hole in my head

I felt like crap most of the day. Turns out I've come down with
something. It's throat-related, and thus miserable, but in all
honesty not grotesque. Just that I hate anything throat- or stomach-
related. In other words, I don't care for being sick.

Well, I have to hand it to my peers. No one said anything about my
being a grump. There were some PMS comments made about themselves,
of which I partook - we're all on the same schedule, it appears - but
nothing about me specifically. At least, not to my face. But then
one of my peers came over to me and started rambling about
something. I only heard approximately every fifth word.... when I'm
not up to par, the CAPD becomes quite obvious to me, which is
excruciatingly frustrating and only exacerbates the problem. Finally
I shut my eyes, put my hand up, and very firmly said, "I'm done with
speech today. Please email that to me and I'll fix it."

No fight, argument, or annoyance that I could see. She simply said,
"Oh. Okay." Walked off and emailed it. Thank God for small miracles.

~nv

KFC

Dale had told me yesterday morning that he'd get KFC for lunch for him and a friend at work.  I decided that was a good idea, so perhaps I'd get KFC on my way home from work that evening.  As the day progressed I wanted KFC SO bad.  Every passing hour made it worse.

So when I realized that I was working past 7, I told myself it would be my reward for pushing forth and doing good things.  I was nearly salivating as I left.  My drool was literally freezing as I made my way through the far parking lot.  The droolcicles fell in my lap as I started my truck, shivering, and waited for the windshield to clear, gently asking my truck to warm up extra quickly.  (He didn't.  Cursed mechanical objects.)

Finally pulled out of the lot, drove like a bat out of hell through the city streets... to bestow upon myself my delicious and filling reward.

There, BEHOLD!!  KFC!!!...'s... light... was out.

I hate working late.

So I called Dale and wailed and he made me mashed potatoes and a chicken patty.  If any of you guys out there ever want to impress your admiration upon a girl or make up with her or whatever, make her dinner at the end of a long day.  Doesn't have to be fancy.  At that point I would have eaten a pop tart and loved him for it.  Extra credit for the KFC concept.

I don't love Dale because of these things, but I have to say that these things do remind me of why I fell in love with him in the first place.

~nv

Calligraphy

I've taken up a new hobby. Sort of. Last weekend I stopped at
Michael's and purchased a set of Calligraphy things: Pens, nibs,
paper, ink, that sort of thing. Fun!

I say it's sort of a new hobby because mostly I've been using my
newfound interest to write poetry and letters. Both of these I do
already, so the hobby part comes in with how I'm doing them. Slight
modification really. I think Calligraphy is good for me because it
makes me aware of my writing techniques. Over the years my
handwriting has developed into its own thing, and it varies depending
on my mood and the words I'm using. For instance, "s" could be
written in cursive, as a printed letter, or as a printed letter drawn
from the bottom of another letter - i.e., itself being drawn from the
bottom to the top.

Calligraphy doesn't really do well from bottom to top. Now, I always
liked doing that. It made the "s" feel "free" to me - its top could
extend out to the right, curve, do whatever it wanted. But certain
things have kept me interested.

First, it's not as difficult as I'd thought to modify my handwriting
techniques to avoid catching the nib on the paper.
Second, the nibs are pressure-sensitive. This allows for the
characteristic "downstrokes" or whatever they're called - you know,
when the stroke is heavier and it tapers as the stroke angles or
curves. I love that look and I was surprised at how easy it can be
to achieve, even with smaller nibs.
Third, the scratchy sound. I don't like it when the paper catches,
but the gentle scratching of nib on paper is quite soothing and
leaves my mind blank. It's almost a bad thing because I want to feel
and hear it so much that I can't think of anything to write.
However, this is where I end up copying stuff, thus practicing my
newer techniques.
Fourth, there's that "elegant, old-fashioned" sense that I get when
I'm writing letters. My next endeavour is to find wax seals to
complete the effect. There's a part of my adult life where I still
feel like a child... pretending, on some level, that I'm in another
time. A time when letters took weeks or months to reach their
recipients. A time when quill and ink were the only option, and
paper was treasured rather than formed into junk mail which is then
shredded and thrown out. It lends an air of respect for the written
word, one that demands thought before movement.

Finally, it's giving me more cause to write.

Even in this technological age where typing is sometimes faster than
thought, there are still reasons why pen and ink has not died.

~nv

Driver Magician Lite

Awesome program. I just used it for the second time in a couple of
weeks. This time on my own computer, as I'm reinstalling XP. It
worked flawlessly just as before.

I LOVE DML.

~w

and heartache came

...to visit me, but I knew it wasn't ever after." (Jewel, "Hands")

I really, really, really like this song. I hear it now and again and
often hear new things in it, glean new insights that I understand to
begin with but suddenly feel without warning. This happened the
other day and again last night.

Last night I was driving home, past this house we've been considering
for the past week, and realized that the last house I'd been so
interested in was in such need of work that this one looks like a
castle with all its renovations. It dawned on me just how crushed I
was when that house had been sold before we even got to look at it,
and how hopeful I am about this current one. Then, amidst all these
thoughts, Jewel's voice is playing and I hear her words: "Poverty
stole your golden shoes, it didn't steal your laughter. And
heartache came to visit me but I knew it wasn't ever after."

This got me to thinking about how blessed I really am, in so many
different ways, on so many different levels. I started out so poor,
materially at least, and emotionally in many ways, and not only am I
materially blessed but I have my faith and I've become so much
stronger, in order to overcome problems and obstacles in life, both
personal and work-related. It's not a new concept to me but this
realization, when it hits, tends to come in the wake of emotional
lapses and it did just this; I'd not exactly been feeling happy as of
late. Not even content. It was frustrating because I know what I
have, and I know how I'm lucky, but I couldn't feel it no matter how
much I reminded myself. Then I'd have to resist spiraling downward
out of guilt for not feeling grateful, knowing that I'm human, after
all, and eventually I'd snap out of the funk.

Attitude is everything. Unfortunately, it's not quite as well-
controlled as the happy amongst us may seem to suggest to the world.
It's ironic that as powerful as knowledge may make us, it also makes
us so vulnerable. And it's even more ironic that we want so
desperately to teach others what took us so long to learn, only to
realize that others need to find it out for themselves. You cannot
teach experience. You also cannot make yourself feel what you don't,
no matter how much you know.

When you're happy and you know it, though... clap your hands!

~nv

OMG I'd forgotten...

...how much trouble it is to work on pcs.

I now remember how annoyingly frustrating - yet rewarding - pc work
was for me back when that's all I did at home. It can be almost
addictive, because you don't want to let it "win." You want to
overcome it all and get it working and it's a power struggle, really,
between you and the machine - and you win. Eventually.

But not today. I'm not that patient.

I bought a new SATA drive for Raven and intended to reinstall XP on
it. Then I intended to copy that partition to another hard drive for
safekeeping, so next time I just reinstall windows - and all basic
drivers, programs, etc - by doing a partition to partition copy.

So XP doesn't see SATA drivers natively. You have to plop in a
diskette with the drivers on it, then let Windows get that. I get
error messages. I try something new. Different messages. You know
what? I spent three hours figuring this out already, and I've got
other stuff I'd like to do on my day off. So I'm going to go find my
IDE drive and simply reformat the bugger. It's not like I have much
to save anyway, and it's partitioned, so I can just dump it to
another partition, reinstall, and whammo, all good. Besides, this
will give me a chance to use that new driver collector I found. :)

Egads.

Now, I plugged my SATA drive into my mac via my external hard drive
to usb adapter thingie, and it saw it just fine. I even partitioned
it so I didn't have to do it on the pc, and it even allowed me to
format the partitions with NTFS.

Macs rule. PC's drool. I still want to build another pc, though.
Mom is trying to save money for a new one and wants me to build it
for her. As much as I don't look forward to her complaints when
things go wrong (she lives too far away for me to be of real use to
her), I am looking forward to the actual build. I must be a
masochist or something.

~nv

sick

gah.

liver n onions

with cayenne pepper!! w00t!! Dale's not feeling all that great as
of late, got some bug or something. I don't know if it's sympathy
symptoms or my own way of warning myself that I've got the same bug,
but I'm not exactly at 100% capacity myself, and I've been treating
my body rather poorly as of late: Skipped meals, excessive junk
food, stress, not quite enough sleep, long hours at work, and a few
days ago, an orange and a piece of clementine. Probably overdid it
on the tea, too, which tends to dehydrate me a tad bit over time,
especially this time of year. I've also been doing way too many
dairy products and not nearly enough water.

So, I decided a blast of nutrition was in order to help minimize any
disruptive viruses that may be attempting to infiltrate and take over
my .exe's.

In comes Liver n Onions. I fry up about as many onion choppings as I
do liver choppings. Generally, it's a 1:1 ratio. Today, however, I
added in a dash of Cayenne, a splash of Chicken Rub, a sprinkle of
Seasoned Salt, and a generous helping of Ground Coriander.

TASTY!!!

Hopefully this dish, and others I'll be making later, will ward off
whatever Dale's got. Later I'll be having marinated bison and pasta
with garlic. And, I'm going to find a good spot to take a nap at
some point. I'm exhausted, even after 9.5 hours of sleep last night.

~nv

buttermilk

Dale had received an ice cream maker from his mom for Christmas.
Then our landlords gave us an herb garden, a pizza kit, and a mix for
pancakes. (We have the coolest landlords in the world, we really do.)

We had lots of fun making pizza and planting the herbs, and decided
we wanted to make vanilla ice cream. So, I stopped at a store and
bought rock salt, ice, and some half and half. (Next time we use
cream.) I also picked up a quart of heavy cream because I had a
sneaking suspicion that I'd like to make butter in the near future.

While I waited for Dale to figure out how to make the ice cream, I
snuck into the fridge and grabbed the cream so I could make butter.
I had discovered that beating it with a mixer is far more efficient -
and easier - than doing it with a blender. So, this time around, I
grabbed the biggest bowl I could find and dumped about 75% of the
quart o' cream into it. Then began mixing at high-speed.

Within ten minutes I had whipped cream. Within fifteen, I had VERY
THICK whipped cream. It had poufed out with air, so I placed a good
portion into a separate bowl so I could keep whipping without
plastering myself, Dale, and the new ice cream maker with white
fluffy stuff.

About 20 minutes had gone by, and suddenly I had chunks of yellow
things in my whipped cream. Yay!! I added salt, and shortly
thereafter I reduced the speed of the mixer to low, pushing the cream
into the beaters with a soft spatula and watching the buttermilk
begin to settle at the bottom. I poured it off, and continued,
pouring off more and more as I went.

Well, I ended up with roughly a stick or two of butter and smooshed
it into a plastic container for safekeeping. I also ended up with a
half-pint or so of buttermilk. Probably closer to a pint. I stuck
this into the fridge and forgot about it until this morning.

Buttermilk - especially homemade, chunky buttermilk - is very tasty
and I love eating it because of the chunks. They're basically little
mini pieces of butter submersed in slightly salty yellow milk. I'm
sure it's horrible for me, but I LOVE this stuff!! You get this
liquidy num nums and then - whup, what's this? Butter? In my
MILK?? YAYYY!!! Smoosh, smoosh, smoosh on the tongue, ahhhh...

Okay, off to drink/eat/smooth more!

~nv

TCP/IP anniversary

Today marks the 25th anniversary of ARPANET's global acceptance of the TCP/IP standard.  Without TCP/IP, there'd be no internet (at least not as we know it).

More info on TCP/IP here:

http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci214173,00.html

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/d1e53415-9a93-4407-87d2-3967d62182dc1033.mspx?mfr=true

Vague synopsis of above articles, since some of you won't understand it anyway and I feel like writing:

* TCP/IP is a little program that is standard on every computer and server, whether Windows, Mac, Linux, Aix, Unix, etc.

* IP = Internet Protocol

* TCP = Transmission Control Protocol

I'll be using UPS (United Parcel Service) as a crude example of how this works.

You create an email and click "send."  SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) runs over, grabs your email, stuffs it in a little box for you, addresses it based on who you sent it to, and then calls up the nearest UPS office to let them know it's coming their way.  (This might be known to UPS as "Billing Information Received.")  SMTP then runs away with it to deliver it to TCP, who works 24x7 at UPS, making sure all packages reach their destinations.

The package then reaches its local TCP office.  TCP then takes the package and explains to SMTP how the package will be sent on, acquiring all necessary addresses, payment and signatures in the process.  This information is explained to the next SMTP, also, through a series of telegrams, which explain how he may track the package online.  UPS might call this "Origin" meaning it's being prepped to be sent out into the world.

TCP then hands the package to IP (UPS:  "Departure") who slaps his own labels on the package to ensure it can cross the whole spanse of the Internet without getting lost.  (UPS:  "Arrival")

IP then checks to see the vehicles available for delivery, and translates the instructions to each driver so they understand where it will go.  The first driver then takes the package along a long route known as a "network interface."  This could be as simple as an ethernet cable!  UPS would call this "out for delivery."

Keep in mind that several of these exchanges may occur in the process of shipping one of the packages, known as "packets."

Once the package reaches its destination UPS office, a new SMTP comes running over, grabs the package excitedly, and delivers it to the addressed computer.  UPS would call this "Delivery."

The user of that computer then opens the email with a big ol' pocket knife and goes, "Egads, ANOTHER chain letter?!"

And this is why UPS packages have so many labels on them.

:)

Oh, and here are some interesting articles, too...

January 1st Events throughout the ages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1#Events

For more info on the internet and how it has "grown up" over the years, here are a couple of good resources:

http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_summary.htm