resides happily in a closet right next to the cable jack.

One 120GB hard drive, from my server. This was the main data drive. Fortunatly I hadn't wiped the old data drive from that machine and only lost about five weeks of data as a result. Also good is that this drive is still under warranty and will be speeding away to RMA land tommorow.

That's it nothing else was damaged, all the other PC's and junk check out fine, as do all of the home electronics and everything else I've unpacked.

For the time being I have my local file server up and running on an 8gb drive scavenged from the experimental server (which had way more storage than it needed anyway) and the old 40gb data drive. I'm slowly getting the basic services I want it to perform installed and configured with DNS and NFS being the two biggies. Since I'm no longer running acerbic.org out of my home I can take my time and not scramble with getting mail and web services up, I will eventually for convenience but it's not at all critical. It's also nice, in a very geeky sorta way, to have my "lab" back again. I keep a lot of spare of computer parts around, mostly bits that got replaced in various upgrades over the years, and am thus well equipped to deal with misc hardware failures and for any troubleshooting work I have to do. As I'm now the most technically profiecent computer geek in my new group of friends I'm getting support calls from time to time and have in fact already done a fair bit of hardware work for Jin. It's been rather frustrating trying to work on her systems without my full set of resources at hand. Now that my I have my "lab" back I'll finally be able to take what will be her linux box for a few days and properly beat it into submission. I'm just going to gut the flakey bastard and reassemble it in a manner that make sense here on Earth, then install Mandrake for her and take the time to explain to the kernel how to use all the hardware crammed in there. Getting that beast working should firmly establish my god-like reputation as an uber-geek :)

Next Sunday I'll be brewing again (que singing of angles) for the first time since arriving here in Houston. I'd better not have forgotten any of the steps as I'll have an audience of three or four people plus whatever neighbors walk by and go "what the fuck?!" If I have the energy I may cook up two batches, one quickie like my nut-brown ale and then something big and mean that'll need time to mellow, like the winter warmer I finished off just before leaving. I've already got a lead on a beer fridge that will hold three five gallon kegs, and have joined the local homebrewers club too. The beer front is looking good.

Things are going pretty well overall: I'm doing far better on the new friends front than I expected (hi guys!), Jin hasn't filed a restraining order (yet), I've found a cool apartment for 2/3's the price of my dump in Anchorage, I have reliable car (loathsome little beast though it may be), I've located the homebrewing scene and I'm actually learning my way around town better than I expected too (yes Jin poor as my navigational skills may be, what you've witnessed has been a far better showing than I've ever managed in the past.)

Now I just need to find, in no particular order: a job, a good coffee shop so I can stop buying (shudder) Starbucks beans, a proper tobacco shop (hey I smoke a pipe and like a good cigar from time to time), a liquor store that stocks micro-brews from the northwest (Black Butte Porter I miss you so) and a girlfriend. Then my life here will be complete and I can start planning my next move :)

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