15 Megs of Fame




Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


New! Search this site:



Subscribe to the notify list for announcements of updates and changes




Buy Blue


Make me a friend on Twitter.





Another smart-assed remark from Mike
Crisis of confidence
23:30:00 on 1999-11-29

I have made some observations based on the statistics I've been gathering on the visitors and referrers to the Mahir spoof I put up to get some hits on my journal through a link on that page.
  • Make no mistake, when Yahoo! finally picks your site up, your hits increase dramatically (like, in this case, forty-fold). I may list with others. I am unsure as to why, but I might just for grins and giggles. Also, since it appears I may be in this journal for a while at this site, I may submit this to Yahoo!, too.

  • People seem to be coming in from my page being related to Santa Claus more than Mahir. (Yahoo! put the page in two categories.) From this, I'm getting the idea that you're going to get more hits on something if it's got a mainstream connection. This bothers me greatly, because that's against everything I ever thought the 'net was about. Then again, the 'net itself went mainstream about five years ago. It bothered me a lot then, too.

  • I get more hits on my journal through diversifying sources of hits than through relying on one avenue. My referrals are a mishmash coming in from many different origins now. I like that.

  • Hits definitely drop when I don't write anything new for a while. I need to start writing shorter occasional entries. I always run around with things to say in my head, and I never find my way to the computer to put them down.

  • I see a lot of the same people return to my journal again and again, but I have no idea who most of them are (by domain), and never hear from most of them. I think it's a karmic thing for never answering email promptly.

  • People spend more time surfing the 'net from work than you'd think. I know I used to spend more than my share of time surfing the 'net at work, but then, I was often considered "in-office on-call help" for whenever disaster struck, and I wanted to look busy, anyway.

    The bit about this that is interesting is that average durations of hits are up from people surfing from work! I guess on the weekends it's a lot of kids surfing or something, or just generally impatient people ("entertain me!")

Now, call me na�ve, but I never thought that you truly needed a mainstream hook to get hits. I knew Yahoo! would have the effect it has, and of course, diversification of potential inputs is always good. But... Santa? This bothers me in so many ways.

Reading:
SQL for Dummies (I kid you not; it's actually pretty good, given that I picked it up for five bucks at Half Priced Books down near NASA)

WinAmp skin:

StarTrekAmp, it's kind of purple, Violet would like it.

Listening to:

"Drive" by The Cars

GIMPS exponent currently in computation on Gillian:


Well, I survived Thanksgiving.

In general, the only thing I have to say about it is that I've discovered a near-foolproof way of keeping people from harassing you. Avoid all eye contact, and when you are spoken to regardless, don't look at people when you talk to them. They tend to get the hint.

The worst of it was that they were talking about stocks that my aunt's sister bought, and she was hemming and hawing about what Cisco did. "I think they build hardware... some sort of internet something? Ummm..." "They build routers and associated connectivity hardware. Okay?" (Read: shut the hell up.)

The five-flavor pound cake was good, though.


As I ranted to my notify list not too long ago:

A perfect example of why I couldn't work at home, never could study at home, can't read at home, or even feel *comfortable* here is this: my family assumes that if you're home you're available. A lot of my friends (like Kirk) assume the same thing.

A perfect example happened Saturday.

I was sitting at home doing my regular just-after-getting-out-of-bed catch-up, checking email, sending out a few things, checking a few online resources, and looking forward to spending the evening having a good chat on the phone with Gurugrrl. It seemed to make perfect sense to me.

That's when Moogie came and told me that my uncle needed me to go with him to Best Buy to get software for my cousins for Christmas. A fate worse than death (I know, because I experienced it last year).

I finish doing what I need to do, and run a couple hundred frags in Quake to clear my head and become mentally prepared for this, and finally finish getting ready so we can go. I walk to my grandparents' place next door (he's staying there while he has his 18-wheeler fixed here in Houston) to get him, and we go.

When we pull into the parking lot at Best Buy, we go in to look at software. I assume he has an idea of what he's looking for, but that's silly to assume. We walk up and down the aisles, looking at everything. I mean everything.

Half the time I think we're looking for him, because he keeps looking at different flight simulators (he's big on flight), and he keeps looking at packages like he's grepping for keywords. "Oh! This one says 'supernatural.' I don't want my kids exposed to that. No, they can't have anything to do with Pok�mon, I don't even want to hear the word in my house. Their mother doesn't want them having anything to do with 'The Simpsons', you know, Bart and his smart mouth. We can't get that, there's somebody using magic in it." Can you tell he's a big-time religious person? It's like that all the time we're looking at software.

Well, he's not thrilled that a lot of the packages out now recommend or require a 3D video card (their computer cost about $1000, monitor and all, a year ago, so you can get the picture). His computer has an AGP video card with some 3D extensions, but it's an off-brand Trident chipset video card, so of course, there are no OpenGL drivers that I can find (and even if there were, they'd suck, because the D3D performance bites), so he ends up wanting to look at 3D video cards.

We go over to the aisle with the video cards and start to look at the options. I think I see the perfect solution for them -- they have a whole host of fifty dollar, twelve meg Voodoo 2 cards. Unfortunately, there's this sixteen year old kid there, too, who seems to have a differing opinion.

This kid starts in telling my uncle things that are 100% valid. That TNT2 cards are faster than any Voodoo 3 cards (and certainly the V2 cards). They offload more processing to the card and off the CPU. That all new games support OpenGL.

They're all between two and three hundred dollars, too. Life must be rough when mommy and daddy buy you everything for your computer.

So now I get to unravel all the confusion this has catapulted my uncle into. Not to mention he's having trouble figuring out the difference in system buses. He keeps looking at all the cheap PCI cards, and I keep telling him that he needs an AGP card to get the maximum fill rate. Of course, he finally notices that the Voodoo 2 is a PCI card, and wants me to explain why it won't impact video performance while another PCI card will. He can't grasp that for the V2 the bus is only to pass textures and control information, essentially, and is an add-on board to use with your existing card.

Never try to have a discussion on elementary PC architecture with a family member.

He asks me what I have, so I have to explain I have a Matrox Millennium G200, I get decent D3D and OpenGL performance on that, I don't need any of these cards, and he starts going on about how if it was any good wouldn't it be on the shelves and where can we go to look at those? I tell him we probably can't, there are G400 cards now, and usually you get them through OEM sources or computer stores.

Finally, we decide to shelve the discussion for a while, and he turns around and sees something on the same aisle we hemmed and hawed over last year: he wants a wheel and pedals for driving simulations. So we get to look at controllers for about forty-five minutes, while he makes fun of me for playing everything with the keyboard. (Yeah, and I bet I kick your controller-using ass, too.)

Go back for another pass through the software. Go look for a TV set that was on sale, and get a rain check for it because of course it's the cheapest possible model, so they have all sold out. Go look at console games ("so, is a Playstation something you hook up to your computer?" Aieee, chihuahua). Go look at appliances. Go look at musical keyboards (musical keyboards?). Go look at fax machines. Shoot me, please.

I finally realized what was going on. They don't have any electronics shops out in The Boonies where he lives, so this is his only chance to shop. I just happened to end up bamboozled into going with him.

So, because they decided that the Big Bad City� might hurt their kids and they move out to the middle of nowhere, I have to be forced to spend the evening at the shop. Again, the decisions and needs of others end up causing me problems.

I won't even go into what happened at the checkout, but let's say it's a continuation of something extremely stupid that I didn't want to continue in the presence of somebody in my family (especially one that loves to gossip).

We finally rolled in at the house around 9:20 PM. I had to immediately leave again to go get dinner, so I was very late to find Gurugrrl. She was very understanding, but I don't think she was entirely happy with me.

Funniest thing I almost did: he saw some bible study software that was $159.95 or so. I so wanted to tell him, "it's expensive to be superstitious, isn't it?"


I think the problem with me right now is that I just don't know what to do. I used to be brimming with energy, I used to have a remarkable amount of drive. Now it takes me forever to get around to doing anything, and once I do it's amazing if I see it through to completion.

I have been thinking about what I should do, now that I am actually managing to come back to life somewhat. I need to figure out what direction I want to go in, but my moral and mental compass seems to be acting as though I am in the Bermuda Triangle.

The other day I started perusing a journal briefly, and in his "about me" page he talks about how he came around to going back to school. Of course, this started me to thinking about returning to school. Crafty and Gurugrrl have both asked me, more or less, when (not if) I am going back. Gurugrrl seemed to expect it.

I feel like I'd have so far to go back, to almost start over, it'd not be worth going back. Then again, I look at job ads, and they want the guy who changes the toilet paper at tech companies to have a BSCS or BSEE, so maybe I should be thinking about it.

I know I would like to start a company again someday, this time pursuing some technology. I just wonder if I'll ever have the temperament or mental control again to do such a thing. I mean, I haven't had the control to even work, or follow through on work that has been offered to me.

I have thought about all the various career choices that I pursued or thought about in the past. Artificial intelligence. Cosmology. Computer games (especially large-scale multiplayer RPGs when such an idea was heresy). Writing. New media technologies. I wonder what to think about any of those.

AI is a dead end. I don't know that we'll develop intelligent machines eventually, but maybe not in the near term, and certainly not under my watch. Anyway, my interest was in symbolic AI. Making neural networks and emergent behaviors in artificial lifeforms isn't my idea of a good time (well, most of the time).

I am too old to be a physicist. A lot of your good work is done before you're thirty, so it's not worth pursuing. Not to mention that my math skills are decimated. Anyway, just tonight I reflected to myself on how utterly useless most of the physics I studied is.

I don't know about games. Like I said, my math and programming skills are quite decimated, so I wouldn't be much good at the 3D games that are in vogue right now, and the adventure/RPG genre seems to be dead, currently, or maybe long-term. I'm not sure what to do there. Anyway, apparently making games is a labor of love, and I want to do something to make some money and make a real difference (call me silly).

Writing? Well, c'mon, I couldn't make a living doing this. [smirk]

And insofar as new media technologies, I have lots of ideas, but I don't know if I'd ever find the funding to pursue them. All of them are definitely long-term, expensive, and some large corporation would work on them and blow past me like I'm sitting there, so why bother?

Regardless of what I think about doing, what I suffer from the most is a lack of confidence in what I'm doing. I don't feel like I can do anything that will result in a finished product, or that I will let whatever I work on fall through, or what have you. I feel like a total failure.

Some people like Crafty and Gurugrrl seem to have all the faith in the world in me. Why can't I have any in myself? I am afraid sometimes that I know the real me, the me that won't let me get to doing what I need to be doing, or will chicken out or walk away from something half-done because there is a new opportunity or flashy possibility out there. I've done it before, and I'd be surprised if I didn't do it again.

I guess what I need to do is just take a first step - find a job, get moving in a direction again. The thing is that looking for a job always affects me badly. Rejection is bad on me. In May I almost got a job programming for a company, and then they dropped me like a hot rock, and wouldn't tell me why. I crawled into my shell and gave up.

But, I persevere. I made up a new r�sum�, and Gurugrrl stayed up (altogether too) late into the night helping me tweak it the other day. (Self-promotion isn't my strong suit. I've always been a "this is me, if you want me, just say the word" kind of guy.) I am digging around for my list of references and wondering if I should update it (there are people on it I haven't spoken to in... years, but then, most of the people I would put on it I haven't spoken to for a while, anyway).

Not to mention that job hunting is expensive. I seem to have let my financial situation get really out of hand without even realizing it, because now I am wondering how to scrape together cash to get some new clothes for interviews and find a job that pays enough to make it worthwhile and not hurt my already weak position (at least, I think it is). The fact that every time I turn around I need to spend more money on something (tires and a serpentine belt for my car, bills, etcetera) isn't helping.

But maybe I can make some headway towards some change. I have my intake appointment in about nine hours with the county mental health authority. Maybe they'll take me and I can bring back the old me. Or, more likely, I fear they'll tell me they won't help me, and I'll have something new to curl up in surrender from.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



<< Before nowAfter now >>