I’ve spent the last few hours hacking away at a new replacement to the underlying structure of this journal. Nothing major will change to you the readers; I’m just trying to redo the back part of it using PHP to make it run a bit smoother and make changes easier. The two visible changes are that the date that you are currently viewing will not be a link to the left, it will be a black, bold date so you can kind of see where you are in the list. And the better change is that I will be able to put an earlier and later button down at the bottom of the page. The only other noticeable change will be that if you go to the index, it will bring up the newest one, and if you click into older ones, the URL will end in ?date=20030101 or whatever. I don’t think that will be that big of a deal, although if you bookmarked an exact date in the past, that bookmark won’t work anymore. I don’t think that will really be an issue for many people, though.

Working in PHP is pretty cool, although I never sat down and studied it or anything - I just jumped in and tried to dig up stuff on google as I got along. It wasn’t really that frustrating, probably because even with a ten-years-rusty knowledge of C, I can figure out a lot of the syntax. It’s fun to have a small project like this to hack away at. It reminds me of when I first started this journal five - no wait, six - years ago, and I hacked together the indexing program that this new overhaul will probably replace. Although I don’t think I could ever become systematic enough to become a software developer on a professional basis, there is something satisfying about slapping together a piece of code that you actually use to get something done.

Speaking of computers, I got back all of my Commodore stuff yesterday. I have a C-64 that I got from eBay maybe five or six years ago. I haven’t touched it in ages; it was actually still in storage at Marie’s place. But I got it all back, and cabled together the unit and the 1541 drive on my living room floor, running the video into my VCR so it would display on the TV. The keyboard was dirty and a few of the keys wouldn’t work without slamming them a few times, and then they would work too much and print repeated letters. Also, all of my cartridges would not work. But I did get the disk drive running, and got the Ghostbusters game going, which is the only thing I have on floppy. It takes forever to load, and then has the most rudimentary voice samples ever, plus some very cheesy theme music in it. But it was still fun to mess with. Today I got some cleaner at Radio Shack and took apart the keyboard and got it running slightly better, and also got the game cartridges working after I cleaned the contacts. I spent part of the afternoon playing Omega Race and Jupiter Lander, and thinking of almost 20 years ago when I played the same carts on my original C-64.

Very tired, and not much else is up. I saw Matt Pinfield yesterday, in the elevator on the way out of work. I guess there’s a recording studio at the top of our building, run by Phillip Glass. I got into the elevator at work and saw the dude, although he was much shorter than I thought. He was listening on a cell phone and I wasn’t sure if it was him or not, so I waited until he talked, and then I definitely knew it was him. He was talking to someone about a recording session, but I don’t know what band or if he produces or what. I have no idea if he is still a VJ at MTV or not. I just did a search on him, and mostly found sites of people that hate him. Anyway, it was a weird sighting.

It’s been raining all weekend, pouring out. It’s been an incredible non-day and I think it’s time for bed…

The city board voted on rent stabilization rents today, which means that next year, my rent will go up 5.5%. That’s up from 2% last year. On one hand, a lot of people may think this is a huge number, but the landlord association originally wanted it to go up to like 18% or something. So at least at only 5.5%, I won’t have to sublet out my closets to pay my rent. This little scheme is one of about 863 different ways New Yorkers are currently getting screwed over at the current time. Sales tax is up; income tax will be up; grocery costs - up; subway fares - you know it; parking tickets - don’t get a parking ticket if you want to live. Pretty much everything is going through the roof, except of course the quality of life in the city. But I still have a job, so I won’t be moving any time soon.

Speaking of moving and jobs, I had to move cubes for the third time since August 2001. And what makes it slightly more Office Space-esque is that spot #4 is the same as spot #2. Okay, the first move was from our startup home, which was a floor and a penthouse of a building near Penn Station. That was a pleasant commute for the month I was there, because every day I had to step over at least a dozen bums splayed out on the sidewalk of 34th Street. There was a porn store nextdoor, which was convenient. The whole tech staff simultaneously got food poisoning from the Blimpie’s across the street. And someone serial-pissed in the salad bar of the deli right by Penn Station. So it was good to get out of that area, even if it added five subway stops to my ride in. And I’m glad to be tucked away in the back corner of the office again, with a slightly larger cube and a good deal of distance from the marketing/sales types who feel a need to talk on speakerphone constantly. Why the fuck do people do that? Does it make their penis feel bigger or something? Fuck.

Nothing is on TV now, not even stupid reality TV shows. I don’t have cable, except for my bootleg connection. But even so, there’s nothing but summer reruns, or shows too shitty to put on during the regular year. There’s an ER rerun I already saw; a curio clock for $1729.99 on ShopNBC; that horrible science show with Alan Alda (I almost accidentally typed Anal Alda) on 21; ancient ladies wearing chiffron mumus on HSN; a woman’s basketball game (WNBA?) on ESPN2; that stupid extreme Japanese game show on TNN; old people on CSPAN2; Steven Seagall on TBS; a shitty Yankees book for $75 on QVC (“Captures the TRUE history. The OFFICIAL retrospective. He’s talking as if photographs were invented just for this fucking book);catfish fishing on Food Network; I think that’s it.

I took a career test online today and it said I should be a techwriter. Not a rodeo cowboy, or a Navy SEAL, but a fucking techwriter. I don’t know whether I should be happy or sad. Actually I should feel cheated, because this was a plotline in Friends about four years ago.

I spent the day at the USS Intrepid museum. It was a good day, and I finally got to check out the USS Growler, a submarine that’s also at the pier. It is the only deactivated nuclear sub open to the public, and it was neat to walk through it after recently seeing the USS Bowfin in Hawaii. The Growler was commissioned in 1958 as opposed to the Bowfin’s 1943, so some of the stuff looked a bit newer, although it had the same general feel and smell to it. What it did have different was a set of Regulus nuclear missiles, and it was cool to see the little room that was the equivalent of a nuclear missile silo’s launch control center. Going through small subs and their tight quarters with very innovative storage spaces always makes me wish I could do similar stuff with my apartment so I could store twice as much shit. I wish I had a welder and a place to use it so I could buy a bunch of steel and cut it into little shelves and lofts and other hiding spaces.

The aircraft carrier was cool, although after going to some much better museums, it saddened me to see the shape of some of their aircraft. Their A-12, a masterpiece in that it’s the first production model ever, has chipped and peeling paint all over it; the very nice A-4 inside the hanger had crappy paint all over, and the cockpit looked like it hadn’t been touched in 20 years. Some of the planes on the deck had spots that were primered grey like a beat-up Impala in East LA or something. Even the ship’s bell was tarnished! I wish I could donate my time to work on a few of these planes. I don’t know that much about the actual details, but I’d gladly get out the steelwool and brasso and get cracking if I was given the chance.

A pretty lax weekend aside from that trip. It’s starting to get hot, and my stand-up oscillating fan has finally died. It has broken a few times, and I’ve managed to repair it, but now it’s flat out dead. I spent $35 of the money I don’t want to spend on a new floor fan, a generic version of one of those vortex things. It’s pretty impressive - on the low speed, it whips up more wind than my air conditioner. It sounds like a small prop airplane, but that’s actually helpful, as it will hypnotize me to sleep.

I didn’t get much writing done all weekend, but I did decide to quit the Bloomington stories for now and get back on The Device. I outlined some stuff all weekend, but no writing yet.

Okay, gotta work on the photos and stuff a bit more…

Ah, the weekend. It’s actually pretty hot outside today, and I’m surprised. The last two weekends have been pretty dreary, and Thursday night a huge storm front started pissing away, so I thought it would be three for three on spoiled weekends. But I have no real funds in the discretionary spending account, since I just paid off the Amex bill for the Hawaii trip, and I’m trying to be good about paying up extra on bills instead of suddenly deciding I need a drum set or a scuba license or some other asinine pursuit that sounds good to me for about a week. Anyway, it’s beautiful out, and I planned on sitting on the couch and catching up on reading, but maybe I will try to find something sensible to do, or at least go for a long walk after I’m done with lunch.

I went to Marie’s the other night to loan her my camera, and met David and saw Poly, Mungo, and Henrey again. (Marie and David are humans, while the others are cats. Actually, it’s arguable that Mungo is a cat as he is as big as a mid-sized dog, but that’s another discussion entirely.) Anyway, Marie gave me a bunch of books, as she works for a publisher and is still in the loop as far as free promotional copies are concerned. One of the things I miss most about Juno is that it was in the same building as Random House and all of those other Bertelsmann publishers, so they always put racks and racks of free books down in the cafeteria. It would absolutely make Falli’s eBay mojo explode.

Anyway, I got, among other things, this book Pandora’s Keepers. It’s about the nine men who created the atomic bomb, and was written by Brian VanDemark, sort of. I say “sort of” because after the review copies went out, it turns out that a few other prominent nuke history authors found that he completely lifted parts of their writing in his book. So the book got recalled, and you can’t find it - but I have it! I’m about halfway through it, and as a person who was addicted to Richard Rhodes’ books on the bomb, I enjoy the reading. I can look past the plagarism charge, as all writing is essentially plagarism and I can see how he could have slipped up and accidentally boosted something. Or maybe I disagree, I don’t know. Either way, it’s a good read. Supposedly, a cleaned up paperback version will be out later in the year.

They are repaving several streets in my neighborhood, which means that if they repave mine and my windows are open, it will most likely turn my apartment into some sort of chemical death chamber. This is good only in that my survivors may be able to sue the city of New York for $50 million dollars, and 17 years later get a “buy 1 get 1 at half off” coupon for Pizza Hut or something. Also, if I do survive, it will make the street marginally better for cycling. It doesn’t cure the problem of a resident triple-parking his Crown Vic and opening their doors into traffic as I pass. I’m still working on a reliable way to mount an M203 grenade launcher on my bike frame, which will solve this issue.

My sister got a research position for the summer at Notre Dame. She is working with a professor on big bang nucleosynthesis, which has to do with figuring out how elements heavier than hydrogen formed right after the big bang. It sounds pretty cool, but the program they are using is written in fortran and is a mess. Still, it sounds like a pretty cool way to spend a summer. Better than teaching driver’s ed, at least.

I’ve decided to stop building models for the time being. I’ve found that painting models is pretty much impossible as a 32-year-old. It’s not like I’m going blind and shaking like a blender from Parkinson’s or anything, but I notice the difference when I’m trying to paint the instrument panel on a 1/35 scale model, and I wonder how I could do it when I was half my current age. (HALF MY AGE! Shit, I just thought about what I wrote about, and that’s way too fucked up.)

OK, time for that walk.

Jury duty - done. I went in for another early morning, but actually got to McDonald’s on time, and had a shouting match at the counter with the idiot they put there over the sizes of orange juice. Remember when it was just small-medium-large? Anyway, I spent most of the morning sitting around, then right before lunch, got marched over and put on a case. I got the new steak and cheese at subway, and sat under a tree on a stone wall to eat lunch. After lunch, I got back on the case, and I was one of the 19 people (19? 18?) in the jury box, but the judge called me back in chambers when they were going over the jury questionnaires. (The judge’s chambers is, in fact, not a chamber in this court. It was more like a back hallway of cinderblocks. Very disappointing.) Anyway, turns out a good friend of mine from high school went to prison for the same thing the defendant was charged with. So without further delay, I was released back to the general pool. When I got there, all of the jurors were gone (it was like 3

), and the court officer looked at my ticket and gave me my discharge papers. After a quick subway ride, I was back to work to check email and turn in my paperwork.

Not much is up here, except I just woke up from a nap and I’m waiting for a club sandwich…