Filling the Gap

Chin Up

2011-01-16T23:40:00.000-08:00

I haven’t written anything here for quite some time now. That on its own isn’t a good reason to write something; there’s nothing worse than speaking just to hear yourself talk. So that’s not why I’m doing this. I feel it’s about time I post something happier (for a change), and to follow up on a few things that have been going on for me.

How it started

So, the feel-good start to this is how this weekend went. Friday night was an impromptu game night, so not a whole lot to write home about. Saturday was when the real fun began, though. I headed up to San Francisco with some friends to try a whiskey bar before another friend’s housewarming. I tried a couple bourbons, but didn’t catch the whole name of the one I preferred. Oh well; I’ll figure it out later.

The housewarming was an excellent time, with a great mix of people I did know and new people I didn’t. While events with 30 people tend to be quite noisy—and my voice is still a bit raw—it was entertaining. Complete with a fake fireplace video! Some friends brought dates, and the happiness was nearly tangible, and that always leaves you feeling good. (Well, unless you’re terribly bitter like my college friends might have expected.)

This was then followed by an unplanned movie night since, sadly, I had not seen The Big Lebowski. So, both because it fit the mood and so everyone could educate me, that went on until about 3:30 in the morning. Since the buses weren’t running, we stayed the night and slept until about 7:30 when city sounds and general restlessness woke the remaining few up.

Thanking our final host from the prior evening, who was pleasant but clearly still exhausted, we headed for the bus. It took us about 20 minutes to get back to where our car was, and being 8:30 in the morning we decided (although not decisively) to grab breakfast before ultimately heading our separate ways. The food was delicious (and, perhaps, a bit too rich to finish), as was the company.

I finally got home about 11:30 in the morning, and promptly fell asleep into a much-needed nap following the late night and early morning.

Why this story?

There’s a takeaway here that I wanted to point out. This morning was the most pleasant I’ve had in a long time, but there was nothing terribly exotic. Just a quiet morning and tasty breakfast with friends after a fun evening. I often get caught up in my own life with work and ties to people located far away, and I suspect I’m not alone in that. I think I should make a point of starting days like this more often.

The other reason for this story is like I said before: I need to share happier insights rather than the stream of sad stories that typically appear here. It’s true that things aren’t always rosy. I’ll avoid enumerating them all, since it’s documented in the archives here, but there’s another footnote to add.

Like I shared with some of my friends before leaving San Francisco this morning, my grandmother has been in the hospital this week for surgery. We found out a few months ago that she had cancer, and it was removed this week. My reaction to the news has been rather muted, but here’s why:

First, it was caught early, and nothing about the prognosis seemed terribly dire. Unless I had hard evidence that things were going to get worse, I decided to keep going and expect the best. Let’s not kid ourselves—modern medicine is downright amazing. So I’m hopeful, not despondent.

I’ve of course done what I can to spend time with family (particularly over Christmas), since there are never any guarantees, but the bigger point is that I think it’s important to keep enjoying the good things about your own life (like the above story) even through adverse times.

For some reason or another, waiting for slumbering friends to awaken this morning, I decided to queue up my Styx album and listen to that. I didn’t get very far at the time, but it’s put me on a Styx binge the rest of the day, and despite the sadness in some of the songs, they make me feel happy in general.

With things like winter camping, skiing, concerts, theater shows, and more potential endeavors in the near future, there’s so much to be happy about. So even though sad things happen, there’s generally more promise in the future than sorrow in the past.

Three

2010-04-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

So. It has been three years since it happened; since we turned on the television and couldn’t believe what we saw; since we frantically checked the news, staring in disbelief as the facts emerged. It has been three years since we desperately called anyone and everyone we knew; since we stared blankly out our windows, wondering what came next; since the world stopped, however briefly, and shared in our pain, offering support that was desperately needed. It has been three years since I was part of a community, stricken by tragedy, that stood together in a way I had never experienced before.

It has been a long three years for me, with plenty of personal triumphs and tragedies in between. I graduated, but left the school I loved; I started a great job, but left behind the people I loved; I’ve made great friends, but lost some as well; I’ve gotten closer to family, but lost my brother unexpectedly. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you lose a lot.

The long and short is this: right now, looking back, remembering what happened, I feel like some of the most important lessons—also the least tangible—have faded over time, and some have even been lost. “What are those,” you say? I’m glad you asked.

Strong communities are crucial.

Without our friends, families, and fellow Hokies, the events of that day would have been even harder to stomach; because we had each other, we had hope of finding our way beyond the pain. I’ll cross the line here and say this too: beware the stealthy spread of fear and distrust disguised as “safety.” It just drives wedges between us; we need to be closer to one another, not farther apart.

Nothing is guaranteed, not even tomorrow.

While this is often repeated and rephrased, the point still remains. While it’s impractical to never make assumptions about the future, it’s important to avoid squandering now. Treat people kindly! Enjoy the time you have with them; for every friendship there is a final parting, and seldom will you see it coming. I got lucky—my brother and I parted with a hug, even though I was coming back in three weeks. It turned out to be our last. When was the last time you hugged the people you care about?

Most quarrels are, in fact, pretty minor.

When compared with the possibility of tragedies of this scale, a lot of things just fade away. The $5 your friend never paid back? Unimportant. The need to win every argument? Not worth it. Feelings of inferiority or superiority? Misplaced. These kinds of events level the playing field, and make us realize we’re all in this together—assuming we don’t tear ourselves apart first.

So why am I writing this? Partly because it saddens me to see myself and others forgetting these lessons. I can see it in our actions over the past three years, and that alone makes this tragedy even sadder. Secondly, and perhaps more honestly, this is my only outlet because—for the second time in as many years—I’ve not made it back to join fellow Hokies in remembrance.

I can’t believe the news today;

Oh, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.

U2, Sunday, Bloody Sunday

That’s how it feels now, looking back. While most days now pass without considering these ideas, this seems to be the magic day—well, one of two—that throws them into stronger relief. Hopefully it’s an impetus to improve our own lives and those of people around us. In memory of those lost, we live for 32.

Sean P. Marks: 1987–2009

2009-12-29T23:31:00.000-08:00

Sean Patrick Marks, age 22, died Thursday, December 10, 2009 at his home in Raleigh.

Sean was born August 9, 1987 in Roanoke, VA, but grew up in Raleigh and knew it as home. He graduated from Enloe High School in 2006, and was employed as a pharmacy technician at Kerr Drug Stores. Sean defined himself using his exceptional talents in music and visual arts. Though reality too often inhibited his dreams, his passion for them will always remain.

He is survived by his parents, Bob and Pegi Marks; brother, Paul; grandparents, John and Alice; and his extended family and close friends. His presence will be sorely missed.

The News & Observer

Some passages you neither expect nor wish to author. Unfortunately, pen had to meet paper for this purpose when my brother passed away earlier this month. It is but a glimpse of the person Sean was; it was the best tribute we could create.

When friends and family found out, the reaction was frequently: “I’m so sorry; I have no idea what to say.” I’ve been in that position before, but never did I believe I’d be on the receiving end. I just want to share my personal feelings on that: great! Even experience can’t teach you quite what to say, and I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone. So for your own sake, I hope you never have to learn this pain.

Remembering Sean

In life:

In death:

Full obituary, The News & Observer
Memorial page, Brown-Wynne Funeral Homes
Facebook group
Musical selections:

Words fall short

For anyone who knows me well, I have a penchant for putting together words at memorable occasions. My parents (and, more surprisingly, many other parents) have not forgotten one such speech toward the end of high school. The point is never simply to talk, but to articulate the elusive and ethereal aspects of an experience so they may be better remembered.

I wanted to make sure my brother’s funeral was a special thing, a fitting tribute and message to those left behind. So here’s what I was able to cobble together:

To describe what we’re all enduring, everyone says there are no words. Among us is one person who knew that better than anyone; my brother, Sean. He said with music that which words cannot; his talent was natural, and that I will always admire.

Though imperfect, like each of us, Sean’s heart was full of love. He loved his music and his family and his friends. Through the many trials life presented, he still loved these in the end. We can hear it in his music, see it in his pictures, and feel it in his deeds.

Sean never would have wanted this. While nothing can ever fill this void, we can honor his life by finding within ourselves the things that he loved. We can find them and share them, just as he spent his life trying to do.

Sean has been part of my life forever. We grew up together, and were supposed to grow old together. I will cherish all the memories we shared. I hope to share his passions with others, because they’re his gift to all of us.

Brother, you left us too early.

I’m told the room was full, but I honestly can’t remember. I gazed out from where I spoke, but I didn’t really see. My message was this: remember Sean for who he was, and help touch the world as he would have. Though he no longer lives among us, he can live in (and through) our memories.

Words can never fully capture a life lived fully, but at least I tried.

All good things…

Depending on how long you’ve known me, you may already have known that my brother and I went through a rough patch toward the end of high school (for me) and into my first year or so of college. The good news is that we had worked past that, and got along well. The bad news is that our reemerging kinship was cut so painfully short.

I wish I could say this is my first experience with death among my peers, but it’s not. I’ve always felt a lingering guilt about that, because it didn’t hit me as hard as maybe it should have. I didn’t know anyone personally, which made it easier for me. This time, it’s practically the opposite: it’s not just a peer or just a friend, it’s my brother.

Back then, our motto became “live for thirty-two,” but now it feels like mine may become thirty-three instead. I just hope it doesn’t happen again.

ASIDE: I think I now understand how hard losing someone can be. It’s not only the initial loss, but also the recurring reminders and passing thoughts that reopen one of life’s most painful wounds. To anyone whose pain I’ve not understood before, I’m sorry; I think I understand now.

Life goes on

I write this not because I will forever hang onto the past, but because I acknowledge that I and everybody else need to put this behind us. Our lives need to continue, even though Sean is finally at peace. Life wasn’t always easy for him, though even in hardship he managed to find some joy for himself. He’d want us to keep finding joy for ourselves, too.

That said, this is simply my way of archiving and remembering things that I feel are important, both about his life and about his passing. I don’t want time to erode some memories; it’s a worthwhile venture to perserve them while I still can.

Loose Ends

2009-03-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

For some reason not wholly apparent to me, I’ve decided I owe everyone an explanation of what’s been occupying my time for the past couple weeks. My life, particularly since I graduated last May, has been rife with loose ends. Some of them were clearly my own creations, and some were just products of my surroundings. One can only collect so many of these before they begin to weigh down the rest of your life; they’ll sit in the back of your mind and complicate your view of other opportunities that present themselves.

So I suppose it should be a relief to me, then, that many of my loose ends appear to be tidying themselves up right now.

The biggest among these is—surprise—academic. I started an undergraduate research project last spring as a substitute for certain graduation requirements. It is simultaneously the best and worst decision I made for my education. I enjoyed the research much more than a corresponding class; I loved choosing my own direction and following it. However, the project has haunted me ever since it began.

Last summer I was busy preparing to move, and trying to bid all my friends farewell in a manner they deserved. All the while, this research was in the back of my mind, as my advisor tried to have graduate students follow-up over the summer. That didn’t pan out, so it spilled into the fall in two capacities. First, trying to tidy up the paper for a formal publication attempt, and second to assist a team of grad students who were trying to make practical use of the work.

When I wasn’t busy at work, I was busy at home fulfilling these two needs. It took time from me that I honestly didn’t want to spare. Except a week spent hiking in New Mexico, this described most of my fall.

Fast forward a couple months, and it still hadn’t gone away. The original attempt at publication faltered, resulting only in acceptance as a poster. The conference was February 22–24, so I spent many of my evenings in Februray contemplating the contents of said poster, trying my best (albeit rather unsuccessfully) to design and properly print the poster. I didn’t have the completed, printed poster in-hand until the Friday before the conference.

So that weekend, I drove to Monterey where the conference was held. I spent one night (between registration and presenting), which turned out to be quite the miserable experience. For several reasons, I was quite ill last weekend and hardly slept at all. I presented the poster, and then returned to San Jose to work, since I didn’t have vacation time to attend the entire conference.

The research and its associated paper and conference have amounted to so much pressure that ambivalence slowly grew into animosity. By the time I got behind the wheel, driving to Monterey, I was incredibly pissed off at the idea of attending a conference for research that had burned me out. That, and I’d only answer questions for an hour and then be conveniently forgotten. So needless to say, I was a bit perturbed that whole weekend.

Having that research and poster squarely behind me is a huge relief, though my life is not completely free of its shackles yet. My advisor is still pushing for a full publication, and there is some private interest in the work that I shall not discuss currently.

When I first decided / announced that I would be moving to California to start my job, my friends received the news with fairly uniform intrigue. A few of them had recently grown into wine aficionados, and at least one is very interested in skiing. California is a great place to do both, so many ideas were discussed about visiting me here to pursue such activities.

I consider this a loose end because we have this habit of never solidifying plans until the last minute. So despite the fact that discussions began well over a year ago, nothing was (or is) concrete. Turns out that, little to my surprise, all the plans to visit/tour have morphed into nothing more than empty threats.

Disappointing, but at least I have my answer(s) now.

Clarifications. To be more specific, I tend to avoid telling people about my life until I have a pretty concrete understanding of what’s going on. In some cases, this means I let folks go a really long time on their own assumptions. So a couple weeks ago, I finally decided to put an end to that. (Rather, I decided to break the silence with a few people.)

I finally got to catch up with Marj in earnest for the first time since we broke up aeons ago (nearly four years, I believe). It was good to get that sorted out, if poorly timed; she’s leaving for the Peace Corps tomorrow. On that note, I finally took my parents aside and made sure they’re on the same page I am about that situation. I could always tell there was some awkwardness on their part, and it’s good to have that wrapped up.

More importantly, it’s about time I started keeping them more informed about the rest of my life. I don’t know why I felt the need to hide parts of it until I had them figured out.

Some more concrete things I’ve finally done this weekend. My car has needed some routine maintenance for a while, and the trip to Monterey finally put me over the limit I’d been awaiting. So I changed its oil and its wiper blades this weekend, though I’ve still got a couple more things to fix.

Finally made it to the mall to get my watch repaired so now I can actually know the time without having to fumble for my phone. That’s been a long time coming.

So, on the whole, it’s good to have a few of these long- and short-lasting loose ends tied up. It’s certainly made for a busy couple of weeks, and some of it still weighs on me more than I’d like. Of course I’ve picked up a few more loose ends in the process, but I’m not yet sure what to make of those. Feels like I’ve lost something important, though.

Deception

2009-01-10T23:38:00.000-08:00

There are few practices in life that will more quickly drain your soul than deception. The underlying reasons can be either admirable or deplorable, but the art itself is difficult. Stories upon stories, never-ending, spiraling out of control. Any grand deception quickly falls victim to the social equivalent of the Butterfly Effect—more stories and more people must be included to sustain it. This innate difficulty, however, makes successful and elaborate deceptions something of a decadent beauty.

We have long fostered a romantic fascination with con artists and their schemes.

The most successful and, simultaneously, most deplorable example of deception is the day-by-day battle a psyche wages against itself between waking and sleeping. The person who does not suffer this discord is rare and fortunate; perhaps such a state is our ultimate quest—finding a life for oneself wherein no false pretenses are required to be at peace with its reality.

What makes this so abominable? It’s reality, right?

What troubles me is my simultaneous awareness of the process and unflappable tendency to repeat it nonetheless. I’m completely aware that half of my satisfaction is manufactured, and simply exists after battling my doubts into submission. It’s absolutely true that I love my job; loving the other 16 hours of every day is what’s forced.

I’m pretty sure the dissonance is rotting my soul.

I went out today and helped out at a high school that’s trying to participate in a robotics competition. Honestly, I would have done this in any situation. A lot of people gave their time to me through high school, so I feel like I should return the favor. However, when troubled, I have a habit of weathering the storm by dedicating myself to projects, people, and problems that are not my own. The Hillcrest jukebox is undoubtedly the canonical example. I slaved away for the first half of that semester, hiding from the questions I really needed to answer. It was something, but ultimately a distraction.

Three years later, it looks suspisciously like I’m doing it again.

Like before, this will eventually go into remission. I have friends who aren’t doing so well themselves, and any attempts to help those situations have been thwarted (or worse, nearly backfired). So it’s been a quiet week—one more completely on my own than usual. I’ve gotten a disturbingly good look at where I am. I suppose I’ll like it well enough after I defeat these questions once more, but no sooner.

Blame

2008-12-21T01:23:00.001-08:00

I was writing a long article about my thoughts on software engineering, and how I’m tired of seeing people hate on some pet application because of a nuance they find infuriating. It’s demoralizing, as a developer, and also very aggravating. Reasoned complaints are fine by me; it’s the unilateral lambasting without duly considering counter-arguments that drives me nuts.

So in thinking about blame, and placing it (if at all), I came up with a few questions I tend to (or should) ask myself first:

Am I informed enough to accurately place blame?
Is the target of my blame truly correct?
Can I support my argument objectively instead of emotionally?
Have I considered and accounted for reasonable counter-arguments?

I find that most tirades that aggravate me fail to address one or more of these basic premises. As for “objective” support, I purposely didn’t mention “subjective” arguments, because sometimes those are inevitable. What’s important is having support that amounts to something more substantiative than “because I said so.” You must be able to acceptably answer the rhetorical question “why?”

If not, your case holds no water. I think we would have a lot fewer stupid and frivolous arguments if people considered questions like these. And for the more serious arguments, I suspect they would be a lot more civil.

My software-specific post may come later, but this is the basic premise that can be applied to many more areas. I’m also interested in hearing from those of you more well-versed in logic and debate about how useful these ideas might be.

Philmont!

2008-09-02T22:54:00.001-07:00

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s roughly in this region of New Mexico.

I will be leaving in about 6 hours to catch a plane into Denver. We’ll arrive at Philmont on Friday, and hit the trail for a week, finishing up on September 13. I am taking my camera, and hope to take many amazing pictures—more amazing, at least, than the crop from last time, which were taken on a crappy film camera. I cannot explain how excited I am to be going back, even knowing how strenuous it is. You don’t grow by taking the easy options. I’ll post here to let everyone know I got back safely when I finally return the evening of the 13th.

Until then, stay safe, and don’t cause too much trouble while I’m gone. You know who you are.

~ Paul

UPDATE: I took my DSLR along, so here are my pictures from Philmont.

I might have a problem…

2008-08-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Let’s just take a quick look at the way I’ve named various hosts that are under my control (at work and at home).

Skaro, my monstrously powerful desktop at work, close to:
SatelliteFive, my laptop from work, which occasionally talks to:
Sontar, the desktop at my apartment, which is tethered to:
Gallifrey, my wireless base station, home to:
The Citadel, a disk with Time Machine backups, accessible via:
The TARDIS, the wireless network in my apartment.

The only thing missing is an eyestalk for the machine at work.

Blacksburg

2008-08-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

This is for everyone who knew me in my years there. Don’t get bogged down in the past tense; there’s so much more to see beyond that. I’m still not wholly convinced I’d be where I am now if it weren’t for all of you.

Here’s to you, the people who put up with my endless work and my frequent absences. Here’s to you; to the memories, the faces, and the places that I’ll always remember; to the shenanigans which stand cemented in our past; to the fights, the tears, and the laughs; to the blue skies and white snow; to the curious but agreeable union of orange and maroon; to the deafening roar of Lane stadium and the serenity of the duck pond; to the twilit corridors roamed by the craziest and brightest among us; to the hushed rumors that color our days; to knowing that the experience, missing just one piece, wouldn’t be as good; to knowing these are the experiences we should never forget.

This is for the personable town where I was born; the place where I lived, loved, lost, learned, and left; the place that taught me one can love ideas as well as people; the place that is as much an idea as a destination; the place I saw, through the worst of times, that there’s still some basic good left to be found; the place where a tiny piece of me still lives, at heart; the place I’ll always carry with me; the place I’ll try to share with people through my deeds, even if they can never and visit and understand its character; the place I know we should never forget.

I hope I’m as much a part of your Blacksburg as you are parts of mine. Regardless of what it is to you, make sure you Never Forget it.

Adieu. Hopefully I’ll be back some day.

It’s finally happening

2008-07-21T21:31:00.002-07:00

All summer, I’ve been preparing to move to California. Well, folks, the time has come; it’s finally happening. The moving truck shows up at 8AM tomorrow, and by 10AM I’ll have put the entirety of my existince onto a truck that will appear in California sometime around August 2nd.

The morning of July 23rd, my parents and I will begin a road trop that will take us to Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and the Grand Tetons. Then, on the morning of July 30th, I will arrive at my apartment in San Jose, CA.

My stuff won’t arrive until a bit later, which is fine; I’ve got plenty of logistics to work out anyway (DMV, voting, and insurance to name a few). But here’s the point. As much as I’ve dreaded this, the time has come for me to leave behind most of what I’ve known. My friends, my family, my memories, my home, and my school. The good times and the bad—oh lord, the bad. The amazing things I’ve done, and my less wholesome moments. The people whose live’s I have touched—for better or worse—are going to become more distant than I ever imagined possible.

This is not me going “sayonara, suckers!” This is me, surgically removing myself from the east coast. This is me, wishing against all the odds that I can keep some semblance of the friendships I’ve built over the past four years, eight years, or longer. This is me, hoping that 3000 miles don’t spell the end of good friends I’ve found in the sometimes-objectionable people and personalities I’ve encountered.

For those of you not familiar with Doctor Who, a newcomer to my list of favorite shows ever, I’m about to invoke some lingo you may not understand. Two of the best shows, even out of context, I’ve ever seen are those called Army of Ghosts and Doomsday. After that, perhaps The Girl in the Fireplace, Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways, and then Last of the Time Lords. (The plot in the last is cheesy, but the final 10-12 minutes are absolutely worth it.)

In Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, the Doctor loses the best companion he’s ever had; someone who, with no reason, pursued The Doctor to discover who he is, and let his do-what’s-right personality bleed into hers. She nearly sacrifices herself to save Earth, and The Doctor loses her forever; at least, as best he knows. They both did what they must, despite knowing the losses they’d suffer. Her name is Rose.

The battle of Canary Wharf, they called it. The day she “died.”

There’s nothing life-or-death about what’s happening right now. But the sealed wall in Torchwood Tower, seen in Doomsday, is every bit relevant to what’s going on. I’m doing what I must. I know that this move, being so distant, stands a very good chance of placing that impenetrable wall between me and the valuable pieces of my past I’d like to keep.

“I’m burning up a sun just to say goodbye.” The Doctor

The Doctor burned a star just so he could say goodbye to Rose. I’m thinking it’s going to take that much work to keep what I don’t want to lose. And, for those I have already lost, maybe I’ll “figure it out” some day. I think about it almost every day… seriously.

I’ll be out of touch until my stuff arrives, or August 4th, whichever happens first. If you want to reach me, or leave me a message, my sole mode of communication will be my cell phone. Thank you everyone—even those come and gone—for everything.

I wouldn’t be here without you; I wouldn’t be who I am. And I hope you’re glad to be part of that. (If you’re not, I’ve done something wrong…)

Drunk driving

2008-07-15T22:30:00.003-07:00

Yes, I’m going to beat this dead horse. Because, apparently, it’s not dead.

Though, I’m not going to rail on about the risks and dangers. We all know about those—I hope. I had to help handle an incident last Friday where an acquaintance of mine tried to drive home while barely able to stand. You read that right: he could barely stand, and tried to drive himself home.

He wouldn’t relinquish his keys, so another friend and I followed/chased him out to his car. We tried to talk him out of it. He started the car and tried to leave with the door open and a conversation still happening. Words were clearly a failed option.

So I reached in over the door (and the steering wheel) and took the keys out of the ignition. For anyone who knows me, this is not my style. I really detest confronting people when it’s not necessary. But in this case, it was absolutely necessary. I wish he’d just listened, to avoid the anger and acrobatics, but that just wasn’t meant to be.

And looking back, I don’t regret it. Nobody should. I hate pissing people off (especially those I know), and this was no exception—he was furious. I figured he’d never speak to me or my friends again. Turns out he barely remembered any of it; he called back the next day and apologized.

So, even though I thought we’d pissed him off, that’s not the case. But even if it were, I wouldn’t care. Others may let this stuff happen, but NOT ON MY WATCH. That’s the point. It’s important to ALWAYS do the right thing in these cases. For all anyone knows, we saved lives. But I’m glad I’ll never know one way or the other.

And I expect the same of my friends. If you’re not going to step up when the pressure’s on, then what’s the point? If I ever try to do something that colossally stupid, I hope my friends do whatever it takes to stop me. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES.

P.S.

I don’t plan on ever doing anything this dumb; I’m just saying that’s what I hope a friend would do. Also, after taking him and his car home, we did confiscate his keys for the night, just to make sure he didn’t try to go anywhere else.

Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious from this: don’t drink and drive. Thanks.

P.P.S.

And a few closing comments. I hope he doesn’t read this, because the point is not to call him out for what happened. The point is that it’s crucial for people (particularly friends) to do “The Right Thing™.”

And, on a more narcissistic note… I always wonder if I’ll handle critical situations (crises, if you will) properly, or cave under the pressure. I’ve spent years of my life being trained/told/convined that I would. But until this, the notion had gone mostly “untested.” So hopefully this is an honest indication that, under pressure, I’ll do “The Right Thing™.”

I’ve failed some friends before, but hopefully I’ll stop doing that. Maybe this is where that changes.

Anchoring Bookmarklet

2008-06-24T16:53:00.002-07:00

Occasionally we find ourselves loading pages with lots of images, and trying to get to a specific piece of the page. The browser will jump to the proper location, which promptly scrolls away while the images load. To solve that problem, I threw together a JavaScript bookmarklet that will snap your window back to the position of whatever element holds the anchor. Here is the code:

var getLocationAnchor = function(url) {
    var i = url.indexOf('#');
    var id = (i >= 0 ? url.substr(i+1) : '');
    return decodeURIComponent(id);
};

var getAnchorNode = function(doc, id) {
    var chkNode = doc.getElementById(id);
    if (chkNode) {
        return chkNode;
    }

    var nodeList = doc.getElementsByName(id);
    for (var i = 0; i < nodeList.length; i++) {
        chkNode = nodeList.item(i);
        if (chkNode.tagName.toLowerCase() == 'a') {
            return chkNode;
        }
    }

    if (nodeList.length) {
        return nodeList.item(0);
    }

    return null;
};

var id = getLocationAnchor(document.location.href);
var node = getAnchorNode(document, id);
if (node) {
    node.scrollIntoView(true);
}

And converted into bookmarklet form, it looks much uglier. So the simple way to do this: bookmark this link. ↩

iTunes content ratings

2008-06-10T01:23:00.004-07:00

Purchased content from the iTunes store has embedded tags that identify the content’s rating. If you use a tool like AtomicParsley, you’ll see an output line that looks something like these data:

Atom "----" [com.apple.iTunes;iTunEXTC] contains: us-tv|TV-14|500|V
Atom "----" [com.apple.iTunes;iTunEXTC] contains: mpaa|PG-13|300|For violence and sexuality.

So I’m not here to discuss the ins-and-outs of how to get the correct atoms into your MP4 file; I’ll let AtomicParsley take care of that. However, I’m here to outline exactly what these tags mean to iTunes. Here’s a more accurate description of what those tags contain:

standard|rating|score|reasons

Where the standard tells iTunes which organization’s standards are being described by the rating. For the United States, these are us-tv for TV shows and mpaa for movies. A reference table with known standards, ratings, and scores is below.

The rating field gives the textual name of the rating given to this content. If iTunes does not recognize the string you give as a rating, it will choke on the file and fail to parse other metadata.

The score gives a numerical value which is used by the parental controls to limit access to media. Presumably, this is categorized such that restricted content from differing nations can still be restricted based on this number, even if the rating scales differ.

The reasons field is an arbitrary area where causes for the given rating can be noted. For us-tv ratings, for example, this includes the single-letter codes used to denote the presence of Violence (V), Language (L), Sexual Content (S), Dialogue (D), or Fantasy Violence (FV). For mpaa it seems to be an arbitrary string. iTunes does not expose this data currently, but it may in the future, so it’s a good idea to set it to something meaningful.

Rating Tables

AU: Movie ratings (`au-movie`)

000: Not Rated
100: G
200: PG
350: M
375: MA 15+
400: R18+
???: Unrated

AU: Television ratings (`au-tv`)

Listed as N/A in iTunes

CA: Movie ratings (`ca-movie`)

000: Not Rated
100: G
200: PG
325: 14
400: 18
500: R
???: Unrated

CA: Television ratings (`ca-tv`)

000: Not Rated
100: C
200: C8
300: G
400: PG
500: 14+
600: 18+
???: Unrated

FR: Movie ratings (`fr-movie`)

Listed as N/A in iTunes

FR: Television ratings (`fr-tv`)

000: Not Rated
100: -10
200: -12
500: -16
600: -18
???: Unrated

DE: Movie ratings (`de-movie`)

Listed as N/A in iTunes

DE: Television ratings (`de-tv`)

000: Not Rated
100: ab 6 Jarhen
200: ab 12 Jarhen
500: ab 16 Jarhen
600: ab 18 Jarhen
???: Unrated

NZ: Movie ratings (`nz-movie`)

000: Not Rated
100: G
200: PG
300: M
325: R13
350: R15
375: R16
400: R18
500: R
???: Unrated

UK: Movie ratings (`uk-movie`)

000: Not Rated
100: U
150: Uc
200: PG
300: 12
325: 12A
350: 15
400: 18
600: E
???: Unrated

UK: Television ratings (`uk-tv`)

000: Not Rated
500: CAUTION
???: Unrated

US: MPAA ratings (`mpaa`)

000: Not Rated
100: G
200: PG
300: PG-13
400: R
500: NC-17 (unverified)
???: Unrated

US: Television ratings (`us-tv`)

000: Not Rated
100: TV-Y
200: TV-Y7
300: TV-G
400: TV-PG
500: TV-14
600: TV-MA (unverified)
???: Unrated

Monkeys, typewriters, and random numbers

2008-04-07T22:37:00.002-07:00

This one’s going to be short, as are all of my posts like these. Reason tells me that it’s all just coincidence, but I swear there’s an uncanny correlation sometimes. iTunes will randomly pick songs in its party shuffle, yet out of thousands of songs and only a few hours of play time, it always manages to find one—usually new to me—that captures my state of mind.

Here’s the good song it found for me tonight. I could hear it in the notes before I followed the words.

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well;

he was alone into his distance;

he was deep into his well.

I could guess what he was laughing at, but I couldn’t really tell.

Now the stories told that Adam jumped, but I’m thinking that he fell…

Together we went traveling, as we received the call;

his destination India, and I had none at all.

Well, I still remember laughing with our backs against the wall;

so free of fear, we never thought that one of us might fall.

I sit before my only candle, but it’s so little light to find my way.

Now this story unfolds before my candle,

which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day.

But I feel just like a candle, in the way

I guess I’ll get there, but I wouldn’t say for sure.

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said,

and I never heard from him again, as each our lives we led.

Except for once in someone else’s letter that I read…

until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.

I sit before my only candle, like a pilgrim sits beside the way.

Now this journey appears before my candle

as a song that’s growing fainter, the harder that I play.

But I fear before I end, I’ll fade away…

but I guess I’ll get there, though I wouldn’t say for sure.

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him long.

And when I stood myself beside him, I never thought I was as strong.

Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song,

but I’m not the one to say I know, but I’m hoping he was wrong

I’m holding out my only candle; though it’s so little light to find my way.

Now this story’s been been laid beneath my candle,

and it’s shorter every hour as it reaches for the day.

Yes, I feel just like a candle, in the way

I hope I’ll get there, but I never pray.

Jackson Browne, Song for Adam

An infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters to generate an infinite quantity of random numbers, and the reality is they still manage to find one that hits close to home… figures.

And that’s about it for now. Back to work.

Riddle me this…

2008-03-21T01:09:00.002-07:00

So there are two questions I’ve been pondering all day, and I just want to put them out here to see what everyone has to say. But first, I’ve got to paint the idea I want you to see.

So this morning I didn’t really feel like doing much. I ended up taking a two-and-a-half hour nap, midday. I woke up, went through the motions of a day; I checked my email, my snail mail, eventually got a bite to eat, went to colloquium and a reading group. All very routine. Mindlessly routine. We all have days like this, where we just lack the desire to do much of anything. Just go through the motions, and tomorrow will be here soon enough.

Cutting to the Chase

But all my life, I’ve had days like that… on steroids. Not many, but they’ve been there; once every couple months, perhaps. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s not a bad feeling; in fact, I think at the very core it’s a total lack of feeling. Nothingness. So I’m not here to say I felt bad, or felt elated, but just to ponder what exactly this phenomena might be.

It’s a mind-boggling emptiness that leaves me wondering why exactly I woke up. Or, perhaps, why I’ll go to sleep and do it again the next day. Normally I’m busy, driven, active; I know what I’m doing, where I’m going, and why. But it’s as if, once in a blue moon, all of that ambition and self-awareness disappears at the flip of a switch. I spend a day—my waking hours between two bouts of sleep—trying to figure out why I’m here, and what the point really is. Take everything you hold dear, and then imagine rendering it completly meaningless for a day. What, then, goes through your head? Is this how it feels to have no ambition or desire? Intense apathy, paradox and all.

This is a bizarre reality for a mind accustomed to caring about something, anything, and everything. And it’s happened for as long as I can remember, back to elementary school. Not often, but it’s so wholly distinct that I can easily tell a day when it’s hit me; generally, without rhyme or reason… or so I think.

Is this a shared feeling that many people have on occasion? Or is it special to me, in this extraordinarily odd head of mine?

Riddle me that…

Threshold outrage

2008-03-07T23:53:00.010-08:00

They say sometimes even good people can do bad things. “Good people.” A simple two-word label given to the idea—not the being—of someone who does no wrong. This person is versed in the ways of Good and Evil; he will never betray our trust; given boundaries, he may step to their edge but never cross. This person… does not exist. An idea, and nothing more; a goal we cannot achieve. The ultimate in frontiers.

Even if we master the expanses space and time, we will never master or understand Good and Evil. And proof of this fact exists around us, day and night. Twice this week, I have found it.

Understand these, or understand nothing of what I say below:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin D. Roosevelt

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power […] is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”

Good is Criminal

Twice this week, I’ve tried to visit my high school to revisit a few people who have been very important to my life. Twice, not because I failed, but because I was turned away. I have no desire to cause trouble, so I stop by the office to pick up a visitor’s pass. No dice.

Sorry, the new policy is no visitors during school hours.1

This, to me, is infuriating. I am not here to be a disturbance. I am not going to interrupt lessons. I am here to do what little I can to show a few teachers that their lifetime devotions are appreciated by at least a small subset of the students whose lives they touch. For teachers, it’s a simple but important feeling that keeps them going. That’s the only purpose of my trip.

But no, I might be up to something nefarious and endanger some number’s performance on a standardized test. God forbid. It’s not like the administrators really care about the students’ education; they just care that their numbers are up over last year.

So, denied the pass, I could ignore the rules and wander on my own. I could trespass. I could get caught. I could be arrested. All for wanting to give back what was given me—the encouragement to keep going.

Doing good in spite of the rules can make you a criminal. Thank you, Ayn Rand. I dislike their veracity, but your words hold merit.

Fear versus Truth

What we see here is a dangerous trend gone unnoticed. We are so afraid of the nasty, evil person somebody might be that we often fail to see the good person they are trying to be.

I see:

A student returning to leave a few kind words of encouragement to teachers who, daily, face unappreciative students. I was one of them once, and only now do I realize the value of what they did.

They see:

A stranger. Young enough to pass for a peer among high school students. Perhaps here to stir up trouble—disturb classes, interrupt testing. Perhaps even worse, he’s here to inflict harm upon one or many students—possibly preselected, possibly random. A liability. If any of these fearsome, litigious outcomes happen, our (administrative) asses are on the line. Nope. Not safe. Don’t let him in, unless there’s an arranged and pre-approved reason.

Kinda takes the fun out of it. Where’s the warmth of surprise when even a 10-minute chat to say “thanks” needs to be scheduled with the cold calculation of a business meeting? The whole process becomes mechanical and inorganic, drained almost entirely of the sincerity it might otherwise have.

We’re so afraid of the legions of evil and nasty people that those of us not falling among their ranks will soon cross some law’s boundary. That is, we’re bound by such laws whose text would make our deeds criminal, regardless of intent or outcome.

Words and interpretation

We create meaning with space and words with ink. Unspoken intent is what gives a language power. Words and definitions merely give it utility.

I was once told that if composers notated every nuance of their music, the sheet music would just be a giant black splotch. Musicians learn to read feeling in the space between notes, instead of simply executing what’s printed on the page. Why is this relevant?

… because we’ve long since forgotten how to infer what’s not written. So we’re bound by the letter of laws, even if the spirit was to prevent evil without forbidding good. But these days, we’re so afraid of this nebulous all-encompassing “evil” that we’re going to drown out all semblance of goodwill remaining in noble-hearted individuals.

There are few—not many—who try hard to be a good influence, and I feel like we’re being backed into a corner because of what people fear. We’ve forgotten to heed the advice of FDR as mentioned above, and this will be our reward. A world without good, defined by fear and mistrust.

We are, all of us, constrained not by who we are, but by whom the world fears we might be.

What does it take to turn a good person bad? I’m not entirely certain, but I imagine there is some threshold at which outrage takes hold and reason breaks down. The frustration of good intents being constantly thwarted probably doesn’t help. But nobody sees this.

… with a few caveats. Notably, it seems that prior contact with school employees (teachers) can get you admittance, but only if pre-arranged on behalf of both parties.

Passages from Invisible Monsters

2008-02-20T12:41:00.007-08:00

The problem with my reading books is that I seem to be finding more and more passages that relate to life as I’ve seen it. Or in some cases, as I’ve long not seen it, suddenly realizing what I missed. The first one I’m going to put here I’ve known for a while now, but just saw it written in a telling fashion.

Apparently Chuck Palahniuk has this ability to capture some of the boneheaded mistakes we make in life. So here are just a few that are notable from the first section of his book, Invisible Monsters.

No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it at all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.

Chuck Palahniuk, “Invisible Monsters,” Chapter 2

This is very much what happened to my three-and-a-half years in college. And at the very end of this section, there’s another passage that gives me pause:

And then Evie just stops and says, “Why?”

And the audience has started to abandon me in a thousand directions.

Because I really, really, really want my brother to be dead. Because my folks want him dead. Because life is just easier if he’s dead. Because this way, I’m an only child. Because it’s my turn, damn it. My turn.

Chuck Palahniuk, “Invisible Monsters,” Chapter 5

Sometimes I wonder if my brother’s felt this way before. Given the unfortunately large shoes I left behind, it wouldn’t surprise me all that much.

Revisionist history

2008-02-16T23:49:00.003-08:00

So in my recent fiddlings with the content of my blog, I re-read an ancient post from 2004 about the graduation shenanigans at Enloe. The article was entitled, simply, “Enloe’s class of 2004: Graduation madness.” In that article, I originally cited the News & Observer as the paper with the original source documents. Turns out, oddly enough, the articles (whose titles I cited verbatim) have since disappeared from the archives.

Strange. As a friend said, it could just be that the News & Observer didn’t think the content worth archiving. However, as much of the issue was swept under the rug before we brought it to the media’s attention, I’m curious what really happened to the information.

So, in that light, perhaps it’s worthwhile to archive documents like that. If only for my own later reference, should I care. You can find the original articles below. I’m not sure if this is a case of revisionist history, but the entire situation was so foul the idea doesn’t seem immediately absurd.

Unfortunate themes

In most cases, I wouldn’t add much personal commentary to something this old. But in light of recent events, some of which I discussed in my “Blue skies and crisp air” musing, I have more to add. This whole situation arose because of a few key problems: time management issues, disingenuity, and (critically) a motive to “succeed” at any cost. Which brings me to my next point—a cliché used to berate (however jokingly) a fictional character to whom I can relate:

Nice guys always finish last.

So, this dusty closet-dwelling skeleton reminds me of the saying. A case wherein a questionable character emerged numerically and systematically above hundreds of peers. However, the aggravation was what appeared to be willful igorance on behalf of the “system,” knowing that holistically, there was something unjust about so blindly handing out titles like “valedictorian.”

But there’s no justice in such mechanical systems, so the “nice guys” (like myself, I suppose) finish last. It’s just unfortunate, and occasionally aggravating, that this truth seems to hold sway over most facets of life. Shucks.

However, don’t get me wrong. If doing the right thing lands me in second place all the time, fine. I can’t be less than I expect of myself for the sake of mastering a broken system. Hell, I’ll take fiftieth over a tainted “first” place. I did in high school, and I probably will again. I just wish that, at least once in a while, there seemed to be more justice in life. Naïve, but true.

Original articles

Here’s the first snippet which started the heated exchange between students and parents of the accused. The original article was called “Uproar clouds Enloe ritual,” published in Raleigh’s News & Observer. Since it’s gone missing, I dug up a presumedly-accurate copy in this forum post at a site called the Democratic Undeground.

RALEIGH — Some seniors at Enloe High School are threatening to disrupt this year’s graduation if the student named valedictorian is allowed to speak.

These seniors are questioning whether Evan Wu deserves the title and say they will stand up and turn their backs on him if he speaks at next Saturday’s ceremony at the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center.

Enloe Principal Lloyd Gardner said Friday he hasn’t decided whether Wu will speak. He said that under Wake County policy, Wu was named valedictorian because his 5.5 grade point average is the highest in the senior class.

Evan Wu could not be reached for this story. Angela Wu said the efforts against her son come from “jealous” and “racist” classmates because he’s Chinese. She said students are taken aback by the attitude he gives of not working hard when in fact he studies well into the night.

“Uproar clouds Enloe ritual,” News & Observer, May 22, 2004

Blue skies and crisp air

2008-02-16T15:55:00.007-08:00

Such was the scene this morning after a jarring wakeup call. The sound of shrieks and screams bled through my window with the warm yellow bath of winter sunlight. I peel my eyelids apart—their movement slow with exhaustion—to see what’s happening outside the window; I can’t. The lawn is a floor below, and I can’t see anything. These things happen on weekends; I make my pillow’s acquiantance once more, hoping the noise will pass and sleep return.

Ten minutes pass. Indifference turns to annoyance. Twenty minutes. Annoyance to frustration. One half hour. Frustration is now anger. The bathroom door locks—someone else has awoken, so I’m not alone. I climb reluctantly from my bed to peer out the window. Thiry people I’ve never seen before are milling around the lawn, playing idiotic games at a volume only rivaled by sold-out sporting venues. Ridiculous. There’s an RHF office in the basement, surely it’s them. I need a plan.

RHF’s not going anywhere. I’m not getting any more sleep. I’m too mad about the situation to really be bothered by anyone else, so I need out. As I get dressed, I lob ideas around in my head. Mountain Lake… too far; the Cascades… too much hiking…; duck pond… too close; the New River… no objections? That settles it—I’m history.

So I drove myself down to the river at 10:45, because RHF saw fit to play raucous games beneath our windows at 10:15. It’s most convenient for them—never mind the fact that most college students are still asleep at 10:15 in the morning. Not to waste an entire morning, I grab my camera and tripod on the way out; I might as well make something good of an aborted slumber.

But this is not an enchanting story, and storytelling is not my business here. This, to me, illustrates a more entrenched issue I and some friends have contemplated recently. Especially with the news of late.

Cult of individuality

So Western society has grown a culture centered—in part, at least—around the individual. In the United States, the concept of individuality is much stronger, I think, than elsewhere. It all stems from the premise (or belief, more accurately) that an individual can start in any walk of life and—by good fortune or ill—end in any other. Barring rare and special cases of overflowing altruism, every individual wishes to move up in the world. A reasonable expectation at face value.

Now add a dash of practicality to the situation. We, as a society, instill this belief so strongly that it becomes expectation. In such a situation, even maintaining your social strata appears “lazy.” Nobody wants to be looked down upon, so your only option is upward motion at any cost. This is not to say a desire for upward mobility is bad—our problem is that we focus on the idea so strongly, so subtly, that we lose focus on our fellow man.

Our biggest mistake.

I saw it this morning with the RHF activity, planned for early on a Saturday morning, outside a building full of slumbering individuals. But nobody, I dare say, paused to consider that. You can see it on the road, too; in general, we lack consideration for anyone else. “Get out of my way, I’ve got somewhere to be.” As if nobody else does. Look around college campuses; it’s blatant.

Consider student organizations: how many serve their listed purpose, and how many become resumé-builders? Greek life: is it about fellowship and community service, or about socially networking your way to a higher tier of society, regardless of qualification? Friendships: I dare say our idea of this is better described by the word “acquaintance,” a word whose meaning and connotation seem mostly lost on people. We just blanketly call everyone friends. We’ve invented the term “close friend” instead.

I’ve seen it with a lot of people, and I’ve got nobody in mind, just my life’s experience as a whole. Friendships often seem less about sharing common ties, and more about “what can you do for me?” The precise answer will differ, but the premise remains approximately the same. If something goes awry, we all abandon ship; we flee for higher ground; we graze where the grass is greener. This is less true of the friends I have, I hope, because I try to pick carefully; however, I’ve not really leaned on anyone for a long time.

Because someone might whisk that shoulder out from under you, and the ground is particularly unforgiving.

Evidenced by recent news

Let me start with an intriguing but innocuous story. A recent study showed that Americans, of all countries, have the fewest “close friends” of all. When life goes down the tubes, we either keep to ourselves, or simply lack friends who might actually care and step in. This is a two-pronged issue: on one front, we’re fickle and quick to shun hardships if we can; on the other, many of us naïvely adopt a policy of self-sufficiency because of the former problem. I’m in the second camp, and try earnestly to make sure that none of my friends feel the same. But rarely does anyone call on me to live up to my promises, and of that I’m guilty too. However, it makes my day if I ever have the chance to turn a good deed.

Now, here’s the other reason I’m writing today:

There has been a rash of school shootings over the past two weeks, like it’s some sort of horrid fashion statement. I don’t know what our problelm is. I don’t know why this happens. I wish I did, but I don’t, and that bothers me. Surely it’s, in part, a problem with some of our legal premises. But I think equally important is the staunch individualism we have. As a good friend of mine said, there’s no “sense of comeraderie.” But that’s the hard problem to address, so nobody tries. I hope that this nonsense will taper off sometime. Whether or not I’ll be around when it does, I can’t say.

We care about doing well for ourselves. We care much less about doing well (or good) for our country and world. You can see this in individuals as well as our larger instruments, corporations. In politics, too: we vote too often on “what’s good for me,” not “what’s better for everyone.” Given the choice between advancing the self or the whole, the common choice is the former.

A small step is greater than none

So I’ve discussed this before, but I try my best to be a really good friend. I try my best to think about what’s best for everyone. I want to do good in the world, as best my skillset will allow. I’m glad I’ve found a company that, I think, is interested in doing good alongside doing well. But in the U.S., I’m one of 300 million, and one of 6 billion in the world. Like a pebble in the river so swift and strong, it doesn’t seem like much.

But it’s the best I can do. And if other people could figure that out, we might just make the world a better place one piece at a time.

Slowly.

I have a bad habit of looking for the good in people, and in most people I’m pretty sure there’s some. I just wish we weren’t so success-driven as to fear using it sometimes. At least I’ve got my part figured out, I think. This has been jogging around my head for a while now, and I’m glad to have finally written it out. A simple credo we could all use to remember, as a conclusion:

Love thy neighbour.

A breath of fresh morning air, down by the river.

Too much Chuck

2008-02-04T16:07:00.000-08:00

So I’ve been reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor today, and I stumbled across this quote around page 162 in my copy:

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.

The truth is you will be.

And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can’t feel a thing.

Trust me on this.
Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

Perhaps it’s a bad sign that I’m so struck by this passage.

Contains twice the recommended dose of Win

2007-12-14T23:23:00.001-08:00

As a follow-up to my last post, what you see to the right of this paragraph is the result of six weeks of blood, sweat, and tears. What you can’t see is the thousands of lines of code that I also had to write to make the project work. Endless superlatives went into the development of this project. So much stress that it shaved years off of my life. Hours so insane that only clocks can keep them. My last Thanksgiving break of college, thrown away because of work. This picture represents pure, distilled, 200-proof engineering.

It comes with a Surgeon General’s Warning stating the following:

“Completion of this project may expose the student to unhealthy levels of stress, sleep deprivation, CEL hours, flux fumes, C++ code, PIC assembly, frustration, hot glue, and model trains. Side effects may include drowsiness, insomnia, missed classes, disappearance, and Win.”

The last side effect was added after the project was completed.

I always knew the kind of work that went into designing computers, but I now have a whole new appreciation for the process that very few people will ever have. It’s funny and aggravating being an electrical engineer. So much of what we do is taken for granted, and never really celebrated. Most engineering majors deal with physical entities (often large and mechanical) that people can see and touch; the sheer scale of things like airplanes impresses folks. A computer that fits in your pocket is seen almost as a novelty. Not nearly as impressive as a gigantic plane, or next year’s new car models. The difficulty in electrical engineering is that most people can’t wrap their heads around the concepts⁠—⁠it’s hard to appreciate how much effort goes into a computer when you can’t visualize it.

I learned more about design and engineering than any lecture in college ever would have taught me. I have a newfound respect for the people who design complex computers and electronics (like my father), considering how complicated this comparatively simple project was for one person.

A rocky road

I ran a few days past most of the deadlines because of some defects in the first board sent to manufacturing by my professors. Turns out it was the fault of fellow students failing to follow the clearly outlined procedures to submit the files needed to manufacture boards. Screw the incompetent ones? No, screw over the smart ones. Anyway, I worked with the professors because of the delay, and got extensions. In the end⁠—⁠on the last day of classes⁠—⁠I got my project to work. It loads coal, stops trains, and moves trains. It works; it wins… I win.

It was my first close encounter with failure in college. I couldn’t let it happen, hence the insane hours. I’m relieved to have it done, and proud that I could make it happen. This is one for the record books.

What keeps me up at night

2007-10-20T00:32:00.001-07:00

Frankly, a wide variety of things do, but here’s the culprit from the past week. It’s important to note that I have never in my life designed a complicated circuit. I have dabbled in the 74xx-series logic chips for some of my design courses, and played with a software toolkit for a Xilinx FPGA, but nothing more complicated.

Now, for Embedded System Design, we’ve been thrown at full-blown design problems, requiring printed circuit boards (PCBs) for most projects. Mine has grown to be significantly more complicated than the others I’ve seen. I don’t know if I’m overachieving, or if my particular problem really warrants the complexity. Either way, I have a newfound respect for the work my father has done the past seven or eight years, and a taste for what real hardware engineering is about.

My project is to automatically load coal into a passing model train. This board, in its fourth revision in under a week, is finally complete. So, I’m going to sleep—it’s time to leave this beast alone.

These are the things that keep me up at night 1 2.

Every day, it’s harder to laugh

2007-09-14T18:59:00.001-07:00

Something that was hammered into me many many years ago was the idea that you must always be willing and able to laugh away the troubles life throws your way. I’ve made it a long way with that wisdom. Often it’s a matter at laughing at how stupid I may have been—which, despite protests to the contrary, I can be frequently.

Yet however direly I cling to that sage advice, I’ve been slowly forgetting it. More and more things go wrong; hope is misplaced, my trust betrayed, or my perceptions challenged. When you’re given lemons, make lemonade. The problem is… my pitcher is full. I rub my eyes to see events and people more clearly, but my vision is stung and distorted by lemons past.

I can’t laugh anymore, because “Ha! What are the chances!” just doesn’t hold the same carefree release it used to. Frankly, what are the chances? And if they’re as low as one might expect, why do I still have my own personal rain cloud? Like I found in California, too much of anything is bad—be it too much rain or too much shine. I could use less rain.

So could a lot of other people. I’d slosh through downpours if it meant some of my friends could see better times. My constant drizzle is better than what they’ve been through.

Friend turned acquaintance

Some would argue, and I would now agree, that at some recent time, I finally gave up on myself. I’ve spent the last several years more worried about helping others and how things are going for them; because, if lady luck isn’t on my side, I can at least brighten someone else’s day.

But there’s something wrong with this formula. It just doesn’t balance out in the end. Because I try to make everyone happy, I’ve accidentally brought sorrow and anger with what little cheer I offer. The only common link in everyone’s frustrations and backhanded commentary is, well… me. I’ve brought together people who, most days, would rather be separate.

So, in trying to be everyone’s friend, I’ve reduced myself to everyone’s acquaintance. As such, nobody turns to me for anything (save academic help), and more importantly I’ve nowhere to turn either. And with helping others as my goal, I’ve backed myself into guaranteed failure. The shoes I’d like to fill are taken, across the board. Everyone’s found better confidants and close friends. I’m socially unemployed.

Expiration

For the past two summers, I’ve felt the effects of having a set expiration date, as it were. There was a set time at summer’s end when I would leave. People plan their projects, interactions, and—I dare say—friendships around that. And it’s understandable. What’s the use in becoming close friends with someone, when you both know there’s an end?

The dark side of my success in California is that I now face this challenge at school. I’ve spent three years developing a love of this town, these people, and this life. Despite the troubles that have shaken it, the connection hasn’t changed. But I’ve now got an expiration date.

I’m going to graduate. In all likelihood, I’m going to move away. It feels like a cruel disservice to develop any kind of close friendships, since everyone knows I’ll practically be abandoning them far too soon. That which I’ve lost is now something I shouldn’t try to find. Maybe someone will convince me otherwise, but I’m skeptical.

It’s a miserable paradox. Every day, it’s harder to laugh at the irony. I think I’ve forgotten how.

Addendum

I wrote this on August 19th, but hadn’t the wherewithal to post it until now. Things have since started looking brighter for a bunch of my friends. Though some might expect the contrary, it’s really made my life a lot simpler. At least I’m now at ease with my role here.

Acceptance is a powerful medicine. Now it's time to do some things for myself.

Our newest pedagogical crutch

2007-08-24T11:13:00.001-07:00

Let’s face it: education has paid a hefty toll since it became a money- and research-driven institution. Frequently the best researchers are the worst teachers—which pits the university’s and its students’ interests against one another. If profanity is “a linguistic crutch for the typically inarticulate motherf*cker,” then slides are the newest pedagogical crutch for the typically ineffective educator.

As technology has pushed forward, it has become faster, more efficient, and more pervasive. It’s everywhere; it’s the cool thing to have, so—clearly—every classroom in the country needs to have it, especially in universities. We’ve invested millions in wiring up projectors, high-tech A/V systems, and campus-wide Internet access—so, clearly, we need to use it.

It’s like handing new toys to a bunch of kindergarteners. They’ll find a way to use them and abuse them, even if it’s not practical. Technology in the classroom should be used as a tool, not a toy.

The seduction of slides

There are many academic stances on the purpose and efficacy of presentations. I once had a professor whose research said that slides are most effective with a full sentence as the title, and little more than pictures, arrows, and lone words as the content. Honestly, that is the most idiotic template of which I’ve ever heard. The audience would get lost in the title, and then be perplexed by the content.

This professor was, frankly, a pompous idiot. He clearly believed that he and his new presentation style were the hottest thing since sliced bread. After claiming he’d studied the best presenters in the world, I asked if he had ever attended or watched one of Steve Jobs’ keynotes. “No,” he replied. Bollocks. Until you’ve watched Steve, you haven’t seen the best.

It takes hours, days, and even weeks to make a fantastic presentation. The past two summers, I’ve had to give a fifteen-minute presentation: 10 minutes of material, and 5 for Q&A. Those 10 minutes of slides took me around two full days of work. Most people don’t give presentations the effort they deserve, because they don’t understand what presentations are.

They’re stories. They must be colorful and engaging. You want your audience to remember what you say. You, the presenter, are the focus. Slides are for support—they can hold graphics and summaries. They can help keep the audience abreast of what you’re saying.

Slides should annotate your speech, not vice versa.

Nine times out of ten, professors use slides as a crutch; they fail to understand this basic premise. I think I understand why. In the same way the Internet allows employees to be more autonomous, working from home and around the world, pre-made slides allow professors to work from their office instead of the classroom.

Perhaps professors are afraid of making mistakes in the classroom, and feel that slides are a way to perfect the material prior to teaching it. It’s also possible that they’re lazy, and they don’t want to write on the chalkboard. You can make a set of slides once, and use them for years to come. More importantly and aggravatingly, they give you something to read verbatim to your students.

As I posit above, presentations should be simple, complementary, and not distracting. Unfortunately, most professors see slides as screen real estae that must be used. They create slides that more closely resemble word and symbol soups instead of presentation aids.

When a professor dims the lights and turns on the projector, I find myself immediately exhausted. I know what’s coming: another set of slides so busy I can’t read all of them, let alone take notes. “That’s ok, the professor can email the slides to all the students,” which only sounds good. In practice, it means that I lose my ability to personalize the material—I get the professors words, not my own.

Furthermore, slides are fixed. If the professor makes a mistake, it’s set in stone. Students don’t challenge slides because they’re effectively unalterable. This discourages open discussion between students and professors. Even if I incorrectly dispute a professor’s solution, I still learn from it. Slides discourage that, because I need to be 100% certain that a slide is wrong before challenging it; and even then, there’s no guarantee the professor will fix it. Students are never 100% certain about new material, so nobody ever pipes up.

So, we’ve spent millions of dollars to slowly extinguish the last organic pieces of higher education. It makes it easier for professors, so they can do more research, get bigger grants, and say “look at what technology can do.” But nobody ever looks closely to see what it has really done.

I, for one, am not a fan. Call me old-fashioned if you wish.

Slate versus software

I may sound like a broken record, but I think the tried-and-true method of chalk on a blackboard holds several advantages over presentations; some advantages are innate to the medium, and others from how each is used.

The chief frustration with blackboards and whiteboards is their biggest advantage: they’re slow. It takes time to write words and symbols by hand. This, of course, gives students more time to read and comprehend what’s written. It also forces the professor to be more cognizant of what he’s saying, and to better engage the students—particularly if errors are made; nobody’s perfect.

The chalkboard gives the professor a large creative space. If a student asks a question, he can more readily diagram an answer. It shows that the professor has an active knowledge of the material, and isn’t simply regurgitating slides that students could read on their own time. It shows that the professors care about the material.

I simply cannot bring myself to care about a course when it’s blatantly obvious the professor doesn’t care either. Slides say “I’m lazy, and don’t care.” Putting elbow grease into the chalkboard and open discussion says “this material is interesting to me, and I’m here to share that interest and with you.”

Conclusions

This is the newest pedagogical crutch on which our educators are beginning to rely. Just throw together some dense, incomprehensible slides so you never have to engage yourself or your students again. Even better, you can blast through slides faster than you can write, so we can cover more material and never slow down to help students understand it.

We shouldn’t abandon technology altogether. We just need to figure out how to use it as a tool for enhancing material, instead of making it an impersonal crutch that supplants true interaction.

We wonder why America is falling behind in fields like engineering. Our universities need to get a clue, and adjust how they hire researchers and educators.

What’s the point in fantastic reasearch now, if we fail to impart the desire and knowledge to continue it?

No wrong answers

2007-08-22T20:25:00.001-07:00

So, I went out for a walk tonight and wound up stargazing for a while. It’s really quite serene, how the moonlit clouds drift slowly over your head. They decorate the sky with something more than navy blue and stars. They’re something that’s near, in an expanse that’s far. Drifting slowly overhead, they must see many people in many places.

If clouds could speak, what stories would they tell? Would they be happy or sad? Where have they been, and where are they going?

This is what happens when my mind wanders.

Truth hides everywhere

2007-08-14T21:17:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I’m struck by pieces of truth as they fall from above. This pebble hit me on the head earlier today; usually, I’d just keep walking. Today I stopped in time to see the rockslide, but too late to avoid it.

Well, he came from college just the other day,

So much like a man I just had to say,

“Son, I’m proud of you. Can you sit for a while?”

He shook his head, and he said with a smile,

“What I’d really like, dad, is to borrow the car keys.

See you later. Can I have them please?”

Harry Chapin, “Cat’s in the Cradle”

It occurs to me that this summarizes my life recently, and probably for the forseeable future. It’s certainly part of what makes one life feel like three.

Working with DiskArbitration

2007-07-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

The DiskArbitration framework, and diskarbitrationd specifically, is the primary arbiter of volumes and disks under Mac OS X. Like Filesystem Bundles, there is no existing documentation of the commands DiskArbitration expects you to implement, and what information it expects you to return.

I’m here to explain it in gruesome detail.

NOTICE: it is assumed you have read the documents on Filesystem Bundles and are familiar with the terminology, at least as far as FSMediaTypes and FSPersonalities are concerned. The terms “media type” and “personality” will be used extensively, so please know them well.

In every media type, you specify a probe executable and arguments. In every personality, you specify formatting and repair executables. As of Mac OS X 10.4, diskarbitrationd chooses the media type and personality using calls to the internal function ___CFDictionaryGetAnyValue(). This function returns the first value as obtained using CFDictionaryGetKeysAndValues(), which is nondeterministic; it could be any media type, or any personality.

Thus, it is advisable that all of your media types and personalities use the same executables. Arguments may differ on a per-type or per-personality basis, as those are only respected by DiskManagement-based applications. The flags used by diskarbitrationd are hard-coded.

Without further ado, here are the major groups of commands in this document. Make certain you read through the terminology section first.

Probe commands
Repair commands
Mounting
Formatting

Terminology

Before diving into the actual specifications, it is crucial that you be familiar with the terminology I’ll be using. Many of the terms were discussed in my post about Filesystem Bundles. Here are the new terms I’ll use, with which you should make yourself familiar before continuing:

Executables

[PROBE]

This refers to the probe executable referenced by the FSProbeExecutable inside the “randomly”-selected FSMediaTypes record chosen by diskarbitrationd.
[FORMAT]

This refers to the formatting executable referenced by the FSFormatExecutable inside the “randomly”-selected FSPersonalities record chosen by diskarbitrationd.
[REPAIR]

This refers to the repair executable referenced by the FSRepairExecutable inside the same FSPersonalities record as used to find the [FORMAT] command.

Arguments

[bsd_name]

This refers to the basename of a disk device; this is my notation of the value that Mac OS X also calls the “BSD Name” of a device. Given /dev/disk0s3, the [bsd_name] is just disk0s3.
[device]

This refers to the block device for a given disk. This is the argument that people familiar with Linux and/or UNIX would expect. Given /dev/disk0s3, the [device] is precisely /dev/disk0s3.
[raw_device]

This refers to the “raw” counterpart to a disk’s block device as referenced by [device]. The effects of using one versus the other can be quite pronounced, and diskarbitrationd uses different variations in different places. Given /dev/disk0s3, the [raw_device] is /dev/rdisk0s3.

Probe commands

Since the concept of probing a disk is specific to diskarbitration and BSD’s idea of a loadable filesystem, the probe commands return statuses are expected to use the FSUR_* constants found in <sys/lodable_fs.h>. These commands should never be accessed by a shell, as they don’t use the “zero-as-success” exit code expected of command-line tools.

These probing commands will be first contact between your filesystem and diskarbitrationd. When a disk first appears, either at boot or when a device is attached to the system, diskarbitrationd goes through the following procedures to check if your filesystem is actually present. However, these checks are only performed if your filesystem has a matching record in FSMediaTypes. The checks are as follows:

Probe device
Get UUID
Set UUID

Probe device

When diskarbitrationd finds a matching media type, it will decide to probe the disk using your filesystem. Since the checks to match a media type are only rudimentary, this is basically diskarbitrationd doing finer-grained checks to determine if the new device actually contains a filesystem you can mount. You will see the following invocation from diskarbitrationd:

[PROBE] -p [bsd_name] removable readonly

You’ll notice that the last two arguments, removable and readonly are hard-coded. They will always be passed by diskarbitrationd; they are two of the string constants defined in <sys/loadable_fs.h>. Their presence seems irrelevant and arcane; in most (if not all) cases, they can be safely ignored.

RETURNS: FSUR_RECOGNIZED.

Any other value is taken to indicate failure, even if it’s another FSUR_ constant such as FSUR_IO_SUCCESS. Also, avoid returning zero, as other tools may interpret that as success when an operation actually failed.

Get UUID

When the initial probe succeeds, diskarbitrationd will immediately invoke your probe executable again. This time, since you claimed the filesystem, it’s looking for the volume’s UUID. This may seem like a menial task you can overlook, but if at all possible, it is of great benefit to diskarbitrationd and other Mac OS X facilities if you can provide a UUID. Your tool will be called as such:

[PROBE] -k [bsd_name]

The UUID is returned to diskarbitrationd by printing it to stdout. You are expected to print the uppercase hexadecimal equivalent of your 64- or 128-bit identifier as text. A newline is not required, and your output should not be hyphenated.

If you only print a 64-bit value (16 characters), diskarbitrationd will automatically conver it into a full 128-bit UUID in a deterministic fashion. For example, the HFS+ utility only returns a 64-bit value. NTFS identifiers are also only 64 bits in length.

RETURNS: FSUR_IO_SUCCESS.

This value indicates that you successfully fetched and output the UUID for diskarbitrationd to parse. Any other value indicates failure. Be very careful with this. If you return success, but your output on stdout fails to parse into a UUID, diskarbitrationd will then ask you to set one via the Set UUID operation.

Set UUID

If your volume returns success for the Get UUID operation, yet fails to provide text that can be converted into a UUID, diskarbitrationd will ask you to set a valid UUID on the volume. The assumption is that the conversion failed because the on-disk data was not a valid ID—for example, if your on-disk value was all zeroes. The invocation is as follows:

[PROBE] -s [bsd_name]

You’ll note that diskarbitrationd doesn’t give you a UUID. It just politely asks that you generate a new identifier for the volume and store it on disk, wherever and however that is appropriately done. For something like NTFS, mkntfs just picks a new random 64-bit value and writes it to disk.

RETURNS: FSUR_IO_SUCCESS.

This indicates that you successfully wrote a new identifier to the disk. If you return success, the new UUID should be immediately readable via the Get UUID operation, as diskarbitrationd will try to fetch it immediately.

Repair commands

These repair commands use the same executable as given by its FSPersonalities, but the arguments are ignored, and diskarbitrationd uses its own set. In the context of diskarbitrationd, these are used for basic verficiation (and/or repair) prior to mounting a volume. Essentially, diskarbitrationd wants to make sure it doesn’t ask you to mount an unclean volume.

If a volume fails verification (and repair, if attempted), then diskarbitrationd WILL NOT fall through to the next media type in the probe order. Thus, if you try to override an internal filesystem, and choke somewhere in verification or repair, then diskarbitrationd will not revert to the old implementation—the user’s volumes will simply fail to mount.

From experience, I can say this confuses a lot of people. When overriding Apple-provided implementations, it is imperative that you only return success during the probe operation if you can actually mount the system; you should not postpone verification logic to this stage.

Here are the two ways (in order) in which diskarbitrationd will call your tools:

Verify volume
Repair volume

Verify volume

At this point, diskarbitrationd just wants to do basic verification on the volume. For reasons I cannot entirely explain, diskarbitrationd will actually pass you the raw device associated with the disk, as such:

[REPAIR] -q [raw_device]

This should do checks necessary to make sure the disk is in working order prior to mounting it. If these checks fail, diskarbitrationd WILL NOT fall through to the next filesystem in the probing order; it will just attempt repair.

RETURNS: 0 on success, non-zero on failure.

Repair volume

If your verification fails, then diskarbitrationd will request that you do a lightweight repair on the volume. If you cannot safely repair the volume (in an automatic, without-user-input way), then this should fail. Like the verification, the arguments are simple:

[REPAIR] -y [raw_device]

Again, it uses the raw device, for reasons I do not understand. If you can successfully repair and clean the volume without intervention, that is fantastic; otherwise, this should fail, lest the user will be using an inconsistent filesystem.

RETURNS: 0 on success, non-zero on failure.

Mounting

True to the BSD nature of Mac OS X, diskarbitrationd actually goes through the standard BSD disk-mounting channels. Though you can set a FSMountExecutable in your FSPersonalities records, those are completely ignored by diskarbitrationd. Once diskarbitrationd has successfully located the first filesystem claiming it can mount a volume, it will mount it using the following command:

/sbin/mount -t [type] (-o [options]) [device] [mountpoint]

Of course, since your filesystem is not one known to /sbin/mount, it will in turn launch the following command to actually mount your filesystem:

/sbin/mount_[type] (-o [options]) [device] [mountpoint]

The -o [options] argumenst will only be present if diskarbitrationd decides there are additional arguments that must be passed. If they are present, [options] will be precisely one argument, as a comma-separated list of flags. The [device] argument is described above, and the [mountpoint] flag is self-explanatory. This is how a UNIX mount command would normally look, so there’s nothing extraordinary here.

Here’s what you do need to know: the value of [type] as passed to /sbin/mount and translated into /sbin/mount_[type] is just the value of your filesystem bundle’s CFBundleName string.

RETURNS: 0 on success, non-zero on failure.

Formatting

This is almost entirely undocumented, and not actually handled by anything related to DiskArbitration. Only tools based on the private DiskManagement framework will actually be able to format volumes. Thus, they respect the argument strings you set in your FSPersonalities records. The format executable is invoked as follows:

[FORMAT] [options] (-v) [vol_name] [raw_device]

The [options] are all of the space-separated options you specify in the selected personality’s FSFormatArguments string. Make sure your utility knows how to parse any flags you use in your bundle’s personalities. Optionally, DiskManagement will pass the -v flag if it wants verbose output, but it’s not guaranteed to be there.

The [vol_name] argument is the volume name the user has requested, encoded as UTF-8 bytes. DiskManagement seems to restrict the length of this to 16 characters in some cases, but I cannot explain why—at least, when I used diskutil to create NTFS volumes using mkntfs, the operation would fail on names longer than 12 or 16 characters, even though mkntfs says it can take up to 128 UTF-8 bytes.

The [raw_device] is the raw disk device as described above.

RETURNS: 0 on success, non-zero on failure.

The Filesystem Bundle

2007-07-09T04:26:00.000-07:00

The inner workings and underpinnings of pluggable filesystems on Mac OS X have never really been documented before. At least, Google couldn’t find any meaningful results if they have, so this is the first in a long series of articles that will (hopefully) demystify the creation of third-party filesystems for OS X.

There are many pieces of software involved in managing filesystems, but the central part that links them all is the filesystem bundle. Apple-supplied filesystems are installed in /System/Library/Filesystems. Unfortunately, /Library/Filesystems is currently not checked by any of the subsystems involved. So, third-party filesystems must also install their bundles into /System/Library/Filesystems, blatantly violating the Apple-only nature of /System.

This article aims to fully document the construction of a filesystem bundle (in the CFBundle and NSBundle sense of the term). Find the information you need in one of the following sections:

Info.plist: Basics
Info.plist: Media Types
Info.plist: Personalities

`Info.plist:` basics

First things first: any filesystem bundle is still a bundle, so it must contain all of the standard bundle keys. The following are the most important keys to specify with your bundle.

`CFBundleIdentifier` (String)

This key, like elsewhere, is just a unique identifier for your filesystem bundle following the reverse-DNS convention. For example, Apple uses com.apple.filesystems.util.msdos for MS-DOS (i.e. FAT) volumes.

`CFBundleName` (String)

Likwise, this standard key should match the basename of your filesystem. For example, if you install ntfs-3g.fs, then your CFBundleName is just ntfs-3g.

`CFBundlePackageType` (String)

For all filesystem bundles found in /System/Library/Filesystems, they their package type code (CFBundlePackageType) is set to the value “fs ”.

Other keys…

Other basic keys have the same relevance as they do in other bundles, but these are the three which every filesystem developer will need to consider when creating the Contents/Info.plist that goes into their bundle. There are two other property list keys specific to filesystem bundles, and their details are much more involved, and much less documented.

`Info.plist`: Media Types

In every filesystem bundle’s Info.plist, you can find the key FSMediaTypes which is a dictionary. It is used by DiskArbitration when scanning filesystems. Essentially, the grossly simplified process looks like this:

A new disk appears
diskarbitrationd probes each new partition
Partition is mounted using first successful probe

In another post, I will document the exact process of a single filesystem probe, and information diskarbitrationd expects you to provide. For now, don’t worry about that just yet. The FSMediaTypes key helps diskarbitrationd more efficiently identify which filesystems should be checked.

The top-level FSMediaTypes key maps to a dictionary. For all intents and purposes, it appears as though an array would have sufficed—that is, the keys inside the FSMediaTypes dictionary appear to be largely irrelevant. Each value inside the FSMediaTypes dictionary is also, itself, a dictionary. To prevent ambiguity, I will refer to these values as the FSMediaTypeDict.

For the purposes of this document, the keys inside FSMediaTypes exist solely as a means for you to give each mapping a unique name. Typically, the key used mirrors any Content Hint given, or is otherwise descriptive if a Content Hint is lacking. Some examples include Whole or Partitionless when there is no Content Hint.

As mentioned above, the individual keys are:

FSMediaProperties
FSProbeExecutable
FSProbeArguments
FSProbeOrder

`FSMediaProperties` (Dictionary)

The FSMediaProperties dictionary contains the most important information about your filesystem. diskarbitrationd uses these data to determine which filesystem bundles should be used to probe a partition. So if a new partition doesn’t match the criteria your FSMediaProperties sets forth, diskarbitration will not attempt to probe the partition using your filesystem bundle.

Criteria inside of each FSMediaProperties are checked using IOServiceMatchPropertyTable() from I/O Kit. Useful keys for matching are described in the IOMedia reference.

Though I cannot find documentation on ADC that details the precise matching algorithm, I can surmise this from the use of keys in filesystems:

“For every key in the match dictionary, a device matches if either (a) it lacks the key or (b) the values are equivalent.”

In this case, the “match dictionary” is the FSMediaProperties dictionary. If the algorithm were anything else, the FSMediaTypeDict entries that specify both Leaf = 1 and Whole = 1 could never match any device, since the two concepts seem to be mutually exclusive.

Leaf (Boolean)

Match a “leaf” device, which will typically have an identifier of the form diskXsY. See also the Whole flag.
Whole (Boolean)

Match a “whole” device, which will typically have an identifier of the form diskX. See also the Leaf flag.
IOProviderClass (String)

This string tells diskarbitrationd that only devices whose IOProviderClass (from I/O Kit) should be probed using this FSMediaTypeDict. The only instance of this is in cddafs.fs, which only wants to operate on physical CD media, and therefore specifies IOProviderClass = IOCDMedia.
Content Hint (String)

The Content Hint provided by any FSMediaTypeDict is singlehandedly the most useful piece of information you can give diskarbitrationd. When this key is present, the given FSMediaTypeDict will only be used to probe partitions or devices whose “Content Hint” string matches the one you specify.

For disks partitioned using the GUID Partition Table, the “Content Hint” provided is the GUID of a given partition’s type. The linked article has a list of known partition type GUIDs.

For disks partitioned using an Apple Partition Map, the “Content Hint” is the pmParType field in each partition record. Known strings include Apple_HFS, Apple_HFSX, Windows_NTFS, and a slew of others for MS-DOS and CD filesystems. As a developer, you’ll know the GUID or pmParType string to expect for filesystems you create.

It is unknown if any Content Hint data is provided for disks partitiond using the Master Boot Record scheme. Current indications are that no hints are provided or checked; likely, all MBR can only match as whole or leaf devices.

`FSProbeExecutable` (String)

The FSProbeExecutable specifies the path to the utility that diskarbitrationd should launch when when it wants your filesystem bundle to probe a new partition—that is, when it wants you to verify that you actually can mount a volume.

Relative paths are considered relative to your bundle’s Resources folder. Utilities should be placed with your Resources, but in Apple’s bundles they are typically at the root of the bundle, not even underneath Contents.

`FSProbeArguments` (String)

This string specifies what command-line arguments should be passed to a probe executable specified with FSProbeExecutable. The arguments are passed first—that is, before any disk identifiers.

`FSProbeOrder` (Integer)

This integer ensures that each of your FSMediaTypeDict values can be executed in a deterministic order. This sort order is global across all known filesystems. For example, if FSMediaTypeDict in ntfs.fs has an FSProbeOrder of 1000, and a matching equivalent in ntfs-3g.fs has an FSProbeOrder of 750, then ntfs-3g.fs will always be asked to probe matching volumes prior to Apple’s ntfs.fs.

A lower value is a higher priority.

Typical values are around 1000. To make your bundle take precedence over other bundles, set your FSProbeOrder values lower, and to make your bundle appear as a last-chance filesystem, set your FSProbeOrder values higher.

`Info.plist`: Personalities

To avoid any confusion, take note that the FSPersonalities list plays absolutely no role in filesystem mounting. That is, if you want to create a filesystem bundle that only mounts volumes, then you do not need to have the FSPersonalities key.

This set of keys is utilized by Apple’s private DiskManagement framework, so there is no publicly-available source code or documentation on its expectations. Thus, all facts and assertions found herein are, more or less, educated guesses as to how DiskManagement actually works. If someone has more time than I, it may be useful to dig through DiskManagement.framework using otx.

Akin to the FSMediaTypes above, FSPersonalities is simply a dictionary of dictionaries. The nested dictionaries each reprsent an invididual “personality,” or method of accessing the filesystem.

The key-value pairs that can be used in each record are described below:

Identification
Formatting and Mounting
Verifying and Reparing

Mind your `<key/>`

Unlike FSMediaTypes, the top-level keys are important. There are two known uses for the top-level keys you choose in your FSPersonalities. They are as follows:

You need the top-level keys to properly localize each personality’s FSName strings. The localized strings are what will appearin Disk Utility.app, if your filesystem manages to appear in its lists.
When formatting volumes with diskutil eraseVolume, the top-level key of each personality is the textual string that is used to choose a specific format. For example, if you have a personality with the key NTFS-3G, then you can create an NTFS-3G volume using:
```
diskutil eraseVolume NTFS-3G VolumeName /Volumes/Somedisk
```
Or whatever localized name appears in Disk Utility.app, if it actually parses all filesystem bundles and makes their formats readily available to the user.

So make sure you carefully choose your top-level personality keys, because their text will be exposed to the user by the output of diskutil eraseVolume.

Personality identification

`FSName` (Localizable String)

This is the localized string that will appear in Disk Utility.app or any other localized application that wishes to verbosely describe a particular personality that your filesystem bundle provides. For an example of a filesystem with many personalities, look at hfs.fs.

Be mindful of the text you put here, because users will see it when anything higher-level than Terminal.app references your filesystem. While this includes Disk Utility.app, it also includes Finder’s “Get Info” windows, among other references that will be found.

These strings are localized inside language projects in your Contents/Resources folder like any other bundle. They end up in the InfoPlist.strings file for each language project.

`FSFormatContentMask` (String)

This string is the formatting analog of the Content Hint in the FSMediaTypes dictionary. However, where a filesystem may have multiple hints depending on a disk’s partitioning scheme, ther does not appear to be a viable method to indicate multiple FSFormatContentMask fields in a personality.

Ideally, each personality would include both the GUID associated with the format on a GPT disk as well as the pmParType hint given for APM disks. Unfortunately, you can only specify one. For most Apple-provided filesystems, the FSFormatContentMask is the string associated with APM-partitioned disks.

There may be cases where specifying the GUID associated with GPT-style disks may be appropriate, but no current filesystem (as of Mac OS X 10.4) does.

`FSSubType` (Integer)

Where FSFormatContentMask is used to store information the filesystem type during creation, FSSubType is used to determine information about a filesystem during analysis. The FSSubType field referenced here can be found in the f_reserved1 field in struct statfs as returned by statfs() and friends. For those of you curious, I looked through the BSD VFS layer in xnu to determine that; feel free to verify by downloading the xnu source from Apple.

Presumably, the DiskManagement framework uses f_fstypename from statfs() to locate the correct bundle for a filesystem, and then uses the FSSubType to locate the proper personality. This is purely speculation, but it explains why fusefs.fs includes localized strings for several common FUSE filesystems, and why those strings wer used despite ntfs-3g.fs including its own. Currently, all MacFUSE volumes belong to “fusefs”.

For VFS developers:

If you’re developing a VFS plugin, you can set the FSSubType value directly by indicating you support the f_fssubtype attribute, and then supplying a real value in your vfs_getattr() implementation. The default value for f_fssubtype is 0, if you don’t supply one yourself.

For MacFUSE developers:

Since your code does not reach down into the kernel, MacFUSE provides a convenient argument through which you can set the f_fssubtype for your mount. You set it using -o subtype=<value>. Unfortunately, this will get you nowhere right now. The f_fstypename field in struct statfs is set by mount_fusefs to always be “fusefs.” Thus, all lookups are done in fusefs.fs, not your own bundle (if any).

I will petition for MacFUSE to allow an fstype= or fstypename= parameter so that MacFUSE developers can get the intened behavior. The only side effect would be breaking my own fuse_daemon program which checked for “fusefs” as the f_fstypename. Other programs that use getmntinfo() to find MacFUSE mounts would have to alter their code too.

With creative hackery, there is a deterministic way to hide a “FUSE” token in the f_fstypename. The kernel, in vfs_fsadd() zeroes out the entire vfstable entry, which includes the default f_fstypename. This entire buffer is then copied into each mount point. So the unused portions of f_fstypename will always be zero. Thus by sticking a non-zero token at the end, we can deterministically say only an actual FUSE volume created that mointpoint, while still allowing developers to use their own f_fstypename (i.e. ntfs-3g).

Update: I have mentioned the idea to the MacFUSE development team on the macfuse-devel mailing list, and I also filed an enhancement request. Follow those for future updates.

Formatting and Mounting

`FSFormatExecutable` (String)

This string specifies the executable used to create a new filesystem with this personality. Also see the executables section.

`FSFormatArguments` (String)

This string specifies the arguments passed to the FSFormatExecutable when a volume is being created.

`FSFormatMinimumSize` (Integer)

This integer specifies the minimum size, in bytes, that the personality can support. Essentially, if a partition is not this size, DiskManagement will disallow this personality (in theory). Though many filesystem limits are documented on Wikipedia, most values are for maximum storage, not minimum requirements.

`FSFormatMaximumSize` (Integer)

This integer specifies the maximum size, in bytes, that the personality can support. If a partition is larger than this, DiskManagement will—in theory—disallow the use of this personality. For a non-normative list of limits, see the filesystem limits page on Wikipedia.

`FSMountExecutable` (String)

This string specifies the executable used to mount a volume with this personality. Also see the executables section.

This key is not used by diskarbitrationd when automatically mounting filesystems. So, in most cases, it is prudent to guarantee that this executable and that accessed by diskarbitrationd when mounting filesystems.

In short, diskarbitration will call /sbin/mount_<CFBundleName>. Since this file lies outside the installation path of your bundle, you may be inclined to use absolute paths; don’t.

`FSMountArguments` (String)

This string specifies the arguments passed to the FSMountExecutable when a volume is being mounted.

Verifying and Reparing

`FSVerificationExecutable` (String)

This string specifies the executable used to verify the contents of a volume with this personality. Also see the executables section.

`FSVerificationArguments` (String)

This string specifies the arguments passed to the FSVerificationExecutable when a volume is being verified.

`FSRepairExecutable` (String)

This string specifies the executable used to repair the contents of a volume with this personality. Also see the executables section.

`FSRepairArguments` (String)

This string specifies the arguments passed to the FSRepairExecutable when a volume is being repaired.

Executables and Arguments

Each record in FSMediaTypes and FSPersonalities contain references to executables on disk. Each reference comes with two values: one to specify the executable path, and another to specify arguments that should be passed. The gory details of the executable and argument strings are discussed below:

Executable strings

All executable strings are evaluated as if they are relative to a bundle’s Contents/Resources folder. It may be possible to specify an executable using an absolute path, but there none of Apple’s filesystems do, so it may not work. In general, it is better to reference all of your executables using relative paths, even if they lie outside your bundle.

The advantage to this method is that no matter how your bundle is located, you will always reference the correct executables. For example, if someone were to symlink directly to your filesystem bundle on another Mac OS X volume, the executables from that volume would still be referenced correctly. Absolute pathnames would fail in that case.

I’m well aware that this example is contrived, generally unsupported, and susceptible to each volume containing the full install of your filesystem’s utilities—not to mention requiring compatible versions of OS X (i.e. both are 10.4, etc…).

Argument strings

Argument strings are passed before any programmatically-determined values. For example, if diskarbitrationd will probe a volume using a command of the form [binary] [...], arguments will be inserted after [executable] but before whatever’s left ([...]). If the list contains spaces, they will be passed as separate arguments to the executable. Thus, the effective result is [executable] [arg_list] [...], where [arg_list] is the space-separated list of arguments you provide.

However, the arguments do not pass through any shell. They are split on whitespace and passed to the executable as such.

Conclusions

There is a ton of information to be learned about how filesystems work under Mac OS X. This document only covers the first of several pieces. Everything you need to know to build a structurally-correct filesystem bundle should be contained here. If there are any ambiguities or missing information, please let me know and I will update this post to reflect any new findings.

I hope this helps someone in their quest to build filesystems for Mac OS X.

Bad news on the doorstep

2007-07-08T01:29:00.000-07:00

After far too long, I have finally received an answer from my employer about releasing my packages for NTFS-3G under Mac OS X. Unfortunately, it is not the answer I nor Mac users at large wanted to hear.

My version of NTFS-3G for Mac OS X is dead.

Upper management (i.e. the top) would “rather not” have me working on this and releasing it on my own. The reasons have not been disclosed to me, all I know is that it’s probably in my best interest not to directly voilate this creed.

Since I pulled the package, I’ve received countless emails and messages voicing support, asking for help, looking for packages, and more. So, despite my silence until now, I’m not going to abandon this idea and everyone that liked it. I’m acutely aware of the fact that people used this package heavily, and would really like to have it available.

I will do everything I can to help similar projects succeed.

And before I continue, I owe a huge thanks to the NTFS-3G project and Google’s MacFUSE for making this possible in the first place. If you used and enjoyed my package, maybe you should drop by one of those places and let them know their work is appreciated. Just as a nice gesture, nothing more.

“Absolutely not.”

In general, this will be my response to inquiries related to my NTFS-3G package. So please don’t get your hopes up.

This much needs to be crystal clear: I cannot release source or binary packages beyond what circulated the Internet in the first half of 2007. I have been in contact with the NTFS-3G maintainers to return my one-line compilation fixes as required by the GPL.

Yes, I was working on a new set of binaries that would integrate better with Mac OS X. No, I cannot release them. Don’t ask me to send either set of packages to you “under the table,” because I won’t do it. I’m just not interested in making any legal missteps.

Maintaining progress

As stated above, I cannot release software or source code.

However:

I can publish all of the information I gathered and documented while I was working on NTFS-3G integration for Mac OS X. Apple provides literally no documentation on how to do this, so I will do my best to make this information easily accessible.

There are some important tools I forged while working on my package. Most of these were only for my convenience, and I think other people will find them useful. They are briefly described as follows:

Xcode scripts
- Build Universal binaries for autoconf-based sources
- Automatically generate installer packages and disk images
MacFUSE Tools
- Simplify integration of MacFUSE and Mac OS X

I’m sure the scripts are fine; they just make it possible to use Xcode as your one-stop-shop for everything from development to distribution. As for the MacFUSE Tools… I’m still undecided. They’re useful and fairly trivial, so I may still go for the “clean room” approach, and just document what they did so others can easily recreate them.

For future developments in this area, keep an eye on my blog. I’ve also created keywords for Mac Filesystems, MacFUSE, and NTFS.

The “clean room” strategy

So, truth be told, I really want NTFS (via NTFS-3G) to become a first-class citizen on Mac OS X. So I’m going to document as much of my amassed knowledge as possible.

For those of you unfimiliar with the term “clean room” in this context, I’m referring to clean room design. The idea is that one person or team creates a specification, and another recreates an implementation, so no “infringing” knowledge of previous implementations is transfered to the new code.

This is particularly important when creating open-source implementations based on reverse engineering. Since my predicament is sufficiently akin, I’m choosing to adopt the “clean room” model. Given my experience, I will provide as much information and informal specifications as possible.

That said, these are the topics I wish to discuss:

Anatomy of a filesystem bundle in /System/Library/Filesystems
Working with diskarbitrationd (DiskArbitration framework)
Working with diskutil and Disk Utility.app (DiskManagement framework)
Useful tricks for FUSE filesystems under Mac OS X
Making use of status information provided by MacFUSE
A few “gotchas” specific to NTFS

There is a wealth of information to cover. Not everything will be available from day one, so be patient—I have real-life responsibilities just like the rest of us. Rest assured, though, that I will do my absolute best to provide the information and tools necessary for someone else to recreate my work. Most importantly, without providing any source code or releasing any binaries.

Everyone wins. Except the users caught in the gap while the wheel is reinvented.

Update

The reason I stopped releasing this package was at the request of my employer. I was still employed part-time during the spring when I released the packages, and didn’t realize my error. Before I continued development on this when I became a full-time intern for the summer, I asked for permission to avoid any problems later. They said “no,” so I’ve stopped.

I’ve heard that some people are incorrectly blaming the fine folks working on the NTFS-3G project, and they had nothing to do with my packages being discontinued. I returned my work to them, because that’s just how open-source works. They very much wanted me to continue, but I can’t. They were great to work with while I was developing my package.

I hope that clarifies everything. Cheers!

A pseudonym never fit so well

2007-07-06T23:39:00.000-07:00

Back in high school, I grew bored with the simple pseudonym I used while on the Internet. The old handle I used was pmarks00, which I’ve tried desperately to shed. It still lingers, for example, as my primary username on AIM, but that’s about it. For most other online activities—forums, games, and otherwise—I started to use the name ShadowOfGed.

It’s original. It’s unique. Somehow, it’s strangely… me.

For those of you who don’t get the reference, Ged is a character out of Ursula K. Leguin’s series, The Wizard of Earthsea. In the first book, which I read in ninth grade, Ged is a wizard-in-training whose darker half is physically separated from him. It appears throughout the book as his shadow, hence my name. ShadowOfGed—my online personality is merely a shadow of the real me.

As surely as moss on a stone, the name grew on me.

Ruled by shadows

The Internet is a fantastic tool. It’s also a frightening reality that we have never faced before. It has dark corners that most try to avoid. These corners exist as a direct result of the Internet’s most distinctive feature. A feature that is, singlehandedly, its greatest asset and its greatest danger: anonymity.

Anonymity, or the perception thereof, brings with it the power to transform people. And when I think hard enough, I’m certain that it has affected me as much as any other.

Who I wanted to seem

One of my better-kept secrets is that I occasionally have an extremely volatile temper. Many years ago, it got me into lots of trouble with my parents, and even a few times at school—I always got my ass kicked. It was one of these volatile fits that ended my first and last relationship. Somewhere, I picked up the notion that I should learn to control it.

So I tried. And depending on your definition of “control,” I succeeded. Really, I’ve just gotten better at subduing my temper when it flares up. For some reason, I’ve always wanted to seem a nice person. Note that I say “seem” instead of “be.” Though I want to be nice, I think I’ve been more driven by how I want others to perceive me.

The Internet has helped that case, which is why I brought it up. I’ve got a couple places I visit frequently. I only enter discussion where I have something humorous, informative, or friendly to add. I’ve spent so much time trying to help others with their problems that I’ve neglected my own.

To be honest, I’m not sure I know how to tackle my own problems. I just look around, trying to help others as a means to ignore them. I’m a victim of the expectations I set for myself.

And occasionally, this fact strikes me like a deftly-wielded sword—with sharp and painful accuracy, precisely where it hurts. It gets under my skin, and for no apparent reason whatsoever, I’m irritated by everything. Tonight has been one of those nights.

Dangerously close

Men and women wiser than I have stated that we treat our closest friends the worst. I’m guilty as charged, and I think it’s coming back to haunt me. For the second summer in a row, I’ve traveled out to sunny California by myself. Living three thousand miles from the only friends I’ve ever known isn’t exactly easy. There are no casual hangouts, no shared meals, and no inside jokes. The simple things are missing, and it hurts.

The only thing that hurts more is knowing I’ll be here again.

And when everything is gone, I find myself wondering who I am. Trying to find some meaning in what I’ve been doing for the past 4 years. Hell, for the past 21 years. And I’m at a loss. People call this success; they tell me I’m lucky.

It’s nonsense. I’ve worked hard. So hard, in fact, that despite four years at a university, I’ve never been to college; despite seven years as such, I never was a teenager; despite my youth, I never was young.

At the end of a day, all that’s left is the shadow I cast of myself. That outline of a person who is smart, funny, and caring. An empty shell. A small tremor and I break. The rock-solid foundation is an illusion. I’m not perfect; nobody is. To believe otherwise is fallacious.

The silence of three thousand miles shook me today, and I’m busy picking up the pieces. Damn.

Taking responsibility

I’m not here to blame anyone. I built a house out of cards and the wind came blustering through today. I should work harder to keep in touch. Despite facing the same lessons for a third summer in a row, I forget how important friends are.

You all rock. I need to play as hard as I work. For me, that’s easier said than done. I need to be less Shadow and more Paul.

NTFS-3G performance gains

2007-05-08T01:54:00.000-07:00

For a long time, the read/write performance of NTFS-3G under MacFUSE has been the most often-voiced complaint about NTFS-3G on Mac OS X. Today, those woes are gone.

After seeing an email from alepulver on the MacFUSE mailing list about caching patches for FreeBSD and their relevance to Mac OS X, I finally mustered up the time to work on it. The credit goes to him and the sources of his patches; I merely added a few lines to make it compile and work properly under OS X.

So here are the new performance numbers. They’re given in MB/s, and as read/write pairs for the given media.

External USB 2.0: 20.0 / 11.0
Internal SATA: 33.0 / 12.0
Disk Image: 22.5 / 11.6 (atop Internal SATA, HFS+)

Those numbers are much better than they were previously, on the whole. The new builds, as always, are available from the [NTFS-3G for Mac OS X][ntfspkg] page. The updated patches and other formalities continue below:

Updated patches

To make these patches compile and operate properly, I had to change three files atop the libublio changes made for FreeBSD. I had to alter the patched versions of libntfs-3g/device.c, libntfs-3g/unix_io.c, and the ublio_conf.h file used to specify a few compile-time options.

In the libntfs-3g changes, I merely augmented occurrences of DIOCGSECTORSIZE with a Mac OS X code path that uses DKIOCGETBLOCKSIZE. That was one of two ioctl() calls used in the FreeBSD patches. The other FreeBSD ioctl() was FreeBSD’s DIOCGMEDIASIZE, which returns a device’s size in bytes. I’m no filesystem expert, but I believe this should yield the same result as block_size * block_count. Thus, I used the Mac OS X ioctl() that retrieves block counts, which is DKIOCGETBLOCKCOUNT.

Once I made those alterations, I created updated versions of the patches for the affected files. My updated patches (which should still work for FreeBSD) are linked here: libntfs-3g/device.c, libntfs-3g/unix_io.c, and ublio_conf.h.

Credit where credit is due

The original patches and inspiration came from the person behind the alepulver handle from FreeBSD. I couldn’t find a full name; sorry. Google groups has a copy of the original email, entitled “ntfs-3g: better performance with libublio.” From that email, I acquired and applied the original libublio patch to the FreeBSD NTFS-3G port, which already included the aligned-IO patches. I do not know where the official site is (if any), but I used libublio-20070103 mentioned in the original poster’s email.

I just made a few slight changes to the hard work of others to bring the benefits to all of us using NTFS-3G on Mac OS X.

Stability?

These patches and updates are fresh off the press. I’ve given them a few tests for the benchmarks, and verified the MD5 sum of the file as I copied it around. Data seems to be safe, but I make no guarantees. It’s possible that the libublio caching will run into problems at the end of a disk, or when disk space runs out; I have not tested for those scenarios.

It works for me, but it’s possible the low-level nature of these big changes will cause data loss. Consider yourself forewarned, in case anything happens.

Updated theme now works with IE 6

2007-05-06T02:33:00.001-07:00

So I finally got around to doing a hefty cleanup on the template and CSS used to display this blog. Most importantly, it now renders usably in Internet Explorer. There are only a few layout quirks that I cannot fix. The theme, however, is usable in IE, which was a major problem with the previous one.

For anyone who wanted IE compatibility, you’re in luck. And for anyone else who’s curious, the layout now has the benefit of being CSS-based, so it’s easy to move columns around. I learned the technique from the wonderful site Position Is Everything.

I’m a few days from returning to California for my summer internship; we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be back soon to write down a few of my thoughts related to this past semester and this coming summer. Have a good day!

Steve Jobs at Stanford’s graduation

2007-04-16T22:25:00.002-07:00

A while back, I read a transcript of Steve Jobs’ graduation speech at Stanford from 2005. There were a few lines that struck me as particularly astute and valuable. After today, and the days coming, I feel like the following is more appropriate than ever:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford graduation speech

Just something I thought about.

Mad as Hell

2007-04-16T11:34:00.001-07:00

This morning, as most of the country—and part of the world—already knows, my university (Virginia Tech) was host to the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. You can read more from WRAL, Fox News, or CNN. Google News turned up an article from The Daily Tarheel, but I can’t get that one to load.

I’m not going to rehash the details, the links are for that. I’m just here to leave the question that’s left me blindingly angry.

I’m mad as hell. What kind of self-righteous asswipe decides he has the God-given right to kill people for shits and giggles? No feeling of betrayal, no sense of abandonment, nothing. There’s no reason. I really hope there’s a special place in hell for the likes of today’s shooter, because nothing justifies what happened here today.

By all reports, the shooter is long since deceased. So likely, we’ll never really know why today happened. There’s no worldly punishment suitable for this guy, a “young Asian male,” deciding to take the lives of his peers. I’m furious, even though nothing will come of my anger.

And for those who were wondering, I’m safe. As are my friends. Thank God.

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X

2007-03-10T16:32:00.001-08:00

For the past five or six weeks, users have found this unwelcome text upon finding this page:

Apologies to everyone, but I need to take this page off the web for a short while.

“A short while” has become “indefinitely.” NTFS-3G for Mac OS X is dead. I’ve posted more information in my post entitled “Bad news on the doorstep.”

There will be no further updates to this post.

Please follow my NTFS keyword for any more NTFS-related information. I also have keywords for MacFUSE and Mac Filesystems if you’re interested in the technical ramblings that will come later.

I have republished archived copies of the original post and the performance notes. They exist as a source of information and nothing more—all non-required download links have been removed. The patches to NTFS-3G and libublio are still available.

It’s been quite a ride, folks. I regret that I must abandon this package, but as I mention in the referenced post, I will do my best to guarantee that someone picks up where I must leave off.

Respectfully,

— Paul Marks

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (Original)

2007-03-10T16:31:00.000-08:00

Through many posts in the MacFUSE thread over at AppleNova, I’ve informally published binary packages to make NTFS-3G accessible to non-technical folk. It lacks a central website, and following that Very Long Thread™ is quite tedious. So here’s a makeshift homepage.

Latest packages
News
Features
Frequenty-asked questions
Warranty
Comments

Use the permalink to this post to find the latest versions of these packages. If you have space available, please mirror these downloads, because my iDisk can’t take a hit from the entire Internet. I will try to keep these packages current as the upstream packages make changes that necessitate new builds.

Latest packages

MacFUSE Tools: 0.3.0
NTFS-3G: 1.516

News

Wednesday May 23, 2007

It’s late and I’m tired, so I won’t put much for now. I’ve updated both packages. For those who wanted simpler distributions, you got it. NTFS-3G is now a meta-package that installs everything you need. MacFUSE Tools got some code cleanups, so a potential race condition is now fixed. There’s one outstanding change I’d like to make to fuse_wait, but I haven’t the time tonight. Enjoy the new versions!

UPDATE: Initial versions were broken because of a silly syntax mistake in my script. The newly-uploaded package works for me. New in this release is a fail-over to read-only in the case of an uncleanly mounted drive, so no volumes will “vanish” like they did before. Otherwise, there’s nothing particularly interesting.

Sunday May 13, 2007

I am going to be traveling across the country until sometime later this week. Consequently, I will be unable to answer emails and comments until then. I hope this latest release has fixed the couple issues people mentioned, and that I’ve helped resolve the other problems people have seen.

I’ll be back around Saturday at the latest. Good luck until then!

Saturday May 12, 2007

After the performance-enhancing patches came through, people noticed some strange bugs with the Finder. I’ve fixed them. They stemmed from DiskArbitration asking NTFS-3G to mount, say, /dev/disk0s3, but instead having /dev/rdisk0s3 get mounted instead. Using a handy FUSE option called fsname, I make it look like /dev/disk0s3 got mounted, as expected. NTFS-3G typically forbids the use of the fsname parameter, so I had to comment out that code. It’s OK in this case, because I Know What I Am Doing™.

Anyhow, the new release (1.417-r4) seems to behave as expected. If you see reproducible problems from these changes, let me know, either here or via email. Cheers!

Tuesday May 8, 2007

The biggest change everyone has been waiting for: [performance gains][speed].

Other than that, I’ve included a few rudimentary changes. For anyone encountering permission problems, I’ve set NTFS-3G to mount volumes for with uid and gid set to 99:99, which translates to unknown:unknown. This has a special meaning for Mac OS X. Files owned by unknown:unknown always appear to be owned by the user/group viewing them. Thus, if you’re accessing the drive from a non-administrator account, the files will still look like they belong to you.

Likewise, I corrected the default modes. Consequently, you can no longer execute OS X binaries from NTFS volumes. If that presents a problem, and enough people would like the +x mode set again, I can make the fix quickly and have a new version out soon. Otherwise, the NTFS volume now appear more sane if you look at the details as seen from the Terminal.

That’s it for this update!

Monday April 23, 2007

I’ve uploaded new versions of everything. Now the packages are properly versioned from the perspective of OS X. Scripts to uninstall each package are included in all the disk images; no separate downloads are necessary. The NTFS-3G driver got an overhaul to match MacFUSE 0.2.5, which added the noping_diskarb option. It only uses this if a new-enough version of MacFUSE is present.

I cleaned up the fuse_daemon code so that it behaves as this: SIGTERM causes forceful unmounts of all FUSE volumes; SIGQUIT causes a friendly unmount of all volumes through Disk Arbitration; and SIGINT causes a clean exit with all FUSE volumes still mounted.

Please download these, they should work better all around. I have done no performance benchmarks, though, so I make no guarantees in that department.

Saturday April 07, 2007

I have uploaded a new version of the MacFUSE Tools (0.2.2-r2) package that alters its behavior. The old algorithm tried to do “polite” unmounting when receiving SIGTERM on shutdown. This appears to stall the shutdown process for some users. It now responds to two signals: SIGINT and SIGTERM.

Upon receiving SIGTERM, it forcibly unmounts all FUSE volumes, not through DiskArbitration. Thus, do not send SIGTERM to fuse_daemon while still running your system. As a regular user, only send it SIGINT, which will perform the old, “polite” unmounting procedure.

Added uninstaller package and instructions in the FAQ.

Summary

What’s special about this distribution of NTFS-3G? What are the MacFUSE Tools?

This NTFS-3G package provides Universal builds of NTFS-3G, ntfsprogs, and the added Mac-friendly ability to automatically mount NTFS volumes as read/write. This eliminates the command-line knowledge previously needed to get read/write access to your NTFS volumes.

The MacFUSE tools provide a set of utilities that any MacFUSE volume can use to ensure proper interaction with Mac OS X, including the Finder, DiskArbitration, and the system shutdown. These tools are invisible to end-users, but are useful for developers wishing to create wrappers similar to the ntfs-3g.fs bundle distributed here.

Background

When MacFUSE was first released, the only way to access NTFS volumes as read/write was to compile your own copy of NTFS-3G. Moreover, you always had to re-mount your NTFS volumes from the command line, as NTFS-3G was not the default filesystem for NTFS volumes; Mac OS X’s own read-only implementation was the default choice.

This method left many of the non-technical Mac users in the dark; there was no way they could compile, install, and mount volumes using NTFS-3G with any reliability. Thanks to the architecture of Mac OS X, automatic disk mounting is handled through a modular service called Disk Arbitration, which scans known filesystem bundles in /System/Library/Filesystems. Thus, to make read/write NTFS access simple, I set out to create an NTFS-3G filesystem bundle that would override the default read-only implementation.

With much effort from Sören Nils Kuklau (chucker) and myself (ShadowOfGed), a set of scripts were developed that formed an ntfs-3g.fs bundle that automatically mounts NTFS volumes as read/write. This bundle was then packaged with Universal binaries of the NTFS-3G project, which is the NTFS driver, and also the ntfsprogs suite for NTFS administration (formatting, renaming, and more). The result is a very Mac-friendly, integrated version of NTFS-3G that requires zero user interaction to work properly.

After the initial release, and after MacFUSE added distributed notifications, it became apparent that a few tools would be needed to relieve a few common problems. First was the problem of ensuring FUSE filesystems initialize prior to exposing them to Finder. Second was the problem of ensuring that FUSE filesystems properly unmount on shutdown to prevent apparent hangs/slowdowns. Thus, the MacFUSE Tools package was developed. Since these problems are not exclusive to NTFS-3G, it is distributed separately in case anyone else can make use of them.

Support for these tools was integrated into NTFS-3G, so as of NTFS-3G 1.0, NTFS volumes will mount read/write seamlessly, quickly, and without any Finder or shutdown glitches. However, the problems of interacting with Boot Camp and NTFS locales also caused people grief, so there are now two features to address those, and they are discussed below.

Features

The following constitute the major features and programs included in the MacFUSE Tools and NTFS-3G distributions:

Boot Camp
NTFS locales

Boot Camp

Since some tools look for the use of Mac OS X’s default NTFS implementation, it is occasionally desirable to have NTFS-3G politely decline to mount an NTFS volume as read/write, allowing the Mac OS X default mounter to take responsibility. This allows things like Boot Camp to work properly. For volumes that you want NTFS-3G to bypass, simply create a file called .ntfs-readonly on the root of the NTFS volume. When this file is present, NTFS-3G will decline to mount the volume as read/write.

NTFS locales

To support NTFS locales, the NTFS-3G mounter must know the desired locale when it mounts a volume. To make this happen automatically, the NTFS-3G bundle looks for a file called .ntfs-locale in the root directory of every NTFS volume. If found, it uses the contents and passes them as the locale= argument to ntfs-3g. Thus, for English, one might specify a locale of en_US. Other examples include de_DE for German, and ru_RU for Russian. For more information on locales, see the NTFS-3G website and Google for further details.

Frequently asked questions

After releasing the software, I’ve been asked many questions about the software, how to do things, what’s wrong, and any other inquiry you might be able to imagine. Here are answers to some of the most frequent questions:

How do I uninstall NTFS-3G and MacFUSE Tools?
How do I find the BSD device for my NTFS volume?
How do I (un)mount my NTFS volume from a terminal?
How do I rename an NTFS volume?
Why are NTFS copy speeds so slow?
Why won’t my NTFS volume mount?
How do I change the volume icon for my NTFS volume?

How do I uninstall NTFS-3G and MacFUSE Tools?

As of MacFUSE Tools 0.2.5 and NTFS-3G 1.417, just use the Uninstall scripts included in the downloadable disk images. They will prompt for your password to get the administrative access they need, and then they will quietly remove the package and all its files.

How do I find the BSD device for my NTFS volume?

Determining the BSD device for your volume is a simple and straightforward task. You’ll need to open Terminal.app to do this. Run the following code from your terminal:

mount | grep '/Volumes/My Volume' | awk '{ print $1 }'

The string /Volumes/My Volume represents the mounted location of your NTFS volume. If you don’t know what this is, instead of typing it in quotes as shown above, you can simply drag the volume from your Desktop into the Terminal window. This will automatically type the right folder for you.

You should get output that resembles this:

/dev/disk1s3

That string, /dev/disk1s3, is the BSD device associated with your NTFS volume. You’ll need it in some places below, so become familiar with this procedure.

How do I (un)mount my NTFS volume from a terminal?

Depending on whether you want to mount or unmount your volume, use one of the following commands after you have found the BSD device for your volume.

diskutil mount /dev/disk1s3
diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s3

How do I rename an NTFS volume?

There are two possible solutions to this problem. One is simple, but requires Windows, and the other is more complicated, but does not require Windows.

Option 1: Connect your NTFS volume to a Windows machine, through Parallels, Boot Camp, or plugging an external drive into a Windows machine. Then, within Windows, right-click on the desired drive in My Computer, and edit the volume name right there. These changes will take effect the next time Mac OS X mounts your volume. This is probably the most reliable method, although it requires Windows and more effort.

Option 2: Find the ntfslabel utility included with the NTFS-3G distribution here. This is a command-line solution, so you’ll need Terminal.app open. If you’re not comfortable with the command line, DO NOT DO THIS. Anyhow… the binaries are in /usr/local/bin, so if that is not in your PATH, you must either (a) use the full path to ntfslabel, or add /usr/local/bin to your PATH. The procedure looks roughly like this:

Find the BSD Device associated with the volume.
Unmount the volume.
Rename using ntfslabel. sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfslabel /dev/disk1s3 “New Label”
Re-mount the volume.

Your NTFS volume should be renamed. There is a limit of 128 Unicode characters for NTFS volume names—if you need more than that, please consider making your volume name more reasonable.

Why are NTFS copy speeds so slow?

This is a known issue with NTFS-3G run atop MacFUSE, but there’s little to be done about it. On internal drives, transmission speeds are typically around 10 MB/s, whereas external USB2.0 drives typically see around 1.0 MB/s. Yes, there is a performance bottleneck somewhere, but it’s not a problem this distribution can solve.

Be happy that we have read/write access to NTFS volumes through MacFUSE. Performance optimizations will come later (hopefully).

Why won’t my NTFS volume mount?

There are only two reasons that an NTFS volume, internal or external, will fail to mount automatically using this NTFS-3G distribution. It’s easy to determine which of the following reasons are causing your NTFS volume to mount using the default read-only implementation.

Your volume contains a .ntfs-readonly file, explicitly telling NTFS-3G to bypass the volume.

In order to remove the .ntfs-readonly file, some extra work is going to be involved. Follow the outlined procedure to remove that file and allow your NTFS volume to once again mount as a read/write volume:
1. Find the BSD device associated with the volume.
2. Unmount the volume.
3. Create a temporary mount point.
```
mkdir ~/my-ntfs3g
```
4. Mount through ntfs-3g.
```
sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk1s3 ~/my-ntfs3g
```
5. Remove the .ntfs-readonly file.
```
rm ~/my-ntfs-3g/.ntfs-readonly
```
6. Unmount from ntfs-3g
```
sudo umount /dev/disk1s3
```
7. Remove the temporary mount point.
```
rmdir ~/my-ntfs3g
```
8. Mount the volume again.
If you followed the directions properly, the NTFS volume should be mounted as read/write. If it still mounts as read-only, then you likely have the same problem described next.
Your NTFS volume was not unmounted or ejected cleanly by Windows.

The only way to safely fix this problem is to attach your NTFS volume to a Windows machine, and have Windows run CHKDSK on it. For internal drives accessed by Parallels or through Boot Camp, Windows should run CHKDSK automatically while booting up for inconsistent NTFS volumes. For external hard drives, you will likely need to run CHKDSK manually.

After running CHKDSK and cleanly unmounting the volume, it should work under NTFS-3G as a read/write volume. To ensure a clean unmount make sure that (a) for internal volumes, you shut down Windows properly, and (b) for external volumes, you “eject” the device before unplugging it.

If your problems persist, then it is likely there are bigger problems with your NTFS volume. I’d recommend trying to manually mount your volume using ntfs-3g and seeing what output it gives—likely, it will tell you why it won’t mount the volume.

How do I change the volume icon for my NTFS volume?

Once your NTFS volume is mounted as read/write, you can change the volume icon in precisely the same manner that you can change it for any other volume seen by Mac OS X. If, for some reason, the icon does not persist across boots, check for the presence of a file named .VolumeIcon.icns at the root of the volume. If this file doesn’t exist, Mac OS X was unable to create it. There are only a few possible reasons:

The volume was mounted read-only when you first changed the icon.
Your NTFS volume is out of disk space, and couldn’t create the icon file.
Something deleted .VolumeIcon.icns when you rebooted.

In any case, setting custom icons is known to work with NTFS-3G, and to persist across reboots. Thus, any problems encountered with this are external to NTFS-3G. Please make sure none of these conditions caused your problem, and if you continue to have trouble, please try thoroughly to determine the underlying cause.

Warranty

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Nothing new. Basically, I’m not responsible if these packages do anything bad to you, your computer, or our data. Such is the price we pay for free software.

Managing myths, mistakes, and misery

2007-02-03T23:11:00.001-08:00

At times like these, I once more find myself using “the Internet” as an outlet for my thoughts, fears, frustrations, and insecurities. The thought of it, at face value, strikes me as dangerous, because I’m freely providing strangers insight into my personal life. Not that I mind people knowing, but it’s occasionally worrisome when I wonder if someone will ever try to use these feelings, musings, and rants against me.

Ultimately, my purpose here is little more than a selfish quest to salvage what’s left of my sanity. Sometimes, I masquerade my writings as a means to communicate with others, hoping that good will come of it. While sometimes it’s possible to extract lessons from my articles, it’s rarely that altruistic goal that drives me to my keyboard.

There’s more to read within.

Introduction

Now that I’ve made that clear, I’m meting out these words tonight in an effort to set the records straight on several counts. Despite my relative agnosticism and pursuit of science and engineering, when I look at the world and its people, I’m struck by awe. We have rules, laws, theorems, postulates, approximations, calculations and metrics of all sorts to describe the interactions we observe. Physical interactions, that is. Despite the best and relatively accurate efforts of Psychology, the human mind and social interactions are still—to me—the world’s most complex and confounding conundrums. We know all about it’s chemical composition, but we cannot truly describe why or how music affects us emotionally, or why dreams are often vivid, striking, and relevant to our daily lives. This list could go on forever, but these are the two factors important to me.

One thing I know very little about is advanced physics, but I do know one of the more prominent underlying points: without expending energy to maintain order, all things tend to decay to disorder. In thermodynamics, that means all energy will eventually become unsalvageable heat. But this also applies at larger levels, that complex systems like the mind and body require enormous effort to maintain. That there are six billion of these highly ordered systems—all indescribably complicated—leads me to believe, sometimes, that there must be a God watching over us. And with that in mind, I often find myself wondering why my life unfolds as it does, despite the certainty that I’ll never know or understand.

Be it by design or by choice, I’m an advocate of honesty and truth to the bitter end. In the past, it’s been my social undoing, and I’m certain it will be again. Indeed, I believe one of humanity’s most egregious crimes against itself is the tendency of some to be false to oneself, one’s peers, or really anyone. If any term must be prescribed for me, then I would choose to be labeled a staunch believer in Truth or Honesty… and that’s why I’m here. Truth. Honesty. Those things which I value most.

Myths: Girls, ladies, women

Take your pick, they all describe the same gender with varying degrees of formality. I honestly don’t know which one to pick, because they’re all equally applicable… and likewise, they all feel equally inappropriate. This is the burning concern which has been smoldering in the back of my head for almost two weeks now. Since I’m here to discuss the truth, here it is, put bluntly, so there is no ambiguity to my meaning:

I am not currently—openly or secretly—in any sort of relationship.

Nor are there any signs that my fortune in that department will change. Not for the foreseeable future, at a minimum. Once you consider my insanely high “standards” and my iron-clad heart, I’m just not sure relationships are in my forecast. I’m not even choosing to avoid them. In fact, I find the prospect of being alone quite depressing, and really wish my luck would take a turn for the better. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. There are a myriad of reasons I could list, but I can detail those elsewhere in case anyone is interested.

So, I realize that I spent the first week or so of this semester hanging out with lots of girls in the dorm. Sure, they’re female, but just because I hang out as a friend doesn’t mean there’s anything else going on. Furthermore, someone applied the term “harem,” which carries a connotation I dislike intensely. It also implies that they choose to hang around me, and not vice versa. Fast forward to now, and you’ll see that it was me opting to enjoy their company when invited. Not vice versa.

I have no harem, and no girlfriend. While it might be “entertaining” for some of you to gossip about such nonsense, it’s simply not true. That’s the truth; lies do not become me.

Mistakes: Shooting the messenger

As one might have gathered from my previous two rants, I’ve tried to exist among two mutually exclusive groups of friends. It used to be one group, but because of past missteps, that’s no longer true. Existing as the last active tie between the two groups was tough. So tough, in fact, that I was concerned I couldn’t keep it up for much longer—fearing I would have to choose one over the other.

Well, it turns out I was right. I couldn’t do it much longer. The good news is that I didn’t have to choose one or the other. The bad news is that’s because I’ve slowly fallen out of both groups, leaving me in my own self-inflicted social limbo. Changes like this don’t usually come abruptly, so here’s how I managed to shoot the messenger—myself—out of both groups.

Due to my choices the first few weeks here, I spent a lot of time hanging out with the girls as I said above. Thus, for almost two weeks, I was rarely—if ever—around when the HCP wanted to go do something, like get food or go bowling. Pull a stunt like that for long enough, and people just get accustomed to life without you… as they did with me. Between those two weeks, varying degrees of laziness, and a temporary addiction to the new Zelda game, I essentially clipped myself out of the HCP picture amicably. I didn’t intend to, which is the problem.

As for the girls, it seems I did something much more offensive. Allegedly, the HCP has been overly noisy with Anime and all the Wii-playing. I’ll grant that accusation, even though it doesn’t usually bother me, and I’m not one to complain. However, when the girls saw fit to loudly and boisterously play and sing 90’s music from the kitchen, I got a little upset. The noise didn’t bother me. The apparent double standard did. Being who I am, trying to maintain peace, I didn’t say anything, and vented lightly in an away message. That’s just how I work. Generally, it’s pretty peaceful.

Apparently it wasn’t. I got myself blocked by someone and have received the silent treatment from the rest. Noting how easily I was just disconnected, I sat down and thought about it for a while. Their main complaint is the political shortsightedness and intolerance of the HCP. But for a group who preaches political tolerance, shouldn’t the same tolerance and forgiveness be applied socially? I mean really, the constant bashing on the HCP gets old. There may be a political rift, and sometimes social incompetence, but having known both groups for a while, they’re decent people too.

Perhaps this past week was just my breaking point. If you’re going to complain about noise from the HCP, you’ve got to keep your own volume under control. As my parents always told me, “clean your own house first” before complaining about someone else’s. However, grudges have never helped anything, so I’m perfectly willing to set all these messes aside to just move on with life.

What’s really stricken me is the notion that I’ve become vermin for observing and commenting on a contradiction I saw, which still seems valid. Maybe I’m unreasonable, or maybe I’m wrong. Either way, it seems I’ve been excommunicated from that group, as none of the girls are really talking to me anymore.

I am who I am, like it or lump it. I like to believe I’m reasonable, fair, and level-headed. If I’ve ruined my repute with some individuals for whatever reason, then I guess that’s just how the world turns.

Misery: Relationships, revisited

I know I discussed relationships earlier, and they’re essentially the topic of this section. It’s common knowledge that I’m single, and have been for a while now. The lesser-known fact is that really, I don’t like being this alone, but I’m OK with it because I must. One thing I never mentioned initially—but now admit openly—is that my first relationship ended because I made a series of poor decisions, and said a range of nasty things. That’s a fact. I’ll never detail it further publicly, because the writing that ended it all was the most damning prose I have ever composed. I’m seriously not proud of it.

To this very day, I find my deeds, words, and reactions to my self-inflicted breakup indescribably reprehensible. That whole timeline will bother me well into the future, but hopefully less so if I can—even once—find the energy to apologize. I’m not the kind to apologize, and I might have let it slide; but I saw the girl’s side of a similar breakup this year, and only then did I see how poorly I handled my own. It’s something I should do, but it will take lots of energy. I’ve bricked that entire episode up inside my iron-clad heart, and that’s why I haven’t yet revisited it.

The reason, I suppose, that I’m writing this, is best said by a little something I threw together just yesterday:

Losses of old form dreams of new;

a faded joy evoked in thought.

These relics of mind, grand but few,

hold the peace I always have sought.

Occasionally I have a dream that will leave me missing what I don’t have. I’ll wake up and remember why relationships are worth all the effort. I’m reminded of the lessons I had to learn by losing Marj, and how she was right in telling me I’d never learn them if she didn’t make me go away.

Sometimes I wonder why it ended, but it’s an old matter that’s pointless to rehash. It just comes as a counterweight to those days where it seems like relationships would be a lost cause. They’re totally worth it once you find one, but it’s not worth forging one to have if it doesn’t occur naturally. Everyone I know says that the right relationship will just happen magically, with seemingly minimal effort from both halves. I keep wishing that will happen some day, because the days and weeks without that support have been wearing me down.

Moderating the melodrama

I realize there’s a lot of up-and-down to my writing these days. School itself is still going alright, despite my many complaints about the accompanying social life. The first two parts of this are issues that needed discussing, and the final part is just musing on why I may seem a little bothered lately. I hope that some of these things will be resolved soon, and for the rest, I just hope that I can make the best of the situations at hand.

This is just how the world turns. As one in six billion, it certainly isn’t going to stop for me. I just keep on going, as always. Good night, everyone.

P.S. I may elaborate on the final section a bit later, but I’m too tired to continue writing. So that’s it for now.

iPhoto Editing

2006-12-21T16:56:00.001-08:00

Just a quick tip for anyone who’s interested. I was tooling around in iPhoto earlier today and noticed that the “Edit in external editor” contextual menu option was disabled. Though there is no preference exposed in the UI, the following command will tell iPhoto to use the GIMP:

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto
    ExternalEditorPath -string "/Applications/Gimp.app"

Feel free to replace that application with your editor of choice. That’s all for today!

On etiquette, consideration, and judgement

2006-12-12T20:09:00.002-08:00

After my previous essay regarding the many problems I’ve seen in Hillcrest, I thought for sure I’d be done here for a while. It seems that I was wrong, and this time it’s personal. Let me just say that it is extraordinarily difficult to genuinely offend me, but there are a few easy ways to cross me. In the past twenty-four hours, several people have found them. I’m tired of this crap, and today it stops.

Etiquette

Simply put, etiquette describes the informal and unwritten rules and protocols of social interaction. Appropriate use of phrases such as “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry” are all good examples of things we learn as etiquette. When someone goes out of their way to help, you thank them. But that’s nothing to do with today. If you move into a house, you expect (both socially and by law) that people will not enter your house uninvited. If you go to someone’s house, you go to the front door and knock. If someone doesn’t answer and let you in, you leave quietly. Simple, yes?

No. Not simple. In practice, dorm rooms are treated exactly like personal residence: nobody official can enter your room without your express permission. In suites, they have a “front door” (the hallway) and a “back door” (the bathroom). Just like a house, if you want to go in, you approach the front door and knock. When a door is closed, it is not yours to open freely. Several of my friends have become far too comfortable with letting themselves into rooms that aren’t their own. When I’m gone for a weekend, don’t leave my room a mess. If you use it, clean it. If my door is closed, don’t open it unprompted. If my hallway door is closed, do not enter through a closed bathroom door.

To most people, this is common sense. To people who call themselves my friends, it’s faded out of their memory. My door, if closed, is closed for a reason. And that reason is because the world ought not be staring inside. I’m furious that the rumor mill works so quickly and that uninvited guests have taken innocent sightings and morphed them into more sinister stories. Jacob and Cas, I’m looking at you.

Consideration

Another problem we’ve had lately is that of being considerate to others. Not only is it general etiquette not to enter a room uninvited, doing so is rather inconsiderate. The door is closed probably because the occupants didn’t want you just barging in. If we did, the door would have been open. Normally I try not to offend, but this is ridiculous. You guys are uncomfortably awkward sometimes, and that’s why the door was closed. You may not like it, but at least respect it.

And now a subject closer to my heart and principles. Yes, I have both. To be blunt: girls are people too, and ought to be treated and spoken of accordingly. I’ve heard many people, including some parents, refer to girls as objects. “We’ll help you find one,” they said. Sorry, but girls are not something you can just go out and pick. Dating and relationships just don’t work that way—you do not go out looking for one and magically find it; if you’re lucky, it finds you unintentionally. Stop talking about girls as if they are something to be found and picked up. I find it reprehensible, and I guarantee the girls you know are even more offended. You wonder why things never go your way.

Choice of language has a powerful influence on interpretation. Earlier today, someone backhandedly apologized to me: “sorry for scaring away your girl.” There are so many problems with that statement, I don’t even know where to begin. First, I’m appalled that anyone would believe he or she knows more about my personal life than I do. I may have a few close female friends, but last I checked, that’s all I’ve got… but that’s not the point. What bothers me the most is the notion of “your girl.” Possession. Even if I were lucky enough to have a girlfriend, I still wouldn’t stand for anyone using that language. People belong to nobody other than themselves, and it’s despicable that people are comfortable using such possessive language to describe any relationships, real or merely imagined.

Judgement

I make no secret of the fact that I make friends slowly, and that I choose them carefully. Apparently I’ve made a few mistakes over the years, as I’m finding out this semester. As I’ve been told, and reluctant to admit, there are many times that my so-called “friends” here treat me like trash. And I won’t stand for it anymore. I’ve survived without you guys before, and I can do it again. You may need me for help with school and such, but I dare say that’s only true one way. Treat me like crap, and I’ll go away. The posse has pushed its luck a little too far.

Cas, I understand that your keys went missing. I respect your choice to ask everyone once if they have seen them. However, you’re entirely wrong to think my close friends or I would be so bankrupt as to find stealing and hiding them humorous. Your mistake was twofold: assuming either of us would find it funny, and inquiring in such a way that you assumed we were already guilty.

As I said, I pick my friends carefully. Nobody I’m close to anymore would be so childish as to think stealing and hiding is humorous. One of the quickest ways to severely offend me is to pass such sweeping character judgement on either me or my close friends. If you assume I did it, I’m offended you think that low of me. I’d never do such a thing, and to believe I would shows that you don’t know me. If you assume a close friend of mine did, then you’re saying that I befriend people of questionable character. I know I don’t do that; my friends are good people. Unlike you guys, I’ll stand up for my friends no matter how it impacts me.

So you can all take your sweeping character judgement and stuff it. There are none of us who are perfect enough to pass judgement on anyone else, so stop doing it. The character judgments leveled against me, Kari, Ben, Amy, and Lindsey have been outrageous. Even if not explicitly stated, actions betray your silence anyway. There’s no real foundation for it, and nobody here is qualified anyhow. Get over yourselves, and stop judging us.

End of the Line

As I said at the beginning, I choose my friends carefully. I’m slow to form friendships, and I’m equally slow to let them go. To be my friend, I have to firmly believe that you are a good enough person that I can trust you with my friendship. To lose me as a friend, you have to show me that my trust was misplaced. Passing judgement on my friends and treating me like crap are two of the quickest ways to offend me and lose my trust. Congratulations guys, you’ve worked hard to get me here.

My room is my home away from home; I certainly wouldn’t let these flaws into my house at home, so I don’t want them here either. Foul moods, character judgement, and baseless rumor mongering are not welcome. This room is mine, first and foremost. When here, you’re the guests, not me; I wish you’d realize that and stop treating me like I am. The futon is for company that’s invited, not for company to invite itself. I intensely dislike being the grouch, but this semester has been entirely too hard on me and those I respect.

Think about what’s important, and decide how to handle it.

Hillcrest: The many meanings of “HC”

2006-12-10T16:49:00.001-08:00

It’s been a long semester here in Hillcrest. To the point that some now refer to it as Hellcrest, and with plenty of good reasons. The problems from Fall 2006 impacted nearly every facet of college life, from academics to dating to politics to university administration. After two years of relative stability, this semester has brought on a sudden and apparently inexplicable dismantling of a community.

We already know that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The entire Hillcrest Community has seen the reaction; now it’s time analyze the original action—the cause. Oddly enough, the abbreviation “HC” is a fitting acronym for many of the problems that have arisen these past 4 months.

Hyper conservatism

Jump back to Fall 2004, an election year. Shortly after my arrival at college, my friends and I were quickly termed the “Hyper Conservative Posse,” or the HCP for short. It became a joke to us, and I was soon labeled the “token moderate.” At the time, it was rather humorous, but in a gratingly dark and sinister fashion—at least to me. Maybe I was the only one who saw it that way.

Fast forward to Fall 2006, the year of the national midterm elections. Lying dormant for two years, the time was once again ripe for hyper-conservatism to rear its ugly head. Recall the term “compassionate conservative” from the 2004 elections. I can assure you that any such label is the antithesis of every quality the HCP exhibited this time around. Perhaps the nature of the HCP had drifted right since the 2004 elections; maybe it was propelled right by the addition of two new “token liberals” since 2004; it’s even possible the HCP was drawn right by the addition of a heavy-hitting conservative in 2005. Regardless of the cause, there has definitely been a bit of rightward shift.

On the Republican agenda during this trip to the polls were several moral issues, including stem cell research and—more importantly—the issue of gay marriage (to purposefully abandon the use of politically correct terms). I can already hear the cynics in the crowd asking: “Why do you care? You’re straight.” While true, that factoid has no bearing on the other fact that I now know at least six people who range from “not entirely straight” to “entirely homosexual.” These people are all completely normal, functional human beings, and their life decisions are theirs to make. While you are welcome to disagree with those decisions personally, it is absolutely inexcusable to force your morality on them through law—particularly on completely innocent issues like this, which will present no impact to your private life whatsoever. To those who will say “well, murder is a moral issue,” I offer the fact that murder directly impacts the lives of other people, and not just the victim.

To nobody’s surprise, however, the overarching opinion was “gay marriage is bad.” Fine. I disagree, but you’re welcome to that opinion. And now a very brief lecture on how voting works: you go to the poll and fill out your ballot. You select candidates you support and voice your opinion on issues up as referenda. It’s really quite simple. The only cases in which you should abstain from voting are on those issues and offices for which you legitimately have no opinion, or cannot make an informed decision. You do not abstain from voting just to please your friends, because you “knew it would pass anyway.” If you have an opinion, vote it. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; people will find out.

The real opinions and values of certain sects of the HCP were made blindingly apparent this semester, and the backstabbing hyper-conservatism was a little much for me (and others) to stomach. Maybe some of the HCP set a bad example, but the rank smell of deceit remains around all its members. I found myself caught in the rift between the HCP and those they crossed, which quickly made this semester my most awkward, uncomfortable, and miserable one to date.

Intolerance is a serious problem; it plagues parts of the HCP, and is slowly affecting larger portions of Hillcrest.

Heartless commentary

There are many terms for the concept of “think before you speak,” such as the Hillcrest favorite, the “brain-to-mouth filter.” For some people, it’s obvious that either this filter is dysfunctional, or they really don’t care about the feelings of others. Usually, I wouldn’t count myself as one who really doesn’t care; after my charades last Friday, I’ve since joined the club. However, that fact bothers me, whereas it doesn’t bother some whom it ought.

Let’s digress to gay marriage for a short while. It was a very heated and oft-discussed issue within Hillcrest this semester, with so much riding on the outcome of the elections, particularly regarding Virginia’s gay marriage legislation. I know precisely one gay couple, so perhaps my sample size is a little low, but allow me to explain. They have been together for 20 years or more, without any of the legal benefits that accompany marriage, and definitely with the occasional scorn that must come from people intolerant of gays. Perhaps I’m talking out of my proverbial rear, but there are a lot of “normal” marriages that end in a matter of years, instead of going strong even after a matter of decades. So this is an example of a gay couple who have been together for considerably longer than most of today’s shorter-lived marriages.

Why is this relevant? I’ll tell you. The comment was made—by a member of the HCP—that “the love you feel isn’t the same kind of love I feel.” To add context, this was from a straight person to a gay person. How anyone on the planet that is not a member of both camps (so to speak) feels qualified to make that judgement call, I will never understand. And, as my story above would indicate, it seems that a gay couple may in fact feel a stronger bond than many straight couples. So making a broad, uninformed statement like this is a complete load of crap. This one comment was particularly ill-timed, and summarily insensitive. It should be no marvel that these individuals stopped talking, but said member of the HCP is so dense that he hasn’t a clue.

Don’t throw around such senseless and baseless comments; it’s dumb, and further crumbles a group already falling apart.

Hopeless crushes

And while we’re on the subject of marriage, it’s an appropriate follow-up to consider the dating antics that have plagued Hillcrest and the HCP this semester. As with any high school or college scene, rumor mongering is an extremely entertaining pass-time (apparently). Being fair, I’ll start with a known fact that began as a rumor, and from it stems a myriad of stress-inducing and foundation-shaking problems that have shown themselves this fall.

In the beginning, it was a new semester; we were all busy meeting new people and making new friends. If this sounds a too altruistic to be true, you’re entirely correct. This happy-go-lucky phase lasted about two weeks, tops. Except for a couple people… two, specifically. One of my friends seemed to be hanging out frequently with one of the girls new to the dorm this year; an RA. So, of course, the rest of the HCP started whispering quietly about what was afoot, almost a full month before either he or she was ready to disclose the truth. It turns out that the rumors were correct, but that’s not the point; as I soon found, being part of a rumor is infinitely less fun than discussing a rumor.

Returning to the first few weeks of school, there was another girl new to the dorm, who hung out in my room frequently. Allegedly this was because my roommate and I are just fun people to hang around. Being me, I took that tale at face value, seeing no reason to read any further into it—at least, not publicly. Needless to say, that’s not what the rest of the HCP saw. Judging by the quiet conversations, the cryptic comments, and playful jabs, the HCP believed for sure that she had developed an active interest in me. Why they subscribed to that notion, I don’t know, because—at the time—she very clearly and very publicly had a boyfriend. End of story, right?

Not quite. All was fine and dandy until one day I walked in on a conversation that I was not expected to hear. Allegedly, my softball playing improved one day when she showed up to watch us practice. I didn’t change anything, but I really did not appreciate being mocked when I wasn’t around, especially due to beliefs that were entirely inaccurate—at least, what they believed was wrong. It was pretty clear (to me, at least) that she had no interest in me, as they believed. However, I had developed an interest in her. I kept it private, because nobody needed to know. To make a long story short, the rumors got a little out of hand, and I explained the entire situation to her, including the rumors and my story. Seemed like the right thing to do, so I did.

Is there a moral here? Very much so. Once you’ve aired the truth, see what happens, and let it go. This really shouldn’t be a hard concept! But apparently it is…

So yet again, the same comment-maker from above very clearly developed a crush on the RA that was, at this point, already taken. That’s fine and dandy, because nobody would ever know—unless, of course, you pull stupid stunts that give it away. It should be common sense and common courtesy that you do not try to steal someone else’s girlfriend, and that you absolutely do not give them grief about being in a relationship. Some of the underhanded and out-of-line comments have been ridiculous. Crushes are fine, but when someone is taken or clearly uninterested, you have to just let it go. Anything else will simply make you more enemies than friends. I let it go, at least. But apparently it’s hard for other people not to be underhanded jerks.

Life sucks sometimes, so get used to it. If something doesn’t go your way, suck it up and move on; don’t make someone else’s life hell because of it. Why is this so hard to understand?

Hatred and cruelty

If there’s anything I know well, it’s stress. It’s a terrible affliction that is simply a side effect of being human. So we learn to deal with it; some people handle it well, and some people really don’t. For example, one great outlet for stress is sports—either playing or watching. However, an important factor in managing stress is mitigating its causes. There are a lot of life problems that justify stress, but there are a lot of petty issues that really don’t.

One of those issues is grades. I spent three years barely passing middle school, and one year doing the same in high school. I spent my last three years of high school cleaning up my act and recovering from my blunders. I pulled it out enough to barely get into the honors community here, but not enough to land the scholarship many say I deserve. I won’t disagree, but there’s nothing I can do about it; so I leave well enough alone. Despite attending hundreds of lectures during my first year of college, there was only one lesson I learned. It had absolutely nothing to do with school.

Unless you count the school of hard knocks. It sounds easy for me to say, but there are many things more important than grades. Staying in school is important to your future, but when the bottom really does fall out, good grades won’t save you. You’ll be desperately reaching for friends and family; ultimately, for love. Because when the world turns upside-down, that’s all you’ve got left. I should know, because I’ve been there before. The point is this: many of my friends have become disproportionately obsessed with grades, and they’ve become blind to other life matters.

Being concerned about grades is OK. I am, because I need to be. What’s unacceptable, however, is allowing grades affect your mood and personality for weeks prior to and following tests. Talking to friends about what I view as past missteps (skipping class) is absolutely not just cause to be hostile and violent toward me; pummeling me with remote controls is far beyond acceptable. I have every right to be worried about my exams, and do not deserve to be hounded about the fact that I usually do well. I’m fallible just like everyone else. To the guilty parties here—you know who you are—it should come as no surprise that the open hostility is rapidly eroding my interest in your company.

So there’s a lot more to life than school and grades. It’s not kosher to tote inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, and general hostility relating to school, grades, and majors. Nothing is worth letting your stress end friendships; always keep that in mind.

Harems and cliques

And now back to issues that pertain to the Hillcrest community more than the HCP. The HCP has it’s fair share of issues, but what’s happened to the community as a whole is altogether more disturbing. When I began as a freshman, the idea of Hillcrest was to form an intellectual community, wherein each person harbors his or her own opinions, and is willing to civilly share them with others. Perhaps an effect of election-year politics, the community has noticeably split itself into many sects, cliques, and harems.

The most obvious clique is the HCP and its close company. This group of friends came to be for two reasons, which are (1) we are all engineers, and thus benefit from keeping company, but more importantly (2) most everyone is comparatively conservative. It seems that Hillcrest, including the HCP, has fallen victim to one of the most dangerous fallacies that plagues us today—forming your communities based on those who agree with you. The goal of an honors community is to challenge and reevaluate ideas, but what has happened is coagulation and stagnation: like beliefs have clumped off into small little groups.

For example, all the RAs except for one have formed their own group, which now summarily dismisses any input members of the HCP might have, simply because we are the HCP. Whether our input is valid or well-founded is irrelevant; the source immediately discredits it. I dare say that “the management’s” such nonchalant dismissal of feedback is frightening. You’re supposed to run the building and the community based on everybody’s feedback; not just input from your close and carefully-selected friends. Playing favorites is a terrible habit, particularly when you’re in a position of authority.

A community is not supposed to be made of discrete groups; it’s supposed to be a fluid mass of cooperating and coexisting individuals. The growing tendency to discredit and ignore those who induce intellectual sores is bothersome. If you can’t back up your beliefs, maybe you should do some rethinking—don’t simply avoid those who shake your foundations.

A saving grace?

There’s no overarching point to this exorbitantly long rant. Each of the various flaws I’ve seen, I discussed. I’m neither innocent nor guilty on all counts. The hope here is that—perhaps—everyone will read this and see themselves in it. This semester has taught me a lot, but I feel like my friends and community have continued down the same path they’ve followed for two years now. We’ve all got to learn from our mistakes, but it’s impossible to learn if nobody highlights them as mistakes or transgressions.

I’m aware that this will offend a lot of people, but sometimes the truth just needs to be told. I’m equally at fault for falling into my own factions here in the community, and as a couple others and I have realized, it’s about time we stopped the drain. Unlike previous years, none of the blame lies on the freshmen, nor should it be unjustly placed on them; the blame lies squarely on us upperclassmen for subconsciously dividing the community into groups as we have. Maybe it will get better going forward, or maybe it’s beyond repair. Nothing’s set in stone, so we’ll see how it all turns out. I’ve seen the community get along before, so I know it’s possible.

Here’s to hoping it can once more.

Facebook furor and foolishness

2006-09-12T08:03:00.001-07:00

Over the past week or two, there have been repeated “petitions” against the changes made to Facebook that allegedly make stalking easier. As is common in popular culture—particularly here in America—people find it easier to whine and complain than to think something through logically.

The first violation was Facebook adding a “mini-feed” that tracks updates to user information. Users complained and tried to have the feature removed, because Facebook didn’t implement privacy controls before enabling the new features. That was indeed an egregious mistake on behalf of Facebook. Two or three days later, the new features had full privacy controls, and now all users who dislike the new “features” can opt out. Problem solved. Facebook has learned not to enable new features without appropritate privacy controls.

And now, there’s news of Facebook opening itself up to anyone and everyone, based on geographical regions. The complaints are emerging again, in the form of “petition” groups, instead of rational arguments directed towards those who are in charge of Facebook. And this time, it’s the users who are wrong. Let’s get a few facts straight:

There are already privacy controls that allow users to enable or disable access to your profile based on other peoples’ networks. That is, if you are in a network for your school, your company, and your geography, you can customize who can see what parts of your profile. The protections are already there, it is merely up to the users to employ them.
Public access will be enabled by letting people join their respective geographies. That is, you will be confined to exactly one geography if you’re not part of any collegiate or corporate network. As a student or employee, you can prevent people in your geography from seeing any of your profile using one of two means. You can (a) restrict access using privacy controls, or (b) do not join a geography to start with.
Like it or not, Facebook is now a company out there to make money. If you don’t like the way they’re conducting business, then you are not obligated to use their site. You can delete your account if you so choose. We, as users, do not retain any right to run the site—they will try to accommodate our privacy concerns, but if you feel they’re not adequate, then get out or stop complaining.

Personally, I am a fan of the changes Facebook has made. Sure, all the information was there before, but there was no easy way to track what was new in my friends’ lives. Facebook has made it easier for me to keep up with what my friends are doing, and vice versa. In fact, before these changes, I used to maintain a “recently updated” line in my profile to make it easier for people.

If you are concerned about your privacy, then please examine and employ the controls that are already there before you blindly complain. People like to make noise, even when it’s completely unjustified. And I’m tired of hearing it. If you’re concerned about it being too easy for people to “stalk” you on Facebook, then please look at the controls. If you can’t figure out how to use them to protect yourself (if you care), then you need to get a brain, and reserve no right to complain. Online stalking is extraordinarily mild as far as “stalking” goes, so keep that in mind—it could be much, much worse.

None of the students who are complaining will ever have any trouble with people in geographies that cannot see them, but that logic is lost amidst the ease and excitement of raising hell and complaining. I welcome the changes, because it will make it easier for me to add friends who may not be part of a college or company network. As for people stalking me, I’ve got my privacy controls set to prevent it from being a problem. Get smart, or get out. Don’t try to ruin my fun on Facebook just because you’re too retarded to protect yourself.

The Internet is a scary place, and Facebook is comparatively tame. If you can’t protect yourself on Facebook, you probably shouldn’t use the Internet, because the scum of the Internet will be able to find you even without Facebook. I could show you lots of information out there that you didn’t even know I could find, and it’s all a matter of public record. It’s a hazard of a free society. Accept the risks as part of our freedom and openness. Be smart and be safe, but don’t be a retard.

Nine five oh one four

2006-08-30T10:22:00.001-07:00

So it’s been a long time since I’ve sat my lazy bum down and written here. My last post was written from Cupertino in good ‘ol sunny California. Now I’m back in Blacksburg, VA, probably my favorite place on earth. The past weeks have been busy to the point of bordering on insane—but I think it’s been good. Some things have changed, but a lot of things haven’t, so here’s a little bit about both.

What’s changed

My computers. At the end of my internship at Apple, I bought a couple things. I sold off my PowerMac G5, for one reason or another, because I felt no burning need for a desktop. Well, then we released the Mac Pro, at a lower price point, and with the addition of an employee discount, I was able to snag a “low-end” desktop and a MacBook Pro for only slightly more than I got from selling the G5. So now I have an awesome desktop, and a pretty awesome laptop. I love both of them to death; it’s working out really well for me so far.

My location. I sprinted across the United States in three excruciatingly long days. It started at 12PM on August 12, the Saturday after I finished. My brother and I got home at 4AM on Tuesday, August 15. The days were like 14 hours, 16 hours, and 18 hours long. Or something ridiculous like that. We took a lot of good pictures, but unfortunately, a lot of the trip was after dark (because of the time crunch), so we missed a lot of good ones too. The 25-hour days on the way to California were nice. The 23-hour days on the way home sucked.

My social life. As if I really have one. Though working at Apple was great, my after-hours social life was abysmal. I wasn’t a huge fan of my housemates or how they cared to (not) clean the appartment. It’s great to be back in Hillcrest again, where work gets done but often comes in a close second to having a good time. I really missed all the people from here this summer, so I’m glad to be here. Rooming with Daniel again is working out really well. So it’s not really different from what it used to be, but it’s changed from what it was this summer.

What hasn’t

Music. I am consistently fascinated by music and its ability to affect me. Some music I can just listen to in the background. Other songs take me to various times in my past, when I first heard or binge-listened to that particular song. And a few more, though rarer, have this uncanny ability to put me in an absurdly reflective mood. And if you know me well at all, you’ll know that almost inevitably ends with me carrying a melancholy aura about, for any number of reasons. Yet, there’s something so fascinating about succumbing so easily to notes, chords, and harmonies that I actually enjoy doing it to myself. Constantly. Good or bad, I don’t know. I figure one of these days, I’ll force myself to tackle my own issues, and music is one way to bring up those thoughts, almost without fail. I guess that’s it

Threats. I’m pretty sure that there are several people around that are still extraordinarily bitter about my existince, in an entirely passive-aggressive manner. The sarcasm, jabs, jokes, and actions all speak to this. Of course, I’m the only one who gets repeatedly screwed over, but that’s par for the course, and I’m accustomed to it by now. Also, I’ve grown immune to the words that are usually thrown my way. If I couldn’t ignore them or laugh at them, I’d have gone postal by now. And that would be ugly… very ugly.

Insanity. I’m taking 23 hours this semester; two more than last, yet I can’t convince myself to lay off. I’d ask what I’m smoking to think this is an OK plan, but unfortunately I don’t do any of that. So it’s just pure, unadulterated insanity. I’m also looking at soccer and softball this year, as a way to force myself out of the building. It should be fun. Our first soccer practice is tonight at 7, and softball practice is sometime on Friday. Go us!

In closing

Well, that’s about it for now. There are many many more things I could say about the past ten to fourteen days, but I’ll refrain for now. I’ve got to run off to class here in a few, but perhaps I’ll say a bit more later if I can find the time and motivataion. Until then, best wishes to all!

Is it the music, or the lyrics?

2006-07-24T00:22:00.001-07:00

So about two years ago, I would have sworn to anyone that I always listen to songs for the music first, and the words second. Tonight, however, something interesting came to my attention; more on that in a bit. My taste in music ebbs and flows in cycles. Any given period in my life seems to be characterized by a set of maybe 20 or 30 songs, which change periodically. This summer, I’ve picked up a few songs I’d like to note. In no particular order, they are: The Unforgettable Fire, by U2; Tears in Heaven, by Eric Clapton; Sitting, by Cat Stevens; The Hands that Built America, by U2; Fields of Gold, by Sting; Look Away, by Chicago; and Kingdom Come, by Coldplay. Again, that’s in no particular order and by no means exhaustive.

Background

So why is it that I listen to music, really? Back at Enloe, when my life was run by band, I listened to music purely for the unique combinations of notes and chords. I didn’t really have much going on in my life; things were pretty simple. I existed. So there was no overarching theme to my favorite music other than “hey, I think that sounds pretty cool.” When I listen to some of my old favorites, I’m consistently taken back to various parts of my life, depending on the song. If you know me, and a bit about my life, you’ll probably notice that the list of songs above share more in common than just appealing to my ears.

So what is that? Immaterial, perhaps, but to put it bluntly: I’m lonely sometimes. Sure, I’ve got a great job, a great family, great friends at school, and many other things that I’m very lucky to have. But at the end of a long day, deep into the night, something still isn’t clicking. Just take a look at the songs, and you can see that without me having to say much else.

The words, indeed

So back to the point. I used to listen to music for the sounds. But the meaning in the songs that I’ve collected this summer lies in their lyrics, not just their music. I love the way they sound, but it’s the meaning in the lyrics that appeals to me now. This struck me so clear when I picked up The Unforgettable Fire. I haven’t really paid close attention to its lyrics, only that I enjoyed the experience of the song as a whole. In fact, there were entire passages that I couldn’t clearly understand. So tonight I looked up the words. I found that, without even knowing it, the words fell right in line with the other songs.

Clearly I now enjoy songs for the words. For whatever reason, that’s how it is. Sure, it’s likely affected by my life’s situation, but you’re always working in life’s context, so it’s really not “different.” A very dear friend of mine loves music for its words, and I used to find that so perplexing. Not that it really matters, but it seems I’ve started listening to music the same way now. Strange how that works.

Making it “click”

It has been a very long time and an equally long journey to finally be able to discuss some parts of my life that, previously, I kept more secret than a new Apple product. In fact, I’m still a bit afraid to talk about it here on the Internet. So I won’t. If you know, you know; if you don’t, ask me. Suffice it to say that there are parts of me that, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot change. “Just keep on pushing hard boy, try as you may / you’re going to wind up where you started from.” For better or worse, I have no clue… but to the last letter, it’s true.

So at the end of the day, what isn’t clicking for me? Well, here’s the best way I can describe it.

Imagine yourself outside, in a wide open space, without a waking soul for miles. Imagine the dark sky that is both late night and early morning, with the faintest hint of a coming sunrise. With the cool breeze in your hair, the white moon floating above, and stars dotting the night sky… thoughtfully gazing into the heavens, what do you want most?

When you need to hear a voice, whose will it be? When you need comfort from everything, anything, or even nothing at all, where will you find it? When you need to settle an unrest that reason cannot, what will you do?

My answer to each and every one of these is simply “I don’t know.” Sure, I’m surviving. And that’s not going to change. But some nights, it’s hard. Really hard. There’s nothing worse than having nowhere to turn after finishing a long day at work, walking out of the building at 4AM, and feeling an uncanny need to just talk to someone… anyone… just to say “hi,” or find a shoulder to lean on. It’s a lonely experience. It’s one I’m tired of repeating.

So that’s what hasn’t clicked: finding an answer to those questions, and others like them. What does it take to have an answer? I don’t know, but for too long, I’ve not been able to find it. And it’s wearing me down.

Life goes on, as always. Good night.

Come to the Moon

2006-06-18T03:09:00.001-07:00

Come to the Moon

I’d write more, but the song itself is pretty much a dead ringer for what I’d like to say.

By Jimmy Buffett:

Full earth tonight

And Mars is big and bright

All our friends are flying in

It’s such a lovely sight

Gravity never could hold me

That is what you always told me

You know me…

So come to the moon

I hope to see you soon

Half a million miles isn’t far to go

You know I need you so

I hope you still need me

So come to the Moon

The starship’s leaving soon

Until then I’m wishing on every star

That you will be here soon

Come to the Moon

Those crazy martian days

When we went separate ways

Through time and space we’d find a place

To bring our lives in phase

We’re lost amid the galaxies revolving

And we’re all just a part of what’s evolving

So come to the moon

I hope to see you soon

Half a million miles isn’t far to go

You know I need you so

I hope you still need me

So come to the Moon

The starship’s leaving soon

Until then I’m wishing on every star

That you will be here soon

Come to the Moon

So come to the moon

I hope to see you soon

Half a million miles isn’t far to go

You know I need you so

I hope you still need me

So come to the Moon

The starship’s leaving soon

Until then I’m wishing on every star

That you will be here soon

Come to the Moon

Come to the Moon

Come to the Moon

Journey back with me

2006-06-09T02:29:00.001-07:00

Snoring roommate to the left, and droning television to the right, it occasionally seems as if the warm, whirring laptop in front of me is my only friend here. For the past four weeks my life has consisted of little more than sleeping, going to work, coming back to the apartment, and doing it all over again. Sure, I keep myself busy at night doing things on my laptop, but there’s more to life than technology.

Don’t get me wrong—I absolutely love this job; the company is great and so is the work. Unfortunately, all the people I love are nearly 3000 miles away. Somehow, the soft synthesized guitar and flute fill my ears with an odd, almost ambient calm; I’ve heard these instruments and melodies woven together many times before, albeit many years ago—before I was a senior in high school. This music sends my mind back to those times.

Now a neo-classical orchestra beats deftly away; uplifting and melodious, and then slow an collected. It’s amazing to me how music reminds me of my past. Perhaps it’s my style of listening, or maybe this is common to people of all ages and backgrounds. I listen in binges. I’ll pick up a new set of music every three months or so, and then listen to it habitually until I pick up something new. So when I go back to certain collections of music, I cannot stop my mind from traveling back to when I first enjoyed it. Bold and belligerent, this latest electronic symphony comes to a close.

The next song, a victory song, begins to play. When I think about where I work, this is how I feel. When I think about what I’ve given up and abandoned to get here, I feel anything but. Sure, my blunt introduction to “The Real World™” did a lot of damage when it shook my world last year; much like the Bay Area’s feared “Big One.” Since high school, I’ve left a lot of good friends behind, and I don’t know how to fix that. In some cases, it was a conscious decision, but in other cases… well, just time and separation has made it so. There are several I regret allowing to slowly unravel, but the one in particular that bothers me the most is the one that I severed.

It’s been good for me, though. I’ve come to take whatever life throws at me and handle it without needing someone else’s help. Is that really such a virtue, though? Some would say not. On nights like tonight, I’m inclined to believe that handling all personal issues alone is not so desirable a trait as it might sound. Much as I hoped I wouldn’t, I find myself applying myself entirely to my school work and professional engagements. Way back when, I was often frustrated by people who appeared too busy to spend time on friendships; now, it seems, I’m one of those people who’s too busy.

More good notes, though; I’ve come to appreciate my family much more since I now fall back on them when I need support, instead of unloading all of my baggage on Marj like in the past. It’s funny, really; she always tried to convince me that I should be closer to my family, but I never figured out how or why until we went our separate ways. Discord and dissonance now emanate from my music. I suppose that’s the sound of irony.

The music whispers some choice vocals: “I live on borrowed time, therefore I see no reason in the world why my heart grows dark.” The notes are filled with mystery and suspense—but something in its composition hints to hope, to renewed energy. I hope that sometime soon I can find again this hope and energy that seem to have been exiled from my life. I’ve been free, I’ve holed up studying, and I’ve holed up working. I’ve met a lot of people and thought about a lot of things. All said and done, I’ve been stupid to let so many of my friendships fade. I had it great back then. It’s a shame I never knew that with my heart until now.

So what’s the story here? Journey back with me—back to the east coast or back to the past, whichever suits you.

I’m coming home this weekend to visit family, and hopefully to see my brother graduate. I won’t be there long, but if I haven’t talked to you recently, look me up. I’d love to hear from you. Silence speaks volumes, but as with all things human, it’s easily misinterpreted; rarely is someone silent for the reason you assume—and we all know what assuming does. Even though “words are the source of misunderstanding,” silence is orders of magnitude worse. “Actions speak louder than words,” so by all means use them.

Good night. I miss you all, even if you don’t think so.

Migration complete

2006-06-02T00:15:00.001-07:00

So this evening I finally finished migrating all of my posts from my previous website. Of course, this involved typing hordes of <p> tags, so I’m hoping that I didn’t screw up too many. The important part is that the data is now all here, so that’s cool.

Maybe sometime soon I’ll find some way to check the page for XML well-formedness. I don’t know that the XHTML validator does that on its own. It’s unfortunate that the code Blogger™ inserts isn’t XHTML 1.0 Strict compatible. They just need to fix a couple errors and capitalization problems and they’ll be good.

It’s late here, folks, so I think for the time being, I’m done. Good night.

Migrating from my old website

2006-05-30T21:43:00.001-07:00

So this is going to take me quite some time, and some of the posts will seem a bit out of context, I suppose, but I think I’m going to copy all of my posts from my old website over to this one. The information hanging out there is quite old and, I dare say, in need of a face lift.

So when you see articles in the distant archives over here that seem a little… odd, this is why. Also, please bear with me while I migrate those posts by hand. It’s going to be quite a slow process.

Update

So the dividers you see here don’t render correctly in Internet Explorer, though they’re “OK,” so I’m not going to fix them. Get a better browser. Furthermore, I’m maybe 40% or so done migrating old posts to the new blog. I must say that I really like the template I’ve got here. Not just because I wrote it; I think it works well. I’ve made some tweaks for code and for block quotes, but all in all, it’s pretty nice. Enjoy!

Update, part two

I found a relatively elegant hack to force MSIE to load an additional stylesheet using document.createStyleSheet() and some simple object checks. Since MSIE is the only browser to set both navigator.systemLanguage and navigator.userLanguage it’s actually a simple yet accurate check to see who’s using MSIE without having to meddle with the catastrophe that is the User Agent string.

So all said and done, now the divider nodes render correctly in MSIE, despite its backwards interpretation of width: and margin: auto properties.

“Cupertino Pro” template

2006-05-28T05:02:00.001-07:00

Good morning everyone! It is indeed morning across the entire United States by now, which means I should have gone to sleep quite some time ago.

Regardless, I finally jumped onto the Blogger boat today, but I wasn’t happy with the themes I saw at the beginning, so I’ve created my own. In honor of one of the coolest computer companies out there, and my summer residence, I have decided to call it “Cupertino Pro.” If you look at the MacBook Pro website, you’ll see why the color sheme alone gives cause to the name.

It’s ridiculously late here by now, so I’m off to bed. I just thought I’d drop a semi-meaningful post before I went. Good night!

Welcome, guests!

2006-02-21T13:34:00.001-08:00

For those of you I have directed here for professional reasons, please see this post concerning the content found here. Since the administrative interface is hidden from regular users, I will eventually post screenshots for others to see. Those will be made available here, though there is no front-end to the files.

Thank you for visiting!

Reflections

2005-06-13T22:23:00.001-07:00

Well, as things go on, it continues to appear that this website is merely a place for me to deposit my musings on thoughtful (read: depressed) nights. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this is usually only when the norm has been unsettled by recent happenings. This usually means that something in my life is causing me various woes—that is to say that I only blog when I am sad. I leave you to be the judge, but I’ve noticed this trend before, and am noticing it again.

That being said, the rest of this post is rather reflective and is certainly not the happiest you’ll read, but perhaps some of my “insights” are actually insightful instead of just being the senseless blatherings of a distraught teenage college student. Let me begin by briefly introducing the reason I’m sitting here writing to the world:

This past semester, my relationship got off to a really rough start because I was significantly less than civil over winter break. After spending all semester patching things over and waiting for summer to finally arrive to fix the problems I’d been having, I instead came home and blew it. Due to a series of unfortunate events, beginning with my phone not charging and it’s battery being dead my first Friday home. That was followed by a weekend in which it was impossible to make phone calls for reasons out of anyone’s control. Unfortunately, at the time I was very dismayed at being “ignored.” That was perhaps the worlds most unfortunate misnomer, but it is what my temper told me at the time. I am not violent, just incredibly stupid with my words. After failing to call and find comfort in the voice I wanted to hear so badly, I fired off an email as a release, and I currently view it as the single worst decision I have ever made. So, to summarize: I was a hothead, and wrote the words that spelled the demise of a relationship I value more than I ever knew.

Now, I promise that I am not writing this because I just finished crying my eyes out, and I’m not just looking to vent. I’ve had a combination of conversations and quiet time tonight that, well, left me with a lot of thoughts, and I figured I should write them down somewhere. In other words, I feel that, for once, my statements are genuine and are as free of irrational notions as possible. Of course, this is me speaking… your mileage may vary.

I’m not the first person to whom this will happen, nor will I be the last. However, many people close to me have suffered the same fate that I seem to be facing. All I seem to gather is that they’re sorry and that I shouldn’t give up on things and let it all go to crap. However, I spoke with someone new tonight… a very dear friend of mine whose insights I trust wholly. He said to me: “Is it important to try and fix things in my past relationship, or should I focus on trying to move on?”

Even now, after a long time of stepping back and thinking, debating the essence of this question without those specific words in mind, I feel that the person, the good times, and the happiness are all worth trying to fix things. Several times I have noted that “things would be easier for me if I were at school.” However, here’s the downside that I’d never seen before tonight: “[If I were at school,] it’d be easier to accidentally throw away the chance to fix things if it ever presented itself.”

In that light, I figure it’s better that I’m suffering through the realizations of what I did and how stupid I was. I’ve made mistakes before in my relationship, but I never really learned from them. This time and space has shown me a lot, and I hope I have learned from my mistakes for real this time. Merely finding distractions is no solution to the underlying problem here—and I hope that, given time, I will be given the chance to make right my many wrongdoings.

Though cliché, it is true that you don’t realize the value of something until it is gone—or, at the very least, you fear that it truly is. Many times I said that I was in love, and that I truly felt a need for things. However, those words never held the same weight and the same truth that they would now. Now, I would not be nearly so fickle, so hotheaded, or so stupid as to consider throwing it away over trivial matters. Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to learn these things is the hard way—I wish it weren’t so for everyone. I wish I had learned them long before now, as to make things happier on the whole, since understanding what is truly important would change anyone’s reaction to minor issues.

Until now, I hadn’t realized many things about the nature and importance of relationships. A relationship is not only something in which you can find enjoyment, it is both a place and a person that you can fall back on when all else in life seems dismal. When nothing goes right, or when you are lonely and the future looks bleak, a relationship and that special someone will always be there to comfort you and to make you see the good despite the bad. Given too many distractions, as I would easily find at school, I would never have come to this understanding. I fear that there are many people who can toss away their relationship and drown themselves in friends and distractions, and not see the utter loneliness that awaits if they should find themselves, even once, without those comforts.

Until you can be free of distraction and experience true solitude, you cannot really decide whether a relationship’s troubles are worth throwing it away—I certainly couldn’t, and now I regret what I said so superficially; instead I wish I’d known how valuable things were to me. True solitude is a powerful experience—albeit a sad one—and it truly puts things into perspective. It is easier to change than to lose and start over. Never underestimate commitment’s power to change someone for the better.

Perhaps I am being done a great favor, and after writing this, I think I have been. I have changed a lot, and will probably change even more in the time to come. For this favor, I am thankful. Faith and pain are powerful emotions that can cause drastic change; it is odd, though, that either one can cause or inspire the other. I’ve changed, for sure; I hope it’s been a change for the better.

You learn to base feelings off of faith and belief in how good things can be instead of how good (or bad) they are. I wait patiently and lovingly for the chance to show myself to be different than the selfish hothead who sent a nasty email over an insignificant issue. Diligence, patience, and care will solve things before anger any day. The world could use more of all three.

Remember to think with your heart, and dismiss frustration by trusting in the good of people. I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes—please learn from mine so that you don’t have to make them yourself.

Thanks for reading. It’s time for bed now, especially since I’ve cleared my head. Good night.

Read this at your own risk

2005-04-08T20:58:00.001-07:00

Feelings will be hurt by this article. I am tired of sitting in my room and saying nothing about any of the shit that goes on in my life or anything that’s related. Either I’m becoming a much more anger-ridden person lately, or several people’s traits have really, really started to get on my nerves. There’s a lot to say, so I’m going to post it all as updates. That way nobody can read it without first having skimmed this disclaimer.

If you read the below articles, you agree to not hold the author accountable for any personally insulting or damaging remarks. Continue at your own risk.

Everyone needs to stop taking jabs at my political beliefs. I belive what I believe because I think that some things just need to be left alone and that some things are being forgotten, such as the idea of “equal protection under the law.” Keep religion and everything else out of government. If you’re religiously opposed to something because God has told you it’s wrong, then it is between God and the people offending His decree. It is not your job to enforce it, and even less the government’s. That’s my stance.

Ryan, I’m sick and tired of you giving me shit about voting Democratic. I am indeed conservative on some issues, which I’ll openly admit. This is why I’m really a moderate instead of either party alone. I did vote for Kerry, and I don’t give a damn what you all think of him. The social issues that I feel the most strongly about made my decision for me. You will not convince me that I made a wrong decision, so stop wasting your time. Note that I do not blanketly criticize Bush unless he does something I really disagree with. I don’t make unfounded, irrelevant claims that anyone is just “imitating” other candidates. Such accusations are baseless, politcally charged, and a waste of everybody’s time, so how about we just put it all behind us, like civilized people?

I share my beliefs so you can think about them on your own. I share them to be discussed, NOT so you can take jabs at me every chance you get. The jabs you take at everyone about homosexuality are also very crude, uncalled for, and immature. Grow up. We’re all tired of it.

Cas needs to start sleeping and stop procrastinating. He spends his life getting distracted by stupid little things, and then complains when he forgets to turn something in, or is crunched for time. Tonight he said “What? Work on Project 4 before the deadline?!” This is a prime example of why he gets no sleep when some things come due, because he never takes the initiative to work on things up front. Quite frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it, and even more tired of being asked to help with problems when procrastination and sleep deprivation are the cause. Oh… please stop swearing when you complain; it’s neither effective nor impressive. Sleep in your own damned room instead of coming and sleeping on our futon and making us cater to your slumber every time. Just because you never sleep at humane hours doesn’t mean you have free license to crash in our room.

Amanda needs to stop a lot of things. If you’re going to complain about your boyfriend not being committed enough, then stop sleeping with him and stop getting alcohol from him. I’m fed up with her getting alcohol and coming into our room slightly tipsy. She is mad at her boyfriend, yet sleeps with him at night, and spends her days crawling all over Daniel and Jerry. Quite frankly, I’m disgusted. I don’t like the prospect of drunk (or even just tipsy) people in the room, especially when they become inappropriately loose despite the presence of people who would prefer such things not be displayed publicly. The gap between being focused on a boyfriend and spending all of your waking hours touching and/or torturing another guy is driving me insane. Pick one person and deal with it, but you can’t have it both ways. The alcohol is illegal until you’re 21, you know. That bothers me a lot as well.

Paul also needs to start sleeping and keeping sane hours, but at least he gets things done ahead of time and doesn’t impose on others when it gets to be crunch time. However, he needs to be much kinder to his girlfriend. He’s been slowly drifting away from her, but it’s all been from his own acts and words. The blame goes nowhere else, to be honest. He says that he feels completely ignored, but it’s probably just a fabrication of his own imagination that does nothing other than make things worse. Rapidly.

Jerry and Daniel are both sane, thankfully. Unfortunately, they have to deal with the other three people on whom I’m railing tonight—Cas, Amanda, and Paul. Marj—you’re also sane, but you’re just consistently overloaded with work, and that’s nothing anyone can hold against you. If Paul complains about things, it’s only because he’s lonely and feels neglected, though it’s not something you can control—your work has to come first and he’s being entirely irrational to expect you to cater to his needs before the needs of your schoolwork.

Well, that’s the end of this rant. I needed to dump severely. Hopefully nobody will read this, or they’ll take the suggestions out of it and ignore the aggravation-inspired portions. Some people have nothing to worry about—Jerry, Daniel, and Marj, specifically. The rest of us—Ryan, Cas, Amanda, and Paul—however, have a lot of things to work on.

Good night everyone.

That is not a small number!

2005-04-06T16:36:00.001-07:00

Yes, a very large number of days have passed since I last decided to write something on my website. Well, as always, I say I’ll try to change that, but it never works out that way, of course. Needless to say, a lot has been going on in my life recently. I’m moving full-tilt through my second semester of college which is, unfortunately, not turning out as well as my first. That 4.0 is going to be hard to keep, but I’m trying my best.

I’ve been in talks with IBM about a position for this summer and next fall, but I don’t know anything yet, so I still have no idea what I’ll be doing with my life. The prospective position sounds interesting enough, being involved with software testing in various environments, some of which would be UNIX based—I’d thoroughly enjoy finally having an official outlet for all this Linux experience I’ve gathered over the years. Well, I’ll see how this all pans out within the next week, or so I’m told.

I’ve got to get my tax forms sent in the morning, so I’ll get those ready tonight, I hope. I’ve fallen victim to this epidemic of not sleeping recently, mostly because I’ve had way too much work to deal with, but I’m going to need to manage my time better, as I’m sure it only gets worse from here on out. I had a test in Circuit Analysis today along with another quiz in Music Theory. Of course, Monday and Wednesday are my severely busy days. The good news is that the rest of the week is rather downhill from here.

I can’t think of anything else to put here for now, but I’m sure I’m leaving lots and lots of things out, considering that I haven’t put anything here in nearly 6 months. If I think of anything later and am conscious enough to write about it, I just might end up putting it here. Until then, however, I’m done for tonight.

Moving on…

2004-10-27T21:04:00.001-07:00

Well, I’ve left that disclaimer up for long enough. It’s time that I got back to posting regularly around here. I’ve finally resolved the computer issues I was having, with my 120GB Western Digital starting to malfunction. I replaced it with two 200GB Seagate SATA drives that are on a 3ware hardware RAID controller, under RAID 1 so that everything is mirrored. This way if any drive decides to die, my data is still safe on the other. Unlike previously, where I risked losing everything if it died completely, which it seems to have done.

Beyond that, life has been very good to me this week. We recorded for our CD last weekend, in addition to the Engineering activity on Saturday. Those were both rather dreary, but ever since Marj left after her fall break, I really haven’t been unhappy. It’s really quite amazing—this feeling that you couldn’t stop being happy even if you wanted to.

I’m going down to visit her this weekend because it’s her birthday. I got her a present. I hope she likes it. I guess I didn’t put a lot of thought into it, but that’s because I couldn’t think of anything… and I couldn’t think of anything… and then it suddenly hit me one night. I got lucky finding it today, as well. I really hope it goes over well.

School is going well. I have a solid 96-ish average in Chemistry (both of my tests were 96, and my homework average is something close to that). In Engineering I don’t like some of the homework grades I’m getting, but they end up counting very little in the end, as usual. And it’s because they’re picky over stupid, stupid things. Just to weed you out. For example, they didn’t agree with the measurements I made on one assignment (where we were given an object and a tape measure to obtain our measurements). Therefore, I lost 10 points for the “wrong” measurement, and then subsequently 10 points every time one of my answers was “too low.” Seeing as how one was caused by the other, it’s not particularly fair to continue docking points for that… My other classes (such as Linear Algebra, Vector Geometry, and Music Theory) are all going quite well, too. Maybe I’ll pull off a 4.0 this semester. That’d be a monster feat to keep up for the rest of my stay here.

Only time will tell! Anyhow, thanks for reading. Maybe I’ll really update more often now that things are settling down around here. Have a great evening!

Disclaimer

2004-09-21T23:17:00.001-07:00

Welcome, anyone who has come to this site after reading my resume. I have referenced this website as a demonstration of my skills—I hope you find it a satisfactory example.

This is what is commonly known as a “Web log”, or “blog” for short. It is essentially an online diary in which I can write occasionally. This means, however, that there are probably several articles, and related comments, that may contain offensive or otherwise suggestive language. I cannot take responsibility for the comments that have been posted here, as they are not moderated. That being said, I hope there is not any content on here, personal or otherwise, that is completely inappropriate for a showcase of my programming skills—if there is, then I apologize in advance.

This is my second attempt at a complex website, so it is much better than what I have done previously, but could still be improved upon. This was a learning experience for me, for which I am grateful. I have learned a lot by writing this, and if I were to construct a third website based on similar principals, I have no doubt that it would be another significant improvement. Now that my introduction is over, feel free to look around to see what this site can and cannot do. There are administrative tools that cannot be seen by everyone for security reasons, but I would be perfectly willing to discuss them with anyone who is interested.

I have posted a digital copy of my résumé here. Thank you for visiting!

Update

I’ve ceased to maintain the original website, and it now redirects you here, which at a minimum displays a custom template I’ve put together for my blog.

Apparently Tylenol wasn’t strong enough…

2004-09-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

Here I am, yet again, on September 20, 2004. Yes, that means I’ve been in college for about a month now. It’s scary, isn’t it? I really need to update things around here a bit more often than I do. I think I’m surviving pretty well. I finally have a car, which is nice for the few times I want to go out to Wal-Mart, which has amounted to all of… twice, so far. I survived band camp, and three games now. But at the second game I got incredibly sunburned, so I’ve been recovering from that for the past week. It’s finally getting better, which is a good thing.

I haven’t had any real quizzes or exams just yet, so only time will show how those turn out. I hope I haven’t gotten into school above my head. The people in Hillcrest are great. Sure, we all have a few people that we don’t care for, but it’s not to the point of fighting or anything like that. It’s all very civil. The weather is perfect; I love it here. I showed this site to a couple people and they seemed reasonably impressed, which struck me as odd because this was just a pet project. Engineering Exploration (ENGE 1024) is the wost class ever. They changed the name this semester, but everyone still calls it EF (used to stand for Engineering Fundamentals), because it’s easier, quicker, and all the older students know what you’re talking about.

Well, that’s a pretty generic summary of what’s going on around here. I hope things work out in the end. Have a great day, everyone!

Holy sh*t, where’s the Tylenol?

2004-06-12T20:12:00.002-07:00

Wow. Graduation happened on May 29th. I have been so busy since then, it’s not even funny. From shopping sprees, field trips, job applications, musical adventures, and road trips, it’s been a busy while. And I have college staring me down at the end of the summer, which I hope will be a fun experience. Here goes a brief run-down of what’s been happening!

Graduation

As a follow-up to my last article, it is important to note that our valedictorian was not present at our commencement ceremonies. Helen’s speech was incredible—meaningful on several levels, and I thought it was a very funny speech, because it subtly jabbed at our valedictorian. Kudos to Helen for putting it together.

After graduation, I went to the reception at Enloe and then back home, where we partied until about 1AM. Needless to say, I was exhausted the next day. The party subsided and I spent the next day shopping on-line, which is an entirely different story. Being thoroughly partied out, I didn’t go to Liz’s party on Sunday either. Monday, however, I went to Christine’s party, as it was the last time I’ll see her for quite a while, if… forever. Though it seems like such a strong word. Only time will tell.

Road trip

Prefix: I farked this one up big-time. I waited too long to ask my parents, so I didn’t get a straight answer about “yes” or “no” until Marj had left town earlier on Sunday. So it just turned into a Paul-screwed-up contest, which I lost bitterly. Luckily I got to go down by bumming a ride off my Dad, because it made no sense to take two cars. Marj and her mom met me in Kinston, to try and spread the work around. Thanks Dad!

So my trip to New Bern lasted about three days, I think. I spent time fixing their computer—more than I had planned at the very least. But aside from that we did some shopping, I think, and went out for a boat ride that was interesting to say the least. I needed a break from being home, and I got it.

Back home

So I came home and did job applications. They all bombed, which pissed me off a bit, especially since I heard no end of “get a job” from my mom, in particular. I basically idled around the house for a while and finished my thank-you letters for graduation presents. The stress just doesn’t let up.

My tech toys came, so I finally got a nice CD burner (that doesn’t suck), an LCD monitor, and a digital camera. My Lite-On CD burner works great, and so does my Canon PowerShot G5. But my NEC 1760-NX had too many color-shifting and response time issues for me to keep it, so I returned it and cleaned up my old monitor, and now I’m on that for the time being.

Road trip, part two

Yet again, I found another opportunity to wander down to New Bern. This time things went a little better, but I still procrastinated and it nearly bit me in the butt again. Anyhow, I finished fixing up their computer so it should be OK, and we went rowing the first night. The rest of the time we spent running various errands and such, including picking blueberries, which was quite an experience. They’d blow up in your hand if you didn’t do it just right (well, just the soggy ones, but still).

It was fun. But then we had to come home.

Maybe a job?

So without anything to do over the summer and still without a job, I decided to go volunteer at Carter Worthy’s campaign. She was running for NC Senate in District 16, vying for the position among a stampede of three other democrats (four total).

So only a couple days in, they offered to pay us, at nothing less than seven dollars an hour ($7.00/hr). I was shocked, and so was she. Hell, you’d be hard-pressed to make that much at most jobs for people our age. But you didn’t hear us complaining!

We cleaned up several things, and spent our time printing, mail-merging, stuffing envelopes, sealing envelopes, running errands, and visiting the post office. It was a good time. Then we ran a fourteen-and-a-half hour day and a twelve-and-a-half hour day, back to back, on July 19 and 20—the day before and the day of the primaries, respectively. We waited eagerly to hear the outcome that night.

Much to everyone’s disappointment, Janet Cowell won; we suspect it was mostly on name recognition, as she was already on City Council. We’ve spent the past few days gathering information on people to leave Carter with a database to start with when she runs for office next time. We’ll hold these jobs until the end of the month, or until Carter cuts us loose… not sure which one will happen first. I’ll have made in excess of $1,200 by the time this is over. Hot diggity. It’s been great for the summer—I’ve been very productive.

Home repairs

So amidst having a job, I voluntarily rearranged my room to put in a larger bed that my parents wanted in here for guests for when I’m gone. Anyhow, not only did I do that in one day with Marj, I took my ugly yellow desk out the following day to re-finish it. I stripped the ugly yellow paint off, and after two weeks of hard work, it now sits in here with a nice stained finish. I’m proud of my work. It’s a shame that I’ll only be here for another month to appreciate it, however self-indulgent and arrogant that sounds.

Orientation

I went to Virginia Tech on July 12–13 and got oriented. I forgot to pick up my ID, so it’s still there. We still don’t know who our roommates are, so lots of decisions can’t be made yet. Lots of things will be cool, and I hope I don’t overload myself with schoolwork. I met some people, got my laptop, et cetera. It was a good time, minus the somewhat tense fighting with my parents, but I gather that it’s a bit on the normal side of things, but not completely.

Where does that leave me now?

Well, that leaves me sitting here in front of my computer at 11:50 PM on July 24. I’m finally going to get an LCD monitor that doesn’t suck—I’ve seen this one in person, unlike the other one. It’s in black so I’m going to get a keyboard to match. My iPod will stick out, but it’s not much of an eye sore anyhow. It doesn’t match beige perfectly as-is, so it won’t be so bad. It might even look better.

I have to get lots of things done to get ready for college at VT, like my four-year course schedule and all the roommate and furnishing-related arrangements. Anyhow, that’s a (very delayed) wrap-up of my summer so far. Only a few weeks left until school starts, so I’m going to try and make the most of it!

Have a good rest of the summer for all you college-bound folks, and good luck for all of the Enloe marchers starting again on Monday. Bye!

Enloe’s class of 2004: Graduation madness

2004-05-22T09:54:00.002-07:00

Today’s article in The News & Observer, entitled “Uproar clouds Enloe ritual,” brings both relief and unrest to the graduating class of 2004. It pleases me to know that, finally, someone has taken the initiative to get this story out to the public. Enloe’s current trend of trying to keep things quiet, especially with such despicable circumstances, has been both angering and disturbing.

As a graduating Senior, and one who is upset, I think it is our job as a Class to embrace the dissemination of information, while trying to correct the slanderous accusations set forth in the aforementioned article. The fact that our valedictorian’s mother can so brazenly belittle his actions as a “silly matter” leaves a terribly sour taste in my mouth. What offends me the most, however, is the fact that the entire student body of Enloe is being accused of jealousy and racism, which is so far from the truth that I wonder if his mother is living in the same universe as us.

As a member of Enloe’s class of 2004, I have constantly found myself surrounded by wonderful people, both academically and personally. By that, I mean that these students are more than just smart—they also hold themselves to high moral standards. Due to the circumstances surrounding Evan’s suspension, the senior class is upset not because of his grades or his race, but because he has proven himself to lack the moral standards to which we all believe a valedictorian should be held.

A valedictorian should be the best member of a class—one who can justly, proudly, and accurately represent a graduating senior class. Our valedictorian represents the “best” academically, but then again—he really doesn’t. It is widely known and disliked by the seniors that our valedictorian has gotten to where he is by at least partially riding upon the work of his fellow students. Having sat in several classes with him, I can personally support this notion. When he was called upon in my eleventh grade English class, he rarely had ideas to share or knew answers to basic questions—he struggled to gather information from surrounding students to save face. It was clear that he had not done the reading, or at least that he hadn’t comprehended it on the level that a deserving valedictorian should. Somehow, he fooled the teachers, and climbed to where he now sits.

As an Eagle Scout and successful student, I feel that he has not met the moral standards that a valedictorian should, and thus I refuse to give him my respect. He has earned his position unjustly, and has further taken advantage of the situation and incensed both students and faculty by what he did earlier in the year.

At this point, it is our job to come together as seniors and clarify the issues surrounding the moral uproar at Enloe High School. We must outline our points and reveal them, civilly, to the reporter, to Enloe’s principal, and to the public. We can contact the reporter and the principal directly, and we can reach the public by writing letters to the editor. Our campaign will be more successful if we agree on the issues we wish to discuss. I implore each and every one of you to post comments here and discuss your ideas.

I hope we can work this out. Thank you for reading my opinions and conclusions!

Post-mortem

So it turns out that, magically, all traces of the uproar at Enloe seem to have disappeared from The News & Observer’s website. However, I found an duplicated copy of the original story on a forum, and have also reproduced what documents I can find in a new rant, Revisionist history.

Retro Prom

2004-05-02T20:28:00.002-07:00

Well, Prom wasn’t really retro, but this article is, because Prom was over two weeks ago. The episode with the car, as noted earlier, really sorta unbalanced everyone’s lives around here, and I don’t think any of us have been quite the same since. Not to dwarf Prom at all, things just got a bit out of whack on my end of the world. This will be another long article, so read on below to hear my story of The 2004 Enloe High School Prom…

Prom itself was quite wonderful. I got ready quite early, and headed over to pick up Marj, which took longer than I’d expected, but no fears, we weren’t terribly late. Five minutes, if that. Nothing compared to Robert and Emily’s thirty minutes… Her parents too pictures galore, though I’m not sure how the ones with her SLR camera turned out. After all the pictures got taken, we headed off to Alison’s house.

After getting there and waiting about another 20 minutes for Robert and Emily to show up, we realized that Andy was missing. So, we gave him a call and he headed over—apparently we hadn’t relayed the 5PM meeting time to him. After he showed, we hit the road and went down to Meredith to take pictures. Now, picture the Paparazzi following a celebrity. That’s what our parents did to the thirteen of us. Cameras didn’t stop going off, so I doubt anybody’s pictures turned out looking particularly stunning. My dad hadn’t used our SLR camera in a while, as the developed pictures show—none of the pictures are in focus. Oh well, so much for that. At least the digital ones turned out.

Then we went to dinner at Irregardless Cafe. I’d never been there before, but it was a nice experience. A lot of us, including both Marj and myself, got soup and salad for dinner, as it was one of the few sane choices—there were only six fairly exotic entrees, so we stuck to what we knew. The Salmon Dill Chowder was excellent, as was the Caesar Salad, though I could have done without the Grilled Salmon, but I didn’t know that when I ordered. Yum. Dinner was good, now to sit around and chat, because nobody shows up early for Prom. We had to be fashionably late.

So we showed up around 9, which was an hour earlier than we arrived for Winter Formal. Alas, our fashionable lateness wasn’t late enough, we were still among the early arrivals. Oh well, we dealt with it. They had a nice “Manhattan” themed setup in the lobby, and the inside was decorated nicely. The punch was good and the mini-cheesecakes were good… I mean, any cheesecake is good. And the people all looked nice, including Marj, of course. The one thing that really left a foul taste in everyone’s mouth, however, was the choice of music. The DJ rather sucked… too much rap for a prom.

Anyhow, afterwards we went back to Alison’s house to spend the night. Getting twelve people into a small room was quite a task. Yes, I said twelve. The thirteenth person went home and didn’t stay…he wasn’t as close a friend, but I don’t mean that in a condescending way. Just didn’t feel comfortable with spending the night. Anyhow, instead of going to sleep first, we had soda and ice cream. Then we decided to watch a movie. Okay, I can handle a movie, despite my tiredness. So we watched Ghostbusters, a mildly scary and decently humorous movie. Once that was over, I was genuinely exhausted. It was nearly 3:30 AM!

At this point, Marj was asleep. Lucky her. They decided to watch yet another movie, despite my protests. So they popped in Back to the Future, and I had to watch that. I couldn’t fall asleep because of all the noise the movie made, and I was right in front of the TV. It sucked to be me. Finally around 6:00 AM, it ended, and I went to sleep.

Then we got up and had pancakes for breakfast, which were quite excellent—thanks Alison (and family). After that we all packed up and Will and Anna left, and then Marj and I left shortly thereafter. That was the end of prom. A very fun weekend for me, hands down.

That’s my story, I hope you liked it! Have a great day!

How a random school day became memorable

2004-04-20T13:02:00.001-07:00

There are some days that pass without notice. There are some days you’ll never forget. But most of the time, the settings for the two never coincide. School is not memorable because it’s so dull, dreary, and ordinary. Memorable things aren’t ordinary.

What follows is a musing on how something could happen to you at school that cause the mundane to become the miraculous, but in the most unpleasant way possible. We remember the bad more easily than good. That’s why such bad tales stick in our memory so much better. Now for the tale of how a random school day became memorable…

The story

So it’s Tuesday, and you realize that you left your AP Multiple Choice problems at home. You call your mom and see if she can drop it off for you in your car. She does. Thanks, mom! You’re stuck in rehearsal during lunch and in an informational session afterwards. Then after your informational session during band, you get out early. Time to go get those multiple choice answers out of the car—but wait, the car isn’t there.

You stand in the blazing sunlight in your now-empty parking spot muttering “What the fuck is going on?” Quick on your feet, you call your mom, who dropped off the problems. Maybe she swapped cars. No answer. You call home, maybe she’s out with her cell phone. No answer. You finally call your dad at work going, “Do you know where mom is?” Such a strange time and such a strange question, you tell him “the car is gone.”

Completely lost, you putter around the parking lot for a while and finally try calling your mom again. Finally! Someone answers! “Hello,” she says. “Where’s the Mazda,” you say. The shocked silence on the other end blares into your right ear. You say again, “the car is gone.” “Someone stole it,” she says. “Well, maybe it got towed,” you think, and say aloud. “I’m going to the office to see what’s going on,” you say, and hang up shortly thereafter.

You arrive in the air conditioned office. Relieved to be inside, away from the heat, you look around blankly, trying to guess who you should talk to. Finally, a friend of your mom’s says “Hi.” So you scurry over and ask if they towed any cars today. No. They check with various people around campus. No again. Your heart sinks through the floor. The nice lady in the office suggests “Well, maybe your brother took it.” Your heart raises a little bit, but you’re still equally upset, as your spirit is now broken.

You debate what to do. You’re on the spot. Sweating in the cool air conditioning, it’s obvious that you’re stressing. The end of the period draws near. You tell the office that you’ll go outside to see if the car has returned, either confirming or debunking the nice woman’s theory about your brother. Back through the heat, you walk back to the parking lot. Your car is there.

Insulted, infuriated, and utterly listless, you run back to the office. You let them know, while on the phone with your mother, that the car is now there, while you tell your mother the same thing. You then try to seek out your brother in his next class to speak with him. He isn’t there, so after searching for five minutes, you return to the office. The office then recieves a message from your father asking to speak to the officer on duty, which is then, by chance, run by you. Intecepting the message before the school gets officially involved, you call your father once more, asking if he’d heard that the car was back, to dispell the thought that it might still be stolen.

You ask him if he’d still like to speak with the officer. He says that he’d like to see a video who drove the car, if it was your brother, or if it was someone else. Knowing that there’s a camera pointed out at the lot, you say “Yes, but if you do that, then the school will likely have no choice but to get involved.” At that juncture, both father and son are equally flustered with the whole situation. “That decision is between you and the school,” you say, and he tells you not to do anything. So you obey and move on for the day, figuring that some serious thinking will be required before any decisions are made.

Moving on with the school day, you arrive late in Physics, with a non-descript note from the office. Between the two Physics periods, you explain the whole situation to a few of your friends. You then get a message that says not to do anything for the rest of the school day. After school, you inform the rest of your friends about this incident. Still morally insulted, you drive home and arrive at a completely empty house.

The mystery

With fury storming around inside you, you settle down at your computer, but nobody is there to talk to you. At least they’re getting work done. Flustered, you decide to sit down and write in your journal. Waiting to read your brother the riot act, you continue to burn time. You continue writing and the tale becomes very long. Suddenly, you see your father pull up in the driveway.

Still writing in your journal, you don’t go downstairs, and likewise he doesn’t come upstairs. After about 10 minutes at home, he speaks over the intercom, saying “Paul, will you feed the dogs at four o’clock?” “Sure,” you respond. You hear his car door shut and he drives off again. Your mother and brother still are not back from the orthodontist. Something strange is happening, and they’re not telling you about it.

A mind distraught

Through all of this, a small part of you keeps trying to hope maybe it was someone else that took your car. It’s hard to be mad at relatives sometimes. But knowing the car, it’s microchipped keys and built-in alarm system, you know full well that only someone with one of your keys to the car and knowledge of the alarm system can operate it successfully. This limits your suspects to family members, and since you and your brother are the only ones on campus, there’s only one suspect left.

Curse logic, for it makes for magnanimous mounds of misery sometimes…

The accusations

Your parents and brother finally get home. An eerie silence falls over the entire house. It was silent before, but the silence became more awkward with the arrival of other people. Finally you utter “do I even want to know?” “No,” is the answer you get. Still thoroughly pissed off, you say “I wish he’d been caught.” Your parents both lash back at you saying “No, that’d be even worse.” You think to yourself, “if I had done it, I’d feel like I ought to be caught.”

Then comes a comment you never expected:

“This is all your fault.”

“You run too late in the mornings! He had to use the keys to open the car himself this morning.”

Dad

The idea thus being that if you had been downstairs earlier, he wouldn’t have taken keys to open the car, and thus wouldn’t have had any keys to take the car later in the day. “So my occasional lateness is the cause of his stupid decisions,” you think to yourself. Realizing it will get you nowhere if you say it, you bite your tongue. You voluntarily give in—if your parents are convinced partially or wholly that it’s your fault, there’s no use in arguing. They’re already mad at you for being so heartless towards your brother.

The conclusion

The rest of the evening continues on without mention of the incident. The whole family keeps an uncomfortable, restless company now. Seeing that nothing too awful is going to come of it, you resign, both irked and glad at the same time. You’d hate to see your brother punished severely, at the same time you’re disgusted that he got away with it. You’re even more disturbed that your parents let it happen. What ever happened to the pristine morals you value? Just thrown out because it’s a fellow family member?

Utterly crushed by the thought that your brother could be so dishonest, that it’s your own damned fault, and that everyone seems to have been let down, you resign for the evening. It’s not worth fighting with anyone. Your parents tighten the screws on your brother, and you are likewise torn about that—you feel violated because you’re held to different standards than your brother, but you feel like you’ve violated your family more, because you once considered turning him in, as it seemed the right thing to do…

Life’s thrown you a lot of lemons today, and your exhaustion shows it. You decide that it’s time to stop writing about it, considering it sufficiently documented. Your parents’ protection of your brother even makes you somewhat ashamed that you wrote about it to start with, but what’s written is written, and you can’t change that.

The truth

If you read all the way to this point, you’re very tolerant. Thanks for reading, and I hope you understand my position a little better…

Of course, this didn’t really happen to you, but it did happen to me. I’m so different from my brother—I’m practically his opposite. The fact remains, however, that I’m his brother, and I’m torn between laws, rules, and family. I’m now convinced that I’d make a terrible parent, for I truly thought that I’d turn him in if I were in my parents’ position.

Where did I go wrong as a person and as a sibling?

P.S. Comments are always welcome. In fact, in this case, I’d really like some…

Your brother does not have a driver’s license, nor does he have a pass to leave campus during lunch—he’s a sophomore. That should explain the grave tone a bit better…

College, here I come!

2004-04-15T19:27:00.001-07:00

So I’ve decided to make this whole college deal official. Yes, that’s right, “official.” Most of you already know, but not all of you, so here it is for the whole world.

I applied to three universities—NCSU, Virginia Tech, and Georgia Tech. Now, I was accepted way early by both NCSU and Georgia Tech. Virginia Tech was the only place to hold fast to its notification schedule. I’ve visited all three campuses, researched their academics, their AP credit, and the possibilities for co-op and double- or triple-majoring. The conclusion? Well, in no uncertain terms, I knew before I recieved my acceptances, basically. It’s neither too close nor too far. It’s neither too urban nor too rural. It’s neither too dull nor too lavish. It’s Virgina Tech.

A beautiful campus, a moderate climate, a quaint town, and an amazing school. Only 3-4 hours away, with 3 becoming more and more a distinct possibility, it’s not too far, as Georgia Tech would be with its 6 hour drive. NCSU is too close too home, and it just had a nasty campus. Gross.

I’ve been accepted, and I’ve returned my acceptance letter already. If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve begun changing my e-mail address to [EDITED TO PREVENT SPAM], which is my username at VT. That will be “me” for many of you for the next four years or more.

The road ahead now clear, I’m looking forward to my next years in education. And no, I don’t know what a Hokie is. No, it isn’t a castrated turkey, though it’s funny to think of it that way. Good luck to everyone else out there. Best of luck in all of your endeavors, whether we keep in touch or not. I mean it as deeply as I can. My four short years at Enloe have been fantastic, and I wouldn’t have had them any other way, nor anywhere else. Thanks.

Spring break

2004-04-13T19:04:00.001-07:00

So spring break was fun. I had my Eagle Ceremony on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who came to that. I had dinner with my parents, grandparents, brother, and Marj on Sunday. I packed and left for the mountains on Monday. While I was there I watched Finding Nemo, Shrek, The Waterboy, and 28 Days Later. We also played various games, including seek-and-hide, card games, video games, and ping pong. Additionally, we had a water balloon fight. I won the race for the biggest phallic symbol balloon. I don’t know why they inflated that way, but that’s just how it worked out. Not to mention any “compensation” lines from Shrek or anything, of course.

I got back in the middle of the week—Thursday to be exact. Then I spent the next few days puttering around, checking out college paperwork, visiting Marj, and the like. Saturday I went to one of Finn’s concerts, which was an interesting experience to say the least. The smoke was something else. Ick. Then on Sunday I came back home after having a great weekend, and slept until late Monday morning. Then I finished up my homework, and here I am, Tuesday night, typing this.

Now that’s a severely condensed version of my spring break, but there you have it. Now back to the grind of school, physics tests, electricity, magnetism, differential equations, 10-work essays, German, and the rest. Yeeha. Not really.

Anyhow, my server also got a bit of a facelift on Monday, as I upgraded it to a 2.6 Linux kernel to hopefully improve its speed and response time, and its security. Things should just be better, period. I hope.

That’s really it now. Have a great evening everyone!

Ad-libs!

2004-03-30T12:30:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this is quite shamelessly stolen from Daniel, who apparently stole it from someone else. I thought it was funny, so I’m going to share this with you. You can post your answers as replies to this article (people really should use that feature more often), or send them to me if you’d like. I don’t care what you put in… good, bad, funny, not funny… whatever you’ve got. By the way, each sentence is sorta designed to stand alone, I think. Anyhow, here goes!

I _______ Paul.
Paul is _______.
Paul thinks a lot about _______.
When I think of _______, I think of Paul.
If I were alone in a room with Paul, I would _______.
I think Paul should _______.
I want to _______ Paul.
If I could describe Paul in a word: _______.
I want Paul to _______ and _______.
Paul has to _______.
If _______ was in Paul's life, he/she would _______.
I think Paul can _______.
Paul _______ me.

So there’s youre ad-lib for today. Have fun with it. Maybe too much fun, maybe not. That’s up to you and your own mind. Not mine. Anyhow, I saw that and thought I’d post it here. The rest of my day has been rather blah, especially the “4 hours of sleep” part. Oh well, back to the real world. Bye!

I've got rhythm

2004-03-25T13:25:00.001-08:00

Well, I’m trying to write here more often now, since this has become a small hobby of mine, though I often leave it forgotten when I’m busy. This week has been nightly pit rehearsals and now pit performances. That’s right—performances. The shows are Wednesday – Saturday (March 24–27), at 7PM every night, in Enloe’s auditorium. The show is Big River. Be there—it’s a very good show, even though I preferred the music from last year.

Anyway, past that my life has been pretty dull this week. Spent a lot of time with Marj last weekend, looks like we’ll hang out before (and after?) the show this Saturday when everyone goes.

The good news is, however, that once I’m caught up on work once the musical has faded away, I’ll be good to go for school, in many ways. Let’s just hope I can get there. Oh yeah, not to mention our Maple lab on LaPlace transforms tomorrow. Seems so funny that we learn something by hand, only to turn around and say “but hey, you could have made your computer do all of this!” But then again, someone must know how to do it, so they can program the computer to do it as well.

Alright, I think I’m out for today. Here’s to hoping that I’ll write here more often! Bye!

The life of pit, and the pits of life

2004-03-19T18:12:00.001-08:00

Well the life of pit orchestra isn’t very insteresting… we had our first decent dress rehearsal today, and we get to do it for 7 more hours tomorrow. I keep wishing I’d never done this thing. It’s sucking away my free time, my energy, and my life. It’s keeping me from doing things that I’d definitely consider more fun, though there are reasons for that as follows.

Now for the pits of life. I like it when people decide they know what’s best for me, and don’t even bother asking me my opinion. Today, for the second time, my friends left me and went to visit in Chapel Hill for the evening, without even asking me if I could show up after rehearsal. There are times when you wonder what friends are for. You know, I don’t do very much but I usually invite them when I do, I think. Have both of these times been an attempt to get me back for something? If so, what did I do?

Well, I have more crap to do tonight. I guess I’ll be doing that, and if I have time I’ll post more later. Life isn’t very happy right now. Talk to you later.

All-Fate auditions

2004-03-05T20:52:00.001-08:00

… I mean All-State Auditions are tomorrow. Or rather today, as is more likely by the time this gets posted. Anyhow, this is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever been able to try out for, including things that don’t involve music. Basically, I’m majorly stressing out. I know I should be able to make it. I want to make first chair, but as a newbie to this whole process, I think I’m at a disadvantage.

Those will, forunately or unfortunately, take up the majority of my day on Saturday. I’ll be gone from about 6:45 AM to 7PM or later, depending on if 7PM is when we leave the audition site or when we hope to be back.

If Enloe gets a group of people in, I’ll be thoroughly impressed. But I’m afraid I won’t be one of them, but here’s to trying!

Anyhow, I have lots of stuff to do this week(end), including some final scholarship details, getting them sent, and then reading for English. Lots of reading for English. Did I mention that I have reading to do for English? And not insignificantly, it’s Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence, which means it was banned, and it’s boring.

Well, this week should prove to be very interesting, but I think things will start settling down afterward, so hopefully I can make it through. I’ve been wished luck with my auditions tomorrow, and I hope that I can make everyone’s wishes come true, mine included. First chair is a pipe dream, but hey—even those come true once in a while.

Until then, I’m out for the night. Have a wonderful day tomorrow, everyone, and wish me luck! Thanks!

Update

So the auditions are over. In short, I’m f*cked. I screwed up my sight-reading so badly that there is no chance I’ll make it. Even if, by some miracle, I do make it, there’s no way it’ll be a respectable chair. I’m angling for last chair, at best. The sight reading was incredibly difficult (and poorly marked up), but I’m sure that one of the other twelve people did better than I did. Surely. I don’t get to find out until tomorrow, so I’m going to be going insane until then.

Yes, it’s official now. My audition was a bust. I didn’t know I was so bad at playing my instrument, but now I’ve definitely been put in my place. Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of another year ahead of me. I wish I did, since it has been my goal, for seven years, to make All-State. And I screwed up my only chance. I know I could have done better, too. That just makes it all so much more aggravating.

Oh well. I’m out, and thanks for listening everyone!

We don’t need no education…

2004-02-28T21:41:00.003-08:00

… we don’t need no mind control. Teachers! Leave our kids alone!

Pink Floyd

There’s some Pink Floyd for you. For those of you who don’t know, my birthday was on Friday. Heck of a way to go, if you ask me. A day off of school and snow to boot. Unfortunately, however, that means that my most recent roll of film still has not come back to Kroger’s. I want it badly, because it has pictures from Winter Formal (possibly the only decent ones, I don’t know).

I had a great birthday. I got to sleep late, Marj came over, and we played pool and watched some TV. Then she went to her grandmother’s house to spend the weekend with her parents, which is just as well, because I’ve got work to do.

Anyhow, it’s getting very late and I’m going to cut this short. Um… I’m 18 now, my voter registration card is getting sent in, I finished the FAFSA (and registered with the Selective Service [groan] through it), and now I’m “legal.” I don’t feel any different, nor will I do anything differently because of it. Just another year on the growing stack. Getting left out of things is something that doesn’t go away with age either, as I found out. Oh well, I’ll get over it.

Have a nice night/morning, everyone. Bye!

Jack frostbite me!

2004-02-18T16:25:00.001-08:00

So this week has gone well so far—at least in the eyes of students. We started Monday with a two-hour delay, ended Tuesday three hours early, and then started Wednesday with another two-hour delay. All said and done, we’ve lost (thanks Robert!) seven hours of school this week. And oddly enough, I’ve enjoyed it. Getting to school around 9AM is much more humane than going at 7AM. No questions asked.

But on some other notes, it’s strange what snow does to people around here. It clouds vision, sure, but it clouds judgement more effectively. The motivation of all students approaches none as snow begins to hit the ground. The more white they see, the less inclined they are to do any work, whatsoever. I can’t say I’ve been innocent myself, but I’ve tried to avoid this disease. It’s like acute senioritis, but it affects every student, not just the seniors—though the seniors are already made more vulnerable by senioritis.

On the technology front, I finally conquered Courier-MTA and Mail::SpamAssassin yesterday, so now all of my mail, from all of my accouts is piped to a single account, and checked for spam. It should make my life easier. I’d post the address here, but it’d get spammed, surely. And I got Courier-MTA working so that it sends mail out through RoadRunner’s SMTP server, so my dad can now do his semi-mass mailings when he needs to (no, they’re not Spam, they’re opt-in mailing lists for the neighborhood and such).

Scholastically, well, I’ve been floundering. Senioritis runs in my veins, though I try to avoid it. It’s also very easy for me to get caught up in instrumental affairs, since music is one of the hobbies I enjoy most. I have pit orchestra for Big River coming up, and then All-State auditions on March 6. Hopefully I’ll make it, in which case the clinic is on April 23. I’m up against stiff competition for once. I’ll be sweating bullets…

The walls of my room breathe more freely now; the decorations have been slightly modified and brought up-to-date. I took down some old certificates from middle school, which, for all purposes, were rather pointless. In their place, I have put up pictures of the 2002 and 2003 Enloe High School Marching Bands, so now I have the complete four-year collection. And then I hung up the two plaques I have left. A change in decoration is welcome occasionally.

And now I think a change in task is appropriate. This is all I’ll be writing for now, perhaps with more later. As of now, however, I have essays to work on, so I’ll be under less pressure this weekend. Oh, and my birthday is next week. Somehow, the “Big 18” doesn’t seem so wonderful anymore. Anyhow—time to work! Bye!

Oh, and as for Jack Frost? He can bite me! Hence the title. But he has failed Wake County students twice now, as everyone expected a day off, yet we didn’t get one. Oh well, that’s the joke in tonight’s headline. Have a nice evening, and I’m going for reall this time!

The good, the bad, and the belated news

2004-02-15T16:50:00.001-08:00

Yes, that’s right. This is extremely late. You might say that it’s rather difficult to bottle up an entire month into a few short paragraphs. Words can never do justice to the teller’s experience. It seems that I left off after All-District auditions which leaves far too many stories to be told. Surely I’ll leave something out, but I can try my best here. Most of my stories come from weekends, as school has been pretty bland since then.

All-District

The following weekend we had the All-District Clinic in Burlington, NC. Which, of course, wouldn’t have been so bad if Hunter hadn’t misdirected our appetites on Friday night. Yes, we were forced to eat at “Hursey’s Barbeque” restaurant, which very few people agreed with, besides Hunter, who counts as several people due to his mass. Anyhow, the music was wonderful, as were the people. There are some rough spots in the recording, but I like it overall. And of course, I’d like to thank Anna, Marj, Michael and Emily for coming to the concert… it made the evening much more enjoyable.

Winter Formal

Then the next weekend we had Winter Formal. Okay, so that goes without saying. I had a good time and it seems like everyone else did too. We stayed in their dorm afterwards, for the company and for the ease of not needing to drive back home on Saturday night. We had bagels on Sunday and then visited Michael, and had dinner in Lenoir and that was the end of my evening.

All-Carolina

Then the next weekend we had All-Carolina. We bummed in their room again. But I’m glad we did, or I would have gone insane. That was, by far, the worst band clinic I have ever had to deal with. The Triangle Youth Brassband had a rehearsal and a concert the same weekend, so all the good brass players were gone. We had a superb woodwind section and an atrocious brass section. No offense to those people, but please—do something.

The week

Anyhow, then we come to this week. Which has, for the most part, been an experience I’d never like to repeat. I was up late working on homework almost every night, not to mention three extremely early mornings. That would be Tuesday, for our first round of Prom tickets. Then Thursday, for our second round of Prom tickets. Then once more on Friday for our first and only round of decorating Robert’s parking space. Friday the 13th was, unfortunately, his birthday. Not so much the 13th being bad, but the Friday didn’t help! Anyhow, everyone got a kick out of it, so I’m glad I got up early (though these early mornings are quite taxing).

A weekend with Marj

And then this weekend was another story. I enjoyed getting to visit Marj again on Friday, but that was nothing compared to Saturday, which was definitely an experience. So basically here’s what happened. We went to her uncle’s house around, say, 5:30 in the afternoon. That goes without saying, since 5:30 in the morning would be ridiculous. Though the way my week had been, it might not have been surprising. Anyhow, we watched about an hour of Pirates until dinner was ready. Then we had dinner, and talked for a while. We died by chocolate for dessert. The food was great, although I think that was my fill of chocolate for the next decade. Then we watched another movie before everyone decided to leave for the evening. Then once we got back to UNC we walked around for probably an hour or more, and I got to tell stories, especially about my two years going to the UNC Tarheel Invitational(s). Reliving memories is fun too.

So I think it’s definitely agreed between the two of us that it was the nicest Valentine’s day either of us has ever seen. Or maybe I’m misquoting, and then I’m sorry. Anyhow, it was also nice how it wasn’t very cliché. That’s not the reason I did things as they happened, but it was just how things turned out. I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I’m glad I got to spend time with her family for once.

And now the dull, drab nature of school strikes again. I’ll post again sometime, and hopefully this time it will be sooner rather than later!

All-District auditions are over

2004-01-18T13:00:00.001-08:00

So yesterday was spent almost totally on auditions. Needless to say, the rest of my evening was shot. I saw some scores before I left for dinner, but unfortunately mine weren’t up yet. So it turns out that Robert, Will, and Christine took 3 of the top 4 chairs in the 11–12 Wind Ensemble. Enloe took 31 chairs overall, but I don’t know all of the numbers for Enloe students, so we’ll find out who made what on Tuesday. Quite surprisingly, however, I managed to make 1st chair for Bass Clarinet. After 6 years of waiting, I guess something finally paid off.

So the All-District clinic is next weekend, and that should be a lot of fun. Auditions for All-State are now on March 6, so I have that to prepare for now, in addition to the clinic next weekend. Oh, and that’s not to mention All-Carolina in February. It’s either February 6–7 or February 6–8; I’ve now seen conflicting reports… Their website says it’s only two days (6–7), but Mr. Hunter’s calendar says it’s three days (6–8). Last year it was also three days, so I’m not sure who to believe.

So this has been, overall, a very band-centric weekend for me, and the next several weeks are shaping up to be the same way. As for the rest of my weekend, it’s looking like scholarship essays that my parents are forcing me to write. And possibly a road trip on Monday, but we’ll see what happens with that.

The weather is grey and gloomy; the temperature is cool and cautious. There is nothing vibrant about the weather today. It’s just one of those days; faded in the wake of yesterday’s glory. Yesterday was a day of blue sky, warm sunshine, and relative happiness. Today just can’t fill it’s shoes.

And that’s about all there is to say about today in general. I’ll probably drop some messages later this weekend. Until then, I’m out!

My oh my, has it been a while

2004-01-13T18:16:00.001-08:00

Wow, it has been quite a while since I’ve put anything here. So many things have happened it’s hard to guess where I should start. I guess I’ll putter back to Christmas, which is about where I left off. So here goes!

So Christmas went without too much mention. I got a long sleeve half-dressy shirt from my parents; it buttons up and has this neat dark blue and green pattern on it. Then I also got a maroon collared shirt from them, which is also interesting. Candy from the grandparents, which doesn’t really qualify as a surprise, knowing them. And of course, anything from them has “Disney” on it. And for the first time in a while, I got something from out of the family. I got a flannel shirt from Marj, which is also long-sleeved and colored blue and green. That was definitely a nice change in pace.

The highlight was, though, being able to take Christmas money and buy an iPod. Yes, I know that I bought the 40GB iPod which is very likely major overkill, but I can use it for things other than just music, such as backing up important files from my computer. That has been a nice toy and an interesting tool to have around.

We had a party on New Year’s Eve at Liz’s house, but that ended with a sorta fizzle when we set off some bottle rockets in the driveway. That was the “party” on New Year’s Eve. Marj, however, wasn’t lucky enough to be able to go to a party… I wished that she could have been there, if for no reason other than being able to have fun.

And now school has started again. I did a lot of work on my short story, and I’m hoping that maybe it doesn’t actually suck. I have a comparison and contrast essay to do this week between Death of a Salesman and Equus.

Oh, and the bad news: Last friday it snowed. Yes, I know it seems like good news, since snow is great and all. Yes, we did have a snowball fight at school, which was a lot of fun. However, it caused All-District auditions to be cancelled on Saturday, as well as causing Winter Formal to be postponed to some undetermined date. Now I have to re-psych myself up for All-District, and hope that Winter Formal isn’t scheduled to conflict with the two band clinics I’m doing this year. That would be All-District (January 24–26) and All-Carolina (February 6–7). So that’s all up in the air.

And finally—today. I practiced, and that’s been the highlight of my evening, I suppose. Done a lot of talking, took a nap, and I haven’t done much else. I’ve still got some German homework to do, so I suppose I’ll get on with that shortly, but not before taking a shower. In addition, my sympathies go out to Daniel for those of you who know why. And wow, this is a lot of stuff to read, but that should bring this place up-to-date.

We’ll see how auditions turn out on Saturday; wish me luck—I’ll need it! I’ve been angling for 1st chair for over 6 years now, and this is my last shot. Hopefully I’ll make it!

That’s it for now. Have a wonderful evening, everyone!

Friend: Marjorie R.

2004-01-01T21:12:00.001-08:00

What can I say? There’s a fine line between saying too much and saying too little, and I’m trying to walk it. If I should fall off of the line? Well; I’d rather not consider that, since I can’t see the ground. I keep telling myself “don’t look down.”

It’s hard to say exactly how we met, and I know people have debated how it happened. I say she started talking to me, but certain others will say it was the other way around, like Anna—but she’s crazy anyway. We’re all crazy. Life is crazy. I’m crazy. It’s fun to be crazy.

If we weren’t all crazy,

we’d all go insane

Jimmy Buffett

So, I have no idea how it happened at all, but I’ve also stopped trying to understand. From other people’s perspective you could say that we’re going out. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Wow, it’s hard for me to say that… it just seems me being so unlike myself. For those of you that know me this is indeed a first, and I cannot tell if it will be a last or not, but I’m not going to make any predictions. I’d make a fool of myself.

So anyway, she’s very different from me. Came from a small(er) town, whereas I’ve grown up in a large(r) one. She has ties to the military, whereas I have anything but. I’m a nerd, she’s, well… not. She goes to a liberal arts school, whereas I’ll likely be going to an engineering, or sciences, school. She also has one of the strangest, and possibly scariest, closets I have ever heard of. Which is a good thing in some ways, because if I met someone so boring as myself, I wouldn’t like them very much, I think.

So, as the sayings go, opposites attract, but we’re polar… slightly opposite, but not completely. The future holds what it may hold, but nobody can see it. It’s like staring at a brick wall and hoping to see what’s on the other side. You just can’t. I can say, however, that I enjoy having her as a friend and girlfriend, even if I’m making more or less of whatever the latter is. As for next year, well, I’ll still gladly talk to her, no matter what happens.

It’s been great, and hopefully it will stay that way. Thanks for being a pal. So yes, you finally made it here. It took me too long to type all of this, but you’re worth that. Alas, what are words? Just a crude approximation of feelings. Hopefully I have said enough without saying too much!

Friend: Emily W.

2004-01-01T20:18:00.001-08:00

Wow, how could I have missed someone I see every day? Well, it seems that I have. That question set aside, I guess I’ll get on with why she gets a spot here too. She has done marching band for the past two years with us, and has been a lot of fun to be with. And, no, it’s not just because she’s Robert’s girlfriend.

I do sorta feel sorry for her, since between family and allergies, getting out and going places with us seems to present a challenge more than it should. I enjoy it when she comes, as does Robert, I’m sure. Some of the funnier things are her… ahem… whistle. If you’ve never heard it, perhaps you should. It’s an experience.

Unfortunately, as with most of my friends, it is unfortunate that there will not be a “next year” for us to spend together. I will close with with something I have said many times before; just because you’re not on my friends page doesn’t mean you’re not my friend. I’ve had fun knowing Emily and I hope to keep in touch with everyone, her included, next year!

Oh, oh, oh!

2003-12-22T15:17:00.001-08:00

*jumps up and down*

Something interesting happened during my break! So I was expecting that Marj would just have to go home, but it turns out that she wasn’t leaving until late in the evening, so I was lucky enough to hang out for a while. We spent an hour or so strolling around Shelly Lake, in case any of you know where that is. I used to live next to it, so it was a really nice place to visit. One of the few nice places to visit in Raleigh, if I do say so myself.

Yeah, so that was about all that happened on Sunday, but it’s okay. I wonder if she’s dying to see if I write anything here… Probably not. Christmas is only a few days away, but I’m not dying to get there for some reason. Like… it’s nice to get things and all, and it’s nice to give things as well, but I think I’ve got enough to keep me happy right now. And for longer than just now, I hope, heh.

As for today, I ate way too many doughnuts this morning. And then I went out and got a radiator for the car and got gas for the car I was driving. Then I came home and practiced. I better practice every day between now and All-District if I want to make it. Which I do. A lot. But past that, today has been another dull one. More (not likely) to come (today).

And no doubt remains—break is here.

2003-12-20T12:24:00.001-08:00

Without any more words than necessary, I’ll say it again—break is here. I have been sitting in my room all day, and I’m not sure if anything interesting is going to happen today. So far the major excitement of my day has been going to the end of the driveway and grabbing the mail.

I think I may go out for a bike ride later, but I’m not sure—it’s a tad chilly for that. But desparate times call for desparate measures. Today has been fairly mediocre, but The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was still phenominal. It was truly the best movie I have seen in a very long time, if not the best one I have ever seen.

If anything noteworthy happens, I’ll put it here, but knowing what breaks are like, that is highly unlikely. I hope everyone else has a wonderful afternoon!

A breath of fresh air!

2003-12-19T19:19:00.001-08:00

Alright folks, I know I have had this site disabled for far too long. Many, many things have happened in my life over the past month and a half. (Or 1.5 months, if you prefer that notation.) Anyway, I’ll just start out with some words to place this journal in another perspective. Again.

My perspective on life shifts on a daily basis, but over the past month, it has shifted in what could be called a revolutionary sense. My life has, quite honestly, taken a large turn. Maybe a 180, almost, but I can’t guarantee that. And I think this turn is for the best… I see no reason to believe otherwise.

There are many things here that existed before I temporarily disabled this site, and I have chosen to let them remain here for several reasons. For one, this has served as a diary of sorts, and you don’t generally erase remarks from a diary. Removing them would also be a difficult and tedious task, so it’s easier for me to leave them be. But please remember that many of my past remarks are now obsolete, in the sense that my emotions have changed.

In case you didn’t know, I now have someone special in my life, or so I’d like to think. Her name is Marjorie, or Marj for short. I’ll go ahead and admit it—she doesn’t go to Enloe. I, personally, am not ashamed of it. She does, in fact, go to UNC, and I don’t believe I’ll be going there next year, so only time can reveal what will come of this. I think the term “girlfriend” would be accurate, but I didn’t check with her before I wrote this. This is as close to an “official” statement that I will get, since I am not a big fan of being “official,” and neither is she.

She has seen me go through many firsts, and also many episodes of self-doubt. I tend to beat myself up unjustly, but she has been kind enough and caring enough to stand by my side (more figuratively, since she’s not actually at my house). Being able to be so open with someone has really shifted my life, for the better I believe. She has been my breath of fresh air. I can’t believe I’ve missed out on this for 17 years, because of both ineptitude and denial. That is, I denied to myself that I wanted to be involved in a relationship. I was both the criminal and the victim, packaged up in one twisted mindset.

And with that said, here’s a brief summary of my current situation. Life is mediocre. School is out, Christmas is near, half the year is behind me, and I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. But Marj isn’t here, so it can’t be wonderful. I’ll just have to settle for mediocre right now.

Have a great evening everyone, and more is sure to come in the near future. Wow, is it nice to be back!

How my life is like marching band

2003-11-02T13:38:00.001-08:00

The marching band show this year, music from the Finale of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, runs a strange parallel to my life. Entitled “Assertion of Personality,” I find that I can strangely relate to it.

For the first part of the school year (and likewise, the marching season), I kept my feelings and emotions constrained inside me, afraid of the suppression and rejection they would recieve should they be exposed. Much in the same way Shostakovich’s music is confined and controlled because of his fear of the Soviet government.

After struggling to be joyous beneath a pall of confinement, I showed my true colors to a few key people. This is nearly a direct parallel to the show, where Shostakovich writes what we call “forced rejoicing.” And like my life, I forced myself to believe exposing myself was a happy thing—my forced rejoicing. But alas, it was not so.

And at the very end, when I thought things might turn out as I had hoped, the show, the season, and my hopes came to a bitter end simultaneously. I started out constrained, became more colorful, and now it is all over forever. It is strange how I can draw such parallels… maybe I’m weirder than I think.

That’s it for now. Bye!

Friend: Anna P.

2003-11-02T13:23:00.001-08:00

A graduate from Enloe with the Class of 2003, I must profess I only know her via proxy. By that I mean I wouldn’t really have met her at all if it weren’t for Will. I dislike using that term because it has such childish connotations. But that is all I can really say. She now goes to UNC, and I have been but once to visit all of the Enloe people when Robert and Emliy went.

She’s also eerily good at reading farther into what I say than I’d like to admit. She was the second person to catch on that I liked someone, and the first to ask me about it openly. I only found out about Will knowing beforehand after Anna had told him and confirmed his suspicions. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about telling her, since she wouldn’t tell everyone, and those she would tell, I can rest assured they wouldn’t betray my trust either.

She’s a very strange person, but she’s listened to me do a lot of complaining about life this year. For that, I am grateful, but for the times she tries to embarrass me, I’m well… embarrassed. And generally it works.

All I can say is this—thanks for listening to me, though sometimes it seems like you plot against me… And if not against me, then at least behind my back… have a nice day.

Competitions are over forever

2003-11-02T13:09:00.001-08:00

And the competitive season has come to a bittersweet end. Our last competition was yesterday—Saturday November 1, 2003 at Cary Band Day. I finished my Park Scholarship application before leaving for rehearsal, so luckily I didn’t get screwed over. So we had rehearsal until 3PM, and then had food, but I’m not sure if it was lunch or dinner. Then we all loaded the buses to drive to Cary.

And then I ended up in a somewhat sour mood about life, triggered by several things, such as facing the last competition of my marching band career, but that wasn’t the only reason. So we got there and warmed up, all the while I was dodging the presence of certain people. So we warmed up and had our performance. Some of the stuff we added worked really well, while some of it kinda flopped. I came back out and we had the post-performance talk.

I did cry. Nobody noticed, but I did cry. Four years of hard work, dedication, and some of the greatest times with the greatest people all coming to a final close, never to happen again. The phrases “final” and “never again” are probably two of the most difficult things I must face this year. Then I stayed in uniform and went into the stadium and sat in the away stands with everyone else. Oh yeah, and one final round of pizza, since it’s the official food of marching band. I’m tired of it now.

So after about an hour, my dad tells me that he can’t find my brother, so I spent the next hour walking around the stadium looking for him. And finally someone found him, as he was hanging out with Tim, David, and Alyssa at the long jump area, at the end of the away stands, when they all should have been sitting with Enloe in the stands. I wasn’t happy, but didn’t tell them. They claimed to have been there for over an hour, but knowing them, God only knows what they had been doing.

But that issue aside, there were other things that troubled me more. About three weeks ago I said some things that I now regret, as it appears that I made a fool of myself by meddling in affairs that I shouldn’t have. I’m probably going to spend the next week trying to undo any damage I’ve done, and try to carefully sever any ties I have forged against the will of others. For involving myself where I don’t belong, I apologize. I hope the person to whom this message is directed reads it.

So then Enloe got some awards. 3rd place Music, 3rd place Drum Major, 3rd place Marching (“Visual” as they called it), and 3rd place overall. Given that there were 7 bands in our class, that’s pretty blasted impressive. And what’s more impressive is our score—we had an 84.7. 1st place, Athens Drive High School, had a 85.3. God, how a sweet and maddening way to end the season—only 0.7 points from winning our class. What I would have given to win that.

Alas, the competitive season is now over. To every marcher, I am glad to have had you with us. For all the clarinets, thank you for making my senior year so wonderful, even if I did seem fairly irritable at times.

My life is somewhat in turmoil. The joy of marching band is all but over, and the social endeavors that I began pursuing nearly 3 weeks ago have proven both foolish, selfish, and fruitless. I apologize to everyone involved in that emotional roller coaster. I have no excuse for my behavior. Now I can only attempt to repair whatever damage has been done. There are no words accurate enough to describe the sadness that wells within myself, due to the simultaneous end of these joys. The fun of marching band and the hope of other things—both ended on the same day.

Both came crashing down upon my head, but I must admit, I saw both of them coming… I just never prepared for their impact. And now with a newly dismal outlook on life, I suppose I must trudge on and clean up the mess.

Thank you all for spending the time to read, and I apologize for the length and melancholy nature of this article. I’ll talk to most of you later. Thanks again, and goodbye!

And the end approaches

2003-10-31T22:45:00.001-08:00

This week signals the end of many things. The November 1 deadline for many college applications is upon us. The final contest of our competitive season is also today. The final football game was last night, on Halloween.

I came home and finished my costume after school. What was I, do you ask? I was a giant Nathan. I now know what it’s like to be Mr. Hunter, since I couldn’t see my feet for the whole night. Of course, everyone seemed to love my costume. So many people took pictures that it’s not even funny anymore. There were several great costumes there. Robert was the Energizer Bunny. I was, of course, a Nathan. Ben Roe was a member of Eagle Club, with the questionable beverage headgear. Conrad was one of the Blue Men from the Blue Men Group. Someone was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum (Susan Melton, I think). And of course, Dena and Christine went as Mr. Pellas and Mr. Hunter, respectively. Those were the more notable costumes for the night. I’m forgetting one though. The “best costume” contest came down to Conrad and me, and it was declared a tie. Though I think I should have won for pure band geekiness.

The Nathan, though just a simple piece of cloth and two hula hoops, was surprisingly warm. I was fine, though everyone else kept complaining of the cold. The best part was that my instrument was inside the costume, so you couldn’t even see when I was playing! I didn’t fall over during the show, which made me (and the real Mr. Pellas) happy, since everyone expected my gigantic costume to be a problem.

Before the game, I did a salute with a lot of people—Emily, Alison, Caitlin, Robert, Will, Liz, Andy, Becca, and me. It was a “wave” sort of deal, so it seemed to go over well. I haven’t seen it yet, but I think tonight was just wonderful. I liked getting to do it in uniform, so the dignity was not tarnished by the silliness of Halloween costumes. And changing out of my uniform into my costume and then coming outside was truly priceless.

I was, obviously, on the raw end of several Nathan Swig jokes, among other things. But it was all a lot of fun. Especially seeing me try to eat with that thing on… interesting times. If you hadn’t heard of it, Mr. Hunter seems to harrass girls a lot. For example, tonight, he “milked” one of the girls who dressed up as a cow. And in the past, he has poured his water onto girls while standing at attention, and repeatedly uttered the phrase “Does that feel better?” (I think that’s it, at least…). Anyway, so while we were exiting the stadium after the game, Will, Christine and I all walked up to Mr. Hunter and squirted him with me. It was quite interesting, and ironic.

Then we went to Ivey’s house, and watched part of Halloween (the movie), but most of us bugged out early for time/sleep reasons. I did, but sadly I’m still here writing. I’ve also started harassing Will about how he harasses me, since the reasons are now common knowledge to the parties involved. No more on that, but it made for an interesting evening of conversation.

I wish I could just bottle tonight up, put a cork on it, and keep it in my mind forever, as it is now. It was an absolutely incredible way to end the football season, and I could truly have wished for no more. I am both extremely happy, yet very distraught—this is the first joyous end that I will miss painfully for the rest of this year, and far into the future.

Thank you, to everyone in marching band, for making the entire season, and especially tonight, so wonderfully enjoyable for me. I’ll never forget it. The engraved memories of a day can be worth more than the sum experience of many years. Today was one of those days.

As a senior, this year is going to be defined by the amalgamation of many bittersweet memories, which the sugar of memory will eventually sweeten beyond their true worth. But the ability to have such memories that will become but sweeter is truly priceless. I am glad I have lived my life this way, for I would hate to have missed out on the joy of tonight.

Even if some things don’t work out as I hope, memories such as tonights will probably soon overwhelm the bitter memories of this year, whether they are from failure or separation. If things do work out as I hope, then tonight’s memory is just another to add to the stack of memories I wish to endure forever… in both my memory and everyone else’s. For those of you who understand what I’m trying to say, I hope you truly do understand. For everyone else, just take this as a view of my feelings after tonight. I am extremely happy.

Thank you all, so very much!

Drumroll, please…

2003-10-24T13:37:00.001-07:00

Actually, there’s no need for a drumroll. But I haven’t written anything here in over a week, so I think that I’ll talk about the past week. Life has been crazy, to say the least. I’m no great writer so reading this will be a rough journey for all of us.

Monday

Not much happened Monday. We had a marching band rehearsal, and as I recall we were lucky enough to have water this week. Band moms are the best!

Tuesday

We were supposed to have a marching band rehearsal, but that was cancelled, because athletics decided that we can’t use the baseball field any more. So I was able to get my haircut on Tuesday instead of Thursday. What a relief! Then I got home, quickly looked at my homework, and then I ate dinner. I showered, shaved, and got dressed for the concert, and then left. The concert was OK, but not really anything to be proud of. I was surprised that Anna and her roommate were there. Not so surprised that Anna was there, but rather that both Jacob and Anna’s roommate tagged along. So then I got home and did a little homework. Whew. Busy day.

Wednesday

Um, not much happened on Wednesday either. We still didn’t have rehearsal for Wind Ensemble, and the brass sectionals for marching band didn’t happen, so I got half way home and had to go BACK to Enloe to pick up my brother. Oh, Will left to go tour the University of Chicago (is that right?) at 3:30 too.

Thursday

Oh, so Hunter talked to Wind Ensemble all period. Will was gone, so I checked in with Hunter about what Will had said, if anything. So then Hunter took it upon himself to proclaim me “interim section leader.” For Pete’s sake… it wasn’t that big of a deal. I should have expected as much. I didn’t really want him to do that, I was just trying to look out for the section. Anyway, rehearsal was very very cold and we didn’t work on much. I got home and ate, and my parents left for the band boosters meeting. So I came up to my room and spent most of the night talking, when I should have been working.

Friday

So we were in the Equus lab… I mean the Maple lab at school today. Norris loves Maple if anyone hadn’t noticed. Anyway, I checked my SAT scores online this morning. Surprisingly, they were actually available. I got a 1520. That made my day. So I got through the school day and then waited around with Robert for about 30 minutes. I took him to the shop so he could pick up his car. And now I’m at home doing nothing.

That’s the quick and dirty rundown of my week. It looks like there might be a movie tonight, but I’m not sure. I have a WebAssign for Physics, Tess of the d’Urbervilles to read for English, a competition all day Saturday, and the fair on Sunday morning. Not to mention Maple homework (though it isn’t due until next Friday). It’s going to be a wild and crazy weekend! Ah! I’ll see you all later!

Update

Oh, something I forgot to mention. On Wednesday, I found out about something called ratemyteachers.com. Enloe has now been the top rated school for two days. That’s cool in a very odd way. But it’s really interesting to see the opinions of other people and what they think of your teachers. I created the first rating for Mr. Hunter. Nobody tell that to him, or I’ll probably get eaten alive.

Sorry, that was really random. I thought you might want to know, since it was another interesting aspect of the week. I’m really done now, I promise!

My, how time flies

2003-10-15T13:36:00.001-07:00

Needlessly to say, my mind has been rather preoccupied this week, and I must apologize for not writing until now. College applications, transcripts from last week, homework, and now testing. I definitely have too much to do. Time is ticking away, and I’m letting it do so. We started the week with an outdoor rehearsal for marching band. Followed by yet another on Tuesday. School proceeded to be the pain that it is.

And now I find myself on Wednesday—half of the way through the week. I had part of a math test this morning. It wasn’t as awful as I had suspected, but it definitely was not easy. Then I had Psychology… I always find it difficult to stay awake. Today was no exception. Then English—we got to spend the day reading short stories and doing more evaluations on our objective test for Dr. Faustus. German is usually a joke, and today was really no different. We had already read through one of the chapters by ourselves. So what did we do? We proceeded to read it aloud in class. And then we spent the rest of the time grading some homework and working on more questions. I’m surprised that we ever get ANYTHING done in there. Really, I am. Then I had lunch. Cold and windy. Enough said. Then I went to the blood drive, which took up the rest of my day. They were behind schedule, so I didn’t get taken care of until about 1:45. So I was done giving blood at 2PM, but I had to wait 15 minutes to leave. They make us wait, in case anyone should happen to get ill from losing blood. So I got done when school was out. And now I’m a day behind in Physics, which can’t be good.

And now I’m at home, sitting at my computer. Contemplating what tonight will bring, I have decided that I need to stop writing here. I’m fine, if anybody was wondering how I did after giving blood. Oh, and my bandage is pink! I wear it proudly! And with that, I’m done writing for now. Have a nice evening!

And rain, it did.

2003-10-11T10:09:00.001-07:00

So yesterday after school we all went to Will’s house and watched a movie. We went to the football game and did the show. We all got slightly rained on. The field was gross, as was the last part of the drill, but we did it. And then I, along with other people, left early because of two things: Some evil math homework due at 11:45 PM and the SAT this morning.

And then there was the SAT this morning. I did OK, minus the one math problem I left blank again (which I was able to solve during some free time later… argh). But during one of the Verbal sections, I pulled some sort of mindless stunt. My eyes saw the words on the page, but I realized after about a paragraph that I hadn’t actually read it. I was reading, but my mind had been wandering elsewhere. Luckily it didn’t cause me to run out of time.

The way my life is these days, anxiety has changed more from a feeling to a lifestyle. It seems that, no matter where I go, I’m always anxious about something. It can’t be good for me. Not to mention the anxiety caused by two halves of my mind disagreeing about what to do in many situations. For exaple, I couldn’t decide whether to stay at the football game until the end, for the fun of it, or to be practical and go home early, while abandoning other people there. Part of me always says “yes, you want to do this,” while another always says “no, it just isn’t smart or considerate.”

I feel like a living example of Freud’s theories. I need some rest after taking that test this morning. It was both early and boring, so I’m exhausted, to say the least. Talk to all of you later! (Oh, and if I’m still asleep around 3PM, somebody make an effort to wake me up… please?)

The tale from my walk of life

2003-10-08T19:24:00.001-07:00

When I was born, it seems as if I took the path less traveled. From this overgrown, weeded path I have stared at the other, distant path. The bleak desolation of winter in the trees behind me, I can see the colors of an exuberant spring on the far side of the other path. Between my path and theirs, I see but darkness. A tangled wasteland of brambles may lie ahead, but just as likely a grass-covered meadow through which I may leap and bound easily.

I have taken the path of a certain J. Alfred Prufrock, until now. No longer will I waste my years wondering what the world thinks of me. All that matters is my opinion, and maybe the opinion of a few others.

I have, at this point, crossed many landmarks on this path. I can lead people—I did it this summer, and I wish I could have done it this year in Marching Band. But what is a leader who cannot even lead his own life with any determiniation. Pondering, idling, and hoping I have spent too many years. My time make my own path has come; I will “take another road to another time,” as said by Jimmy Buffet. His songs are both reality-based and fictional, but pointless is a word that cannot be used to describe any of them.

As a leader, I could yell “Lie, Ben!” and Ben would lie, and to not beleive this is to lie to myself. But this is not the point. In that sentence lies a hidden word that maybe some can find. Alas, my life marches onward, and I must soon take my first step across the unknown void to the other path.

I have seen the kindled fires of others start as a pile of fuel, to shortly burn brightly. I start my own fire, but I have reached through it before, only to burn myself to no avail. My fire burns again, but now I must convince myself that if I reach through it, I will experience no pain. I am urged by others and their fires to do so, but ultimately it is I who must convince myself of this.

The light of my determination has thus far flickered dimly. Now I must solidify that determination into a piercing beam with which I may find my way across the abyss to the fields of green and groves of happiness.

Voices through the darkness beckon me. Voices I know that were once on this side. I trust them, but now I must cut my own path while crossing the same gap they have already crossed. On the other side, I hope I will see them all. Should I fall, I can but rest happy knowing I have tried yet a second time.

Outwardly, “nothing is, but what is not.” I am completely different on the inside. I must make my appearance and emotions once more harmonious as I journey across. That is the conflict that MacBeth could not resolve.

I have seen others that are not beckoned toward the other side, but have yet tried and many times failed. I do not wish to join their ranks. And with on that, I camp this night still on the sidelines of life. The rest of this week, however, I shall break camp and try to jump into the game of life, head-first. I hope to see you all there—it will be fun!

Update

It seems that my style has faded and I continue to fail at keeping a poker face. Likely, if this is read by many, the things I say will probably scare other people away. I suppose my ability to employ hidden or ambiguous messages in my writing are becoming less and less inconspicuous. As my feelings struggle to surface, it appears that my writing, subconsciously, tries to betray those feelings and expose them ever more clearly in my writing.

You’ll notice that one of hte above paragraphs sticks out sorely, and though I wish to remove it since it may be too obvious, I have decided to leave it here. I cannot change what I have thought or written in the past elsewhere, so I will not change it here.

Depressed is no longer the word I should use. Sheepish is probably the best word. And without further ado, I bid all of you a mirthful, restful sleep!

Let it rain

2003-10-08T12:48:00.001-07:00

Let it rain, I say. For however much we may not like rain, it is necessary. WIthout rain there would be very few places where we could live on this planet, so whenever rain gets you down, be glad to have it. Though a dreary gray is cast upon our lives’ stage, our lives are continually supported and rejuvenated by the rain.

Actually the problem was finding somewhere to eat today! Some people went off campus, but I stayed behind since I already had a lunch, and since some other key people didn’t go. Then a bunch of people went to eat in someone’s car. Sorry, that’s a little bit too much for me. I ended up eating on the stairs by the parking lot, essentially alone, since Andy was the only other person there. So displaced from the wall, we scattered in confusion. Interestingly enough, this was the first time that it has rained during lunch this year.

I killed a lot of tests today… that’s a bad thing. There was a quiz in Calculus III, the rest of my English test, and a Physics test. Life hated me today, in that respect. So I came home, and I find myself here writing. And in other news, there’s a cat out of a bag somewhere. The question is, however: will it end back up in the bag or will someone catch it first? Life shows the adversities of being shy, and I have not the ability to overcome my plague. But that cat does, which is why I fear it in some ways.

Okay, my own writing is confusing me now. That means that I should stop, and call it a day. I might write later… who knows. Bye!

Filling the Gap

Chin Up

How it started

Why this story?

Three

Sean P. Marks: 1987–2009

Remembering Sean

In life:

In death:

Words fall short

All good things…

Life goes on

Loose Ends

Deception

Blame

Philmont!

I might have a problem…

Blacksburg

It’s finally happening

Drunk driving

P.S.

P.P.S.

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iTunes content ratings

Rating Tables

AU: Movie ratings (au-movie)

AU: Television ratings (au-tv)

CA: Movie ratings (ca-movie)

CA: Television ratings (ca-tv)

FR: Movie ratings (fr-movie)

FR: Television ratings (fr-tv)

DE: Movie ratings (de-movie)

DE: Television ratings (de-tv)

NZ: Movie ratings (nz-movie)

UK: Movie ratings (uk-movie)

UK: Television ratings (uk-tv)

US: MPAA ratings (mpaa)

US: Television ratings (us-tv)

Monkeys, typewriters, and random numbers

Riddle me this…

Cutting to the Chase

Threshold outrage

Good is Criminal

Fear versus Truth

Words and interpretation

Passages from Invisible Monsters

Revisionist history

Unfortunate themes

Original articles

Blue skies and crisp air

Cult of individuality

Evidenced by recent news

A small step is greater than none

Too much Chuck

Contains twice the recommended dose of Win

A rocky road

What keeps me up at night

Every day, it’s harder to laugh

Friend turned acquaintance

Expiration

Addendum

Our newest pedagogical crutch

The seduction of slides

Slate versus software

Conclusions

No wrong answers

Truth hides everywhere

Working with DiskArbitration

Terminology

Executables

Arguments

Probe commands

Probe device

Get UUID

Set UUID

Repair commands

Verify volume

Repair volume

Mounting

Formatting

AU: Movie ratings (`au-movie`)

AU: Television ratings (`au-tv`)

CA: Movie ratings (`ca-movie`)

CA: Television ratings (`ca-tv`)

FR: Movie ratings (`fr-movie`)

FR: Television ratings (`fr-tv`)

DE: Movie ratings (`de-movie`)

DE: Television ratings (`de-tv`)

NZ: Movie ratings (`nz-movie`)

UK: Movie ratings (`uk-movie`)

UK: Television ratings (`uk-tv`)

US: MPAA ratings (`mpaa`)

US: Television ratings (`us-tv`)

`Info.plist:` basics

`CFBundleIdentifier` (String)

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`FSProbeArguments` (String)

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Mind your `<key/>`

`FSName` (Localizable String)

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`FSSubType` (Integer)

`FSFormatExecutable` (String)

`FSFormatArguments` (String)

`FSFormatMinimumSize` (Integer)

`FSFormatMaximumSize` (Integer)

`FSMountExecutable` (String)

`FSMountArguments` (String)

`FSVerificationExecutable` (String)

`FSVerificationArguments` (String)

`FSRepairExecutable` (String)

`FSRepairArguments` (String)