One idiot's blog

Variation on a Common Dream

You ever have those dreams where you had to go back to high school?

I have them all the time, and I had one last night, but last night's one seemed somehow different.

See, I wasn't 0x23 years old in the dream, at least not at the outset. It was all somehow perfectly normal that I was going back to finish high school. Not the way it usually is, where someone went digging back into the records and found out, after all these years, that you were missing something, and would need a refresher, or something like that. I was perfectly accepting of this, not fretting "I'll be so much older than all the other students", because, at the time, I was not aware of being older than your normal high school student.

Something was wrong though. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I thought to myself, "it feels like it's been so long since my last semester¹. Why does it feel that way?" So I was walking to school to register, I think, with a bunch of other people, of whom I remember one definitely adult white woman and an Asian kid about 7 or 8. And, as so often happens in dreams, the walk up the hill to the school was rather labored and not progressing the way it should; I wanted to blame it on the older people or the little kid, but I wasn't sure I didn't find it a little tiring myself.

Eventually made it to the school. It was time for me to go up to one of the desks and register, but I was still hesitant. Something was wrong. I wanted to ask somebody whether I was really supposed to be doing this, but I didn't know who to ask. Soon, my cousin Rob was near me, possibly signing up his daughter (who, in real life, is in college). He said, unsarcastically, "well, you have a bachelor's degree; I think that should be good enough." A bachelor's degree! That's right, I remember! That's at least part of what I've been doing since the last time I remember taking a high school course. "Hey, thanks, Rob". I think I woke up at that point.

I got myself a little stressed out at work yesterday, because I've spent weeks working on a single bug, and making just about zero progress, and I just don't know what the hell I'm doing. Tuesdays are team meeting days, and I didn't want to show up and say, "I'm no closer to fixing the bug than I was a week ago". I actually decided to go to bed at least an hour earlier than usual, and get up about two hours earlier than usual, just so I could get as much done as possible -- and ask questions of knowledgeable people -- before the meeting.

I mention all this in the same post because I suspect there's some sort of connection between my stress and me having this particular dream. Hell if I know what it is, though.

[1] One additional thing that's odd about this is that my high school didn't have semesters, it had quarters. The quarters were really just grading periods; you took the same classes for a whole year.

Tears Upon the Fields of Soybeans

I've been going back-and-forth on this issue of whether to go biodiesel in my new 2004 VW Golf TDI GLS with 5-speed manual transmission. Several days ago, I started re-reading the fine print, and came up with: there's still a risk, in that if there is a problem, the dealer mechanics may be quicker to lay the blame on biodiesel, but maybe that's not that great a risk. And, though I swear I knew this before, it somehow became clear to me: this is different from voiding the warranty. A fuel-related problem can equally be caused by bad "dino-diesel" as by bad bio-diesel, though it is probably the case that problems caused by bad dino-diesel, if they are common enough, are just considered to be problems with the cars themselves, whereas if there are problems that are unique to biodiesel-powered cars, even if they do not suffer from the aforementioned dinodiesel problems, the blame is put entirely on the fuel.

So anyway, I just discovered that my car probably has the new "Pumpe Düse" fuel injector technology, which, according to tdiclub.com, is not recommended for use with biodiesel. Period.

Damn.

Well, the car's still fast.

Yahoo's left hand knoweth not...

While regular Yahoo freeloaders automatically have a 100MB storage limit, it would take a special effort for a Yahoo Plus member like me to get that same limit, so perhaps the above graphic makes sense after all. Funny how I'm not inclined to find out more about that.

How many links from Google

Matt Howie invented this new game. So I guess it's time to play. Start from Google's home page. Clicking only on links (no searches -- Matt disccovered the game when he was surfing for a while without a keyboard), see if you can get to your home page or blog. The most likely results will follow the first three or four steps I took.

Here goes:
Google
"more>>"
Blogger
about (at bottom)
buy us (in middle of page)
Evan Williams (in article)
October 2003 (archive list in sidebar on right)
Jeremy Zawodny's Blog
blog home page
August 2003 (again, monthly archive listing in sidebar on right)
12:00 P.M. (under "Yahoo! Korea Blog Service Launched")
Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Korea Launches Blog Service. Ah, the sweet power of Trackback. I also left several comments on that page, but I linked them to my homepage, so there's another level to go through if you took that route.

If anyone suggests that using trackbacks or comments created by you yourself on other people's blogs is not a valid way to play the game, they will be vigorously ignored.

I suppose the real test of whether you're part of the literati is whether you, like Haughey, can make a (reasonably short) path without resorting to your own comments, anyone else's comments, trackbacks, or, if you really want to shine, without resorting to the archives of anyone in the chain.

Hyperfine Writing

Damn, defective yeti is funny. Go read this link right now.

More News from the Charlestowne North Front

Remember back in November when they wanted to raise everyone's rent by 30-55%? With the help of the Greenbelt City Council, we got them to back out of that, but they are up to some new shenanigans. Last month, several people got their payments posted to the wrong apartments. Rather than inform those tenants that they appeared to be in arrears, they just quietly waited until the 15th, then posted court summons on the doors of those tenants to begin eviction proceedings. The court dates were two days after the date the tenants received those notices. We're all flabbergasted. They did the same thing to another woman this month -- not crediting to the wrong apartment, but the dragging-into-court without any prior notice thing -- and that was also partly due to bad bookkeeping on their part.

So we've all been busy trying to work up a letter to send to them, with signatures from the tenants in the building. That's what I've been busy with lately.

Happy July 14th

Hey, looks like I got the sentiment in a little earlier in the day than last year.

Goodbye, New Car Smell

Hello, Old Car Smell.

I don't even remember opening the car window at any point during the drive home yesterday, but when I came out to the car this morning, I found the driver's side window open. And of course, it rained last night. At least the seat wasn't really wet when I got in, and amazingly, no one stole my Prokofiev 2-CD set that was sitting in the passenger seat in plain view! But, as the title indicates, that new-car smell seemed to be gone. All right, I didn't actually smell an old-car smell -- yet. The moisture could probably start something that would turn into a smell, though. The new-car smell had faded enough that you only noticed it on hot days, which today is not, so I may be jumping the gun.

A couple of months ago, the awesomely nice police guy who lives in our apartment building knocked on my door. He had seen my window open in the parking lot, run a check on the license plate, and found my apartment to tell me the window was open. I was floored. Of course, that was my old car, and it didn't rain that night, so big whoop. Where was he yesterday? I now call him the only-mostly-awesomely-nice police guy.

Saving the Planet: The Numbers are In

Well, I've finally had a chance to drive to Pittsburgh and back, giving me something close to a full tank of highway driving to assess my TDI's highway MPG. The result: 48 MPG highway. The EPA highway mileage is 46, so I beat it! A little disappointing, really; I was hoping to break 50. But I did use A/C most of the way, and I guess it's hard to improve on highway mileage when speeds stay relatively constant. Well, I could drive 55 in the 65 MPH zones, but that's not exactly realistic.

Wish I could get a good city driving test, but most of my driving (i.e., to work and back) is done on the highway during non-rush hours.

When I refilled for the first time down in Wallops, I calculated 39 MPG for that tank. About a third of that was the drive to Wallops, and 2/3 was normal driving. Going to Wallops again tomorrow, so I will again be deprived of a chance to have one solid tank's worth of day-to-day driving. Boo-hoo.

Good Mozilla

Isn't it nice of Mozilla to detect that a script may kill the browser? And to give you the option to go ahead with it anyway?

I surfed over to Muslim Access, and Mozilla kept popping that warning up. My first guess is that the script on that site is so bad that I would just never have gotten the page if I hadn't eventually clicked "OK" to abort. Another possibility, I suppose, is that Mozilla's JavaScript engine is slower than IE's. Will I remember to try to check this next time I'm on a computer running IE? Actually, that could be a long time, since the Department of Homeland Security has jumped on the bandwagon of recommending people to switch to a different browser, and I don't especially trust this site.