I managed to cram in a whopping hour or two of sleep tonight. I’m so far beyond exhausted that I’m having trouble holding my head up. I’m at that level of exhaustion that makes you feel like puking. And yet, my eyes refuse to stay shut. It usually starts to become unbearable at right around midnight or one o’clock. The voices in my head start swirling and talking faster. I can’t seem to hold a thought, and at the same time, I’m trying to hold a hundred different ones. I’m not sure why I’m having so much trouble tonight. Probably because I’m feeling vulnerable, and in turn, my self-destructive side thinks that I welcome the distraction from my problems. I don’t. I just hate it when people point out my faults, insecurities, and when they make it blatantly obvious in the ways that I’m failing them. And really, it’s my fault for failing them. It is. But there are ways of communicating that, and there are ways not to. So tonight I’m sitting on the couch, watching bad B movies and waiting for sunrise to come rescue me from myself. The wait is always long and the night always drags

Continue readingAnd in every woman’s man is a little boy that died

For over a week I’ve had nothing useful to say and to be honest, that’s probably a good thing. When I write, it’s generally when things are going wrong or things are bad or I’m just needing a place to rant and rave about the stupidity of others. In that sense, it has been a pretty decent nine or so days. So let’s talk about fear. And not just regular fear, but irrational fear. You know what that is. Everyone does and has some kind of fear that controls them. A fear that consumes them in some manner. A fear that would eat you alive if you hadn’t learned of some way (healthy or not) to deal with it. We tend to calls these types of fears “phobias”, even though a lot of fears wouldn’t normally be associated with a phobia. Merriam-webster describes a phobia as such: an exaggerated, usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation. Now think about that for a second. Have you ever been afraid of something and known, abstractly at least, that it was an irrational fear? Of course you have, and that qualifies as a phobia. Afraid of

Continue readingAshes and diamonds, foe and friend, we were all equal in the end

I wrote a blog entry a few days ago (see the blog entry just before this one) talking about how easy it is to make a big mistake in programming, and how one little character can screw everything up. I was talking about Microsoft’s latest patch to Internet Explorer because, as it turned out, they had added a single extra ‘&’ symbol on one line of code, and it ended up being a security vulnerability. Well, guess what happened to me today? I deal with some of the programming aspects of a search engine at work. There exists a search box, attached to a piece of code that generates a URL and sends data to the user. We noticed that when a person searched from one area of the program it worked fine, but from another, the results were empty. This was a bit of a WTF moment. Looking at the URL’s just a little while ago, I discovered the problem. I wanted to scream. Here are the URL’s, I’ve shortened them down from their insanely long length, down to these short lines below, just so you can see the insanity I’m dealing with. The Non-working URL: &site=PROD_oregon_IMT|PROD_TRG_IMT&output=xml_no_dtd The working

Continue readingIf I had a dollar each time you walked away from me, I’d be the richest man in the world

For the most part, my job is one of programmer and general systems tinkerer and repairer. I ran across an interesting write up of the latest Internet Explorer fix issued by Microsoft and, I have to say, it’s pretty much the archetype of what programmers like myself deal with every day. Okay, so if you haven’t heard, Microsoft released a patch for Internet Explorer 8 to resolve an exploit. What was the problem with the code? What huge mistake did some unnamed and faceless programmer make in the process of creating the code for Internet Explorer? He added an extra ampersand. One. A single ‘&’ symbol, and all their code came crashing down. I’ll explain but it’s going to get pretty geeky here in a second. Here’s the code in question: hr = pStream->Read((void*)&pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL); And here is the resulting code after the fix: hr = pStream->Read((void*)pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL); The extra ‘&’ character– which I’ve highlighted in the first line of vulnerable code– causes the code to write data, of size cbSize, to the address of the pointer to the array, pbArray, rather than write the data into the array itself. And that pointer is on the stack. Big problem. This

Continue readingIf you have to leave, I’m begging you please, go all the way to Mexico

You can be angry all you want, and that’s the problem; when you really consider life and the things around you, it seems inevitable that anger follows. Today I’m left bereft of hope and solace, and I have no idea why. It seems the world is full of nothing but broken promises and broken truths that fail to measure up. Why is it that nobody can ever seem to say what they mean, do what they say, and just leave it at that? Why is it filled with half truths, and “things I probably won’t do”, and “things I have no intention of doing”. What the fuck does intention have to do with anything? I have no intention of dying, does that mean I’m going to magically live forever? Why can’t it be, “I will not.” or “I will.” or “Yes” or “No”? Why does everything in between have to be so fucking complicated, and why does everyone feel the need to tread within the gray area to their hearts content? I was thinking about something I wrote, and it fits my day and my mood today. I’m posting it here because, well, I’ve got nothing left to write that

Continue readingCures you whisper make no sense, drift gently into mental illness

Today marks the 40 year anniversary of Apollo 11’s famous launch. 40 years ago, three men embarked on what would be an accomplishment unsurpassed in terms of technology and sheer intellectual prowess. There are times when I honestly wish I had been alive to see the first steps on the moon, to hear those first words spoken on the surface, and to see those two men (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin) hopping along like oversized rabbits thousands of miles away. There’s a website being run by the Kennedy Library, and on it, they’re providing a simulation of the moon landing in real time. What that means is, they’re reliving the entire launch, trip, broadcast, landing, and return, all via a webcast/website. I encourage you all to check it out. Not only is it neat, but it’s about as close to actually reliving the experience as most of us younger generation will ever get. Here’s the website: http://wechoosethemoon.org/