simply Tive

Amagami SS, filthy tricks & "Christians"

2011-04-09T22:03:13Z

So, not too long ago I finished watching "Amagami SS" (a sort of comedic romance series), which I ended up enjoying a lot more than I'd expected to. Up till the last episode. That's the one which reveals how one set of people planned to play a really filthy trick on someone. And also how another filthy trick was played more than once. For a while I was puzzled, a bit: why is the filthy-dirty-tricks-thing bothering me this much? But then I realized: wait a minute! Of course those filthy tricks bother me! Since such filthy tricks would have been typical of my oh-so-"Christian"-(yeah, right) class mates at East Edmonton "Christian" school. (Or the WECS-ers, when I attended it, to be completely fair.)

So for a while now I've been remembering the filthy tricks that were played on me by those who call themselves "Christian", recalling who did what, realizing a bit more about what a certain backstabbing in grade 9 meant about a former class-mate who left before grade 8, re-evaluating how totally psycho one person's actions reveal them to be, and, in general, been... A lot less laid back about certain things than I usually am.

Someone asked me: what has turned you so against Christianity? Why do I *hate* "Christians" this much? Short A: because of how horribly "Christian" class mates (mostly EECS-ers, also WECS-ers) treated yours truly... For ten years. Without almost any Christian intervention by any of the "Christian" witnesses, teachers, or parents of those around. I plan to write a possibly very long article about that not too long from now. My family has a right to know the truth. And I figure, the evil ones I knew will be continue to get off way more lightly than they have ever deserved, if I don't publicly document the sins they committed against me. But if I do publicly document them, then at least maybe their next potential victims might be a little more fore-warned, and fore-warmed is fore-armed and all that...

still alive, etc

2011-03-31T23:05:29Z

So, it's been even more ages and ages and ages and ages since the last time I blogged about anything than I'd remembered. If that bothered anyone, I'm sorry. It was just that work took a turn for *almost* the absolute worst. Which left me not wanting to have to think about that or any other problem after work. So I just stopped taking part in the interactive parts of the 'net. (Except for okaying/refusing friend requests on fb: they nag when you take too long to react, and besides, since that's about all I do on fb I figure it doesn't count.)

After months and months of frustration and not being able to find a bug that had to be found and fixed before the end of the year (as far as I knew then anyway), and despair and mistakenly thinking something was fixed, and more despair, and more despair, I finally did in the end find the cause of a mysterious bug that caused one of our Solaris programs to crash on start-up about 22.5% of the time, but only after I'd marked a certain Solaris problem-report I'd worked on as fixed. Which kind-of seemed to say that I was "the one what done it"... Which wasn't true, but it sure looked like it. It was just a complete nightmare, for way too long. And one of the funny things: my team-leader says he didn't notice. Maybe I'm deficient at showing frustration, I suppose...

I don't really know what more to write about, nothing really fundamental has changed in my personal life. Except maybe the fact that we're now taking care of a dog for the daughter of a chat-friend of Dad's (it's a loooong story). But we've had Deira over as a temporary house-guest/pet for quite a while now, and she's an absolute darling of a "wiener dog" I think Americans call 'em. Anyway, she's smart, loving, and an absolute scamp. But none of us would want her to be any other way...

reached a milestone at work...

2009-10-15T22:31:00Z

So, I just saw that my last post was 7 weeks ago. Back then I mentioned looking for a crash-during-shutdown of one of our programs. Well, today I finally saw my custom build of that program execute without crashing. Which is a huge relief, I was starting to think that that would never happen. However, it's also something I've been working on for soooooo long and it's been going so very slowly that I'd reached the despair phase. Had stopped even wanting to deal with any problems other than the ones from work, and those only cause they pay the bill and I hafta...

So anyway, today I'm more optimistic, can maybe finally start working on the AIX port soon. Can't be too complacent yet about the non-crashing-ness of today's custom build, though, since there's at least one problem I sort-of skipped over by choosing the well-if-that-doesnt-work-lets-try-the-next-best-alternative... Which does seem to work (or at least, is not leading to a crash), but... the next-best-alternative isn't the one that's supposed to be correct... So, will have at least a few more things to check before producing a testable version. Work's never done, it seems. But then, better to have too much to do than too little of it...

car, work, manga reccs

2009-08-26T22:53:24Z

So once again it's been ages since my last update. Oddly enough *some* things have changed by now!

For one, I'm slowly starting to get used to my new car. I've gathered that the Dutch "Cash for Clunkers" thingy wasn't as good a deal as it was in Germany and the UK, but it did make it easier for me to decide that the time for my clunker had come. And in retrospect I reached that decision barely on time, since a part of the clunker's engine went bust soon after I'd signed the dotted line... So now I have to learn if I *really* have to drop everything and fill-'er-up the second the low-fuel light goes on, or if I can be a little more relaxed about that kind of thing. And how it handles in general, knowing how much it'll accelerate (or not), is it's reported mileage near correct or not and all kinds of stuff like that. One of the harder things to do is unlearning how to shift gears according to that eco-drive stuff, I was surprised to hear that the whole eco-driving is actively bad for any car's engine, which meant that all of a sudden I had something new to unlearn, and also something new to try to remember how-did-I-used-to-do-this-two-years-ago?

Another nice thing is that my UCS2 fixes (that I'd started on working on way back in January) finally got incorporated into the 7.0 Usoft-current-version tree. After which we only needed to fix things so a new daily build would run and all. And now I'm working on adding the same fixes, as far as they apply anyway, to the not-yet-released-soon-to-be new-Usoft-version tree. Unfortunately at least two of the resulting executables crash, apparently during shutdown, which... is interesting, anyway. I'm hoping the same bug is present in the Windows version, because debugging in Windows works *lots* better than debugging on Solaris... But oh well, will see, I hope. Am in a bit of a rush because the 7.0 stuff needs to get ported to AIX soon too, and I'm the "port-guy-for-the-daily-builds" in the team. My team also has a "port-person" for 7.0 on non-Solaris environments, and she and I get to trade tips n stuff.

Another cool thing was Erik-Berndt's birthday barbecue. Only Jurjen and I showed up, but that was okay, I thought, just to get us four talking together again. Erik-Berndt and Jurjen were my house-mates most of the times I was in college, and we all got on quite well together. In the mean time Jurjen independently got into manga and things, and he recommended a whole slew of series I'm going to have to check out sometime. A burden, I'm sure! ;-) He mentioned Pluto (amazing how many people recc this, guess this one I'll really have to give a good look-over), K-on, Sketchbook, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and also Dragonball (without the Z)... It's going to be interesting, I guess. Not that I mind...

how (some) things change

2009-07-01T21:47:01Z

So, it's been forever and then some since my last update. No worries: I *am* still alive. Barely. I think.
Which things have changed in the last 11 weeks?

At work, the project-which-refuses-to-die is finally *almost* done. When I mark it's two parts as fixed, both sets of Solaris builds work, and even the Windows' build's web tests succeed, as they have for a while now... Which is about time, since I've been working on mostly only this since half-of-January. I really want to get it officially incorporated in the production build before my vacation (in two weeks and a bit DV), since if I don't... Lots of colleagues will then discover that they need one (or more) of the files *I*'ve locked, and then when I get back DV, I'll have to do more just to get back to where I am now... Which is make-work I'd prefer to avoid... So now I've been busy taking the same UCS-2 fixes and adding them (as far as seems necessary) to the planned next version of USoft, due out this year. Which is cool, with my different options the compiler has spotted some mistakes that are bad ones, I'm in the process of removing those bugs from both the current released and next-to-be-released version, and, well... it's gratifying to know that what you're doing will improve the program clients are using...

I could go on about other changes, but I'll just leave it at the one biggy I'd never have imagined I'd do: taking advantage of the government's incentive to scrap-older-cars-and-replace-em-with-newer-more-environmentally-better-ones... So, if all goes well at the end of the month I'll have a new car... The thought that now *I*'m going to be the one that's scared of oldish-cars-with-scratches-n-dents-on-'em (instead of the other way around) is going to take some getting used to...

life, a web site, etc.

2009-04-14T23:45:50Z

So, it's about time to give an update, methinks. I have been contributing some content at the "Kudo's Bookshelf" wiki, but that's slowed down a lot, since I now plan to publish my original content on a personal web site as well. So I've been reading up on CSS & HTML and designing-a-web-site and even how-to-program-in-Perl (I expect to need Perl for the search-functionality & the dealing-with-CGI stuff; it helps that Perl is also on most of the Unix systems at work, so hopefully that'll be helpful in other ways as well). And that also leads to the question, now that I have a web site, what *else* shall I do with it? Not planning on blogging or wiki-ing or placing a forum, but what else might be cool? Publishing source code? Fan fics? A recommended manga list?

As far as work goes: my current project is still the same, and it's going the same: I just need to do a *little* bit more to get it almost totally done, but that 'little bit more' just seems to keep on going on and on and on... Keep getting further, but keep finding more to do... Reminds me of that 'Littlest hobo' song: "Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down. Maybe tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on..."

life, the universe, etc.

2009-04-02T21:03:09Z

Well, perhaps not quite all that... in 1 post, anyway! ;-)

Have had a 2nd cuz from Canada visit us for a week. It was cool to see her again, and meet her two kids. OTOH, she's both an incorrigible tease, and a practicing Christian. Which led me to two discoveries about myself: 1) I absolutely do NOT want to be touched while driving; I was almost flabbergasted she could consider doing so. And 2) I'm only comfortable talking about my faith life with those who have earned my trust in that respect. I don't plan to discuss such things with anyone "only because they're Christian and they think that that entitles them"... Which I'm not thinking my cuz thought, but it's what her attitude seemed to imply.

And finally, am feeling tired at / of work. I'm checking in the current code; no new interesting problems are expected. So I'm downish, which I often am at the end of things. OTOH, it's been a looong project, other jobs might get some rust out...

Oh, and just one more thing: I read "The Day of Revolution" (about an appearance-wise guy who's biologically female, who decides to live on as a fem); it's pretty good, it has enough good jokes, and I ended up liking and enjoying it more than I expected to.

how things are atm

2009-03-17T23:46:51Z

So, it's been forever and then some (almost) since my last post. Hope y'all haven't been missing yours truly overmuch.... ;-)

Recently I've been having 'fun' writing a few private projects in Ruby at home... I'm putting the 'fun' within quotes, cause that's also involved a ... learning experience or three, and those don't usually tend to be too fun at the time... But, have learned at least one new Ruby 'trick' in the bargain, and have also been able to ask myself some questions I hadn't had occasion to before, so that was good. (If anyone truly cares, it involved how to read command line arguments with 3 different Ruby libraries - doubtless super interesting to a fellow developer, but not so much so to anyone else. Have learned, but also needed to eat some metaphorical crow...)

Have also been wiki-ing for the first time ever. The 'new' Detective Conan wiki opened a short while ago, and I've been adding some stuff from the huge list of story-arc summaries I made a huge project out of a couple of years ago, but stopped about a year ago. There's been some eating-crow involved in that as well, as I realized that some of the summaries were way too oriented towards the things I care about most in D.C. (which is: the meaningful interactions between the main characters and what can be concluded from them), as opposed to the details of each mystery/murder case/ or what-have-you. The extreme expression of which was that I'd "summarized" the six chapter 'Hatamoto family massacre on a liner' story arc in to two sentences (about how Ran had described the boy she liked, how Conan reacted, and how Kogoro reacted to that...) Which isn't *bad*, per se, but it was just too lop-sided towards my personal cares... So I had to add a bit more, and did. It was almost funny, though, the guy that started the wiki had found my expressed interest in contributing to other parts of the wiki than my own planned contributions... a bit limited. Well, I think I'll let how things go speak for itself on my behalf, but it's going to be a loooong time before I'm done even just posting all summaries I have, not to mention the 100+ more chapters which still need summarizing...

As far as work goes, I was permitted to do the 2 day SQL-for-beginners course my company offers last week, and was very glad I'd been able to do so, since my SQL-knowledge badly needed refreshing... Since about halfway thru January I've been working on the 16-bits Solaris port of Usoft Developer, so that's about two months long by now. Though a lot of it hasn't been too fun, since 2 or three weeks ago I've been happy to have been able to build not-immediately-crashing builds of almost all of the programs Usoft consists of. It's been good to see a pretty large amount of invested time result in tangible programs which might not always work correctly yet, but... they're also pretty close to working and the partner I've been pair-programming along with and I have already successfully run some Unicode-containing SQL statements against our 16-bit sqlscript program, as well as some simple Unicode-containing-SQL batchjobs against 16-bit runbatch. We still have some ways to go, though, and debugging on Solaris isn't as good as it would be on Windows (the Solaris debugger doesn't display 16-bits string easily, and it also just sort-of locks up for a minute or so at random, while you're using it, which *really* sucks)... There's a progress report planned for Thursday, hope by then we'll have gotten significantly more bugs sorted out...

how things are; experimenting with some new things

2009-02-05T22:42:35Z

So, it's been *ages* since my last LJ update. Ever since coming back from our vacation in Japan, I haven't really felt like blogging, because life has just gone on as usual, with the normal ups and downs. I have no significant changes, unfortunately, to report. OTOH, I suppose that's better than having really, really bad news.

So, what have I been doing lately? Well, someone on LJ had commented that fanfiction.org is worthless, so I remembered I still have an account there, logged in, and found an advert for a web site that hosts manga per page online. Which is very, very nice. (when the pics download, anyway: that sometimes glitches) Been able to catch up with the newer Negima chapters from after AQS stopped (well, they claim to still have scanlations in the works, but seeing is believing...)

Since my vacation I've also been vacationing from the learning-Japanese efforts. I'm starting to feel ready to start doing stuff on that again, but don't ask when. And an intention isn't a promise..

Recently one of the things I've been playing around with again is downloading LiveCDs of Linux distributions; my PC's been randomly crashing a lot lately (or at least the Vista GUI has been), so I want to check out alternatives. Kubuntu 8.10 worked very well for me, the only thing that didn't work is it wouldn't access my normal Windows drives (the external USB drives were no prob), and it failed to open .Rar files...

I'm also playing around with other browsers than default Firefox. (Since I suspected relatively large memory use by FF might be a possible culprit for my PC probs). So I'm now running the 2nd beta of Firefox 3.1 (which does use less memory). OTOH, it doesn't work well with Hotmail, so for that I'm using Safari (with an updated WebKit from the last two weeks or so)

I'm also playing around with other stuff. Just yesterday I downloaded and ran a MinGW autoinstaller (MinGW == GCC on Windows). I'd played around with MinGW before, but considered it not-really-quite there yet since it didn't seem to support working with wide characters, which is kind of the minimum I really expect... As well as supporting STL. But I also got the MinGW alpha version of GCC 4.3, and that does seem to support wide-chars out-of-the-box... But it also displayed a supposedly wide string (correctly) as output to a DOS shell (which is *not* what I'd been expecting, I figured I'd see a list of question marks, I think that's how command-line Visual Studio would do). So now I'm trying to figure out how to prove it *is* doing what I tell it to, preferrably without resorting to writing-to-a file (it's easy, but I like more elegant solutions)

strip show

2008-10-13T23:51:24Z

So, last night when we were walking thru Kabuki-cho in the evening, some one saw me & my brothers and invited us in English to a strip show. I immediately thought: "no way!"... But since then I've been trying to figure out why even the thought of going to such a show makes me feel empty and somehow a bit dirty. When in a relationship you reach the stage of getting nude in front of a would-be lover (for me, anyway), that creates a certain amount of intimacy: not having any barriers between yourself and your special someone, it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but there's also a confidence that what they see won't disappoint them. But seeing someone strip just because money has hanged hands, without any relationship between the stripping person and the viewers, some how that seems obscene.

travel blog

2008-10-11T12:59:49Z

For anyone who's interested: am blogging about our Japan trip at http://tivetripping.livejournal.com , feel free to check it out...

just a moment

2008-10-06T21:00:41Z

So, this is my first personal post in a very, very long time. If that bothered anyone, I'm sorry. I just haven't felt like writing.

I suppose a part of it's from just before my birthday. I'm 37 now, and the things is, normally I don't give much of a care about things like birthdays (except that they make a nice excuse for a party). After you reach a certain age you can vote, drive, work, and all that, and then what matters IMO is not how old you are, but what you know and what you can do. But this year a not great thought occurred to me. I am just a normal person like anyone else, and I have had certain hopes/aspirations/ambitions for quite a while. So the thought was: "You know, you've had such a sea of time to achieve those goals, but you haven't. So what makes you think you're any more likely to achieve those goals within the *next* 37 years, assuming you live that long?"

So that thought has been bothering me. Sometimes I feel angry/resentful. Some of those goals/etc., yeah, I could have reached them, but it would have been wrong on one level or another, and I'd rather not also cheapen myself (others have done enough enough of that already, TYVM). But why do I have to regret being who I am? At other times I'm tired of the anger and feel like accepting what I can't change. At other times, just the idea of such an acceptance horrifies me: how can I even consider giving up for even a second? And sometimes I feel like I'm such a jerk for not being happy for all the good things in my life, why isn't it enough, it ought to be: I've been a lot luckier than many, after all.

And then there's now: tomorrow's the first day of my vacation, and if everything goes as planned, day after tomorrow me and my brothers will be heading for Japan for about four weeks. We've wanted this for so long, it just seems it's impossible for it to happen. Sometimes I think just the fact that I want something causes the universe to mess me over and steal it (that too, it sometimes seems, has happened all too often). So a part of me is happy, a part exhausted, a part anxious, etc. Things just seem unreal, how can I not have to go to work again for almost an entire month?

Writer's Block: Neuromancer

2008-10-01T22:26:20Z

There can be only one: "The Lord of the Rings", which 'single-handedly' created a whole new genre...

what I've been upto

2008-05-20T13:19:49Z

So, the last few days at work have been irritating. Some things I fixed ages ago seemed not to work for my teamleader when he was trying things out. So today I tried out one of the oldest builds I'd kept around just in case something like that would happen, and blammo: old errors that I don't even remember how I fixed 'em occurred again. :S So now I rebuilt and am running my most-recent build (which also exhibited the same bugs as my teamleader had the other day), and now the Java unit tests are all succeeding perfectly. Till now, anyway. (Oh wait, one just failed.) So now I gotta ask myself, what in tarnation is up with all of this? Random seeming failures suck. Oh well, that's life I suppose. There's a reason they gotta pay me to make me do it...

As far as other things go, haven't been doing much. Did decide to stop watching the "Kimikiss" anime a while back (I didn't like the drawing style, and the plot looked veeerrryy standard). Have started watching Chokotto Sister again, now and then. Am also watching Zetsubou Sensei episodes when I want a dose of lovely off-the-wallness; Zetsubou Sensei is pretty good as far as that goes!

And then there's the never-ending cleaning-up of downloaded files. People post waaay too much hentai these days, can't keep up! Well, in a manner of speaking... ;)

finally got some reviews done

2008-05-07T22:20:07Z

So, today I finally got a set of 3 reviews done. Reviewing a fanfic is a piece of cake, but reviewing a manga volume (especially one of your favourites) turns out to be a real bother. And I'd kind-of decided to first: get the reviews done; then: update my stuff-Tive-wants file and only then order new manga. Since the first step took so long, the other two steps were really late... OTOH, I suppose it's not too bad of a thing just to go slow at it: will give opportunities to do other things than usual... Or at least, I hope so.

Today work went better than yesterday (which wasn't hard, since yesterday *totally* sucked). Anyway, have gotten over how some of our software is misbehaving like it bloody well never did before. In a way that's good: the sooner errors are seen the sooner they can be fixed (hopefully, if I can find out *why* things are all going south...) OTOH, it's totally taken all the speed out of things and makes me wonder if I'll be able to the fixes that are supposed to be done this week on time... And come to think of it, I still have something to look up, talk more later, I hope!

how the evening is....

2008-05-05T20:29:12Z

I'm doing okay at the moment. We had two holidays last week (Queen's day on Wednesday and Ascension day on Thursday), and so I did what a lot of other people did and took Friday off in order to get 5 consecutive days off from work. Which was veeeeerrrryyyyy nice. Bro Vincent and I went to Amsterdam on Saturday to go to the American bookstore (and that's where I got the newest Bujold book I'd just found out the other week that it had become available)... And today at work I played around some more with the ODBC stress testing program my team leader wrote last week, and I'm glad to say that *finally* I'm seeing some of the same kind of problems that our customer did, which gives us a lot better chance of being able to fix it (am very optimistic at the moment about that, I hope tomorrow won't let me down)...

I'm in a sort-of looking-gladly-at-the-past mood. Have been enjoying reading the good parts of the Agent-of-Change Liaden books. Enjoyed listening & watching "Furry Shiny Monsters" on Youtube last week, and after that decided to try to listen to REM some more again; just because it seems old doesn't mean the music's bad... Hmmm... Which leaves a kinda bad note to end with... Anyway, just finished watching the 6th or 7th Chokotto Sister episode (the one in which bro takes his crush to a movie instead of younger-sis Chokotto); enjoyed that one as well and I plan to enjoy the next one soon...

work & newish (for me) anime

2008-04-28T11:54:41Z

I was going to write that I am bored out my skull at work (due to a stresstest that just seems to be refusing to fail at all as often as I want it to) but just now I got some 4 failures in a row. Which is what I'm after at the moment, it's only when I've got a more-or-less reproducible fail that I can really check if solution A works or not. And if solution A doesn't work, how about solution B, etc. ... Thank goodness for less boring moments!

This weekend I didn't do a certain number of things I'd planned to (including a major fanfic revision). But I did catch up with a lot of anime series. Watched the last few "True Tears" episodes (don't know what to say about this one). Also watched "They are my noble masters" (fluffy, but not exceptional). Watched the last episodes of the 1st "Minami-ke" season that I hadn't watched yet, and started on the second season. After watching Minami-ke episode 9 I'd pretty much decided to not watch it anymore, even though some of the prior episodes were just hilarious. But soon after deciding that I found out that the mangaka of Minami-ke also did "Today in class 5-2", which is a totally *brilliant* manga. So then I reconsidered not watching it anymore, and I'm glad I did. Minami-ke is goooood! And then, last but not least: watched all of "Myself, Yourself"... Which is (maybe undeservedly) pretty addictive: at just about the end of every episode I was like: I really should stop watching now. But I want to find out: what happens next? Why did she do that? What are they going to do? etc., etc. ... I plan to start watching "Kimikiss" tonight. If it's as good as "Myself, Yourself" I think it'll be a good evening, that I'm looking forward to...

work, a better attitude, and how-to solve 1 networking problem

2008-04-21T21:39:06Z

So, today was mind-numbingly boring at work; I "got" to continue running tests that take longer and longer to finish; the last one I saw finish today took a bit more than two hours to run. Still, I'm more optimistic about the problem I have now (which still is that we get sporadic "connection refused" errors). Today I downloaded some stuff from the official open-sourcing-of-Java site; looking at that source (and brainstorming a bit) has resulted in a page or two of new things that remain to be tried. Still, the problem is irritating, it's easy to come up with a zillion reasons why a connect-attempt might fail, but the thing is: how can you tell when you're barking up the wrong tree?

For the rest, I'm doing better than in the weekend, which is nice. If my bro thinks my fanfic's are bad, it's just too bad: I'm determined to prove him wrong! Which is a mindset I like a lot better than being totally defeatist due to a bad review.

And, one other random thing: what to do if you have a lot of PCs in a workgroup, someone else connects their PC to your network, and all of a sudden noone has internet anymore? In our case it was: a) disconnect the newly-attached PC, and when after that everyone else got their 'net connections back b) make sure the offending PC is on the right (and same) workgroup as everyone else...

humble pie & stuff...

2008-04-18T16:06:05Z

Am running this hugely long RulesService-calling-a-nonlocal-oracle-account test just to see if & where it'll break. So I'm just waiting for the next line of text in a DOS prompt screen to show up... Have been testing on SQLServer today instead of Oracle (which is what I'd been doing up to yesterday)... At first it looked like the unit tests were all super broken on SQL server, but later on it turned out they weren't. And then it turned out a Java fix I'd written to try to workaround an SQLServer problem turned out to be incorrect: removing my bad fix made lots of things work that hadn't worked at all before. OTOH, what may also have helped is copying a certain older error-message file over a new one in my Usoft install directory (which reverted an automatically-translate-error-messages thingy). Hmmmm...

Looking back on it there've been a number of things that boosted my ego a bit during the last week or so. But the last couple of days it's been time for humble pie. Things that seemed to be going well have stopped (going well, i.e.). My bro told me my fanfic writing was bad (which sort of neutralized the happy glow from a nice review I got a few weeks ago). And yesterday I "got" to create a new SQL server account on my PC for our Java unit tests. I hate feeling dumb-as-a-rock, but working with pretty unfamiliar programs like that just really enhances the boy-are-you-dumb feeling... And then there some stuff in Usoft stuff I couldn't find: turned out certain commands were 'hidden' under a context-menu. Which makes you feel oh-so-smart when it's pointed out.

Oh well. There's plenty worse things. Just hope *those* will pass me by... And that it won't take much longer for it to become weekend!

New things...

2008-04-09T20:52:55Z

So, the first new thing: I found out it's actually possible to declare *and use* an array of 500 million (!!!) chars in Visual C++ on Windows. Woooowwww!!!!!

Second new thing, I was checking out my old email at yahoo (which I don't do often enough, especially not within the last 4 months or so), and guess what? It looks like someone sent me one of them sexy-get-in-touch IMs *as a PM in fanfiction.net * ... My goodness, what's next???? I'm amused, really, but still: good grief. Maybe I should start lying in profiles (I'm unhappily married (*single*) but will have it annulled any second now so anyone sending come-on's just come on and do it!)

*grins evilly* yeah, that last bit wasn't at first intended tongue-in-cheekily but then, some say I'm cheeky ...

lotsa Live Action stuff this weekend...

2008-03-31T21:33:54Z

Such as: "The Colour of Magic" & "the Light Fantastic"... Apparently it got posted to usenet this weekend or so... (Bro R, who got them, said that both epi's were huge tho, at more than 10 G a piece!) It was cool to see "Inspector Frost" as Rincewind, but I'm thinking the former Hobbit didn't quite work as Twoflower, for me...

I also finally got around to watching the two Detective Conan specials; the first one didn't really interest me, but the second was cool: I really liked seeing how Ran and Ai-in-her-grown-up-body got along. It gave me some unexpected avenues of thought anyway. Ai is kinda like my favourite evil-vampire-trapped-in-a-much-too-young-body, come to think of it...

And today was a good day as well: I *didn't* have an accident today (which is not that unusual, really! honest!). But more that I really deserved one, I totally overlooked a car coming from the right this morning. :(

At work things went puzzlingly well. For one a lot of the unit tests that didn't work well on Friday did work today, which is what's making me wonder: what's different between then and now? Was Friday a bad fluke? Or will today turn out to have been a "goodness"-fluke? And also, today I minded my talkaholic LOUD new colleague much less. Which is nice, I'd rather be like the manga I like and embody compassion than strict judgmental coldness towards those unlike ourself which is sadly all too prevalent in Western "civil"-ization (especially the "Christian" bits).

today was better

2008-03-27T22:16:49Z

though I don't what to think of it anymore. Today I purposely did NOT pray for a blessing on my work. But I felt like today God kind-of 'accidentally' got me to glance just right at the section of incorrect code that was causing the deadlock that I've been needing to find this week, and also helping me realize that, hey: even though I wrote it, *that* part is wrong. And it's been corrected and my short stress test works again. The long one took too long, so I left the PC on and hope it will have completed correctly by now. But at the same time I now don't know what I'm supposed to think: should I just have been more patient with an initial non-answer from God? Or what? Is there a lesson to be learned from this all, like I need to learn to be more patient or less concerned about only my circumstances compared to the way more serious circumstances of others or ... or what? Anyway, have said sorry to God, and I feel more like on speaking terms with Him than yesterday... But I don't know anymore, what to do about praying for a blessing on work or not...

prayer

2008-03-26T23:48:46Z

So, today has been very much of a lousy day. Whenever I'm stumped at work or feeling apprehensive about being able to handle expected difficulties, I pray about it, and tend to ask for God's help or blessing on it. Which probably sounds strange coming from a person who hasn't seen the inside of a church since 2005 or so, but... It's twisted reasoning but according to free will God isn't allowed to unfairly put churchgoers ahead of non-churchgoers, and so I feel I might as well make that work for me (for a change). So, I pray. But both today and at least one other recent workday I feel like God totally ignored that prayer. Which I tend to resent. And when I recall other prayers of mine God seems to be answering with a resounding "Hell no, not for you"... *grinds teeth* One of the things I recall the Bible saying about prayer is that you're supposed to wholeheartedly believe that God will grant it. But how can you believe that when God's answers seem to disappoint so much, so often? (And to think I even prayed the "I-believe-Lord-help-my-unbelief" prayer this morning) I think I'm going to give up on prayer for now. I don't want the aggravation or disappointment any more.

confesses

2008-03-25T23:14:50Z

... so, this Friday until and including Monday 2nd day of Easter formed a four day weekend for yours truly. And I totally took-off-time too: didn't work on the stuff I took home from work, not at all. Just re-read the interesting bits of all the Negima books I've managed to collect (and re-read the first half again right after finishing it, I was so enthused about the non-serious bits and how Nodoka gets along with Negi bits). Also caught up with the School Rumble scanlations *and* the Yume de Aetera ones *and* the (few) Kage Kara Mamoru ones... (I even found out that the official translation of K.K.M. will be out in a number of months, which is cool) And there's plenty more to catch up on, but... The ones I did, I'm glad I did, tho there were 'heavy' bits in both the "Yume" and "School Rumble" parts... But oh well, that's just how it goes, and I'm sure School Rumble will get less serious (it always has till now, anyway).

Japan trip, work

2008-03-19T22:57:54Z

So: today I finally took the plunge and ordered three plane tickets to Japan! Yes!! Okay, so I'm about 3000 euro's poorer, but the tickets are ordered. Milestone 1 is done, now we can seriously start on phase II: plan when we want to be where and stuff, etc., arrange for lodging, etc. ... So, about that I'm happy.

I'm also happy about how today ended, it's Mom and Dad's 37th wedding anniversary and we all went out to eat at a pancake shop. Mine was goooood, I think I might just keep that place in mind for when my next birthday rolls around DV...

What I'm a little less happy about is how things went at work, since that was: slooooooooooowwwwllllyyyy. Today I just couldn't get the compiler to listen to me, which kinda sucks cause usually I'm better than that, but, well, not today. I guess you win some and you lose some, but during the losing its no fun. Oh well, at least nothing truly bad happened.

Oh yeah, and I got this idea about that maybe it'd be cool to keep a bit of a log at LJ on what I've been up to at work. Today I changed the logging code I've got in order to use it in it's save-messages-directly-to-file mode (as opposed to the temporarily-store-all-messages-in-a-HUGE-string-and-save-that-on-shutdown mode, which is cool and works reasonably well because during shutdown the program isn't multi-threaded much). Unfortunately that save-all-strings-first approach won't help with analyzing the new problems we've recently discovered. The RulesService (which is what I'm exclusively working on at the moment), which is supposed to be massively multi-threaded, has multi-threading problems. First one is: it appears to NOT be multi-threading much even when we try to stress it out (which is plain incorrect). But most importantly ALL of it's threads sometimes deadlock; that most threads start sleeping isn't a problem, but they shouldn't when there's work for them to do, and at least a few threads should just never totally lockup like they do. So now some of our questions are: did my new fix-up's break existing code, or has the RulesService been broken for a long time by now but we just didn't notice because we didn't stress it enough, or has a previous RulesService re-write messed things up but we're only discovering that now? So, lots of questions, but: getting the answers is going to be ... not fun, assuming I can answer them at all, anyway... Oh well, guess it's time to *earn* my salary a bit more...