A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Almost got to 10 seconds before I lost it.

Thought I was okerer.

Shit.

I just don’t have the heart to post this to my cigar blog. It just seems wrong.

Cigar Monster is a website that has hourly deals.  Great hourly deals.  But I don’t want to spend my days checking it, peeking over at five minutes after every hour.

What I want is to enter in to “something” a list of cigar brands and names I’m interested then have that something keep track for me and send me an email if I get a hit.  Then I can go look and see if the deal is worth hitting.

This is going to be a particularly important feature after my job starts next Wednesday (w00t!)

For about a month I was running Ubuntu on this box as it just seemed the right thing to keep my chops up, etc.

So I banged the script out in perl.  Took a couple more hours than I thought since my perl chops had atrophied a bit.  The code won’t win any awards, but it’s about 150 lines of relatively tight (yet still comprehensible) perl source.

Along the way I hit a snag.  Sending email through smtp on gmail is problematic because they use a TLS layer underneath smtp.  But between CPAN and linux, this error went away quickly.  Net::SMTP::TLS FTW!

And it was all happy nice nice.  The script just ran, checked every once in a while, sent me a message if there was a deal on PH 681s, Ashtons, and a couple other things. (The other interesting side effect is that it’s been accruing all the Cigar Monster deals for a few weeks which is actually an interesting table of data to look at.)

There are just too many things linux is a righteous pain in the ass about.  Filenames, music and media, etc.  So once I got the job offer I switched back, unplugging one SATA drive and plugging in the vista one.

That’s all fine and good since cygwin offers a “linux enough” environment for running my scripts generally.

The nice thing about the script was that it dumped data to a network repository (fancy way of csv file on a network attached drive) so when I switched back it ran in place.

Except, apparently, for the way perl library management works.  I just couldn’t get the TLS library to install under cygwin, so I tried going to ActiveState (the happy nice-nice native windows perl distro.)  Still… no go.

So I ended up rewriting the thing in python this morning (mostly.  Still have repository de-duping management to deal with.  Not exactly computer science, I just needed a break.)

I was hoping to use it as an inital ruby project, but I couldn’t find a clear answer on whether TLS was supported on an out of the box ruby install, so I bailed on it.  I may yet reconvert the thing.

SO yeah, there’s that.

Between screen-scraping the internet, watching for patterns, sending personal alerts (and having an engine for people to submit things they may be interested in) the resulting code is actually something I’ve found myself doing over and over again, so it’s time to start distilling it down to something consistent.  I’m not quite sure what will come out of it, but if I keep the refactoring clean and manage the code base such that it’s all in the same place, I should start seeing some interesting emerging libraries pretty quickly.

The trick for me is to not attempt to anticipate what form those things are going to take then try and over-engineer it.

It’s nice to be excited about software development again.

As I mentioned, I got the job. It’s now about 10 hours later and I have to say I’m still marginally stunned. That’s not to say I’m surprised really. It was all going in that direction. But as I’ve said all over the social networking universe, I’ve been out of work for so long that I don’t quite know what to do with myself now.

Fortunately (frankly) I’m down to the wire financially and indeed will be called upon to make some embarrassing phone calls to stave people off until the first couple paychecks come through. It may seem an odd thing to call fortunate but I know myself well enough to understand that were I to have a significant cash reserve here at the end of this that I would blow it. The spending itself wouldn’t be such a travesty. In fact I plan on doing just that after a token savings build up.

No, the fortunate part about this is that I now have a bit over a week where I can afford nothing other than some serious introspection and meaningful effort towards a few distinct goals without the distractions of hangovers or $500 dinners.

I’m definitely starting to enjoy the idea. Tomorrow I take care of the administrivia and then I’m set loose on the world.

And I have to say I’m surprised how much is unwinding from my head. Sure, I knew I was covered in emotional cruft and I expected it was a layer thicker and heavier than I realized, but this is crazy. I exhale twice for every inhalation I take. The surest most frightening sign of all this is looking around my apartment at how thoroughly I’ve created a living space that mirrors my mental and emotional state over the last year or so.

I’ve started cleaning that up as it’s so incredibly oppressive and while I have an awfully long way to go, it’s progress towards equilibrium so there’s something of a gravitational pull to get it done.

But now, pushing two o’clock, I’m beginning to feel the effects of my excited lack of sleep last night.

Good night everyone. o/

So I’ve been spending the last couple hours shaking the fog out of my head.  Yes, I really got the job.  No really.

Finally I turned around and looked at my apartment and was utterly disgusted.  “Who LIVES like this?” I yelled to no one in particular.

My hands have since pruned up from dishes.  I have 2 bags of laundry and a collection of shirts packed and ready to head out tomorrow morning.

Back to it.

Got the job.

Start in a week and a half.

I am going to drink myself into oblivion.

So apparently there are 1532 different terminal applications available on linux. What are the one or two worth using?

I still use bash. Is this going to get me in trouble?

Is there a reasonable norton commander implementation that’s not some java based crapware? (I really don’t want to try 300 different pieces of half-assed open source in my search.)

What else should I be running?

I’ll have more as I noodle around a bit.

I was pitched a job today (well, technically yesterday) that required my social security number.

Now, a couple things:

1) It’s illegal to require (but not to “ask for”) a social security number for a purpose that doesn’t involve reporting information to the irs.
2) I wouldn’t have such a bug up my ass about this if I hadn’t woken up one morning (years ago) to find major dents in my bank accounts and people sending me all kinds of bizarre emails.

Can’t do it. Especially not now.

I told the recruiter that I’d be happy to provide my social security number when and if we reached a point in the process where it would be legally required. But not for a blind job submission.

“But… this is a really great job!”
“On principle, I can’t do it.”
“I guarantee it will be kept in the strictest confidence.”
“I appreciate that, but you understand it’s not in your power to make that guarantee, right?”

That was the highlight of my day. I’ve spent the rest of it trying to mitigate this bizarre fog my head’s been swimming in. I’ve tried eating all KINDS of things (proving once again that I was right, fatass IS a verb.) I tried caffeinating myself to oblivion, writing code, writing, listening to music (of a few different genres.) Nothing.

“Meh” is the nicest thing I have to say about most things right now.

There’s someone I was a twitter/facebook/blip.fm friend of for a few months. We got along relatively well but after she’d showed her cards through a series of acts which led me to where I speak of her in the perfect tense I realized something.

In looking at her prolific self-portraits I had a little epiphany which led me to the perhaps odd act of going through every single picture that was publicly available of her to test a theory.

I was in total shock, really. There are candid shots, set-ups; pictures in the mirror and from friends’ cameras; parties and work settings. Probably something over a hundred shots.

And in not ONE is she smiling.

Not One.

People. Do yourselves a favor. Go flip through some pictures of yourself, just for a reality check.

A quick note about this notion about not judging people. Now, I don’t mean judging for objective rights and wrongs in the biblical “judge not” sense. I mean that soft social value judgment we all engage in and too many people seem to complain about.

Make no mistake that when someone says “don’t judge me” it’s not what they mean. They’re lying to protect that soft spot in their ego.

They want very much to BE judged and pass that judgment.

Well there’s no way to play the “duplicate posts from Groundhog’s day all week” game if you didn’t actually POST anything.

sassafraggaraggindumbass.

Ah well.

Some piece of garbage spammer decided to use my email address in the ‘from’ field of his latest marketing effort, making it look like I sent it.

Now, the right question is “wait… how is that possible?” The sad answer is “It’s trivial for anyone with the faintest understanding of email protocols. Who a message is marked as being ‘from’ has nothing to do with who sent it.”

So if you happened to find your way here before sending me a nastygram, no it’s really not from me.

Ya know, two weeks later and I really don’t enjoy coffee any more today than I did when I started. The enthusiasm of it all had me worked up pretty good but now, on my second cup of the day I realize I’m really forcing it down.

I’ll keep trying things because I’m determined to have a substitute to soda (which takes a front seat until something bumps it out) for caffeine intake. But it’s really got to be better than this for me to ever WANT the stuff.

I’m not sure how long this will last.

I was going through the Akismet filter and just saw this:

Oh jesus you’ll not belief this. My mindless kitten just farted on my knee!? I mean what’s the problem with this!? I care for this thing and I get this in return. I even now will not belief this. Anyway, you’ve got several useful facts there in your article. I knew Yahoo will take me to a few unique stuff today :). Alright must search for this creature now! Have a good evening you all!

I just… yeah.