Go Vote on November 2nd

It's funny and sad...

I keep trying to leave someone alone and in peace, without even mentioning their name even on a weekly basis, but they keep trying to harass me and get under my skin. It's a shame really because I once wished the best of fortunes to this person. I recently came to understand they were moving on with their life and I was happy for them, but I just got yet another negative message from them. It's sad, really, that I'm not even the source of their anger but they won't let me live in the peace I've been giving them.

Nonetheless, I will forever pity them, and pray that they can let go of their anger. And I still wish the best for them.

"Six Feet Deep" or "How's School Coming Along?"

I think I mentioned that this semester gave me a much heavier workload than the previous two semesters... If not, this should give you an idea of how bad it is:

This coming Friday I have a test in Japanese. I also have to do all remaining homework for this chapter in Japanese, which amounts to 3 workbook pages including some translating of audio clips.
Over the weekend I have to read an entire chapter on Islam and write a paper on it for Monday.
Also this weekend, I have to watch at least two Akira Kurosawa films, come up with a thesis for and write a 5 page paper for my film class for Tuesday.
Oh, and I also have to study at least the last two chapters from my Japanese book, probably more, for an oral interview I have on Wednesday.

Stressed? Me? Nah...

Just Another Day Near Chrysler's HQ

On Monday afternoon, while driving home from Oakland University, I saw a SUV with New Jersey plates that had the absolute worst paint job I had ever seen. Now, considering I know of a Dodge Ram in southern Los Angeles county that's red with tacky flames painted over every square inch of it, chrome flames placed on the windows and tire flaps, this has to be pretty bad.Think zebra, but instead of stripes, it had lots of little swirling patterns all over the entire car. I didn't really think any thing of it except that the paint job hid the shape of the vehicle pretty well because you had an urge to look away at once. I just thought someone had pretty bad taste.

But today, I realized that it was something else. It really was done to make you look away. I came to this conclusion as I drove to school today, and found myself behind a sedan painted in an extremely similar passion that I correctly guessed was getting off I-75 at Chrysler's headquarters. This one had a Michigan manufacturer's plate, and I took a picture of it from behind. I was driving so I don't have any good pictures of this vehicle, and certainly none that show it from the side, but I can say that I didn't recognize the vehicle's design. (I'll post the picture after I edit the license plate numbers out to be on the safe side.) This car may have been made by another company, but I know for sure that it's not a Chrysler/Dodge model that I'm familiar with; and I consider myself a fan of Chrysler & Dodge vehicles. Now, what I think this vehicle may be is a prototype or concept car for possible future production. It's not uncommon for new models undergoing road tests to have unusual paint jobs making them as unidentifiable as possible, but I've never before seen one that actually made the car painful to look at.

Given the chances of running into a single car with that kind of paint job are pretty slim, I'd have to say there's something more significant than bad taste for seeing two cars in the same week in the same area. Now, it is entirely possible that both are owned by the same individual, but I think the more plausible explanation is that they're new vehicle models.

ugh

To say the least, this semester is going to be a bitch. It looks like I have writing assignments due every week, and there doesn't appear to be much opportunity to catch up... I asked for this...

A Funny Moment Long Past...

About 15 years ago, during the run up for the '96 Presidential elections, I was working at a little place called Scantron Quality Computers, a relatively recently purchased addition to the Scantron Corporation. Yes, THAT Scantron Corporation. My boss at the time had gotten to be a pretty good friend of mine, and we worked with an older lady that was a little eccentric to say the least. My boss was and is a Libertarian and a vehement Harry Browne supporter and had been giving information about him to our coworker's daughter for her homework.

Now, on the day of the incident, he and I had been talking about girls all day, which celebrity women we thought were attractive, and which of our co-workers as well. Our coworker had gone to lunch, leaving us to discuss more in detail what kind of girls we like.

While I don't know what our last words were, she reappeared, more or less talking to herself, the asked "Got any Harry Browne ones?"

Tech support calls weren't answered for about an hour afterward, and much of the company came to find out what we were laughing at.

Getting Psyched Up!

It's hard for me to describe how excited and terrified I am to be going back to school in a couple of weeks. It will be the first time I've taken college classes for two consecutive school years since the mid 90s! And it will be the first time that I'll start the year with a lot of pressure riding my shoulders.

Last school year, I did well enough to make the Dean's List, as well as be invited to two separate honors societies. While no one is telling me that I have to repeat that level of performance, I'm holding myself to it because A) I'm not going to half-ass do anything, and B) I'm the one paying the bills on this college trip in the end. While Oakland University isn't the University of Michigan or Michigan State University, it sure as hell isn't cheap. (To all my California friends that complain about $26 per credit hour, lets just say I wish I had been paying that 15 years ago here in Michigan! )

I'm excited to go hang out with my school friends, learn more Japanese, and maybe to impress the Cinema Studies program director enough for him to refer me to some of the movie studios opening up here. But there's a ton of work to be done, and I'm more than ready to get started on it!

To San Diego Brent, Stalker and Confused Reader

Brent, I'm not exactly sure why you think it's your life's mission to not only continue to harass our mutual ex, but now me... But you're obviously not over her like you claim, and I have no interest in you, your comments, your friends, or your family. Go away. Lori said it, and now I'm saying it.

P.S. I didn't even bother to read your comments. I hope you'll get the point.
P.P.S. And yes, I see that you visit my blog every day, just looking for the acknowledgment I'm now giving you. I hope it sets you free, so that you can go get the mental help you so obviously need.
P.P.P.S. You can keep posting comments, but they're going to continue to be deleted without being read. Take the hint, even if you won't get some help.

Sidebar: A Word (or Thousand) on Cookies

In the beginning, circa 1969, there was the Internet. And it was good. But it lacked a lot of features and capabilities that you and I now take for granted. There were no streaming videos or music. There was no Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or Google. There was... the command prompt.

Eventually people decided that they wanted to communicate with one another on the Internet, and so the powers that be brought forth gopher, talk, and electronic mail. While these too were good, they weren't great. And so they evolved.

Many years passed until someone had the idea that communicating effectively on the Internet was too difficult, and he brought forth the Hyper Text Mark-up Language we now call HTML, and joined it with the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol we all now know and love as http (note the lowercase acronym). While He certainly brought forth the modern era of the Internet, it became forever known by someone else's name: The Web.

And it too was good.

The web allowed us to share our pictures, and our ideas rapidly, and it allowed us to do online banking, and so many other countless things, but it was flawed. In the deepest bowels of http, there was no way to keep track of exactly what someone had already done. There was no sense of... "state." You see, http is a stateless protocol; each transaction is as individual as you and I, and there was no way to be say that Bob requested a box on one page, and that Bob has a box on another in a computer understandable method.

This was bad.

Then, the Lord, our God, gave to his servants Kristol of Bell Labs/Lucent Tech and Montulli of Netscape Communications his commandment: Thou shalt write and implement RFC 2109, HTTP State Management Mechanism, and thou shalt call it "cookie" for I like cookies. (Ok, so maybe those weren't His exact words.)

The early Web Users were amazed by what could be done with cookies, and they became afraid. "What of our privacy?" they shouted. "Are you watching what I'm doing online?" they cried. And they despaired. A year or so later, they got over it, and the Web as we know it was more or less born.

But still, in this day and age, some do not understand what these cookies are! Tis true! For this reason, I shall enlighten you on this page rather than my more mundane PHP Addicts site.

In the simplest of terms, a cookie is a small amount of text information that is stored in your computer's web browser by a web site you're visiting, and is sent back to that web site when you visit either the same or different web page. Most people have noticed the benefits of a cookie without even knowing that cookies were at play. For instance, when you log into a web site, say your bank or a dating web site, they'll set a cookie containing some user account information. When you're done with the site, you typically log out, and in many cases, the web site's programmer has decided to delete the cookie at that point. Some sites, like Amazon.com don't necessarily delete all the cookies or all information within a cookie; that's why sometimes when you go back to them, it greets you by name and shows you information specific for you.

This is part of the reason people panicked back in the early days of cookies, and why it periodically flares up again. Cookies offer a powerful way of keeping track of your users and giving them information that pertains to them. They can also be used to cater advertisements to them, or enable other capabilities. For instance, it's entirely possible that you can stay logged in on a web site for years between visits simply because a cookie was set when you logged into it the last time. Take that dating site example I mentioned earlier: if a web programmer decided to do so, he or she could encrypt the user's unique identifier plus a  non-password check value into a bit of text and set that as a cookie on the browser, setting the cookie's expiration date to something far down the road. Then, if the user comes back to the web page at a later date, lets say 2 years for the sake of argument, they'd be automatically logged into the web site without even so much as typing their password. Now, if the user had intentionally or accidentally made that web page their browser's home page, the very action of starting their web browser would trigger the login process on that site.

This sounds like fiction, but it's actually very real. To show exactly how real it is, the major dating site Match.com sets cookies on their users' browsers to allow them to access the site without going through the log-in process unless the user logged out during their previous visit. Want another real world example? Then how about Facebook: if you don't log out of Facebook when you're done with it on a given day, it's entirely possible to remain logged in for days or weeks without visiting the site again.

How is this possible? Well, it's simple really. Part of the process of setting cookies, allows you to set an expiration date. By default, if no expiration date is set, then the cookie will expire and be deleted either when the web browser is closed or the next time it's started. That type of cookie is called a session cookie, because it lasts for one browser session. There's no limit on how far in the future a cookie's expiration date can be set. It can be a few seconds or minutes or a few decades if the web programmer chooses. The user can affect the cookie's lifetime by actively deleting it from the browser (through a variety of means), enabling a privacy mode on their browser that clears some or all cookies when the browser is closed, switching to a different browser, using a different computer, and sometimes through various software programs or operating system features, bugs, or options. In practical terms, it's not usually a benefit to set a cookie to expire more than one or two years from the time of a user's visit to a given web site because they may buy a completely new computer in that time. However, should they do that, then come back and visit your site with their old computer, the cookie may still be sitting there, unexpired, and return to active duty, automatically logging them in to that site without their permission or knowledge.

That's just the way it is with cookies. And it's good. Mostly.

Tired and Lost...

Like the title says, right now I'm feeling tired and lost. I've been living more or less day to day for so long that I'm not sure how I manage to keep going at all.  I've got visions of the future I want for myself, but I'm not entirely sure it's possible for me to get there. I miss having my friends around me, I miss having a significant other. I miss my son. I also miss that part of my soul that I took for granted: the creative spark that let me write stories like a mad man.

I can still write very well, and I believe I can come up with ingenious story ideas with plots and subplots that flow so well it's hard to believe I'm making them up as I go along, but I fear that I've lost the ability to just put those ideas on paper, weaving them as they come out. It's not just because I'm out of practice, there was just a fire that I've lost some where along the way to where I am now...

Ironically, the creative talent that I fear I've lost has been replaced by programming logic I wouldn't mind losing... I've been surviving on my talents with computers for more than 10 years now, but they've never really lead me to a successful career. Just when I thought I had settled into a company I could stay with forever, Be Incorporated, they went and died on me. So I found myself floating from company to company between years of unemployment, and yet here I am working on a project that might help pay my bills if I'm lucky.

As I mentioned on my development web site, Bad Luck Software, I'm working on an Android application that will allow people to enter the price of gas at a local gas station. Yeah, that's real genius right? Well, the good part, the part that I hope people will like, is that as people enter gas prices everywhere, hopefully on a daily basis, people will be able to find the lowest gas prices in their area. And maybe, just maybe, if they find my little app useful enough, they'll donate a few dollars to support my work. Maybe.

The app is nearly done... I'm in the process of trying to link the app to the central database, and then I have a few more items to polish up. After that, I have the not so insignificant task of convincing people to use it without pre-existing data. At the moment, I have no fucking idea how I'm going to do that when I can't even get my friends and family to acknowledge that they have Android phones so they could possibly help me out... I don't want to pester anyone into using something to help me (and others) out, but I don't think I have any other choice...

I'm really tired of trying to make a better life for myself only to fail. I'm tired of being alone. I'm tired of bad shit happening to me. But I'm praying and hoping that I'm on God's path, and that on this path I'll find that place I'm supposed to be so I won't be lost any more.