Day Twenty Seven: Random Access

Friday, September 25th, 2009

I had my first day at Comm-Tech today. My first task was sorting through the massive amount of RAM modules that they have in an attempt to make some order of them. This wasn’t as tedious as it sounds. The only irritating part was that there were quite a few that didn’t give any clear indication what size they were. I also removed a couple hard drives from computers. This weekend we’re house sitting for that “uncle” I mentioned. Tomorrow we’re going to a place called…Tiggywinkles. It’s a wildlife hospital that has baby critters including hedgepigs. Unfortunately it requires that I get up early on a Saturday morning…urrrgggghhhh.

Day Twenty: Four Hours Later

Friday, September 18th, 2009

I went to bed at four and was woken up at eight on the dot by screaming children outside my room. The dining room is the next door over. After giving up on going back to sleep. I got up and went to breakfast. I made the mistake of saying I wanted tea. I don’t like tea. Then I noticed the orange juice. My mom said she’d be back later and we’d go to the camera obscura that overlooks the Avon Gorge, but that didn’t happen. I played TFTwo until Trung went to sleep. Then sat around for a while before looking for a towel so that I cold take a shower. I got in the shower and tried to close the door, but it decided to fall off its rail so I tried to put it back on, but it didn’t work. I ended up closing it and hoping it would fall on me. Then I sat around some more. Eventually, I went looking for my mom, who decided to come looking for me as well. We went to lunch at a cafe. I got a tuna melt and a ginger beer. Again, ginger ale is nothing like ginger beer. I came back to the hotel and started working on a model that I’ll likely never finish. Around six my mom came back we set out to meet my dad somewhere for dinner. That’s what I thought. Turns out we were meeting him at a reception after his conference. This put me in a foul mood because I didn’t want to stand around and wait for him; I had been working. We eventually got dinner at a posh restaurant called The Shed. The burger was meh, but the chips were good. Still pissed, we walked along the harbor to find some ships my mom wanted to see. We eventually found them. They weren’t all that exciting. Though the replica sailing ship was tooling around the harbor with people on it. On the way to catch the bus back a group of teenagers passed us. One of them attempted to engage me by saying he liked my glasses. Maybe that’s some English insult, maybe they were just stupid. I ignored them. I found out that Fringe is back, but to watch it on Huku I had to install an automatic proxy finder cause it’s only available in the US and the proxies I tried didn’t work. That’s something to look forward to.

Day Ten: Ping High Noon

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Slept four an a half hours. Got up and found the internet had slowed to a crawl. Pining google.co.uk took one hundred and sixty-seven ish milliseconds. I thought that it was a problem with the router again so I tried switching back to the old one, but that refused to work entirely. In short I couldn’t fix it meaning no TFTwo. Trung said he was getting tired of it anyway. That the lack of teamwork was making him lose faith in humanity. If that’s all then he’s lucky. We tried to come up with another coop game we could play. The only one we both could easily get was Synergy. At this point the internet started picking up and I was able to install Synergy in a few seconds. I then had to walk Trung though the steps necessary to get the server working so I could connect. When I finally connected my ping was over nine hundred. It wasn’t long before we turned on cheats because I couldn’t really walk let alone shoot anything without dying. We played for a couple hours until he decided the sun coming up was a sign he should go to bed. Then I took a shower. Then I floated lifelessly for a while until I got the idea I would Photoshop a TFTwo dispenser into a picture from the living room window. I needed to use Garry’s Mod to get a good picture of the dispenser and I thought that I could get an addon thatwould make the dispenser have a display. I ended up getting some other addons which I was then distracted by for a number of hours. I spent twenty minutes trying to back stab a manhack (an enemy from Half-Life Two) with the spy’s knife from TFTwo (I eventually got it). I never got around to the shooping. Finally, Trung and I played some TFTwo. There were some good parts, but it ended of meh.

Like the depth.

Like the depth.

NEED A DISPENSA HERE!

NEED A DISPENSA HERE!

Knife fight.

Knife fight.

Playing with the AI.

Playing with the AI.

Day Nine: The Day Batman Died

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Stayed up late again and slept in. Didn’t go with my dad to drop off my application for a tech internship, but apparently it’s a chopshop where they take recycled computers and rebuild them for non-profits. Dismantling and rebuilding computers? Hey that’s what I’ve been dong since I was six…at least the dismantling part. Our landlord finally gave me the DSL info so I fucked around with the routers and managed to get the newer one working. Yay! My dad also got a wireless printer, which was unnecessary because the router has a networked printer server setup thingy. It was easy to set up on my laptop, but I wasn’t able to just pick it up on my dad’s netbook so after fifteen minutes of fucking around I had to share my DVD drive and then fuck around some more because I had to turn off password protection on shared folders. Got that working and then tried my mom’s laptop. Unfortunately there’s no Linux driver for the printer and no substitute, so she’ll have to use the netbook if she wants to print. Then I finished off Batman:TAS. I started watching episode eighty-six and realized something was wrong. Right off the character art style looked different and not in a good way. Something was missing, maybe they were less detailed. Whatever the case it was wrong. I looked it up on Wikipedia. After eighty-five episodes they stopped. They went on to other projects like Superman:TAS. Then a while later they came back and made twentish new episodes, but this was The New Batman Adventures. It really was new. So I stopped. Wasn’t worth watching a cheap knockoff even if it was by the same people. On to the next series: Farscape.

Six Months

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I haven’t posted in a while. I got bored and didn’t have much to say. This summer has been pretty dull to boot, but I am at a new point in my li-oh, who the fuck an I kidding? It’s going to be the same shit I’ve been doing for the past four or five years, but in a different location.

I didn’t apply to college. Yeah, probably a mistake as I also didn’t find anything productive to do in my year off. Instead, I’m moving with my parents to England for seven months. In retrospect this is possibly the worst thing I could do without trying very hard (I could probably fuck up more if I actually put some effort into it). Seven months, in a small flat, in London. Oh sure, it’s London, the once center of the verse, but I’m also spending with my parents and I haven’t changed at all. I generally don’t make friends unless they’re people that I see every day for something like school. I can’t go up to someone and say “hey, you want to go mock people because they’re stupid?” Other people can do that, but unless I know the person, I’m generally shy. I guess I have very low confidence.

I know I have very low drive. I have no purpose, no idea what I want to do in life. I’ve grown so cynical that I have trouble enjoying life. If I’m not distracted by something I become depressed, because I feel like I’m wasting time. I blame that on school; there’s always something that you have to do. Vacation? Sweet right? Fuck no, you get reports projects, all at the same time as if every teacher assumes that you’ll have nothing to do over a break. I don’t but that doesn’t mean I want to spend it doing school work. The problem with this cynicism is that the only purpose to life I can see is further the human race and seeing as I’ve had zero luck in that area, what else is left for me. I know it’s mean to my friends, but sometimes I feel like I have nothing, that I need something more. I keep hoping that something will come along and change my life, give me direction something to live for.

My little projects help, but they only last so long. I eventually run up against a wall that I can’t overcome either because I just lose interest or I have so many things that I want to implement I end up bogging it down and it becomes unusable or I’m just not capable of doing what I want, I don’t have the skill or the knowledge necessary. When my ideas work I’m overjoyed; I actually get giddy, but just the opposite when they fail. That project was all I had at the time and now that it’s done or failed I have nothing. I try to come up with something else to work on, but nothing seems plausible or it just doesn’t interest me. What do I do then?

I wholeheartedly believe that ignorance is bliss, maybe that’s not true and of course this is me believing I know something others don’t. The religious believe in an afterlife, I don’t. By some huge cosmic coincidence you live (maybe there’s something out there, but all sources point to no) and then you die. You cease to exist. You are nothing. Most people who practice religion must know in the back of their minds that this really is it. Why else would they be afraid of death? Why are we afraid of death at all? Am I? I don’t think so, only a painful death, but not the aftermath. As I see it there is nothing and that’s what scares people because it’s impossible to wrap your mind around the idea of not existing. How can you imagine non-existence. Try and think about it, when I do I have those “who the fuck am I?” moments. Similar to “what the fuck do these sounds have to do with their meaning” moments.

So what do I do? I don’t want to go to college. I can’t get a girl. My ideas are transient. Oh and to top it off, I’m paranoid. Not aliens and the government and tinfoil hats, but I can’t shake the feeling that my friends have problems with me, but choose not to tell me and instead talk about it when I’m not there…oh wait. Not all of them. Some of them I know honestly love me even if it would be “gay” for them to say it. And then there are those who I know are my friends, but i can’t tell if they’re telling the truth or are trying to not hurt my feelings. I can’t tell if it really is them or if it’s me. It eats at me. When I get nervous I pick my nails. Or if I think too much.

That’s another problem I have. Sometimes I just can’t stop. All kinds of stuff going through my head. Math, people, quotes, “that would be a cool picture”, “what if I tried using that equation?” Maybe I have mild aspergers. Sometimes I talk too much, but I don’t think that it. I just have trouble condensing stories, because I feel that every detail is important. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to tell them? It just ends up boring people (xkcd). This wasn’t even going to be this long, but then I started writing what came to mind.

I haven’t done anything amazing. I’m not really good at anything. I’m just good at a lot of things, most of which are useless. I played Ultimate for four years I stopped getting better after three I was ok and knew what I was doing, but I wasn’t a star. Not that I tried that hard.

I guess I haven’t tried very hard at a lot of things. I didn’t try to get interested in college. I don’t try to read books. I haven’t tried hard to meet someone.

As I said, I’m not the kind of person that can just go up and start talking to someone. The idea of trying to hook up with someone that you don’t know at all, but that you are physically attracted to seems wrong to me. Which I figure is my problem. I always try to become friends with girls that I’m interested in before trying to make a move. And who am I kidding, I don’t make moves. I just sit there, pining, forever. And then when I do move, it’s just weird. I don’t know if it’s the way I go about it or if it’s that I’m just not attractive mentally of physically. The last girl that said she liked me was someone that I had never met in person. It wasn’t a completely random creepy meeting on some forum thing, her sister is my friend. When we finally met, she decided that there wasn’t a place in her life for me. She claimed that school had suddenly picked up and that what with school, family, horseback riding, friends, lacrosse she just didn’t have the time I deserved. Somehow, I never fully accepted that. Then there was the girl that I like on an off for two and a half years. Yeah, I fucked that up too. Three times. Not so much fuck ups, just nothing.

I haven’t had a regular sleep cycle in five or six years, maybe longer. Pictures that my mom dug up show me around twelve with dark circles. They became a permanent facial feature. I don’t think that they’re leaving any time soon if at all. I think I have insomnia, maybe mild. First I don’t want to sleep, back to that needing to do something with my time or else it’s wasted. And then, there’s the knowing that once I get in bed, I won’t be able to fall asleep for at least an hour unless I’m utterly and completely exhausted. Sometimes not even then. I can easily fall asleep working on homework, my body uses it as a form of self defense, but once I actually get in bed, I’m wide awake. My mind fills with thoughts that I can’t make go away. Sometimes trying to daydream works, but it’s become harder and harder to do so on commands. These days I wake up dehydrated with a headache and bloodshot eyes. Doesn’t really help attract the opposite sex.

Not that I even meet girls. I spend all my time in my room. I would have friends if it weren’t for school. The only other place that I know people from is JRTechie and I stopped going there a long time ago. It doesn’t even exist anymore. I started this blog back when I was working there the first time. And now everyone is leaving. We’ll keep in contact over Facebook, but it won’t be the same and we’ll slowly drift apart until we don’t talk to each other.

So what do I do? I go to England. What do I do there? I don’t know. Tourist activities? I hate tourists and I hate the idea of being one. I want to go back to Lewes, I want to go to Ireland, I want to try and find my friends from seventh year. The girl that I had a mutual crush on, but nothing ever happened, because I was in sixth grade, what the fuck can you do. I got a laptop so that I can keep playing TF2 with Trung and Ravic. I’m not sure what else…

From the first day there to sometime in March I’ll be writing.

Are you happy now? I know I’m not.

Facebook

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

To me, Facebook seems just as bad as Myspace, but slowly, all my friends have been sucked in by it. Today I found out that Souvey got a Facebook account. Well shit, it looks like I might have to break down and join the herd.

Yay! DirectX 1-Oh Wait Nevermind

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Yeah, so I missed the fact that DirectX 10 only works with Vista…oh well, I can still play Portal!

Damn You Newegg

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

I thought that my computer was coming tomorrow because that’s what the UPS tracker says. However, my dad failed to mention he got a second email telling him that the OTHER parts had been shipped, so all I’m getting tomorrow is my case and LCD. I guess I can play around with the screen, but I was really looking forward to putting my computer together tomorrow and not on the 12th.

Meatfest 2008

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

That didn’t go well.

I Don’t Wanna Go to Meatfest

Friday, March 7th, 2008

I have two one-day tournaments this weekend. I really don’t want to go.