Linkstew

The only way that turning 22 in 2002 would be any better is if I were born on either February 2nd, February 20th, or February 22nd.

Of course, this one's a little cooler if you write your dates DD-MM-YYYY instead of the more sensible YYYY-MM-DD, because then you get 20-02-2002 20:02 -- in other words, a symmetrical/palindromic date.

Wow, look at all those 2s! You don't see that every day.

I'm so amused by this perfectly correct, and yet so very undesirable crond behavior:

Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 01:59:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: another nightly cron report

Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 01:59:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: another nightly cron report

Well, looks like it's time to start running that nightly report at some other time...

So one of the many pieces of the project I was working on last week is a cron job which runs every fifteen minutes and emails me the output. I'm very tired of getting emails that look like this:

Finished cron at 999900027, synced 5399 records

Now, for those of you who don't do unix, that time format is usually referred simply to as "unixtime", and it's just the total number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970 GMT.

And every fifteen minutes, for the last week, I've been getting emails letting me k2now that my cron finished at 999932426, or at 999948638, or at 999985529, or at 999990999, or at 999999953, and so on. And so for the last week, I've been frequently reminded of the impending roll over of unixtime.

I find amusing to that unixtime is hitting nine 9s (followed by nine 0s) on 9/9 (GMT).

But as of 2001-09-08 6:46:40PM out here in the Pacific Time Zone, One Billion Seconds of UNIX goodness have elapsed.

I haven't written something for two tiny days and I feel like I haven't said anything interesting in ages. Excuses are easy to come by -- Finals happened. They happened. Past tense, as in, they're over. They're so over that the grades for 3 out of my 4 classes are already available via InfoBears. They're so over that this post written a mere two and a half weeks ago seems like it was an eternity away.

But I'm still fighting the undertow -- The open seas of the summer are waiting for me, but the specter of the semester is looming over me. I've spent the last two days trying to think of something to write about, but all my ideas seem trite and unimportant. I need to get on with things and put the semester behind me -- I need some closure. So pardon me while I do just that. The following (preceding? The direction of time is so difficult to keep track of in a blog...) entries were written not for you, but for me.

For all intents and purposes, classes are over. There are a couple of classes I'll attend tomorrow, but my heart won't really be in it. I think I'll mainly be going because I feel guilty about missing so many lectures this semester. Well, that's a lie. One of the classes tomorrow is really a final review.

For all intents and purposes, another semester is over, except for the finals. I have five days before my first final. It seems an eternity away. And it's only been three days since I turned in my last homework assignment. It seems an eternity away.

I'm in a long moment of transition. A limbo. I've been waiting for something to happen, but nothing has. Tomorrow I'll get out and go to class, and maybe that will help. It probably hasn't helped that I've been incapacitated by allergies for the last three days. Between allergy medicine and the allergies themselves, my head has been spinning, making the limbo seem even more significant.

It's just been a long weekend. I've just been sitting around doing nothing. It hasn't been an eternity, just three days. My sleeping schedule is a little off, and my nose is still stuffy, and my throat is still sore...

But tomorrow, I'll get up, go to a few classes, focus myself and commence with the studying. In eleven days, the semester will be over. It may seem like an eternity away, but it'll be here long before I'm ready for the finals, and two weeks from now, my linguistics final, three days past, will seem an eternity away.

I was stewing more old entries today, when I came across my review of The Truth, and I thought to myself "Gee, isn't it about time for Thief of Time?" So I went and checked Amazon, and sure enough, there it was, all set to be released on April 24th?? That's like... Tuesday!

I'll have to drop by Cody's Books (or Moe's, or any number of other local bookstores) to pick it up on Tuesday. Pity I won't be able to read it until after Thursday.

My how the time between Pratchett installments flies when I'm having fun! I barely noticed that so much time had passed. In fact, it's almost as if someone stole the time... Hey, wait a second...

Gee willikers, a new millennium is well under way, and I've been caught with my pants down! So, I guess I should make some new Millennium resolutions. How about...

No, if I have a millennium to take care of them, then it'll be too easy to procrastinate. Maybe I better stick to the tried and true Year Long variety. Nah, even those give me too much time to toy around.

Instead, let's go with a smaller unit, but one which stands out in front of my eyes like a beacon: Semester Long Resolutions. And further, no silly resolutions, I'll just make a list of things that I'd really like to get done this semester.

• Finish Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, Zelda 64 and Pokemon Silver. Preferably in that order, but without a PlayStation, Zelda 64 is first on my list.
• Reinstall my primary desktop computer. It needs to be reinstalled because, though it works, it's still Debian 2.0 upgraded to 2.1 upgraded to 2.2, with all the cruft that entails. I don't know if I'll stick with Debian or try out a BSD. I also need to evaluate how much I should attempt to converge my Win2k machine with this machine, and consider VMWare and upgraded pieces as a solution. Also consider a KVM switchbox.
• Clean up my files that are scattered across three linux machines, a solaris machine, a Mac OS 9 machine, a Mac OS X laptop, and a Windows 2000 machine. Damn that's a mess. I need my own server located somewhere fast reletive to home (maybe at home... hahaha.. pardon the pun) that exports samba and appletalk, I think. That might be a lot to do in a semester, but maybe if I consolodated my desktops, I could use the parts for a server and put FreeBSD or somesuch on that for the experience. Hey, this is starting to sound like a plan.
• Read Science Of The Discworld.
• Hone LinkStew. This includes entering more old content, cleaning up the old content that already here, making the categories sane and useful, and maybe advertising it somewhere somehow.
• Revise my php user account scripts.
• Maybe work on that community oriented gaming site that I started years ago.
• Catch up on all those online comics I stopped reading 8 or 9 months ago. Why do I suspect a wget and a several hour drive to and from Tahoe is going to be my solution to this one?

Yeah, that's a lot for a semester that also includes school, work and a life. Maybe if I just manage some of that I'll be happy, then it'll be summer. And I learned my lesson last summer and will not, under any circumstances, work two jobs again. Unless one of them is an internship, in which case, I won't do much ResComp work anyway.

this is a nice diagram about the start of the new Millennium. Well, as nice as a news publication can be, because it has to dumb down the content for stupid readers. Boy it must have been cool to have been alive in the 19th century; What with so few people being able to read, newspapers probably didn't have to bother with dumbing things down. There was probably such a disparity between those who would read a newspaper and those who wouldn't that it wasn't necessary to make the thing stupid for stupid people to understand.

Somehow it's already come to be December 18. The weather today was incredibly pleasant. It barely feels like December, let alone does it feel like a week from Christmas. This semester has passed by in the blink of an eye. Though when I think about it, things that happened just a little more than a week ago, like my Japanese Finals, seem like months ago.

It seems like time is distorting around me. The present is fleeting, and as soon as it's past, it's flung far away, while the future isn't even a factor in my day-to-day life.

In a way, without even trying, I'm living completely for the present. Carpe Diem, et cetera, et cetera.

Of course, now that this has just occured to me, it will no longer be the case and I'll probably start focusing on the past and the future to an extreme degree, leaving the present to fall away from me, ignored.

Today in class it occured to me that Japanese also has seven days of the week, and Japanese also calls Sunday "Day of the Sun" and Monday "Day of the Moon." So I found myself wonder why they were so like Western names for the days of the week. I figure that, since the months in Japanese are called "First Moon", "Second Moon", etc, that dividing a moon into four groups of seven was logical. Also, the names of the days of the week have enough significance that I suspect they predate 1860. So, armed with these questions, I found this page, which seems to not only answer my questions, but answer related questions and generally be informative. I'd summarize here, but I'd do the page a disservice.