Almost Almost Done

Started: 2002-07-28 20:52:57

Submitted: 2002-07-28 21:52:33

Visibility: World-readable

I am so almost done I can taste it.

In one hundred and sixty-eight hours, I'll be ____ (you can fill in the blank). :)

Going back to the last time I really wrote a rambling... on Thursday (18 July 2002), the entire Logan family hopped into two of our Hondas (Yoda and C-3PO) and drove ten hours to Jackson, Wyoming, at the southern end of Grand Teton National park, just south of Yellowstone National Park. Friday we went white water rafting in the Snake River, which was fun. (I observed that I could just follow the river downstream and end up in Longview.) I hypothesized that, if there were one place in Wyoming where I could get wireless phone coverage, it would be Jackson. I broke out my wireless phone at our campsite and got one bar, which is occasionally enough to actually make a call, but not usually. I drove into Jackson that evening, parked in the parking lot of the local visitor's center, and called Illinois. Gem and I talked for a while until she decided she really needed to sleep.

Saturday we canoed in a different section of the Snake River. I ended up a little sunburned, including neat triangle-shaped tans on the top of my feet, where the sun shined through my sandals. I declined to hike in the afternoon and finished reading Snow Crash, the second time through.

Sunday I departed Jackson and headed west to College Place. I think I-84 between Baker City and La Grande is cursed; this time I had another fun-filled encounter with the State Patrol. Seventy-eight in a sixty-five zone. US$175 ticket. The only really annoying thing is that it was the middle of the afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, bright and sunny, straight, flat Interstate. Seventy-eight was a perfectly safe and reasonable speed. But the abject morons in Salem don't seem to agree. (Let's hope this doesn't degenerate into a tirade against the state that sits between California and Washington. I still haven't met anyone who can tell me why Oregonians are incapable of pumping their own gas.) Oh, and my official court date is 05 August 2002, in Baker City.

Monday I was pointed to the embedded 386 development board Stirling thinks I should use. I downloaded DJGPP (GCC for DOS) and convinced it to compile my code without much trouble. By Tuesday I had a functional CS8900 (the Ethernet chip conveniently attached to the board) driver and proceeded to tie all of my code together. I could ping myself without much trouble, which was great absurd amounts of fun.

(Monday night I watched Full Metal Jacket, which was one of the movies Gem signaled as having negative interest in seeing. It was disappointedly pan-and-scan, and at some points the dark, subtle colors looked horribly washed-out. Tuesday night I watched Drawing Flies, which also fit in Gem's same category. Independent film produced by Kevin Smith (the filmmaker, not the Walla Walla student whom I e-mailed my code to two hours ago) staring View Askew favorites Jason Mewes and Jason Lee. Odd.)

Wednesday I hacked out the details of posting data to an HTTP server, which took a little more hacking than I thought it should, but I ended up with a couple of neat features that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I talked to Stirling and convinced him that I was officially done with my project. I talked to Dr. Wood and asked when I could present.

Thursday I started working on my documentation. I broke out AbiWord and typed eleven pages of reference material for my stack. Printed it out and handed it to Stirling. Lost motivation to do anything, documented here.

Friday I consulted Stirling for his advice on my paper and applied most of it. By late afternoon, I decided I couldn't really do anything more of value and pulled my old Civilization: Call to Power off my shelf and tossed it in Ziyal. I'm playing as Jaeger of the Canadians. Great fun.

I have this obnoxious inability to sleep past 0800 in my room. I gave up on sleeping on the top bunk, because it was too warm, and moved my bed to the lower bunk, which lets me blow my fan (er, Gem's) across me as I sleep. I woke up late at 0820 Saturday morning, played Call to Power for a while, and went to church. I talked to more people in ten minutes after church than I have all week long. Nemo invited me over for a low-key lunch. I was impressed when I learned that he has recently been experimenting with making his own bread, which produced a rather good loaf that was prominently featured in lunch. After eating, we sat in his kitchen and talked for several hours.

I eventually wandered back to my quarters and ended up playing a few more hours of Call to Power, exchanging instant messages with Gem while she stayed up all night to finish her last paper for her intense week of library school boot camp, and watched Rushmore, which was amusing. (I think Max Fisher is a distant, twisted version of me. And Miss Rosemary Cross looked uncannily like my advanced comp teacher senior year of high school.) After some more Call to Power, I went to bed around 0100.

I actually managed to sleep in this morning. I was dreaming at 1010 when my wireless phone rang. It was Lance, my cousin (or is it cousin-in-law, since he's married to my cousin? I think cousin works well enough) talking to me about job opportunities. I managed to quickly become coherent enough to talk intelligently.

I decided that it was a sufficiently compelling time to get up. I continued working on my documentation and eventually headed to the diglab for a little more hands-on work. I wrote a small HTTP client equivalent to a stripped-down version of wget. (Great; I think I've spent too much time in AbiWord recently. I keep expecting words I misspell to have squiggly red underlines.) Now I no longer have to download new software over the horribly-slow serial connection, which is greatly exciting. (I keep wondering if I should add support for Transport-Encoding: chunked, which is what I end up when I try to fetch the contents of most CGI scripts.)

I'm fairly confident that the current, beta version of my documentation closely resembles the final product. I'll hand it to Stirling tomorrow morning for more critique, and start working on my presentation, which is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. I was hoping that I could be done in time to meet Gem at PDX at 1940 Monday evening. I haven't yet convinced myself that it'd be a bad idea to leave College Place tomorrow afternoon, pick Gem up, drop some of my stuff in Longview, sleep there, and wake up bright and early to return to College Place to give my final presentation, pack up the rest of my room, check out, and drag the remainder of my stuff to Longview.

I almost find myself wanting tiled browsing in Mozilla -- having two separate webpages open concurrently in the same window, both viewable. (Like a cross between frames and tables.) At least when I'm reading old Bitscape ramblings and want to cross-reference the events of day X with my journals.

Have you ever been haunted
The way I've been by you
And have you ever felt the measure
Of the days that I've spent waiting,
Pining for you

I can't see the sun for the daylight
I can't feel your breath for the wind
I don't want to step from these shadows,
Till you're coming back again

I've dammed the emotions
To keep my lanterns lit
I'm shaken by this longing
Coursing through my veins
In my mind I can't make sense of it

I can't see the sun for the daylight
I can't feel your breath for the wind
I get so used to these shadows
Are you cumin back again?

Do we give up this search and turn out the light?
Give up the holy ghost that rattles through the night?

I can't see the sun for the daylight
I can't feel your breath for the wind
I get so used to these shadows
Will you chase away theses shadows
When you come back again?