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The boring life of a goody two shoes |
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2003-10-31
One down, one still standing
Why the heck is it called a "cold" if the most prominent symptom is fever?!
Anyway, my stuffed, sniffing, dripping nose pales in comparison to what my wife has going on at the moment. Not only is her nose equally stuffed and dripping, she also has lots of mucous stuff in her upper respiratory tract that really doesn't belong there, knows this, and therefore desperately wants to get out by way of a racking cough. Add to this a raging headache, aching limbs, an aching back, and the remaining body parts aching as well, and you have a violently ill, bed bound, and, because she hates having to spend a whole day in bed, rather grumpy wife in your care.
Oh, and then there's the fever. I don't know how much, because she has a strong aversion against having her temperature taken (because then we'd know how sick she really is, probably), but she's definitely hot. The problem with this is that she doesn't take kindly to fever. Anything above 38 °C (100,4 °F), and she's more or less unable to leave the bed for anything exceeding a walk to the toilet. This is in stark contrast to yours truly, who has been known to hop on his bicycle and pedal more than 5 miles to the doctor's office while sporting a pneumonia and a temperature of about 40 °C (104 °F).
So I'm a full time care giver now. Still, I desperately want to blog about Vienna. I'll see if I can find the time for that on Saturday evening...
2003-10-27
Good and Bad
The Good: I'm sitting here, eating the last piece of the absolutely delicious russian cheese cake my wife had baked on Saturday, and I've got the time and energy to do a blog post.
The Bad: I don't really know what to write.
The Good: Yesterday I've downloaded Exult and started re-playing Ultima 7 again, and amazingly it's almost as much fun as I remember, despite its positively preluvial age.
The Bad: I foresee lots of time going into playing that game in the near future.
The Good: The house looks even better with the scaffolding finally gone. This is true both for the street front and the back side. The kitchen is completely finished now, and we've put a lot of our plants and flowers in the living room, where they'll stay until spring.
The Good: We managed to finish the bathroom in our new house, which I haven't managed yet to make a decent photo of, the cork floor of our bedroom as received the lacquer sealant treatment, and the entry hall has gotten the last paintjob it needed. So we are actually ready to move in next weekend, which due to Friday being a protestant holiday around here, is three days long. The Bad: If we were to move in right now, we'd be in legally questionable territory both with respect to the communal construction office which hasn't cleared the building yet, and our construction firm, because moving in now could be interpreted as accepting the status quo, and thus weakening our chances at getting the last few minor but irritating issues fixed by them. Damn.
The Good: My father and stepmother finally found the time to visit us and have a look at our house on Saturday (hence the cheese cake).
The Bad: My dad seems to have aged a lot this year. Granted, he'll be 74 come january, but still, I definitely didn't like the way he looked really tired and old.
The Bad: My stepmother talked a lot, and I mean a LOT, about her children and grandchildren. Which meant that, seeing as both me and my wife are too polite to intterrupt her when that happens, we didn't get all that much air time ourselves, and thus couldn't talk about a few things that badly needed addressing. But at least we've got their new mobile phone number now, so we again have a chance to actually talk to them via phone.
The Good: I'll be on a business trip to Vienna tomorrow. And the prospective customer looks to be reasonably clueful for a public service agency, so there will hopefully be lots of constructive talk tomorrow, and perhaps a bit of sight seeing in the evening.
The Bad: Getting up before 4 a.m. tomorrow, and not being back before midnight. I'm just not made for workdays of more than about ten hours...
The Bad: Our boss will come along, so there will probably be no opportunity to catch some sleep on the flights, and the chances of doing some sight seeing in the evening are very slim indeed.
The Bad: I still haven't seen the agenda for the meeting tomorrow. Heck, I don't even know if there is one. Thanks, boss!
2003-10-22
Funk
What?! It's been how long since I last posted here? Damn, even time isn't what it used to be, I tell ya! But it's probably all for the better in the end. Suffice it to say that I have been in deep funk mode for the last umpteen days. And when I say deep funk, I mean a deep, bleary, constantly teetering on the brink of breaking into an endless stream of tears and sobs kind of funk of the most evil kind I've ever encountered. And before you go and point out the seemingly obvious, I'll state that the fact that Layne has announced that she'll stop updating my favourite blog for the time being and quite possibly forever, has almost nothing to do with this. Granted, it didn't precisely help, but unlike the last time something like this happened, I was expecting something it to happen sooner or later, and Layne actually said a proper Goodbye instead of just up and leaving in the deep of the night.
So, Layne, a heartfelt Goodbye to you. Thanks for granting us the privilege of a glance into your life and your deepest feelings, and giving us lots of some of the best writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. I hope this isn't the last I've read of you. Take very good care of you!
Anyway, the funk. I haven't got the slightest clue as to why it happened. But what I found interesting was a talk I heard on the radio this week, where people were discussing the apparently freshly coined "quarter life crisis" that seems to hold people in their twenties in its grip. They cited the economic crisis (high unemployment, the rising costs of the social and medical security services, etc.), an uncertain and quite possibly bleak future, and the current political world climate as sources for that crisis, and all of this probably also played a role in my case. But then, things have been looking bleak like this for months, and stress levels have been high at casa Gudy ever since the house building thing got into full swing in early summer, which means that none of this really explains the latest onset of the deep funk.
Be that as it may, I feel better today. Not good, but sufficiently better that I don't want to rant at great length about how my boss told us on Monday that for this year's Xmas party, which is organized by the main company and which therefore takes place in the home country of our firm on the 19th of December, attending is compulsory for all the staff unless sickness or an extended vacation gets in the way. Now, I had no intention to attend, seeing as that day is the last workday of the year for me, and that these last few months I have had sufficiently little time together with my wife that spending that Friday evening as well as the better half of the Saturday abroad when I could just as well spend it with her, is just not something I find very compelling. But we'll see about that. Right now I'm willing to let the matter rest, hopefully until it's to late to book a flight... ;-)
In more or less unrelated news, the bathroom in our house is now more or less finished. I assembled and installed the shower cabin, fittings and faucet last weekend and my wife finished cleaning up the freshly laid tiles. If all goes as planned, we'll be able to finish the paint job in the entry hall this weekend and we'll also apply the last layer of lacquer on the cork floorboards in the bed room, so that when we finally get the correct room doors installed on Thursday next week, we'll finally, finally be ready to move in. Hopefully. And if we aren't, well there's still enough work to do in the basement and on the upper floor, so there's no lack of things to do for us.
But you'll have to wait a bit longer yet for the new pictures of our house. For some as yet unknown reason my computer steadfastly refuses to have anything to do with the digicam, which means that I have to sort out some USB problems now. Great! But all hardware sucks, and all software sucks, so what else is new?
2003-10-14
AOL sucks
This is nothing new and shouldn't really surprise everyone. I just wish they would restrict their suckage to their own customers. But every once in a while I encounter a new, exciting way in which AOL manages to suck for people who are not their customers. Like, say, today when I looked through my Sitemeter only to find someone who had visisted my blog with a referral that looked suspiciously like an AOL search engine result page. Which I found upon checking was indeed the source of that hit.
What's the deal with this, you ask? The problem is that each and every page on Gudy Two Shoes tells visiting robots, spiders, and search engines who care to listen and know the relevant specs, namely the HTML specification as published by the W3C, that they should neither index nor cache this blog or any of its archive pages. Which most of them do, as they should.
Now, why does it not really surprise me that it is AOL of all entities, whose engineers - and I use that word very loosely indeed - are apparently not sufficiently literate to read and understand the most basic specifications of the stuff they deal with every freaking day? Fucking Morons!
2003-10-13
Of Beanstalks and Bathrooms
I'm not a big fan of sequels and modern continuations of older stories like e.g. fairy tales. The main reason for this is that most of these don't live up to people's expectations or even the quality of the prequels or original stories.
On the other hand, I love the works of Jim Henson, late inventor of the Muppets. He was able to take a story and turn it into something bigger, better, sometimes even magical. I fondly remember religiously watching the wonder that was the Muppet Show, or Fraggle Rock, and all those wonderful characters and stories every Sunday afternoon. Every movie I've ever seen that somehow involved Jim Henson Productions has so far been worth seeing, not only because of the love that Henson must have felt for his work and that permeates every minute of those movies, the attention to detail, the joy they brought me, and the thought provoking little questions they left me with after the happy end.
So when I saw that one of the stations around here would broadcast Brian Henson's Jack and the Beanstalk" TV mini series in two parts on Saturday and Sunday evening, I was curious what Jim Henson's son would do with a modern continuation of that old fairy tale.
And I'm glad to report that as far as I am concerned, the Henson talent won out over the Danger of the Weak Sequel. The film was a delight to watch: thoughtful, wonderful, with great actors and a plot that put a new twist on that old story of the poor guy who climbed a giant beanstalk and killed an evil giant to win himself and his mother a fortune.
The one weakness that marred the over all enjoyment of the movie was the quality of the special effects, which left things to be desired. Quite apart from the fact that the "real world" parts of the movie somehow worked better for me than those set in the "fairy world", some of those special effects looked artificial and contrived. The worst offender in that respect was the animation of the growing of those magical beanstalks. The green tendrils that were sprouting from the beans would have been stars playing the role of a slimy, green tentacle belonging to an equally slimy, green monster in a cheap horror movie. But as bean sprouts they were a complete and utter failure.
Fortunately, the rest of the cast had more talent. Jon Voigt as the backstabbing, weasely Siggy was a perverse delight to watch, and Vanessa Redgrave as Jack's aunt and Richard Attenborough as Magog, the wise head of the council of the giants, were just plain great. Matthew Modine playing the modern day Jack felt somewhat wooden in places, but then he had to contend with the utterly wonderful Mia Sara at his side, who played the role of Ondine, the woman who was sent from the fairy land to try and correct the fatal consequences which the events in that old tale had brought to her home land. Maybe that comparison is unfair, but Mia Sara was positively angelic in that role, so I imagine almost everyone would look a bit wooden in comparison.
Unfortunately, the second thing which spoiled the experience a bit for me was connected with the role of Ondine. Namely, I found the change of appearance between the Ondine of the old fairy tale and the Ondine of the modern part of the movie a bit implausible given the relatively short amount of time which was supposed to have passed between those events in the fairy land. But that borders on nitpicking, and all in all, Modine and Sara together were a delight to watch.
My verdict: if you have a thing for that kind of stuff, watch it. I'd give it eight or nine out of ten points, mainly due to the weak special effects. And I know that next time they broadcast "Jack and the Beanstalk", I'll have my video recorder armed and ready. This stuff is a keeper.
[And I still dream of Mia Sara's wonderful eyes. She has a face I could crush on. Hard.]
In totally unrelated news, the bathroom in our house is coming along nicely. There are still a few square feet of bathroom wall which need the gaps between the tiles filled, the radiator needs to be remounted on the wall, which should be a piece of cake, and then there's only the shower cabin to put together and install in the bathroom. After that, there's only the minor matter of once again painting the entry hall and giving the cork floor in the bed room a nice finish, and we're ready to move in. Yay to that!
[Yes, there are a handful of new house pictures in the digicam. But don't hold your breath.]
2003-10-09
Ahnuld and Beyond
All the racket about Ahnuld being the next governor of California has compelled me to do something I don't very often do on this blog: write a political commentary.
I'm not really surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger won the recall in California. Heck, I would have been mildly surprised if he didn't, despite all the sexual harassment/Enron/whatever things people have dug up during the last few weeks. I'm also struck by how apparently the majorities of both those who voted for him and who are now criticizing him seem to be mixing up the guy and the roles he played during his rather successful career as a mediocre actor. He's neither the Governator who will singlehandedly save California by cleaning up all those issues without hurting the good guys, nor is he the dumb brawns-for-brains schmuck that many of his more vociferous critics make him out to be. He's smarter than most people think, and this and his absolute will to succeed may serve him well in his new job. Whether that'll be enough remains to be seen, though...
That said, I'm appalled that he got elected. But not because he's Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because he apparently got his votes solely based on his popularity as an action star, because he got elected without any prior track record in politics, without having something even remotely resembling a political program beyond "I don't know yet what I'll do, but it will be great, and it won't be paid for with more taxation", which may be right on the first count, but highly doubtful on the other two.
But important as the election of that republican action star in the most liberal and economically biggest state of the US may be in the next few years, there are other issues with these elections which have important long-term implications, and which are falling by the wayside in that orchestrated bruhaha being staged in the short intention span economy that is the American public. Because what has me concerned rather more than who got elected is the question of how these elections got held.
This starts with things like how you guys have elections in the middle of the week, and how this means that polling stations opening belatedly (due to technical or organizational difficulties or any other reason) are potentially disenfrenchasing voters who need to go to work and therefore don't have the time to wait indefinitely for the people manning the polling stations to get their act together. It continues with how there were apparently no identity checks for the voters in many places, how there were organizational fuckups that meant that polling offices were closed and the voters (mis-)directed elsewhere, or that people who had registered to vote again didn't turn up in the lists, and other such things that are more or less unthinkable to someone like me, who is used to the rather smoothly organized elections here in Germany.
But all of this pales in contrast to the issues surrounding the use of voting machines. And it's not just that working in the IT field and being cynical and all that, I'm naturally sceptic and suspicious about the general idea. (BTW, if any of my esteemed readers could please explain to me why you are using voting machines in the US, and what that purportedly gains you compared to using the tried and true pen-and-paper approach, which in addition to being elementarily easy has the additional advantage of providing full accountability for every single vote, I'd be grateful, because I just don't Get It.) No, what absolutely baffles me is the fact that you keep on using voting machines like those punch card systems that are known to be unreliable as all hell (the words Bush and Florida come to mind).
What really frightens we witless, though, is the increasing use of those electronic touch screen systems. Hell, I won't even go into the connections that exist between Diebold and the republican party or at least several of its governors, because I won't touch this with a ten foot pole. But these voting systems are proven by security researchers to be insecure by design. Several of the serious and debilitating security flaws in those things have been known for years without being fixed, and still these abominations are employed throughout the country. WTF?!
And I'm not talking about relatively minor things like changing/dropping a single vote, the possibility of multiple votes by the same person through the use of copies/replicas of the insecure smart cards used in some of those systems. The whole system is in fact far from temper proof and can be attacked in multiple ways by any sufficiently technology-savvy person, allowing potential attackers to change votes, transfer them from one candidate to another, totally replace the ballot with one of their own design, etc. ad nauseam. And the clincher? Some of those changes are not detectable after the fact. AT. ALL. And a spokescritter has the gall to say that such tamperings have never happened?! Hey, the whole point is that you can't know whether any of the elections carried out with the help of these electronic voting machines have been tampered with, because the design of those systems has apparently been done by some shit for brain morons without a clue about security, the source code was not publically reviewed by independent security researchers (because it apparently is Valuable Intellectual Property of the company in question, and that is of course more important than ensuring a correct voting process) and there are basically no useful laws or regulations about the use of such automated voting systems.
Worst of all, there seems to be basically no public discussion about any of this. I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.
[BTW, from several thousand miles away, having no stake in the outcome, and not knowing much about any of the candidates, my favorite candidate was Larry Flint. And not just because I'm an oversexed smut proponent...]
2003-10-06
Damn, that was fast
[Venting ahead, avert your eyes!]
Half an hour into my first working day after the vacation, and I'm annoyed. Four hours, and I'm royally pissed off, and what little effects of relaxation I managed to get in three weeks of mostly house building related activities is mostly gone as well.
Yes, it's the Project from Hell again, and the incredible timing of my boss, who managed to schedule a preparatory meeting, Powerpoint presentations and all, with some of the bigwigs from our clients for this Wednesday. There is of course the small detail of the officially designated project manager, our head of IT, being on vacation this week, and the similarly small matter of the acting project manager, namely yours truly, having been on vacation, and blissfully unaware of said Very Important Meeting until today. Of course, none of the Powerpoint presentations even exist yet, which means that in addition to getting up to speed in the two projects where I am project manager already, I (who am definitely not a great presenter, no Powerpoint Guru, and whose concept of a graphically intense, convincing presentation is no more involved than slides with bulleted lists) have to whip up a sufficient number of Powerpoint slides to support a 90 minute presentation of our vision of the software for the Project from Hell.
Due to a fuckup that is entirely not our business we'll also have to cram more functionality into the software, probably without getting a bigger budget for it, because my boss promised that fixed price a few months ago. Oh, and did I mention that no, we actually won't use an Application Server after all (which is probably a good thing) like we've been saying for almost a year now. Which means that key elements of the envisioned server architecture will look considerably different, and no-one is quite sure how, because no-one has had the fucking time to properly think about it. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what's wrong with this project: it's worth a million buck or thereabouts, and there's no time to properly think things through.
And the IT job market in Germany is flat as a billard table and dead as a Dodo.
Fuck! Fucking Fuck!
2003-10-01
A Dozen Blog Posts Rolled Into One
Bleh, this is not what I had imagined our vacation to be like. The original plan involved a few days at the Baltic Sea, doing stuff in our new house, lots of long walks through the woods during the bout of exceptionally nice weather we had here throughout the second half of September, lots of sleep, and certainly lots of sex as well. But it seems that the old adage about even the best battle plans going poof once the fight is joined doesn't just apply to armed combat...
OK, so we actually managed to spend a few days at the sea, though we didn't stay as long as we should have, and we certainly made some progress on the house construction front, but other than that things didn't quite go as planned. For one thing, everything just took longer for one reason or another. We also had some crisis intervention duties handed to us because obviously the logistics department of our house construction firm is so overworked that they are basically unable to function properly, which means that we had to do a lot of organizing and coordinating, which ate up a surprisingly large amount of energy and time.
Nonetheless, progress has been made, which I hope to document with a few pictures here in the next days (but don't hold your breath...): We finally have both water and gas, and we also laid the waste water pipes, so the kitchen finally works. With the oven having been installed last week, and the dining table hopefully arriving tomorrow, the kitchen will in fact be the first room that is totally and completely finished. A big, heartfelt yay! to that. The living room is essentially only missing the ceiling lamps, TV and phone plugs, which will all be installed by Saturday at the latest, so apart from the fact that it's still devoid of furniture (we bought a couch already, but it will only arrive in about 6-8 weeks), it's more or less finished as well. The same is true of the temporary bed room and later guest/work room, as well as the entry hall, which is only waiting for a second paint job. So, once I finish tiling that darned bath room, and install the shower cabin and toilet, we are basically ready to move in!
In non-house-related news, between the cold that I have finally shaken off completely, and my wife having had her period last week (which it turns out not only I but also she herself is squeamish about!) we have been going without sex for two weeks now. This both explains the lack of sex-related posts here as well as our horniness, now that all handicaps have been removed. I'm certainly looking forward to what may come of that!
Other things I would have liked to blog about at greater length but haven't managed to:
- Our trip to the Spreewald, a region of wetlands and forests created by the river Spree forking up into many little rivers and canals. We rented a kayak and paddled along the Spree for a few hours, enjoying the peace and calm, drinking in the natural beauty of the landscape.
- Today's walk along our favourite 90-minute trail around one of the lakes around here. The weather was fabulous, and the small brook connecting that lake with the next one was turned into an enchanted looking place by the autumn sun. (Btw, this is quite similar to what the Spreewald looks like.)
- Enjoying the full bloom of another of our orchids
- Enduring another bout of insomnia, and going with only four hours of sleep for several days.
- Installing Gentoo Linux as a dual boot with Windows 98 on my box, and getting the ISDN card to work with it. (Well, that bloody insomnia has got to be good for something at least!)
- Finishing Janny Wurts' "Peril's Gate" from her excellent "Curse of the Mist Wraith" series. The book was great, as all of her books have been to date, but it had its fair share of flaws, some of them new to me in Wurts' works. In the end I was somewhat surprised to find that it would have benefitted from being about 100 pages shorter than it is, and I'm not usually one to hanker for shorter books. Heck, I fully agree with the guy who said that "'The Lord of the Rings' is a great book, but it has one flaw - it is too short", but Peril's Gate just hasn't been up to Janny Wurts's usually high standard of excellence, in my opinion. (Btw, I'm reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy right now, and I'm having a blast, although the thing is somewhat hard to digest in places due to the lack of structure. But as far as whacky conspiracy theories go, this one is still a killer.)
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