confusion

Somewhere around nine this morning as I turned left from New Hampshire Ave. onto 18th St South, I saw her out of the corer of my eye. She came around the delivery van making a left onto 18th St. North. And there was nothing I could do.

I got out and ran over to her car to make sure she was alright. She stood up then almost fell as the adrenaline left and shock set in. She was hyperventilating.

Someone called the cops, a girl standing on the corner when it happened. The fire truck showed up in a few minutes. Then an ambulance. They took her to the hospital because she could not stop hyperventilating.

I waited for the police to look around. Then they wrote me a ticket—$25 for failure to yield. But it will cost me a fortune. Since I got the ticket, since I was crossing traffic my insurance will have to pay for both my truck and her car. Neither one was drivable.

Never mind the fact that she illegally passed the delivery van on the right. Because no one else was paying attention and no one can tell the cop what happened the law says I am at fault.

Fuck.

I don’t know what bad karma I am burning off, but every day it seams it’s something new. There goes all my money for Japan. I mean I’ll have enough to go but I don’t know how much spending money I will have.

I don’t know how I’m going to get to and from work for the next who-knows-how-long while they fix my truck. I don’t know if they can fix it. I still owe a bunch on the truck. I want a new car but I cannot afford one.

My left side where I slammed against the wall hurts. My head hurts. Just bruised, but I feel like I got run over.

It has not been a good week, maybe next week will be better. Maybe not.

I hope she is okay.

Note to self: copy constructors are bad.

I spent a significant portion of the last 72 hours debugging a apparently random bug in one of my programs. Now the ‘program ‘ is really three separate programs communicating across sockets. And each one is multi-threaded. The abstract purpose of the system is to process and deliver messages. Testing with a small number or messages did not show any bugs. But under significant load the system would crash. As long as the number of messages was fairly large the point at which the system crashed as apparently random. With a little help from my boss I finally figured it out. Bottom line: copy constructors are bad and when they are implied constructors from the STL they are worse because you don’t ever realize they are there!

Only S██████ will understand this entry. :)

I got a call tonight from my mom. There was message on the answering machine at my parents for me that a teacher I knew from high school had died. It’s not like I have talked to them for a few years, I was friends with his son and was fairly good friends with him. Still, it’s the third person his age (50’s) that I know that has died of heart problems in the past three years. A great guy, old school member of SCA and a unreformed Berkley radical. Just knowing he is gone makes the world a little less entertaining.

Ahh… Behold; the power of the internet:

So, last night I was digging through my bookmarks file while I waited for something to compile. I pruned many dead links and many links I no longer needed. I ran across more than a few links I had no idea what the hell they where or why I book-marked them. Clicking on them I came across a Journal belonging to a girl I had only met once or twice through C██████. I was getting ready to delete the bookmark but one of the entries in the journal caught my eye—it mentioned the Mudhouse [ mudhouse.com ], Dirty Pretty Things [ go-underground.com ] and “a Charlottesville company” — Hum… this could be a most interesting person. So I left a note in a kinda funky, ‘you don’t know me but I know who you are’ way. Guess what? I got a reply from them today. I don’t know why but it struck my as the funny-but-kinda-scary power of the Internet. Someone from C’ville living in NoVa tracking down someone from NoVa living in C’ville randomly. Be afraid, very afraid.

But I don’t know anyone who lives in +61:

Sitting in a (very heated and important) meeting here at work this morning my mobile starts to give me that warm an fuzzy feeling as it proceeds to vibrate my leg like some toy from Anne Summers. [ annesummers.co.uk ] But when I looked at it the calling number started with +61. I said, “I don’t know anybody in Australia”—more over it’s sad that as I know no one in or from Australia (other than Catie from High School) but I know off the top of my head that +61 is Australia’s country code. So I answered it and this female voice comes back; “hello, how are you?” All I could think to say was “I’m fine—you?” And then, “I”m in a meeting right now, can you call me back in say an hour?” She said “Um. Ok, one hour? Sure.” And that was that. Never hear anything else, but I still have this +61 number on my caller id. Only things I can come up with: 1) It’s C██████ and she went of on some trip she did not mention last time I talked to her, but I doubt it, the voice was wrong—I think. 2) Wrong number, in which case I will never know—not to mention an expensive wrong number. 3) It was Mena being Mena and calling from random foreign countries (that was debunked when she ask if we could do lunch tomorrow later over I’m) So years from now suffering from Alzheimers I will have this clear as crystal memory of a girl I never heard from before or after calling me from Australia and me being too busy to talk. And I’m single and she sounded cute! ;)

Unfortunate name:

Also wanted to say that I found out in some news article that the French guy who lead the ‘investigation’ in the effect of women wearing the Hajib to school in France was named Stasi… Isn’t that scary? I mean the dudes name is like the Evil DDR secret police’s name.

and:

This journal entry has about enough substance to be the cream filling in Twinkies so I think I will stop now.

I’ve been really bad, not saying something sooner but I want to congratulate J███████ for being accepted to the Ph.D. Research program in Sociology at Oxford University! I cannot even say how much I envy him for going back to England. I totally agree with what he says; that the more time that goes by since we got back to more I miss my time in England and Europe. I wish I could go back to live, but I will have to settle for going to see J███████. He better watch out though, I might be there more than Kim! I hope he has the time of his life—I’m sure he will, and before Dr. Vespa comes back we will have to toast many pints at the Tuff, The Bear and The Eagle and Child.