Category: Life

So I got a call tonight. When I answered, the person on the other end was immediately shouting a bunch of obscenities my way. Thinking it was some buddies pulling my leg, I answered “Andrew”?

Then I found out that the guy on the other end was serious. It wasn’t Andrew, but my roommate. To set the stage: two days ago, he comes home drunk out of his mind from a Kegger. He falls asleep on his couch. So what do I, a responsible roommate do? Why I get another partier to draw cocks on his body as I film of course! We then come up with the idea of writing the names of people down that attended the party to make it seem like that all happened while he was over there. Didn’t quite work.

Fastforward to two days later, and my roommate figures out the culprit. After the initial one-sided shouting match, and me hanging up on him twice for throwing swear words my way, he calmed down. By this point, he was expressing his very serious will to punch me in the face. Being a glutton for punishment, I let this go on for half-an-hour, patiently trying to soothe him. It didn’t work. He accused me of all sorts of things, over analyzing what I thought to be a very simple situation with no intended malice.

If there’s another bit of humour to extract from this, its this nugget during the emo phase of the conversation:

Him: I never want to see your face again.
Me: (Tired) Okay, fine. Can we get off the phone now?
Him: I mean what would your mother think?
Me: I told her. She laughed. (She did!)
Him: (Serious) I never want to see you or her again.

Well, I did it. I got the job as a geophysicist. I’m cautiously optimistic at this point, as I’m not entirely sure what I got myself into. Nevertheless, it will be a part of my life I look back to with a smile I’m sure. I suppose its a bit of a godsend, as I was really unsure what to do past the September mark. There was a point where I was seriously considering returning to school to pursue an education in computer science.

I’m glad that things have turned the way they have. In other news, I’m moving out of my place. The situation demanded it as such. Living with two roommates has been a wonderful experience, but I certainly do look forward to moving into a bachelor’s (or 1 bedroom.)

So what’s in store for me? Apart from the new job, and the whole moving business, I have my university field camp to accomplish. It’s a weeklong affair that once done will allow me to get my degree.

Rice Tea has been going on as usual. I’ve sent out a few interview requests to individuals with law enforcement backgrounds for some help, but I’ve had no responses. Eh well. I’ve also updated the site for the book- it now automatically groups the updates into small expandable batches to cut down on the page’s consumption of vertical space.

I’ve also been working on a 3D filesystem explorer over the last little while. It’s a project that I’ve been working on bit by bit, as part of a challenge that was set at the last 2600 get-together I attended. It displays files/directories as entities within a solar system. Directories are planets, files are asteroids, and the current directory is the star. Clicking on a planet (directory) transforms it into a star, and a new solar system is formed around the directory. Clicking on a star goes up one directory level, turning it back into a planet that’s part of a greater solar system.

I’m doing the file system explorer in Ruby. What a wonderful, simple, fast, language that is. It’s high level, but it runs extremely well on my 300MHz PII. I come from a background where all I did was recursive imperative code (in C, PHP, etc.), and this was a great introduction to object-oriented programming. With zero experience, you can get up and running on that thing within seconds if you have some programming experience.

So the issue of the post-university question mark has perhaps been resolved, in the form of an aereal surveying company.

With the news of a possible job there, I’ve taken a few drastic changes in my life. For one, I’m moving out of my current place – where I live with two roommates – into a bachelors. I’ve given my roommates a month’s notice, and needless to say, they really aren’t pleased. I’ve also offered to pay an extra month’s worth of rent if they didn’t find a replacement, which I believe to be fair.

This being said, I haven’t even secured the bachelors yet. I gotta get a move on that. As do I to secure a long-term job, aereal company or not.

Flying blind boys, flying blind.

In keeping with my promise, I’m be releasing an update to the book. Just as I’ll do each and every Friday from here until completion.

I’ve also created a site where you can grab both the current and earlier edits. See what’s changed in the space of a week, or go back in time to revisit certain segments before they were re-edited.

You can check out the new revisions-tracking site here:
http://book.maelys.bio/archive.php

…and as usual, you can always download the latest revision here:
http://book.maelys.bio/latest.php

Well, here’s the front cover for the book: