much ado about

nothing. nothing. that's what i'm doing, and that's all i've done today. I've definitely had those moments when i'm just totally unmotivated, but this is going on being a whole day of no motivation. There is a meeting late in the day, which will in theory give me more focused work to do, but until then i'm really just having a no-brain day at work. until then, my thoughts: Google Checkout This doesn't make much sense to me. I don't see how this fits into aggregating the world's data. So really it's just another avenue for revenue. Which could be put to some good use. For instance, what if based on your purchase history, Google was able to recommend things you might like across various online stores instead of closed to a single amazon.com store? Better yet, leverage that Google database and incorporate things you've searched for, emails you've recieved, videos you've watched, etc etc etc. I love and hate this idea. ... hmm. i thought i had more points to make, but i guess not. it's a slow day.

well, i think you're crazy.

My office building has become mostly full. When I began here, the only two people in cubes were myself and some other guy named Jun who I had met at orientation. Now there's only 2 cubes free on the whole floor. When everyone gets excited, it gets pretty loud. So I've finally resorted to listening to music at work. Yeah, I really don't have much to post. I just needed a break from learning. That's right. Learning. I was assigned two projects when I came to VMware, both of which looked like something I had a reasonable amount of technical expertise in. However, this is what's known as Phase 0 of like a 6-phase process (where the second half is betas and release candidates) which is a nice way of saying we don't really know what we're doing yet, but we're trying to figure it out. Unfortunately in figuring it out the project keeps spinning off into realms of technology everyone knows will work great but which I've never used before. So I have to keep learning them, changing my design, and so on. It's odd. Designing software is less thought-intensive than development work. I like it, but I'm begining to miss the ability to actually create a program that does something rather than creating a design that looks like it should do something. But that comes next. Alright. I'mma go get myself a snack or something and try and get back to learning.

all your base-10 are belong to us.

I was thinking of my usual thought process and I came across the newfangled concept that there is no such thing as an absolute fact. Everything known to be certain is really only known based on some underlying context or bias. That old chestnut. An internal conversation ensued. "What about math? Math is always consistant." "Only within consistant axioms. What's 1+1?" "Two" "Why?" "Because that's what it means to add 1 to 1." "That's what it means to you. And to anyone using the standard meanings of both "one" and "plus"" "What?" "Let's say I make my own base-10 numbering scheme except each number is mapped to the name and symbol of the following number. For example, my '4' would be your '3'. Thus, '1' + '1' = '1'. " "That's ridiculous." "Better yet, keep the numbers & symbols, and just change the base. What's 1+1 in base-2? 10." "Base-2?" "Yeah, it's where you only have digits 0 and 1. not 2 or above." "Well that's a strange name." "Why's that strange?" "Because if all you knew was base-2 then you wouldn't have a concept of the number '2' to describe the base" "Interesting" "What do you call normal math?" "Base-10" "There isn't a single digit to describe 10? You use base-10 numbers to describe the base of a base 10 number?" "I suppose." "Why don't you do that for other bases, then, what makes 10 so special?" "Fine, we'll do it for other bases as well." "Good. Now what does that make base-2?" "Base-10."

time = $$

i never used to believe that time equals money. but it's true. i'm at work for x hours. for every hour i'm at work, i gain money. i travel around, and for every hour I travel, i lose money. everytime i eat, i lose money. unless I didn't pay for lunch. really, what I'd like to do is sit down and figure out when i should work, when i should travel, when i should sleep, etc, etc, etc. but the problem is i don't really have enough time. so i do ad-hoc things and i'm probably losing money. case in point: i slept in berkeley sunday and tuesday night. i drove to work. not only did i use gas instead of bart, but i had to pay the $3.00 to use the dumbarton bridge. I also spent $8.00 doing laundry (coin-operated machines are total rip-offs). so i've decided something. I'm not really going to be able to keep all my money. My hands aren't big enough, my grip isn't tight enough to keep it from paying for food, gas, and evil greedy gnomes. so i've decided instead of making this thing a battle between me getting money vs. losing it. it's now become a race to spend my money on fun things faster than i spend it on the needed things. so i bought two t-shirts. (1)(2)

what can I say, i'm a busy guy

that's right. I haven't been posting. I've been busy. "But Chris, the point of the schedule was that, despite being busy, you had a real schedule with real deadlines that you had to meet despite how important you thought what you were doing was" Who said that? Who? That's what I thought. Seriously, nobody has been on my case about writing. Nobody. It's not like you all said "oh yay, more chris writings! I can hardly wait until his next update of carefully arranged words, yum!" No. It seems to me you all laughed to yourself, rolled your eyes, condescendingly wished me good luck, and went back to sleep (behind my back, no less!) Shame, shame on you! You're letting me get away with this. It's people like you who let people like me get away with not writing. You should be ashamed. ok, i gg now, i got stuff to do.

it's late. it's really late. i saw debbie again tonight. it was the third time in two weeks. long story short, i'm the king of mixed signals. it was exactly what i wanted, exactly what i needed, but exactly what i was afraid of. this time after hugging we went back to her room and made out. i was trying not to get involved thinking "she doesn't need this -- she's about to go away again. gahhhh we agreed to keep in touch and have a quasi-open relationship. i know i'm just going to end up waiting for her. and now i get to deal with asking if she's found someone... i don't know. i wasn't cut out for this. she leaves in less than 4 hours. i'm tired. and i can still taste her Dr Pepper kisses and her scent still lingers on my clothes. ok. i'm passing out now.

what a night i spent the evening at debbie's. it was a doubl fature of mean girls and when hrry met sally. in that order. it was good. we definitely spent pleanty of time talking before, during, and after the movis had started. that was really one of the best parts. she really listens to me and cares about what i have to say, and she asks the questions i ned to hear. it was good. the only thing that was better were her hugs at the end. man, does she give strong hugs. i felt so safe and secure there... i hated to leave. but it's 3am and i've got work tomorrow if onlly it were college i probably would have stayed over. sleeping on the floor or whatnot. because damn, i really didn't want it to end. but it had to and so it did.

late for my first post.

oh snap. it's 3:40pm. I swear I was thinking to myself at 1pm, "yay italy winning at futbal, double yay watching tv at work, oh yeah i have to write a post, i will when I get back to my desk." which did happen before 3pm, but unforutnately by the time i got back that thought had been long buried by other, more recent thoughts. anyhoo weekend was good. saturday i played sticks, a game I haven't played in over a year. it was ridiculously fun. then I went to my brother's graduation party, which was really for my parents. As soon as I walked in I was paraded around to say hi to everyone -- old family friends, old family, and people who I don't know but who clearly really know me. By the end, I had a headache, and they ran out of eggrolls. Boo on no eggrolls. I spent practically all of sunday starting, playing, and beating a game known as FutureTactics for PS2 (my brother won a mini PS2 at his all-night on-campus graduation party. you know, the one where they have fun stuff to do all night immediately after graduation to prevent you from going out and finding booze and driving drunk or other fun things.) It was my first turn-based fighting game. And it was the first video game I'd played in a while. It was addicting, but only for a day. one hour late. close enough. "Weighed down with words too over-dramatic"

written on Bart

Hey, hey. okay. what about, i mean, remember that time when you were like "what do you wanna do" and i was like "i wanna write everyday" and you were like "awesome, you should totally do it" and i was all "yeah i totally will" man, we were so baked. I've thought about writing. I really have. On and off for these last few weeks. But I haven't. That's a fact. I've been trying to think of a schedule on which i could regularly update without it making a huge negative impact on my schedule. And I think that's currently just been a stall tactic for me not writing. So here's my new pledge to you, the faithful^* reader. 1. Daily updates to my blogs Monday - Friday by 3pm. I plan on doing this daily after lunch, but sometimes lunches can go pretty late in the afternoon... Also, these will be small nonfiction updates. Don't expect much 2. New writings at midnight on Mondays. By the end of monday night I'll have something new written. It'll be pretty substantial. Like a Dan Brown chapter. 3. Published writings to my blogs every Wednesday. This could just be an extra-long post or it could actually be the thing i wrote for Monday. It depends on what I feel like publishing. So really all you care about is #1 and #3, but it's good to have my personal deadline of #2 written down. I'm hoping I can talk with Olivia or Debbie and get some literary criticism between Monday and Wednesday. That or I might have to tweak the days a bit depending on my schedule/the schedule of my editors. "hey, do you kiss on the first date?"