notes on the past few days

Hrum... haven't posted in a few days. I'm sure everybody missed me showing up on your friends page, probably was going into Alex-withdrawal, and had to head back into the archives to get their oniugnip fix... right? :)

It seems like I've been having a bunch of low-content days, as of late... today, I've mostly just slept and worked out, but a whole lot of both of those... after sleeping for something like 11 hours, I proceeded to go walking (and jogging a little bit) with my mother -- she's decided she's going to get in shape this summer, and she's been doing this workout video and swimming every day, and for the past few days, we've been walking three or four miles in the afternoons. Rock on :) Lessee, almost right after our walk, I headed out back onto the trails and did a run on my own (about four miles, 'round the lake). In the afternoon, I played racquetball with my father (that was wonderful -- hadn't played with him in a while, but we used to play every week) and then did my lifting routine that I got for the weight training class, partly at Gold's, where we were playing racquetball, and partly at his house, after dinner.

... and that's been my day, thus far. Very exciting. I'm losing my flab, at least :)

Possibly the most interesting thing that happened since I last posted was my evening/morning, Friday night. We'd gone off to see the Maclay Company production of Godspell, and it was semi-odd being back at my old highschool. Everybody was getting older, and I realized that I didn't know a bunch of the kids in the drama club. A number of recent graduates were around, though -- it's just strange, getting older and seeing all my old HS friends -- some having had late-HS growth spurts and suddenly being taller than me, some (people I'd once thought of as little kids) going and graduating and being off to Stanford in the fall, some coming back from two years at university and having put on weight after having once been track stars.... the teachers I'd run into didn't seem to have changed a whole lot, though :)

What had changed was the face of Company... back in the day, when I was in Maclay's drama club, it was largely ... sort of a socially fringe group. Now it seems like it's got more people from Chorus and the local Young Actors group. A few years ago, the kids who might be labeled more goth-ish gravitated towards it, and the shows that we did tended towards ... well, darker than Godspell, anyway, and they certainly weren't full-length musicals. They were generally one-acts, if memory serves. This was the first musical I think Company's done in recent memory... and it was beautiful. Brent, whom everybody loves, played an excellently convincing Jesus, and the music was beautiful, and everything was all bright and colourful, and the cast did a really good job of portraying childishness. Brent's just that kind of guy, though -- if you were casting a musical with Jesus in it, you'd want to cast him. Some number of years ago, when I was in company (pressing buttons and running sound, as is my custom) and we were doing some dark-ish one-act ("Last Wish Baby", I think) at a competition, we were all backstage waiting to go on, and everybody was all nervous, milling around and being right on the edge of freaking out... and then he calmly glides into the room, playing his guitar and singing, and you could see everyone's tension melt away. That's the sort of guy he is.

So it was a good show. Godspell is cool, and I might have to snag a copy of the music. Lloyd, Lacy, and Lacy's younger brother Charlie came in costume -- Lloyd as Christ (carrying a wooden fish and wearing a wreath on a his head, with a white pseudo-toga) and Lacy as Mary Magdalen (similarly garbed, but in brown)... I claimed to be dressed up as Neo, The Other Messianic Figure, having come in all black. I've got some strange associates...

After the show, a bunch of crazy Maclay-connected kids (oddly enough, an almost entirely vegetarian crowd... Garrett's a veggie sympathizer, at least) headed out to Black Dog Cafe, which is where all the cool Tallahasseean kids hang out :) We ended up walking around the lake, chatting about stuff, and eventually retiring to Lloyd's house, where vegan fruity-pancakes were made and Monty Python's Meaning of Life was watched. That's a thoroughly strange film... I think I prefer Life of Brian and Holy Grail. The crowd at Lloyd's house eventually dwindled down to Lacy and Lloyd and myself, and after taking a semi-lengthy 4-AM walk 'round his neighborhood, we headed home, and I plopped into bed at around 0600 hours.

I didn't do too many terribly interesting things this weekend. I watched more movies than I usually do (which is None At All) -- I finally sat down and watched Six-String Samurai (low-content but high-style, very well done) and The Animatrix (absolutely beautiful -- it makes the world of the Matrix that much richer, and the animation ... it's gorgeous. If you're into the Matrix, I'd highly recommend this. I'm almost completely sure that one of the segments in there was done by the folks that had done Aeon Flux, and another one of the segments looked very Lain-like, but that's a somewhat less distinctive style). I ran a bit. I hung out with some friends, and I read... and I slept a lot.

So that's a rundown of the past few days -- tonight, I'm doing some reading in Linux Device Drivers and maybe Thus Spake Zarathustra ... and maybe looking into Eurail passes for next month :) Goin' to Europe, going to see Esther... yay :) :)

flashbacks to middle school, feline administrativa, and a bunch of miles in the forest

Years ago, when we were younger and more innocent, before the idea of a multiuser or multitasking operating system invaded our little heads, Brett and myself did our programming on qbasic on dos boxes...

And somehow or another, it came to our attention that if you gave a particular command to that little program (ah, but what a program it was... all the editing power of edit and all the interpretation power of ... well, of a basic that didn't require line numbers and handled subroutines and everything. Amazing!), you could make the machine reboot all of a sudden. This was endlessly amusing, as you might imagine :)

Not too long ago, in the Kernel class, we've been talking about interfacing with the x86 hardware, with the whole IO port system, which boils down to a separate namespace for all the different IO addresses that you can access, distinct from memory addresses, and the calls the kernel uses to talk to these ports -- they're pretty much just macros for assembly code, for anybody who cares, as it's a really platform-specific sort of thing, talking to the IO ports. And earlier this afternoon, the BASIC command came to me:

OUT &HFE, &H64

w00t :) This was directly applicable, as Brett and myself found out... x86 machines can be easily (suddenly) rebooted with an analogous call from inside the Linux kernel :) :) Well, I thought that was funny, at least.

Hrum... and on a veterinarian's office that I drive by on my way back from FSU, the sign outside displays the following words: "KITTENS TO ADOPT LUNCHTIME APPOINTMENTS". I hope it works out well for them... I wonder if I should call ahead to get an appointment with the kittens at lunchtime...

Today's workout log: today was Legs Day, lifting-wise, and that was ... sweaty. I wasn't feeling particularly springy afterwards... just sore. I'd recovered by the time I got home, though -- just after I returned from FSU, mother and myself headed off to do an afternoon walk, and we went out on some trails I hadn't seen before, over by the Other Lake. Every so often, we ran a bit, which was good... and then after walking, she headed home and I hit the Other Trails. Today's run was about four miles, a backwards Blair Witch, longway.

You don't know what a "backwards Blair Witch, longway" is. That's alright. I don't fault you for it. Feel free to come and visit Tallahassee, and come run with me, and I'll take you on one. It'll be great :)

I've been realizing that I've got issues with anger... I'm quick to get a bad impression of people, sometimes, and if this particular person is an authority figure, then ... well, I'm not sure how evident it is to the outside world, but my body tenses up, and I'm apt to get a good deal more sarcastic. Example: today my younger sister Natalie accidentally got her car stuck on a curb (and, because she had an exam in the Very Near Future, had to head out quickly -- not a big deal, right? Anthony and mother and myself will deal with this), and the manager of the business who's curb she'd smacked (and damaged, a bit) comes out and rubs me the wrong way by ignoring us as we're trying to remove her car, belly-hung on this curb, with a jack and some pieces of wood. He's looking it over, talking on the phone, and not talking to us. The first thing he says is something about how "young people these days don't have any sense" -- and I'm ready to bite him. He's ignoring us, insinuating that my sister's not very smart, and making sweeping generalizations about young people. When he says "well, I've made some mistakes", I'm quick to submit "Undoubtedly."

... which was interesting -- it felt, in a hedonistic sense, good to get in quips at this guy, but it clearly wasn't the nicest thing to do. And I shouldn't have been nearly that angry, in the first place -- I mean, there was a Sentra stuck on his curb.

That situation resolved nicely, though -- through Anthony's brilliance, we managed to wood-and-jack the car off of the curb, where it'd been stuck, and the guy turned out not to be such a jerk after all -- he was the manager, upset that the owner might be upset that there was damage to the curb, it got pushed back into place -- Natalie'd shoved it a number of inches whilst trying to get over it. So that situation was solved :)

... but I still have a tendency to assume that police officers and various other Authority Figure Folks (occasionally park rangers, even -- like a few days ago, when one came up and wanted to see my park pass, possibly with the intention of ticketing me if I didn't have one) are out to screw me, and the tendency to tense up and get angry easily in this sort of situation. And that's not a good thing...

"Well, I love everyone
I am filled with delight.
I understand all your feelings...
I don't see from wrong or right"
-- Blues Traveler, "Battle of Someone"