Is there nothing more disruptive yet appallingly belittled as the common cold? I speak of course as a current sufferer, and in fact have been suffering for nearly a week now. Seven days of coughing, sneezing and flipping between periods of chills and sweats; what a bother! But I do feel its end to be near, and thence to freedom! Freedom, yay, and more, for I shall be, as of January 29th, moving to the King East area of Toronto, known for its high end furniture stores, the St. Lawrence market and, uh, proximity to the Distillery district. I drove past my building Saturday to be met by the soul-crushing, jaw-dropping scene of a condo highrise being constructed across the street, perfectly set up to obstruct my view of the city's sunset. I do not condone senseless violence; which is why I entirely condone myself blasting that monstrosity to smithereens, weekly if need be. I haven't the technology, the skill, nor the materiel, but surely my cause is righteous.

Until that time, in between sniffs I have been packing and dismantling furniture. My place is more than usually unkempt. Not many hours until I move so this is definitely the time for upheaval.

Other news? I have been dating rather heavily. More than that I shan't elaborate, though I will say that my wallet has never been lighter.

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meditated for 15 minutes, involuntarily opening my eyes. Not today, the other evening.

if a task I need to do occurs to me, I need to write it down or else it will haunt me (through remembering it) later.

wow I am really bad with updates, for which I apologize. I'm just.. too boring and busy to talk about anything. I saw Fantastic Mr Fox, that was primo. I don't have any stories to share, other than I recently realized that I am horribly, disfiguratively broke. Work is totally kicking my ass. So yeah, job and money stress await me in 2010. Been online dating, which I guess means I'm out there and meeting people, sometimes face to face! I bought Agricola and have yet to play it, although Settlers has been getting some action.

I am taking today off, so I'm typing in my pajamas, a bit of free time before I have to get ready and get out there. The weather is a cool -6C, but it'll get up to zero later. Christmas and Boxing day are supposed to be 4 and 3 degrees, which is rather nutty.

Oh yes, some friends and I worked on a clinical survey website, which you're welcome to try. The questions are there but the layout isn't 100% finished so don't bother pointing out if the images don't line up in your browser or some such; we're working on it. The link: Am I Gay?

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Ok, yup, I bought a place. It still hasn't quite sunk in yet. I mean, I believe it to be true and am slowly (slowly) warming up to the idea but until I actually move in it's still a rather unreal thing for me. Certainly, it is nice to not have to flip through ugly, ugly housing listings. Now, paperwork and all the tedium that it brings are my daily plate. Oh, and financial strains, indeed and oh yes.

Speaking of strains, my freakin' harddrive died! And it would seem I lost everything -- old photos (more recent ones are on flickr and at work), shows, movies.. and all my saved games! My personal notes on stuff. Gone. Well, not GONE gone.. presumably they're in statis, comatose on a few drive platters, locked by a $1k key ie. a data retrieval service. It's a frakking nightmare I tells ya! Although to be truthful I am getting more reading done at home; nearly halfway through The Crossing.

Saw a couple movies recently, A Serious Man, the new Coen brothers film, and The Road. The first quietly delighted me, the second made my blood boil; it seemed like a flagrant slap to those that had read the book. Looking back I suppose it's made the story more palatable to those who've not read it, but I still think it unnecessary and an insult to viewers. But ah well.

Winter is here with a frosty backfist to the cheeks. Bicycling has become officially a painful thing to do, so I've been taking the streetcar for the past couple of days. Gives me a chance to catch up on "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe" podcast. HOLY COW it's -9 outside? That's Mother Nature for ya: turn around and she's kicking you in the ballsack.

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Well it's a fine how-do-you-do; my other memory stick died! For those keeping track, that's the second of two 1GB OCZ sticks dying. At least, I think it's the memory that's gone bad -- I suppose it's entirely possible that the motherboard sockets are gone, which would be quite the pain. On top of the cost of replacing the motherboard, there's the installation process. So yeah, I'm really hoping it's the sticks themselves that have gone. Strange, it's so quiet in my apartment when the computer is off. Is this how it must've been, back in the 19, uh, 1910s? I remember as a kid disappointed when in a house that didn't have a computer or TV.

The reason for rebooting my computer, for indeed it was otherwise working fine before I turned it off, was that I'd been fiddling with the webserver and needed to update my HOSTS file. Yes, fiddling with the webserver because I'm getting familiar with MVC and in particular, Symfony, a PHP MVC framework. Inspired, you might say, as I've been learning about MVC at work. That and jQuery, a nifty JavaScript library. Oh I am learning a lot, reminding me of my university days when faced with reading textbooks and scanning articles; mindnumbing stuff. Maybe my brain just gets full? Whatever it is, I get tired at work, head-droopingly tired. Thankfully I have started doing some real, productive work which keeps me awake through stress ie. concern that I didn't actually learn anything and just slept a lot.

Looking at real estate listings is a lot like on-line dating -- you flip through descriptions and pictures, musing what'd be like to live there/date them. After you've seen a few places (met a few faces), you get an idea of what to expect based on the profiles. And so you act less often, growing tired and not feeling the need to see what they would really be like. Oh sure, you believe that there's one out there for you, and so you keep looking but the day after day of mediocre or unsuitable (or simply totally out of my league) matches does drain one's will, leaving one to compare them with the ones that got away.

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The product I'd been working on has finally been released. And yet, after all that toil and trouble, I do not feel much better than before. Perhaps I'd grown used to the stress of a deadline looming over me. Indeed, I seem to recall saying something to that effect before but cannot be bothered to look that up now. Having it out there in a mostly usable form is a relief, certainly.

As a sort of reward for myself I purchased, and have since played, Dragon Age, the new BioWare RPG. Ah, that age old system of pausing battles, telling all your little dudes what spells to cast or action to take, unpausing to let them do it, and then pausing again. Artificial turn-based combat: delicious. Reminds me of my experiences with Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate, which is a good thing.

No news on the housing front. I'm averaging about 1 acceptable property a month, so it's slow going. I'm in no particular hurry and do my best not to get worked up about it.

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2010/01/24 growli It's not "common" as in pedestrian. It's "common" because we all share this malediction of an affliction, from high-born to low.
2009/12/10 dangerman in sgh wow! congrats on your new place!
2009/12/10 Kyle Lahnakoski Whatever's use of the word "efficiency" really means danger! I want to protecting myself from more than one point of failure. Rebuilding a terabyte will take all day, and during that time a failure will be catastrophic. Yes, I am paranoid.
2009/12/10 whatever Raid 6 is completely useless in a home environment. Raid 6 provides double disk protection by doing pairity calculations on both horizontal and diagonal directions, and requires 2 extra drives for pairity. If you have a drive distribution that's larger than 8 drives, then raid 6 makes sense as a larger grouping has an exponentially greater possibility for failure. if you really wanted to maximize your efficiency then use zfs on a solaris system, connected to a storage array with raid 4 or raid dp. that will allow instant snapshots, and protect against any single failures.
2009/12/10 Hwan Sure! I had actually given thought to getting a Drobo, but I've heard a lot of mixed reviews about those things. I just like it because I don't need to learn much.
2009/12/10 Kyle Lahnakoski You got to get yourself hardware raid6! I have a drive failure at least every year, and it has saved me many times. I also have a separate machine for nightly backup. I am developing a peer2peer, fully encrypted, raided, backup. This way I, and others, do not have to resort to complicated and expensive setups just to get reliable backup. It will be ready in the spring. Want to be a guinea pig?
2002/01/24 Hwan Oh. Your. God. http://www.neatorama.com/2009/11/16/gerbil-shirt/
2009/11/10 Growli That blog post reminded me of Coop work term reports: Technical and tedious, but something to be proud of nonetheless.
2009/09/29 Hwan I was outbid. But I also didn't go over my self-imposed limit. I am content to have been in the running, apparently being very close. I may have more news tomorrow. Time for Civ3, now.
2009/09/23 girl You have this love/hate relationship with alcohol. Have you examined where the desire to drink comes from? Perhaps from the lack of anchovy pizzas in your life? :)