May 27, 2010

I noticed a curious absence of daylogs for today, and being the ignorant newbie I am, I presume to fill the void with my day's ramble.

It occurs to me that there are few things as unpleasant as not being able to see. For those who care to continue reading, I am essentially night-blind. Below a certain luminance (far above the norm for a human of my age and health), I can't see anything, not even vague outlines of objects and people. This rarely presents me with any real problems, because I have had a very long time to be accustomed to using my ears and fingertips as 'eyes' at night... but tonight was different.

The overhead light in my kitchen died while I was going to fetch a glass of water before bed. I had used a glass earlier for the same purpose, and of a wish not to wash one more unnecessary dish, I had left it sitting on the back of the counter. I grabbed it blindly, cranked the tap until the hiss of water grew high-pitched in the way that means the glass is almost full, and took a long, deep swig...
...until I smelled formic acid.

Oh, dear.

I picked my way delicately back to my bedroom, the only room in the house where a light was currently on, and sure enough, the glass had several small black ants swarming over it. At some point, if I did not swallow any, then at the very least I squished one under my hand while lifting the glass. That was the source of the formic acid stink.

I'll say this for ants: they're cool little critters, as long as they stay off my food and aren't biting me. I try not to kill them if I don't have to kill them, and in fact at this very moment a small platoon of them is criss-crossing my laptop screen. I'm not going to do anything to harm them; the ones that get on my skin are flicked off in a fairly benign manner.
This doesn't mean I like drinking ants with my water. Eiichhh.
Funny thing, six years ago that would have had me shrieking and spazzing out. Now it's more a vague reaction of "huh...well, it's not a big enough dose to kill me, and maybe I got a microgramme of protein from the little buggy."

In other news, this evening I managed to acquire a second degree burn on my right hand, after a small fiasco involving macaroni and cheese. I'm cheerfully on the mend; I hadn't burnt myself (except sunburns) since I was three years old, so I'm pleased to have lasted so long with no significant displays of clumsiness in the presence of heat.

As I write this, I am alternating windows between E2 and gmail, discussing possible career options for my fiance, and I have a feeling that he is going to do or be something seriously phenomenal... if I can keep him motivated to whichever set of ideals he finally chooses.

I got the job today May 27 2010, I should be expecting a call tonight or tomorrow about the introduction to what I'll have to be doing. For now I can only say: I am thrilled. This is exactly the kind of job I wanted for my summer holidays because I have nothing better to do at night if I maintain a Dymaxion sleep schedule and I can still go out with friends any time of the day. I hope to get a second job too so I won't need to work during school. My grandma said that people don't even have one job and you expect to get two. She's right unfortunately. I'm not just talking about the Crisis, but the government decided to set restrictions on how people with student status can be employed. The new law is called Small labour or Malo delo, which prohibits working over a certain amount of hours per month or per year. Either way, it is a good idea in my opinion, contrary to local belief, since our economy has to get back on it's feet somehow and that isn't going to happen if the employer only takes student workers. I went to the gallery in which I once worked, lord knows why I quit, and they told me they'd call me. In our country that literally means that they'll call me when they'll need me. But I probably wont get more than 10 hours with them.

The job is in a hostel! That means food, internet, new people and a bed! Now where can you possibly get a job that resembles a computer desk, bedroom and a cafe? To make it more interesting, the night-shift pays more, even though those guys clean and dine. Of course they consider it as a job that requires stamina and possible health risks are involved, but that' just for the peak of the Gauss curve. Not saying I'm much different I just don't consider that as a problem for my biorhythm.

I'll keep you guys posted on interesting events. Maybe if there'll be plenty of things to write about I might actually transform this into a log. I'll obviously have time, which is why I have the feeling I won't. Rooting for busy nights and interesting insomniac guests, I'd like this to be more than just face-time.

This is a good day. I just discovered that the city of Norfolk owes me $200 in overcharged taxes and the check is already in the mail. I didn't even have to play hardball! On top of that, I just got a minor pay raise. I think this offsets the aggravation of being stuck out here on an iron bathtub, at least a little.

So, in celebration I just picked up a trio of OCZ Vertex SSDs for myself and my nakama. If you've never used one of these, give it a try. Putting one in my main desktop reduced boot time from 1.5 minutes to 21 seconds. The transfer rates are awesome, but even more awesome is the fact that seek latency drops way down. Starting apps is lightning quick. Saving files is fast. Those annoying little hiccups that result from an app deciding to fire off a handful of dinky little writes disappear. Even better, you don't have to do anything else but use one in place of a normal hard drive. Yeah, the capacity isn't so hot, only 30-120GB if you want to keep costs reasonable, but that's no big deal. Most large files don't need ultra-fast access times anyway, so store them on a cheap 1TB 5400RPM disk, or on some LAN storage.

In other news, the promotion list for the Navy came out today. I didn't get promoted, but then, I already knew that. Unfortunately, neither did anyone else in my division. The percentage of ITs advanced to petty officer second class dropped from around 70%, where it's been for almost a decade, down to less than 30%.