Miscellany

I’m about halfway through the Odyssey. Is it me, or was Odysseus kind of an ass?

They said they had “improved” it, so I took the OKCupid again. I didn’t notice any changes. And despite the fact that my answers have changed, I’m still the fucking “Gentleman”:

Steady & mature. You are The Gentleman.

For anyone looking for an even-keeled, considerate lover, you’re their man. You’re sophisticated. You know what you want both in a relationship and outside of it. You have a substantial romantic side, and you’re experienced enough sexually to handle yourself in that arena, too. Your future relationships will be long-lasting; you’re classic “marrying material,” a prize in the eyes of many.

It’s possible that behind it all, you’re a bit of a male slut. Your best friends know that in relationships you’re fundamentally sex-driven. You’re a safe, reliable guy, who does get laid. In a lot of ways, you’re like a well-worn, comfortable pair of socks. Did you ever jack off into one of those? All the time.

Bah. I don’t feel like “marrying material” these days. I’m sexually frustrated and a recluse in my own house. I don’t envy my family. But then, considering the men in today’s society, maybe I AM what passes for a catch these days. Scary thought.

I’ve started working overtime. It’s kind of nice: I have a well-defined problem to work on all day until I’m too tired to focus, then home and straight to bed, then rinse and repeat. Dinner optional. Unfortunately it means I have even less opportunity for getting anything done around the house. I also haven’t made any further progress on going back to school. The old conundrum: it’s vital to my employment, but my employment doesn’t make it easy.

Yes, I’m playing out the classic “losing himself in his work” stereotype. Until an attractice alternative presents itself, I see no reason to do otherwise.

I discovered yesterday that serial communications coding in Windows is a giant pain in the butt. And that there are no working Ruby libraries to make it easier. I have heard complaints that the UNIX approach of treating everything as a file is problematic because it’s a leaky abstraction. But the advantage of that approach is that with a little reseach you can do anything you need to with ioctl and ordinary file I/O calls – from whatever language you’re comfortable in. You can even do it with a shell script if you want. In Windows you have to use an idiosynchratic C API for anything remotely out of the ordinary. If no one has conveniently wrapped up that API with a library for $LANGUAGE, you’re up a creek with a stick for a paddle.

Which is all to say that a quick-and-dirty tool that I thought would take a couple hours to whip up took me all day yesterday just to get started on, because I’m having to write it in C++ instead of Ruby.

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5 Comments

  1. I became The Battleaxe.

    Not sure how I feel about that. :-/

    1. Heh. I quote from the end of “The Gentleman”: Avoid the The Battleaxe at all fucking costs.

      1. Well, before, when I was still The … up-and-leaver (can’t remember the name) … it said I should avoid The Gentleman.

        I could go take it again. I think my mood has changed (again). I’m feeling a little less sadistic than when I took it earlier.

  2. not sure how to respond

    i guess i’d say we all have a certain amount of energy. it may be that devoting so much energy to work is causing you to be more remote at home – it may also be that being more remote at home is conserving (rightly, wrongly, no value judgment here) more energy which you then have available for work.

    i do hope to see you guys out sometime, whether separately or together. you are both missed in the club circles.

  3. …… jaded and cynical……. *kiss*

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