Yeah, I only got three hours of sleep. Now I'm back at work. Grr. At least it's a beautiful day.

I never made it home. This seemingly innocuous piece of software ended up disabling my entire mail server for seven hours. Now it's almost 8:30 and I still haven't slept...normally I'd just take the day off. But today is the office staff review followed by a free food & drinks bonanza. So I have to make it back. After I make it home. After I make sure everything here is running smoothly.

I was almost out of options this time. By hour six, I had almost resigned myself to restoring from yesterday's backup, meaning I'd throw away a day's worth of e-mail from everyone. On top of the fact that the maintenance I was supposed to do all went wrong, so I would've wasted tons of time getting us back to where we were the day before. Luckily (skillfully?) I managed to isolate the problem in hour eight and brought things back up without any problems. Except, of course, that now I have to explain to my boss why I'm going to be out this morning, catching some sleep.

The thing about computers is that there's no point getting frustrated: they don't have any empathy. You either solve the problem or not. I solved it.

Let there be Heath! Since Helena wanted a name for her fellow traveller, I've decided to go ahead and update the nicknames page with Heath's dossier. If she wishes to edit said information, I'm sure she can figure out how to get there.

Oh, and by the way, I'm at work. East coast time. I've been here for 3 hours. It's not fun. Hopefully I can finish up soon and catch some z's.

I found out Spartan is playing at Bethesda Row. Yay! Then I realized it's playing next Saturday, not this Saturday. Damn.

As far as a credibility gap is concerned, I think this says it all. The fact that the administration is resorting to this early shows how desperate they've become.

Any district residents know if Spartan is playing somewhere this Saturday? I'd really like to see it opening night.

Ranting time. Sorry. This is not coherent thought: it is more faulknerian.

At the risk of offending some people, it's time to pull behind Kerry now. There, I said it. I'm proud of the time I spent helping Dr. Dean. I'm proud of going to Iowa. I'm proud Dean won the first primary in the nation. I'm proud to continue to work strongly with the local people I met here through the Dean movement. They and I will continue to fight for real progressive change.

With that said, I'm tired of people trotting out "Bush-lite". Dean used it as a rhetorical move, not as an actual critique. Joe Lieberman, as conservative as I've made him out to be, is still far to the left of Bush. I'm sick of Nader lovers. I'm sick of the Green party. I'm sick of people who seem to take comfort in losing because they have "principles".

Yes, Kerry played dirty. But life is dirty. Politics is dirty. We don't need another Dem who brings a knife to a gunfight. We need a fighter. Dean was that fighter. Kerry got shot up, bled badly, nursed his wounds, and fought back. We need to make sure he keeps shooting against Bush.

Unlike Edwards, Kerry spurned matching funds. The good doctor always said that with 2 million people coughing up $100, we could beat Bush. And I think we can do that.

Do I have reservations? Sure. Will I campaign for Kerry as enthusiastically as Dean? Two weeks ago I would've said no. I still probably wouldn't knock on doors for Kerry. But the more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the final two days in Iowa.

I had been doing very little hard work. Just pushing some buttons, chatting with people, etc. Sure, I was "training" people to go out, but the number of people training dropped in the last two days. And I realized that if I wasn't actively helping, that Dean could lose. My inactivity was hurting. So I got out and knocked on doors. I didn't want to walk into the Val Air that evening and know that my sloth cost Dean the election. The last two days hurt: they were cold and not fun. But that night, when the bad news came in, I didn't feel terribly bad. We had organizational problems, but those weren't my fault. Neither were the bad advertisements. I did the best that I could. Dean didn't lose because of me, and if I hadn't been there he would've done worse. That ability, the ability to help everyone "make a difference" is important. Because once you get people convinced they are making a difference, then the opposite is also true: when the same people don't help, they are helping to elect Bush.

And that's simply not acceptable. If the people I know sit on their hands because Kerry won, they are helping Bush. If I decide to skip helping out with the election, I'm helping Bush. And that begins today. There is no downtime. So, the past be damned, I'm going to help Kerry however I can. And I'm not going to take any lip from people who think otherwise.

The true test of the "Anybody But Bush" was always the Dean people. We built a movement. We build a candidacy. We generated more money and support than any other Democrat has ever received in the history of the United States. Mull on that. We still lost, because of some crazy voters in Iowa. But if the Dean people get behind Kerry, he can't lose. The Toles cartoon is about us: the people who supported the good doctor. If all of us who wore our ABB and "Redefeat Bush" stickers get behind Kerry, he will become the next president of the United States. While I've always thought the Democrat would win in November (*standard catching UBL exclusion!), I think the Dean voters are still annoyed.

Count me as no longer annoyed. I'll help the Dean movement on the local level. On the national level, I'll help Kerry.

End rant.

Enough said. I wish I'd had this cartoon months ago when I was telling people we could put a monkey in a suit and it would win in November. Dems are angrier at any point than we have been in the past decade. It's like 1994 in reverse...only this time the President is also up for re-election. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

Less people, more social, last night. If these half-political, half-social Dean events become a regular fixture, they could be cool. (And it would appear that Bossa needs the business!) Although Kevin might disagree...he's evidently hurting this morning. At one point I was seriously regretting the free tickets to the Caps game I could've had if I'd been willing to socialize with one of our clients at the same time. Thankfully, some food/conversation at the Reef swung things back in the other direction, so it ended up being fun for all parties.

On a related note, since Helena and Kevin both expressed questions about nomenclature yesterday, I figure I should point them to the not-so-handy guidebook listing the nicknames of people. It's not self-explanatory, but it is fun to guess who's who on the list. Fortunately, every description is somewhat nebulous.

I'm off to enjoy some happy hour bickering with Gwyn and friends. I don't know whether I want more people to show up for political reasons, or less for social reasons. Either way, I'm sure nothing will get done. But that's life, eh?

In the meantime, my scratch pad for css changes is located here. Try not to sql hack it...I don't think much is exposed, but I'd rather not have to restore from backup. And don't expect the IE and Firefox versions to look similar. I'm going to code it compliant, then walk back for IE if I feel like it. Which, right now, I don't.

This is a combination monday/tuesday choice, but it's a no brainer. The credibility gap is simple: Scott McClellan yesterday said this:

The trouble when Scott says something is "nonsense", the reporters realize he is refusing to deny it. You can only cry wolf so many times before people stop believing you, and since he's claimed other times that things are "nonsense" instead of untrue, he's lost credibility with the media and the American people.

Of course, Aristide has now publically said he was kidnapped by the United States. So Scott has egg on his face. And he's not wiping it off well..

So I realized I was doing the online DC tax form wrong, and when I ended up correcting myself I managed to score a refund. Not as large as the federal one, but still impressive. I'm happy about that.

On a tangent, I realized two weekends ago that I'm a pretty lousy listener. I tend to either let people drone on continuously or interrupt them with pointless questions. On the other hand, I'm an excellent interrogator: within about a minute I can normally tell if someone is lying to me, or isn't telling the whole truth, and within five minutes I usually am able to extract key details that shed greater light on the story in question.

The real problem, with my listening skills and interrogation tendencies, is simple interest: everyone wants to tell stories to other people, but no one is really interested in listening to them. The trick is to either buy into the social compact, politely listen to someone describing how boring their day was and how Unbelievably Hard it is to do Their Very Important Job, only to allow yourself to go off on a rant the minute they finish about Your Super-Mega Important Job. I'm not a huge fan of this technique. I'd rather have people tell me my story is boring, and stop there. The other method is to embellish beyond rational belief: this way your stories are interesting, even if what actually happened wasn't. Instead of saying you went to get lunch and the line was long, simply say you walked in right after a robbery and the cashiers were being interviewed by the police. Through a few facts into the mix and it becomes a cool story. Instead of being late to work because you were out late partying, have a gas explosion in your neighborhood. Or a car accident that you witnessed. Everything's fair game, right?

That's what I've noticed lately: people seem to lie almost without compunction. There's the usual "oh, i'm fine" distraction, or the more nuanced "i had a bad day at work" when obviously work isn't the issue. I spent a good hour talking to a young woman last week about this guy who went on a few dates with her. It was clear from the beginning that something didn't add up in her story: when I called her on it she added more relevant details but by that point the story made even less sense.

That, in the end, is the cost of lying: once you lose veracity, you can't get it back. As soon as you start to shade the truth in a way that appears inappropriate (ie, not for comic effect or to explain a larger meta-narrative), everything takes on a certain hue of denial. At that point all you can do, if one is as socially awkward as I occasionally act, is to keep pushing until you break their will to lie. Not a pretty sight, in the end. Better to keep yourself surrounded by white lies, by the thoughts that everything is fine, that nothing is wrong.

Of course, in my case, it helps to have a fairly charmed (even if star-crossed) life. I mean, I'm sitting in a house with enough technology to run a third-world country. I have enough credit to buy a car tomorrow if I wanted to. My house is cool, but I can sit outside and not give a damn about anyone else. Why would I need to lie? Things are too good to need icing right now...

Which reminds me: the blue room is opening up May 10th or at the end of June, depending on a person applying to live here. If any of you know some people that are interested in living in the best house in the city, send them my way, okay? Thanks. Time to remove the contacts and begin the shutdown procedure.

Yeah, coding got boring after about two minutes. So I clicked on some portishead and surfed for a while. Well, more like an hour or two. That means my busy busy monday consisted of getting a haircut, getting screwed on the metro for reasons unknown, giving my old monitor to an ex-coworker, scarfing down the remains of a calzone (I'll fill you in shortly) while watching the first ten god-awful minutes of 'IJ & The Temple of Doom', hitting the gym, then coming home and messing with the css for a bit before giving up. Internet Explorer just stinks. I'm thinking of telling people they should just get firefox or suffer the wrath of a poorly coded site. It's not my fault IE gets the box model wrong.

The lack of posts this weekend, chiaotzu notwithstanding, was mainly caused by the bright blue, nice and warm weather we had. Here's the reader's digest version of events I failed to cover due to the lack of a computer, the presence of blue skies, and general shenanigans. I had planned to, like last week, somehow manage to spend almost no money. The only spanner in the works was the realization that Sigourney was coming into town and we'd have to hang out. Still, one night only, right? How bad could it be?

Thursday I make plans to meet her in Dupont, along with Jodie and her sig o. After retreiving my brand new monitor, I get a call from Meat who wants to meet up at the same location as Sigourney, so I schedule him in. Nothing makes me feel better than to work in as many people as possible: it manages to satisfy my inability to tell people 'no' while simultaneously gratifying the 'edward must be social' voice screaming in the back of my head. They feel good, I feel good. So I meet up with Meat at DG, trade stories of work and life, then get Sigourney to drop on by and provide her $.02 for Meat's pleasure. Next we roll across the street to snag some dinner at Raku. As usual, the service is sub-par. I really should give them a bad review sometime. At least the sushi was good. Post fish, we moved to U St. and finished things out at Local 16. Even though I only got to see Sigourney for a short while, I had a great time and it reminded me how cool she was...hopefully at some point I'll get the chance to visit the west coast and pay a visit. (Yes, Helena, I know, you're first on the list!)

Friday I got my machine and blew the entire evening starting to set it up.

Saturday I planned more low key computer fun, but the fantastic weather forced me outside for the duration. It wasn't as warm as sunday, but the sky was a perfect shade of blue. I had almost forgotten the difference that makes in my easily altered personality: just one hour of sun and I felt like I could take on the world. Instead, I prevaricated about doing yard work, read a book Helena gave me awhile back, and caught as many rays as possible. In the afternoon, I rolled over to return a sleeping back Loaf conveniently provided to me for my infamous trip to the land of 'Kum and Go' stations. While at her workplace, I idiotically decided to purchase some new tiki torch replacements. At the last party, one torch decided to combust into a wall of flame, leaving me with only two pseudo-workeable models. Both were looking pretty ragged after my morning inspection, so rather than risk burning the house down again, I figured I'd upgrade. At 75% off...I got quite a steal. I spent about the same amount on one copper torchiere for my parental units, only this time I scored three, with larger reservoirs. While there, I managed to confirm Meat's story from Thursday night. Yeah, I said confirm. There were no differences of fact, merely omitted details from both sides. Thinking that Nicole was going to call me, I dallied for a bit, unaware that the temps were dropping. (Nicole was actually supposed to call me on Sunday; whoops!) I ended up catching some dinner, then falling into the trap of enjoying myself on a Saturday night, culiminating with, as is par for the course on evenings involving Loafs presence, almost getting into a fight at a pizza place near woodley park. (I was an innocent bystander but the hungry pizza preppies looked toasty enough to mix it up with anyone, especially if one was trying as I was, to hustle them out of the establishment before things got out of hand.) Post pizza, I manage to walk outside and miss the link by mere seconds. Normally I'd just wait but the temps had dropped below freezing and I was without a jacket.

Late as it was, I still probably could've gone back inside the pizza establishment, but by this point I was halfway across the bridge, so I hailed a cab, offered him my last $7, and climbed in. Little did I know that the cab driver was only to happy to pick me up, so long as he could cruise the strip looking for women to drive. Weird. We ended up picking up a couple of guys who insisted that they needed to go to their office on 11th and L. We kept cruising and finally picked up a woman (since I was conning the guy, tip-wise, I couldn't really complain, and the cab was warm...) and promptly pulled a 180 to driver her home. As soon as she departed, the driver and the guy in the shotgun seat began to berate me and the other officeworker for failing to convert with the strange woman. Keep in mind, we're talking four average looking guys and an average looking woman. Not exactly inspiring stuff.

It was definitely past winning time, and I just wanted to end things as quickly as possible. I got back to the house, jumped out and caught a bit of a movie before crashing.

Sunday was even nicer, with a thin layer of clouds but warmer temps. Perfect for yardwork, so I read some more. Eventually Nicole called and we both decided going to a movie (our original plan) was an idiotic idea on such a gorgeous day. So we had a late lunch at Woodley Park, mere yards from the previous evening's anti-climatic coda. I saw a few people I knew, and Nicole mentioned the possibility of a trip to the Bahamas. I really need to ask her about that...grr. I just realized she'll be in Pennslyvania tomorrow. Oh, well. Hopefully she'll still have her 'berry running. Sunday evening I came back and plowed through some yardwork left over from the weeks after Isabel. Yeah, Isabel. Things in the city just don't decay at the rate I'm used to. You can pile up trees/clippings and they just sit there without any change for months. I realized I need to do a great deal more work, but the plants are still dormant, so hopefully next weekend I can knock a bunch of them out. I will, however, have to snag some more rocks, which means hitting up a friend for a car. I'll worry about that tomorrow. Er...today.

So my plan to

Tonight, if I have some free time (which I won't), I really need to tackle the css on the site. The image floatation has always bothered me to no end, but reconciling the differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox was too difficult. The solution? Simply don't include many images. Now that I know I'll be posting more images, I need to adjust.

Here are some thoughts, although I tend to dislike each group except for the 'minimalist' style. I'm doing a great deal of design thought for work. Don't ask.

While reading three webpages, watching the white house press briefing, instant messaging two different people simultaneously (one in the office, the other in...Mass?) and ordering lunch for a coworker, I found time to appreciate my ability to multitask.

Work rocks, today at least.

Lucky, eh? Well, Brad, I might have scored a cheap weekend next month in the Bahamas today. It would end up costing me about about 1/2 of my friggin' huge tax return I just calculated, leaving the rest to help me attack the still large but ever shrinking amount of debt accumulated from purchasing chiaotzu.

And, yeah, I originally spec'd out a raptor but then I read some interesting statistics about the bottlenecks of first generation fast-spindle SATA drives...it turns out pumping things up to 10,000, while cool, doesn't alter the price/performance break of the 250 drive I scored. Of course, two days ago, hitachi came out with a 300db 10k spindle speed monster...but it'll probably run too pricey anyways. I'm happy with my decision.

I didn't finish my DC tax return (I got to the final step where, as usual, I owe the DC government money...not much, but enough to make me wish they allowed me to deduct capital gains losses...yeah, idle rich, right. Good point.)

A little gabriel, sponge, cake and poe mixing into a musical melange. I haven't ported over my large supply of tunes, but perhaps a little ftp love might help me out from persons in a commonwealth. I'd still want to convert my songs to ogg vorbis, but getting access to some other tunes might be a cool bonus.

Okay, time to get back to lovin' it. A pity I have to work tomorrow...but perhaps then I can cover the past four days of fun in the sun.

To really appreciate how large my new desktop (computer desktop, that is) is, you should check out these two pictures:

Here's the empty desktop with a task bar.

Here's the desktop being used with a couple programs open. I had an image with even more stuff running but I realized a few programs that revealed my secret identity were visible. Hence, less applications in this picture than I could have shown.

1600x1200 gives you tons of space to work with...but if I ever run out I can pick up another monitor and double my area without getting a separete video card. Planning ahead didn't even cost me extra.

So the new box is up and running:

I decided to call it Chiaotzu, for a couple reasons. The first is that it fits in with the naming convention I setup at the office whereby every box gets a DBZ name. I thought about calling it 'AM', from Harlan Ellison fame, but decided Chiaotzu was better, because:

• Chiaotzu was small: my desk is completely clear as you can see; the keyboard and media pad "sleep" in the drawer but come out to play for the next reason
• Chiaotzu was telepathic; my box uses bluetooth to connect wirelessly to my keyboard, mouse, media control pad and even my cell phone
• Chiaotzu was somewhat funny looking, and as you can tell, the XPC has a mirrored face which reflects everything
• And finally, Chiaotzu was fairly powerful, which fits in well with the 64-bit demon contained within the tiny frame

The specs are simple: AMD64 2.0 gHz processor, a gigabyte of memory, a 250 gigabyte serial ata hard drive, a GeForceFX 5900XT video card, a combo dvd player/cd-rw burner, full usb 2.0 and firewire ports on front and rear, as well as 5.1 surround sound. The lcd is a 20" model from Dell with a sub-16ms response time, 1600x1200 native resolution, and enough brightness to light up the room even if everything else is turned off. The super-cool wireless keyboard/media pad/mouse combo is a logitech dinovo media desktop. It's the perfect combination of form and function: aesthically its the best keyboard on the market, bar none. The mouse, likewise, is great to look at, but houses the most accurate optical sensor on the market today. And the numpad is completely separate from the keyboard, doubling as a "media pad" which basically means you can use it to remotely control playing music on your computer. I've tested all three out and they work seamlessly. The bluetooth hub doubles as a mouse recharging staiton, so when I stop workingon chiaotzu I can store the keyboard and media pad in the drawer and the mouse back in its charger, leaving my desktop completely clean. Amazing.

I've been ripping some cds and delaying the inevitable work on my taxes so far. My office is about 75% cleaned up from setting chiaotzu up, but there's still a little bit left. Nicely, now, the firewall and dsl modem are in plain sight, so I can tell if anything is amiss with the network. Combined with my new monitor, the whole desk is barren of any technology. I never thought I'd save so much room by moving to a shuttle and a flat panel monitor, but the difference is extraordinary.

The last several days have seen multiple fun events that I've failed to mention because of my lack of hardware. It's time to get back in the game, so I'll make up for lost time.

I almost forgot: I took this picture with my phone, and then (using chiaotzu's telepathy!) uploaded the image in seconds to chiaotzu, then sftp-ing the file to the web server. Total time: less than a minute from start to finish. Instead of paying the ridiculous $5 a month surcharge to t-mobile, I can now take pictures for free and upload them at my leisure. As a bonus benefit, I can now use my super-small spy camera brad hooked me up with awhile back. It's twice as small as my cell phone so it can go places my cell can't. Either way, this means the website will have more images on it in the future, so people should start cleaning themselves up before heading out. Consider yourselves warned.