What a night.  Couldn't sleep much because my temperature kept rising and falling.  I'd wake up freezing and pile on the blankets and even put on a warm jacket and then an hour later I'd wake up boiling.  I took 1000mg of Tylenol right before bed, plus Robitussin CF.  The cough syrup really does suppress the coughing but it does nothing for the fever.  My wife encourages me to take Tylenol Cold with the cough syrup but two of those is only 700mg of Tylenol, so I figure I'm better off taking the syrup and the regular Tylenol caplets for now.

When I get a fever, my mind becomes pretty flighty and I often find myself reasoning out thoroughly a completely ridiculous proposition as if it were true... especially when I am on the edge of sleep.  And last night, for example, I spent many edge-of-sleep moments mulling the fact that the polygons that make up my body each contained too much heat.  The proper thing to do of course was to take my mouse and select these polygons and then edit them to remove the excess heat.  The problem was figuring out how to get all the polygons selected at once.  Apparently there are multiple kinds of polygons in my body and they can't all be selected at once, and selecting only a few at a time is useless because it would take forever and the heat would just redistribute itself. Finally at 3 AM it occurred to me that this notion was nonsense, stop thinking about that crap and go to sleep, I said to myself.

In my sleeping moments I had the most peculiar dream.  It actually makes a halfway decent if odd story.  I was in college again, but for some reason, college was in Michigan (I attribute this to noting a Michigan license plate in a movie I watched recently).  Strangely, James, my trusted college compatriot was also there, and another person who was our friend, but I could not remember his name and every time I looked at him, his face was a blur.  So for now, I'll call him "Blur".  The only thing I remember about blur was that he worked for the school paper.

We were enrolled in a humanities course on archeology, got to get those Humanities credits if you want to graduate with a degree in Comp Sci.  The professor, a gray haired old fellow whose name escapes me, took the whole class out on assignment to a local historic spot that he had gotten permission to dig at.  It was at a rest stop by the side of a Michigan highway.  The rest stop was basically a dirt half circle, on the edge of a pond, with a stone structure near the water, mostly hidden by brush.  It was like the circle of stones that forms a covered well standing about 3.5 feet high and about 3.5 feet in diameter.

The professor explained that this cylindrical structure was built by the prehistoric ancestors of a local Indian tribe.  I don't remember the tribe's name.  The cylinder was full of dirt and a vine-covered tree had grown in it at one time, and this tree was important to these early people for some sort of rituals.  I don't remember most of what he said, but he went on to say that when Europeans settled the area and discovered the tree was used for rituals (which to them were Satanic, since they weren't Christian), they had chopped the tree down.

We were going to dig in and around this structure, which was now partially obscured by brush on the sides and top.  So we cleared the brush away for starters, which revealed the relatively small tree stump and a tangle of vines sprouting from it still bearing leaves.  I remarked that I was amazed the tree was still clinging to life and the professor said we would dig around it.  It occurred to me that with the brush cleared, the tree might actually be able to grow again, and that made me happy.

Then the digging began, gently scraping away soil with trowels and brushing it away with brushes.  We found some small shards of pottery and a clay pipe, and the professor noted that it looked like the soil had been disturbed recently.  That's when we uncovered something that definitely did not belong.  It was a Maine license plate, 682 HG, buried in the soil.  The professor snatched it up disgustedly and flung it away.  Why would someone bury a license plate?  I wondered... I was curious about it so I grabbed it and stuck it in my pack.

For each item uncovered James and I were to write a small report, and I forget why, but for some reason the professor didn't like our reports.  I think he felt we Comp Sci majors were unwelcome invaders in his class.  He made some noise about them not being thorough enough, or some such thing.  And he refused to grade them, and further, refused to explain what exactly we needed to do to fix them, leaving us pretty much in the lurch, with no choice but to keep trying.

Each day we returned to the dig site and did more work uncovering more stuff, and all the while the professor refused to explain what he wanted in these reports.  We had checked our textbooks and had formatted the reports as suggested therein, using Mac Write to carefully lay them out.  They looked as though they wouldn't appear out of place in the book themselves.  The only thing different about them is that they were done on the computer instead of written by hand in a notebook.

It turned out, our professor finally admitted, that this is why he would not accept them.  "True archaeologists don't use computers." he said, accenting the word with distaste.  Clearly the professor was a technophobic nut-job.  I found his argument to be a ridiculous statement in the extreme, utter bullshit, James agreed and we told the professor so.  We had both seen documentaries on TV where archaeologists used computers to catalog or scan finds and so forth.  Our friend Blur concurred.

The professor countered that the reports HAD to be in our lab notebooks.  Okay, fine, James said, and I could tell he was about to deliberately misinterpret the teacher's intentions, just to piss him off, I'll paste these report pages to the pages of my notebook.  That should be acceptable, right?  Because it will be in my notebook.

I didn't think this was going to fly with the professor, and I was right.  It just made him angry.  He said that it was not acceptable to which James immediately and sharply shot back "why?" repeatedly.  At that age James loved to catch someone in their own illogical arguments and then needle them over it, never backing down.  At least, if memory serves.  I always both admired this trait and feared it, because I was afraid it would get him into trouble.  But he survived into adulthood relatively unscathed so I guess my fears were unfounded.

Finally the professor told us that if we didn't want to flunk the course, we would write the reports by hand using an engineering pencil in our notebooks as all of his students had done in the past.  James' argument that archaeologists should study the past, not live in it landed on deaf ears.  We were simply going to have to rewrite them and that was that.

The next day at the dig site there was a bunch of students I didn't recognize protesting.  They were holding up signs and everything.  At first I thought they were protesting the dig for some reason, but it turned out they were protesting the professor for refusing to move with the times and accept reports in the superior digital format.  Blur mentioned to James, Sorry I got the paper involved, to which James said, Are you kidding?  This is great!

I didn't know what they were talking about until Blur handed me the latest copy of the school paper, open to a particular article that immediately caught my eye.  Apparently the student in charge of taking photographs of the dig and the finds, had also shot pictures of the students.  And there was a picture of me, James, and Blur in the paper.  My back was to the camera, Blur was partially obscured behind James, and James was sipping something from a plastic cup and grinning, looking charming with his close-cropped hair, glasses, and bomber-style jacket.  In the background was the dig site and the professor with his back turned toward us.  The article said "Professor Unfairly Threatens to Flunk Students", and went on to describe the situation in unflattering terms.

Needless to say the professor was livid.  He began by accusing me of arranging the whole thing and I said I hadn't known anything about it.  Then he accused James, to which James calmly replied that he too hadn't had anything to do with it, but noted that people don't just sit by when they see someone behaving in an unjust manner.  Certainly we had told other people that he had threatened to flunk us, but we never went to the paper.  Obviously someone had, but not us.  The photographer, upon questioning, said that the paper had called him and asked for pictures of the dig because they were going to write an article about it.  They hadn't mentioned anything about his threatening to flunk us, and so he had happily supplied copies of all of the pictures, figuring the professor would be pleased.

Nobody would admit to anything, and the professor was becoming more and more belligerent.  He actually screamed at an older guy in the class who was apparently back in school in his 40's trying to finally get that degree, something about the proper way to use a trowel.  The guy's name was something Jenkins... his first name began with a D.  And when the professor started yelling at him Jenkins began to look positively scary, like he would snap the smaller man's neck.

After class the professor announced that he was canceling the remainder of the dig.  All reports would be due in his office in the morning, done by hand in notebooks, no later than 8 AM. He knew this meant James and I would be up all night, and clearly relished the idea.  James and I knew that he would be merciless when he graded our reports, and by all accounts no matter how good they were, he would flunk us.

James assured me that the fight wouldn't be over just because he flunked us, and that in the end he would get the grade overturned.  Nonetheless, at this point we needed to play by the professor's rules or it would be harder to get the grade overturned, and we needed to do an excellent job.  So we went to the library and poured on the research.  The library was apparently open 24 hours a day, so we pretty much camped out there, adding all sorts of details to our reports.

James wickedly suggested that we should write a report on the license plate too.  After all, it was found at the dig site and the professor said all finds had to be documented.  The professor wouldn't like it, but I had definitely reached the "fuck him" stage at that point.

In addition I did background research on the vicinity of the rest stop and came across an article in a local newspaper dated ten years prior.  It was an appeal from the state police for information on the whereabouts of D(something) Jakes.  Apparently Mr. Jakes had murdered his family in Maine and fled without a trace.  The police had only one lead in that a couple days later a trooper had spotted a car with Maine plates pulling into the rest stop where the dig site was at about 2 AM.  The officer in the cruiser was off duty, and didn't note the plate number, just that it was a Maine plate.  He pulled up next to the vehicle, rolled down his window and asked the other driver if he was alright.  To which the 30 year old responded, yeah, I'm just tired and I'm going to catch some sleep.

That was good enough to the officer who said drive safe and left. Only later did the officer read a bulletin on Jakes, and wasn't sure but thought the man he had spoken to the day before might have been Jakes.  Hence the appeal for information.  But none was forthcoming.  I went looking for more information on Jakes and found a couple more appeals for information in later years.  Clearly the trail had gone cold.

And I was probably holding his license plate in my hands.  Then it occurred to me that D(something) Jenkins was an anagram of D(something) Jakes.  I shared all this with my friend James who went wide-eyed and noted that Jenkins had almost certainly seen me pick up the plate.  We reasoned that he had possibly ditched his car, maybe dumping it in the pond, or had switched out the plates or something.  This explained why the plate had been buried.

We have to go to the police, he said, right now.

That's when I woke up, and when I went back to sleep the dream did not return.  My wife told me in the morning that I had been swearing in my sleep all night. She said every other phrase out of my mouth had been "eff you".  I told her I was angry at my archeology professor and that got a look as strange as one might expect.

100.5 is my temp now.  I'm so miserable.

That's the temperature of my fever.  Yes it appears I have become sick in the last 24 hours.  And I am positively miserable.  During one coughing fit today I coughed into my left hand and then went to the sink to wash it with antibacterial soap.  While staring bleary eyed into the mirror and washing, I suddenly felt my wedding ring slide off my finger.  Clink.  Clink.  Sploosh.  Right down the drain.  Dammit.

So I got under the bathroom sink (while sick to my stomach I might add), and unscrewed the PVC trap from one end of the drainpipe.  I was so spaced out it didn't occur to me to put down a pail.   So after tightening the pipe back up I went to the kitchen to get an empty margerine tub.  Then I again unscrewed the trap and swiveled it to the right to reveal a massive glob of fibers.  Probably human hair, dog hair, cat hair, rug and fabric fibers and so forth.  I really didn't want to touch it but I said to myself.  "I'll just wash up with antibacterial soap after."  That's about when my brain kicked in.  Here's what it said to me:

"You effing moron.  You've been washing in this sink with antibacterial soap two to four times a day.  Any germs living in that trap have long since acquired an immunity... shit for brains."

I was going to flip my brain the bird, but I had to concede, it was right.  (I say "it", because as previously demonstrated, my brain is neither male nor female.)  Besides it was so addled, it had called me shit for brains, so you can see where that gets us.

Anyway I went back to the kitchen and retrieved a disposable plastic fork and cleared all the crud from the trap and then fished out my wedding band.  I got it all back together and washed my ring extensively for the next five minutes using different soap.  I was vaguely reminded of the scene from the abyss where Bud fishes his wedding ring out of the blue-water toilet, staining his arm.  I wondered if my ring would later save my life.  Probably not.

That's when Pat and Lynnea returned back home from checking out furniture... Pat wants new living room furniture, and I kind of do too.  The furniture we have now was delivered the day after Lynnea was born.  That makes it pretty old, and being Sears-brand, pretty destroyed at this point.

Pat had stopped at Chili's on the way home to pick up dinner.  Lynnea and I were to share fajitas for two, don't worry we used an independent piece of silverware to pick up the meat, onions, peppers, and fixings.  Unfortunately, Chili's in Leominster, being assholes, once again provided us with too few tortillas.  I know they're trying to run a business, but 3 tortillas is not enough to eat fajitas for one, and it certainly isn't enough to eat fajitas for two.  What, I'm going to have one, the other person is going to have one and then we split the third?  Jerks.

In addition, instead of packaging the tortillas laid out flat in a stack, they chose to wrap them in tinfoil all rolled into a tube.  As a result the tortillas baked themselves becoming crusty on the edges, and causing the moist inner core to meld into a solid mass.  The tortilla's could not be separated, and we tried believe me, ending up with a tattered mass of doughy sheets all stuck together.  Thanks a shitload, dingwads.

So Lynnea and I ate meat and onions on a plate.  Yum.   I didn't have an appetite anyway.

Afterward I went to my desk and tried to play MTGO but my brain was too fried to think straight.  At one point my opponent asked if I was retarded.  I explained to him that I was sick and having trouble concentrating.  He said, "go to bed" and quit.  I took that as a hint to quit before it became any more embarrassing.  So I trundled up to bed, stretched out, and played DOAX-2 for awhile.  Until I started getting the shakes and came down to check my temperature, discovering it to be 100.7° F. Yayyy.

So having choked down some cough syrup (bleah) and a couple tylenol for the fever I came in here to write about my mundane day.  And if you think it's a little sad that I would actually think these petty rants and insignificant details of my day might interest someone, please keep in mind, you just read the whole thing.  What does that say? 

Be nice to me, I'm sick.    Now I'm going to try and eat some soup.

Bad Astonomer Phil Plait recently posted this gem.  I'd comment but I think this excerpt is all you will need to read:

According to this press release from PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), Bush White House appointees are suppressing real science in order to promote creationism. Specifically, at the Grand Canyon National Park, a book is on sale that says the canyon was formed in Noah’s flood. Also, guides at the park are not allowed to answer questions about how old the canyon is, despite scientists’ incredibly detailed and intricate knowledge of the formation mechanism, scheme, and history of the canyon (hint: some of the oldest rocks in the canyon are two billion years old).

I can't even begin to express how angry this makes me. I hope it's not true.  It's hard to believe that something so inane could happen in this day and age.  While I don't doubt that there is creationist claptrap in the park's giftstore (that crap is everywhere), guides not being permitted to discuss the verified age of the canyon?  Seems way too outlandish.  Can anyone confirm this story?  I hope not!

My wife got me an XBOX 360 for Christmas, which was an insanely cool gift to get.  Now it's just a matter of figuring out which games to play.  A lot of people point me toward GameSpot as a source of information.  IMHO GameSpot is a great source of hype, but I have trouble taking their reviews very seriously.  Some games seem to get props which upon play are clearly undeserved.

Some examples?  How about NeverWinter Nights 2 for the PC? I have been playing this here and there throughout December as time allows.  It's a pretty fun game, but it is also the buggiest RPG I've ever played.  It is insanely easy to trip on bugs in this game, and yet, as near as I can tell, the bugs go unmentioned.  You would think that the fact that picking a certain lock and going through a certain door at the wrong time will basically lock off an entire region of the map to you permanently, would be a somewhat relevant piece of information.  No recent save?  Sucks to be you.  GameSpot gives this game an 8.6 out of 10.  They rather ironically rate it as "stable".

What I find is, the closer a game is to the top of the GameSpot rating system (theoretically, a game rated 10.0, don't know if there has ever been one) the more likely that the rating is accurate.  But this accuracy tends to fall off rather rapidly as you move downscale.  I take this as a desire to artificially elevate game ratings.  And why not?  Their site is covered with ads from game companies, and game companies would rather see the virtues of their games extolled rather than their flaws criticized.  I find the following chart accurately converts between how I would rate a game, and how GameSpot would rate the same game:

So for example, if GameSpot rates a game as somewhere between 9 and 10, in actuality it could fall anywhere between 8.1 and 10.  Or it could just mean that I'm overly critical.  In which case, tough, I pronounce myself correct anyway.  Being overly critical means that only the best will appeal to me, and therefore my "system" of rating games is better.

The real problem with a rating system which artificially inflates game ratings is that it is repeated by other gamers, leading to a phenomenon I have noted among my friends and acquaintances.  I don't think anyone has ever told me that a game was "fairly decent".  No.  In casual conversation, games seem to be divided into the following categories:  sucks, or awesome.  Awesome seems to be generally anything rated 7.5 or higher at GameSpot, and sucks is everything else (allowing for the particular likes and dislikes of the person being asked).

Because of the conversational rating system as I have been able to discern it, I am likely to find awesome games which are pretty mediocre, or sucks games that aren't nearly that bad.  Trying to keep all this in mind when attempting to decide what games to get is difficult.  And sometimes I forget and operate under the assumption that a game everyone is saying is awesome really is awesome... usually I end up disappointed when that happens.  Given that, I recommend renting games or trying them out at in-store displays before you buy.  That way you'll know what you are getting into.

Or you could read my overly critical opinion.   Here's what I've tried out on my xbox 360 thus far, and how it rates, from best to worst:

Well I just took the BBC's "Sex I.D. Quiz", a test designed to tell you if you have a male brain or a female brain.  The results are given in a sliding scale which goes "Female 100-50-0-50-100 Male" which is to say the right half of the scale belongs to the men, and the left half to the women.  The average female score tends to be at 50 on the left, while on average males tend to score 50 on the right.  Me?  I scored 0, dead center.

And for some reason I find that strangely appealing.  I like being a dichotomy.

The part of the test I enjoyed most was being shown photos of faces where you could only see the eyes and being asked to guess what emotion the person being photographed was feeling.  In reality, such tests can't be all that accurate, I figure.  Looking my results over it appears that when I scored male I scored very male, but when I scored female I scored very female, which resulted in me averaging out to dead center.  Weird.  There were only a couple tests where I really scored in the center.

The quiz is a bit lengthy, but I thought it was fun.  Be warned, should you decide to take it, you have to complete all six parts to get the results, and for the part where they ask you to measure your fingers, you will need a ruler which can measure in millimeters.

We wish you a

Merry Christmas!

Well, another thing that happens when your job sucks is that you don't have enough time to do anything else.  So now I am going out to do all of my Christmas shopping.  At 1:15 PM on Dec 23.  Sheesh.

Happy Holidays everyone... I'll report in later if I survive the trip.

You know what I don't understand?  The attraction of videos featuring people having accidents.  Videos of people falling off their bicycles, trampolines, horses, and what have you are posted on YouTube as humor, usually with a dubbed laugh track and moronic music.  And people post comments saying how funny these videos are.  Clearly I have no sense of humor because all I feel when I watch these videos is sympathy and horror for the person who suffered the injury.  That and revulsion at people who think someone flipping off a trampoline and landing on their head and neck is fricking hilarious.  It would be one thing if it was a stunt being performed by a trained stunt man, most of these are home videos and portray real events.

A little old lady with osteoporosis getting dragged across a lawn by a rambunctious great dane is funny right up until it's your mom.

Jesus.

Sorry I've been so busy, guys, just haven't had time to post at all.  I am on the project from hell at work.  Tuesday I worked a 15 hour day which finished up at about 2 AM.  I spent the entire day trying to get a new feature implemented and working on this product I'm involved with.  At 1:30 AM it was finally finished, and I took some screenshots, wrote up a report to explain how it all worked, sent the report to the team and checked everything in.  The next day I got up at about 11 AM and checked my e-mail.  From the entire team I had but one response, from my boss.  Here's what it said:

Thanks for the update.

Not, thanks for busting your ass, or wow looks great, or take the day off.  I was pondering alternative employment when the phone rang.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hi Chuck, are you sleeping right now?" It was my boss.

"I just crawled out of bed a few minutes ago and was getting ready to pack up and come in to work.  What's up?"  Here it comes, I said to myself, she's decided to thank me over the phone, the personal touch and all that.

"I'm here with [the QA guy] and [the customer's technical lead] and we'd like you to walk us through the new screen."

Now that the QA guy and the customer know that I just crawled out of bed, sure why not?  "Um, sure, although that report I sent you pretty much covers it." I said while rubbing sleep out of my eyes.

"Well we think we get it, but we'd like you to go through it anyway, and then we'd like to discuss how we'd like it changed." 

*sigh*  Not only do I not get a thanks for working all night  but I do get a your work isn't good enough.

And the changes they wanted?  Completely cosmetic and IMHO unnecessary, the "new" version is no better than the old version and is going to cost me another 4 hours at some point.  Yayyyyyy.

I gotta get a new job.

So since I've been too busy to post, I uploaded some new pictures.  Nothing amazing, pictures of my cats mostly.  Check 'em out in the recent photos sidebar at the left.  Hope y'all had a Happy Solstice (or Yule for the Wiccans out there) yesterday, and enjoy the beginning of Humanlight (for the atheists/agnostics out there) which starts tomorrow and runs until the 27'th I believe, Happy Hannukah to my Jewish friends, and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody.  Happy Holidays.