Thr Sep 4		Previous|Index|Next

There is a dream that I often have -- I haven't had it recently, but I just remembered it. I dream that I am lying in bed, asleep, and I wake up to the realization that my teeth are crumbling away, flaking off in soft little leaves. You know when you have just eaten corn on the cob and you get those difficult to remove corn skins stuck in your teeth? Well, my dream is that that is all my teeth are, and the tooth-skins are all starting to come off. I struggle to keep them in place, but I can feel the still-solid roots of the teeth held in only by the nerve-artery cable. I dream that I wake up with a jolt, my hands cupped over my mouth to prevent all the teeth dripping out and I can taste the blood on my tongue. I also dream that I have dreamt this before, but this time it is real. It's probably the most terrifying nightmare of my adult life, perhaps the most terrifying recurring dream I have. I wonder what it means.

Before I return to the yawner that is my emotional and introspective life, let me relate a few ordinary things about my everyday life. I will do so by relating, in relative detail, my past 20 hours or so. I won't do this often, but I realize I have not done it at all.

It is morning now, pre-work although I am at my office. Yesterday morning I was in the same place, doing the same thing. Work for me officially starts at 9:00, so I like to write the outline of a journal entry from 8:30 to 9, and then finish it up at lunch, if I have time, or at home. Because my work place is behind a rather complicated firewall, I must keep files current between the two locations in rather byzantine fashion. It's okay, though, I have about a half dozen accounts hither and yon. I am down from my all time high of valid logins on ten non-work, non-home machines, none of them illegal.

So yesterday I spent the entire day working on enhancing this Web Server that I wrote in Java. The original version, about ten lines of code, was 0.9 compliant. I am working to make it 1.0 compliant now, which will probably take a couple of weeks of work unless I get to work on it continuously, as I did yesterday, in which case I could finish it this week. The problem, of course, is that there are lots of things I should be doing. Nobody around here actually needs a custom web server. But it is good research that could be adapted to other purposes should need arise, which is part of my job description. The best part. The things I should be doing involve upkeep on several peripheral web sites, more asp work for user testing of several "mission critical" web sites, and some organizational intitiatives that need to be undertaken to stay on top of some of our allied vendors who tend to ignore us if we don't hassle them. Thus, yesterday I shirked my loathesome duties and had a blast. I doubt I will be able to procrastinate much longer.

I left a little before six because I wanted to hit the Borders in the World Trade Center for a book on the HTTP 1.1 protocols for the train ride home. Had a devil of a time finding the book. Back when I shelved the computer section in a different location things were considerably better organized and there were about a million books on http protocols and http programming. Now I had to slog through a mush of poorly associated titles. (I really hate it when they pack the books on Java programming in-between books on Internet Explorer and books on Netscape. Java is a language, not a web technology! Ah, it's futile.) Fortunately, the computer bookseller had his section time right while I was there. He had no idea what I was talking about, sadly, and he had to go off and use TLU to find me a book. Of course, I could have done so myself by seeking out a vacant terminal. I could also crash their local area network, if I so chose, unless they have plugged all the holes, which I doubt. But I am a good boy, and customers are not allowed to use the terminals, so I let him do the research. And voila, he came up with something. It was the only book on HTTP in the store, and it is a dandy: Illustrated Guide to HTTP by Paul S. Hethmon. In it he walks through the creation of an HTTP server compliant to 0.9, 1.0, and the unofficial 1.1 standard as of last December. He does it all in C and C++, but that's all the better: it leaves me some work to do.

So I read this on the trains. When I get immersed in a book, the world might as well not exist, so there is nothing I could tell you about the train rides, except that the grammar of HTTP is really a very beautiful thing. Although most of his actual writing consists of little more than cutting and pasting various RFCs, the RFCs are exquisitely concise, and Hethmon organizes and explains them well without diminishing that underlying purity.

I walked home through a clear, deep blue sky, Jupiter gleaming boldly in the South East (not twinkling -- planets don't twinkle). At home Kate had gone out (a rarity that I took advantage of)! So, after feeding our voracious felines, I headed up to my lair to continue work on the server. I put the Phillies game on the radio (third game against the destable Yanks, and a third, glorious victory delivered by, of all things, great hitting by Kevin Stocker! Still just barely ahead of Oakland in the worst-in-baseball competition, and still a couple of games behind Chicago for worst-in-the-NL).

Unfortunately, I had not yet put the JDK1.1.3 on my machine at home, so I had to dl that. That's 8.9 meg across a 14.4. Bad enough, but of course I spent the duration reading journals which further slowed the connection. Why do I have a 14.4 you ask, when modems are so cheap? Why not ask why I don't have a working mouse? Ok, the mouse makes a better story (have I told it already?) -- Kate is more accustomed to Macs, and in a fit of rage at the inexplicable and uncooperative behavior of the PC, she smashed the mouse to bits. She actually reassembled it, and it can, in theory, be used. But it's such a pain in the neck to actually get the left button to click properly that I just don't use it. And you know what? You almost never have to once you know your way around the keyboard. The one problem I have is that I am using an old keyboard, pre-Win95, and it doesn't have the little window key between ctrl and alt, so I do have to use the mouse to pop the Start menu. Fortunately, I have the background for my desktop set such that a click anywhere on it will pop the start menu. As for the modem, well, I got it long ago when I ran a BBS and (gosh I feel like I have written all this before. I hope it was in email to someone and not like two days ago in the journal here) I have just never upgraded. Our finances suck right now with Kate out of work, so I am trying not to go into debt for non-essentials.

Right. A spent practically the whole evening reading Anita's journal. It's really a wonderful journal. She appears to be a truly remarkable person, in a very quiet way. I have completely fallen in love with her. (Which is a whole different topic that I had planned to write about today, but this is really getting lengthy as it is.) (Do you think I use parenthesis enough?)

Eventually the JDK finished downloading (2 3/4 hours). I did a little work on the server, but at least I am set up to work more intensively in the future. Kate came home, we had some tea, I also had a glass of beautiful golden scotch. Checked on the beer brewing in the cellar: the fermentation is quieting now, the carboy starting to clear. Finally got to bed about midnight.

As I was drifting into sleep I had a series of vivid dreamlets. They were just sudden, surprising images. I have no idea what they were, although at the time I thought they would make for amusing descriptions here in the journal.

Woke up at about 5:30, and off to work. I don't sleep with an alarm anymore. I used to wake up to the little bleeping of my wristwatch, but I seem to have lost it. About two weeks ago it went missing. It's probably under the bed. The cats like to steal it off my bed side table and play with it. But I find I wake up when I need to nonetheless, so long as I haven't been drinking. A couple of glasses of scotch does not constitute drinking.

The night was almost cold. Certainly the morning was delightful: dark, clear, bracing. It doesn't quite smell like fall yet, so it still seems like an impossibly cold summer day, but I caught hints of fall smells here and there. Enough to make me start thinking about the Fall. I'm a little ahead of myself:

My ritual on rising is to shave (electric), shower (shampoo if I'm not late, shampoo & conditioner if early), dry, deoderize (all natural mineral deoderant), brush teeth (sort of naturalish Toms of Maine stuff), floss if I'm not late. This morning was a shampoo & conditioner but no floss morning. Then dress: today loose tan trousers, a billowing white shirt. Then feed the cats. If I'm late I leave that for Kate to do, but I wasn't late this morning. In fact, had time to toast some bread for breakfast. Don't usually eat breakfast. Should have taken some vitamins, but forgot. Kiss Kate goodbye in her sleep, and out into the dark morning. Oh such wonderful cool fresh clean fine air!

Pick up an Inquirer on the way to 30th street station, read about the Phillies spectacular sweep of the filthy grovelling Yankees on the train (along with a lot more drivel about princess Di, which I was sorely tempted to go on about again, but -- good luck all around -- there's no time for it now). Following the business with the bounty hunters getting the wrong couple? The mob did that once in south jersey. Took out a whole family; some dyslexic guido had written the house number down with the digits in the wrong order. Thursday is tech life in the Inquirer. They probably have more sensible technology coverage in bloody Angola for crying out loud. What a waste of time that section is. Finish the paper, pick up the HTTP book again, dive back in and before you know it I am walking up from the underbelly of the World Trade Center onto the streets of New York again!

Remind me to go into detail sometime about the walk from the WTC to my own workplace. It's not a long walk, but there's a lot to tell. No time for it now. Gotta start work asap. Have just been loaded with several trivial tasks that must be done right this second. I've gone a little over this morning. Have to skip lunch.

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