Off By One

I’m posting this, slacking, from my ethics class. Frankly, regardless of the degree of interest I have in the content in itself, the presentation (didactic, lecture) is not my cup of tea. It gets good, when we start hitting the discussion aspects of the course…

Anyway, I’m bored. Char’s outta town, for those that aren’t paying attention, the local hockey team is sucking it back in ways that resulted in my being mocked by the AppleCare support folk I spoke to this morning, and work was… if not completely useless today, competitive with it.

Blah.

If the weather gets good, at least I can go skydiving this weekend, having been unable to last week (sorry to disappoint, Dad — I was at the library getting books for the Phil250 paper that was due, well, today).

We’ll see.

Simon and Char are roaming the world, and they (like M&M before them) are posting on Morruz.

Well, not so much. But I really do have nothing to say.

A quick sum-up:

Work: Active, rewarding, and busy. Friends: Hanging out with a bit more, which is good. School: Really iffy on Philosophy 250 — this is some wonky stuff, if you ask me.

The world: Fucked, man. Hypocrisy in Congress down south, media shutdown up here…

I’d rather not think about it.

It’s been a thought tickling around in the back of my brain, but a post about finding a friend thought lost by a good friend of mine (Jebus, that’s a construct and a half. Note to self: Simpler sentences!) got me thinking about it a bit more.

I’ve never been one for many friendships. The people whom I consider to be my friends are infinitely precious to me, as a product of both their individual merits and their scarcity. As it is, I don’t see enough of the people that matter to me, so I clutch those moments close.

However, over the course of my life, I’ve let go of, or been let go by, a few friends.

Farthest back was Daniel, a kid across the street in Clairmont. It was a typical 6-year-old’s lament — his parents moved away. Looking back, I suspect that I was more “into it” than he was, setting a pattern that I believe holds even today, although to a lesser extent as I become more selective in my associations.

There’s a scattering of loose acquaintances throughout elementary and junior high, but the only friends I really had during those years (that I can remember, of course) were Cody and Eric, neither of whom had anything to do with my school life. Cody was a farm kid, something of a troublemaker. I remember his dad’s house was the coolest place in the world, and the barn was the only place I’ve ever been scared of the dark. I remember some filthy-minded conversations, stealing our respective parents’ porn, and the fact that it was a friend of his that introduced me to Elfquest. It was also at his birthday party (13th, I think) that I played the most lascivious game of Truth or Dare that I can remember… Ah, Kate. Never meant to be, I think, but it was fun I was 14, at the time. Last I heard, Cody was working at a gas station in GP, but that was at least seven years ago.

Eric… How to explain Eric? This was the first friendship I ever flat-out ended. Eric could be a good guy, but mostly he was… Well, I didn’t like the person I was when he was around. It’s hard to quantify. He did some bad things to someone that was a close family friend, and that more or less ended things right there. I’m curious where he’s at, now. I haven’t heard anything about him in years. I can only hope that, flawed as his father may have been, he takes after dad and not his mother.

Dennis and DJ — Never really close. See Daniel, above, for the nature of this friendship. Still, they were good guys. I’ve bumped into both of them a couple of times since graduating, and I gather they’re doing well. It’s been probably five years since I saw either of them, but I still wonder.

Ryan was a pain in the ass. We lived together for a while, but he was … well, he was like me, sans moral compass. Which is not to say I was perfect those days, either, but all the same, I had an idea that some of the things I was doing were wrong. When it came to respect for others’ property, he’s about as low as it goes.

Shaun was one of my oldest friends. From a common interest in Dungeons and Dragons, through years of geekly association, we were friends for almost a decade. We kind of drifted apart. He lives in Edmonton here, last time I heard he was working for Telus, and has possibly as many as two children. I don’t know what happened, to be honest. First we were friends, then we were not. It was a weird enough situation that I still (to this day) am not 100% sure that it wasn’t him that destroyed my apartment in GP.

Now that I’m in Edmonton, there’s been a veritable whirlwind of brief friendships, barely quickened from mere acquaintances. So many people in a bar crowd stand out for a moment, maybe flirt, maybe hang out, maybe sleep together, and then they recede into the morass. I’m thinking Lindsey, Jess, Candace (Amber, I suppose), Shane, Andi…

I know that some of these have meant more to me than they did to the other person. I find myself constantly fighting the urge to call and cling to the friends I have — I know that people have social obligations that take more time than mine do — having a small circle of friends will lead to that. Still, I like the people in this group now.

Time will tell, of course. It always does.

I have had a few people ask me for ideas, so I figured I’d just put them out here as a suggestion or three.

Yes, it’s a swaglist. Sue me, it’s my website.

(On a related note, by the way, Char and Simon will be getting posting setup at Morruz when they take off. So you’ll all have to read it for their travels, too. I hope that Simon will post there, with a link over from his usual haunts, so that the travel docs can be kept together.)

Anyhoo.

So, there’s a few techie things that I’ll get out of the way ASAP. I’m looking for a Microsoft Bluetooth (wireless) mouse. I’m also looking for some kind of USB2 external hard drive in the medium-large range. Nothing insane. Last, but not least, I’m interested in a couple of computer games. For Windows (sad, but I installed Windows on the laptop just this weekend. I’m a sucker for techie playthings, what can I say). The games are HalfLife 2, and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Heh.

Books are cool, too, of course. I’m low on literature, despite Amy’s best efforts to swamp me

Anyway, that’s about it for the technolust. I don’t know why people keep saying I’m hard to buy for, since I usually make it pretty clear what I want.

Ye heavenly hosts, I am undermotivated today.

According to my spell checker, “undermotivated” is not a word.

I really should be working on homework, doing laundry, or maybe even just calling a friend and having lunch. Why I’m not doing this is a bit of a mystery. I shouldn’t lack energy, but I sure do.

Maybe I’ll read some more. I finally picked up The Da Vinci Code, since Char bought herself a copy of the paperback a week ago, and just finished it.

See? This is the kind of thing of which blogging nightmares are made.

I could follow Simon’s advice, but I suspect that if I started talking about how frustrating it was trying to implement a custom SAML assertion verification using open-source solutions in a WebSphere app serving environment, and how I find myself staring at code samples until my eyes feel like they’re going to start bleeding, while the deadlines that we have for delivering this solution creep up on us quickly…

Runon sentences cannot do it justice.

Yeah, or something like that, anyway.

It’s increasingly obvious to me that I need to find something that I’m passionate about to write about. The “Here’s what’s new in my life” format has its place, and will never truly leave these pages, but I don’t know that it has the mileage to make it.

At any rate, this is more of a “ping” to let you all know I’m not dead, I haven’t forgotten the blog, and I plan to write more, soon.

Oh…

And Apple just released a mechanism whereby my MacBook will be able to run Windows. Games, games, games!

Heh. That one was for Char.

So where am I at?

Oh, this isn’t going to be a “life story” sort of post. It’s more of a corny way of saying “Here’s what I’ve been up to over the last week.”

Char and I have been doing well, thanks for asking.

I’ve seen some pretty funny theatre in the last 24 hours, and a well-written play not too long before. The former is, of course, Die Nasty, and the latter is a Stuart Lemoine piece called The Velvet Shock. The play was enjoyable. A bit dark in humour, which I like, and with a hint of a happy, romantic ending. And a talented cast, bolstered in no small part by a skilled (and attractive!) supporting actress in the role of the niece.

I’ve come to a conclusion that, practically speaking, there is one thing that irks me more than anything else when dealing with friends. I don’t mind if plans change, and someone can’t do something with me that was planned. That’s cool. But in this age of mobile and ubiquitous communication, for christ’s sake, call me. Just dial a damned number and say “Sorry, Chris, I can’t make it to [thing].” Is it that bloody hard?

Grrr…

I just realized that the above complaint was the blog post that had been tickling about my head for the last day and a half. Glad to get that out of my system.

So, no big plans, really. I think I’m going to investigate writing my first serious OS X program, to do some bookkeeping and synchronization of my pair of ITunes libraries. Just metadata, I think, but you never know… I might get ambitious.

Having an attack of confidence is great.

I checked my mark rankings in CS 313 yesterday, and discovered that — contrary to my expectations — I’m #6 in the class of 35. It’s still not great, but it’s tolerable. So I feel better about that.

I’ve had a week to poke around at my new toy, and I must say, I like it. It’s fast, it’s pretty, and it has a nice set of tools that just… work. Video playback is still a work in progress, but I already knew that.

Looks good, though.

In other news, the travelers are returning soon. We’re looking forward to having them back.

Char’s mom is visiting.

‘bout it, really.

There is something fundamentally fucked up about the idea of going out — in Edmonton — and playing disc golf on December 28th. This is not natural. It is, however, kind of nice.

So, the season of … well, whatever the season is of, to you … is come and mostly gone. Family was saw, presents sent and presented. I think that the Go board I got from Simon, along w/ the Calvin and Hobbes collection from Char are pretty much the standouts of the lot. Thanks, though, to all for the neato things. I hope my own gifts were appreciated as well. Surprisingly, the whole “giving” part of all of this is the best for me. Don’t get me wrong; I love getting stuff, too, but there’s something just fun about picking just the right gift for people.

In other news, it seems that work is not going to call me in over the week. This is bleeding great, as it means I can, um, work on some work-related programming

Ye gods, I’ve got strange ideas of “fun.”

For those who are into politics: Vote Conservative, damn it. Green is an acceptable second choice. Contemptible actions such as A) voting Liberal because you’re blind, deaf, and just plain dumb, therefore missing the rampant corruption, dishonesty, and arrogance of the last twelve years, or B) voting Liberal ‘strategically’, because Stephen Harper is just soo-o-o scary will result in… well, you getting the government you deserve. The problem is, if you do that, I get the government you deserve, too, and I deserve a better one. So get your shit together!

This rant brought to you by procrastination.