Sobriety Test

Last night I made a decision: I will abstain from alcohol until I've taken both exams at the end of this month. The purpose is twofold:I will be forced to stay home and hit the books instead of drinking to celebrate or drinking before getting down to business. Secondly, I've felt for a while now that my confidence level should never be dependent on anything. It needs to stay at a stable level irregardless of how many drinks I've had, how much I can bench, how many miles I've run, what I just accomplished, etc. And honestly, alcohol has always been a significant confidence booster for me... Let's live on the edge and try to live without it for awhile.


Mic Check

My music tastes are widely diverse. Here's what's bumpin in my hard drive right now.

Calla
Death Angel
Binary Star
John Lee Hooker
Portishead
Hendrix
De La Soul
Interpol
Herbie Hancock
Kraftwerk

Testing My Limits

They say the only way to truly know yourself is to take yourself to the edge. In other words, test your limits. Right now, at this very moment, mine are getting tested... harshly. Every aspect of my life is getting challenged. Physically, I'm fighting a strange elusive cold/flu/virus. I'm constantly exhausted and every fucking cell in my body aches. I really need to rest this off. Unfortunately there's not much time for quality rest.

Several projects at work are near completion. Deadlines rapidly approach. My group is short about 3-4 bodies. My collegues are putting alot of pressure on me to step up and get things done either because they are too busy already or they feel I'm best suited to take on certain tasks (since I did them before a couple years ago). Unfortunately, I've it's been ages since I've performed these tasks so I'll have to figure it all out again. If they had the time and patience they'd tackle these problems themselves. It shouldn't be difficult but it's burning up a lot of my time and energy.

As I write this, I've developed a couple methods to automated certain processes. It doesn't help much though because these "jobs" take forever to run. Isn't it fucked up that no matter how fast computers get we still spend excessive amounts of time waiting on them to finish tasks?

As far as school goes, I've got one last ECO lesson to complete before I can take the final at the end of the month. Knocking it out won't be a problem but since time is such a rare commodity I'm struggling a bit.

Stay strong playa.


The Magic of a Pool Table

Yesterday I was sick as a dog and my strength was about 20% throughout the day. I remember straining just to replace a water bottle for my lovely (internally) coworkers. Although I previously agreed earlier in the day to shoot some pool with a homie, by late afternoon I contemplated cancelling. My body just felt like crap. All I wanted was to go home and lay down. For some reason I decided against flaking and ended up at the GE with my cue. After breaking the first rack something magical happened. All my pain and suffering faded away. Work and school related problems vanished miraculously. All that mattered now was making shots and getting good shape on the next ball. Man, I love that game.


Random Musings

That new Prince Album, Musicology is pretty fuckin crunk.

Wifey and I are hella addicted to the BBC comedic sitcom, The Office. Yeah mate, that show smokes like crack. Gareth is my favorite haha.

The developers of IBM's AIX Operating System should be shot. What's the logic behind the naming of certain commands like smit, lssrc, startsrc, etc.


Lyrics to Live by

Reality Check by Binary Star
I'm used to being indigent, who said its all about the Benjamin's?
I wanna fortune, I wanna make music and hit the lottery
Fortunately my music is never watery
That's how its gotta be, as far as I can see
Maybe you should grab a telescope to see my view its like astronomy
It aint all about economy
so the fact that these wack emcees is making G's don't bother me
Honestly, my number one policy is quality
never sell my soul is my philosophy

Additions to Quote Collection

"A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned"
-- Paul Newman in the Color of Money

"Life aint nothin' but bitches, money, and root"
-- Ninja Networks

Vertigo Returns

I suffer from vertigo, we have our weekly staff meetings in a room called vertigo, and I just saw the movie Vertigo (a must see) last week. I hope this is the last time I write about it.

I woke up last night after a four hour nap and noticed the room was spinning.. again. Argh. Although it isn't near as severe as it was a few weeks ago, it is still _very_ annoying. I can't find any patterns or pre-vertigo symptoms other than severe soreness in my back. I worked out my lats yesterday so I just figured the soreness was a result of that. And since the aching was pretty severe I went ahead and popped a couple advils. Now lets see, both occurences of vertigo occurred after strenuous exercise. The initial case occurred after waking up from the first nap whereas this one occurred two naps later. I can't recall I took ibuprofen before the first occurence. Instead of rambling, let's list all possible causes:

a. stress - Yeah I'm pretty damn stressed right now because of this painful project at work and upcoming finals on these two classes I'm taking.
b. ibuprofen - I pop a couple advil approximately 1-2 times a week. There doesn't appear to be a direct correlation between ibuprofen and the vertigo.
c. overstrenuous excercise - There may be some relation to excercise and dizzness but I seriously doubt this connection is direct.
d. allergy related - What I believe may be regular allergies may be a slight flu or cold (I can never tell the difference). It's possible that the flonase is suppressing many of its typical symptoms such as (runny nose, coughing etc.
e. too much drinking - Yeah... you wish. I drink a lot.. when I drink.
f. ear infection - I can feel hollowness in my right ear. I can't tell if its in the outer or inner ear. I'm applying cortisol ear drops 2-3 times daily. I could possibly be exacerbating the problem... or I just haven't been taking it routinely.

I ain't no doctor (although I did aspire to become one at one time) but here's my diagnosis and treatment suggestion.

Diagnosis: The problem is a combination of possible factors d, f, a (in that order). It's allergy season and flownase just isn't enough. My sinuses are currently getting overpowered by allergens and it is causing excess fluid to enter the eustachian tube. This excess fluid is causing the balance and vertigo problems as evidenced by different levels of spinning sensations depending on how my head it tilted. In addition, this minor ear infection is worsening the problems too. Either I don't really have an ear infection any more and these drops are entering the eustachian tube from the outside or the ear infection is serious and I'm not appying the medicine frequently enough to eliminate the problem. On top of all that the stress has weakened my immune system so I'm more suseptible to all of these problem.

Treatment: Meclizine (for vertigo relief), Sudafed (to help clear the eustachian tube), Light excercise and good diet. I think the last doctor said the same exact thing. Shit.

If you're a brilliant doctor who's reading this and thinks they know what's up hit me up: suntzu at gmail dot com.

Semi-productive Allnighter

I planned on finishing up the last History lesson tonight but got distracted by some friends online. Instead of writing about Civil War strategies I got caught up writing about Fantasy Football '04 Supplementary draft strategies, Vida Guerra's ass, and some l33t new blogs (see previous post). After all that I did manage to write a clever essay about why the Confederates didn't actually lose the war, the Union just won the conflict. Go figure. I could stay up and knock out this last essay while my synapses are still firing but I'm not. It'll be ok.. it'll be submitted tomorrow night.

On the subject of firing synapses, I've noticed that it takes my brain quite some time to warm up. I've noticed it's usually 1-2 hours before I feel sharp. There has to be a way I can cut this mental stretching phase in half. Keep this in mind...

I'm gonna try to catch some Z's. I've got a ton of shit to accomplish during the daily noon conference call.

Some Fresh Linkage

How To Hack Your Head - By Steven Johnson
File under Meta Hacking?

Hobopoet
File under another way of looking at things.

Pac Manhattan
An NYU graduate project brings real life PAC MAN to Manhattan streets.
File under Too fuckin kewl.

love and casino war poker blog
File under Gambling Blogs.

P-P-P... P-P-P... P-Unit!
Don't ask how I came up with this one... I haven't the faintest idea.
A few Princeton kids came up with this satirical rap song that mocks top 40 rap. Princeton and Rap... in the same sentence. Kinda funny.

Here's some hacker/security/blackhat blogs I managed to dig up. Will parse through them later.
disLEXia
rootkit.com
Bit Splitter

Berardinelli's Top 100
Werd on the street is this dood knows movies. I like movies so I'll listen.

Guyshop
Nice trendy ass clothes that I'd probably wear once before donating to GoodWill after they sit in my closet for three years.

MichiganHipHop.com
File under Music/Underground HipHop

The Drudgery of the Same Routine

It's safe to say I'm really bored with my typical daily routine: work, study, workout, get drunk (repeat). All the while everything is staying the same: my skills, my bank account, my gut. It's frustrating at times and this is one of those days I'm bothered by it. Maybe I just have a "bad case of the Mondays" ha. Who knows, all is well... possibly I'm just being greedy. That's really all I've got today. I plan on hitting the gym, having a nice dinner and studying my arse off.

Oh yeah... We watched Seven Samurai last night... I was blown away by it. Usually a long (3hr) movie would make me drowsy and force me to shot a couple espressos.. but i didn't need it.

One Love.

Schooling the Champion

Yeah.. I watched the Matrix 3 yesterday.. and uhhh could it apply to 9-ball cuz I swear I those lines were spelled out for me in hex? Just wondering because I just waxed my boy M. I swear that fool learned some good racking technique after the session concluded. At the onset he was giving me the 8 and he was racking a lot. After about 4-5 games I noticed that I was never racking so I told him straight up. What do you know... Let's just say my 9-ball game as improved. Too easy... he's still the king though but that title is in jeopardy ;-)

The Eustachian Tube

Apparently, is a tube that connects the middle ear to the back of the nose. It's purpose is to allow air to pass from the nose to the middle ear. Now why do I know that? It appears that it's the source of many of my vertigo/ear problems. It may be clogged.. who knows... but I need to get it fixed.


Procrastination and Indecisiveness

Well here i sit... middle of the day. I've got my workout gear on while sitting at the computer listening to mp3s and smoking cigs. I can't decide what I'm going to do. Undecided whether I should work out. Is it going to strengthen my immune system or will it weaken it? Wifey's at work. An old (really old skool) gf is in town with her bf. Should I meet up with them later? I don't want to spend any money... but I do want to drink, conversate, and catch up. I look pretty beat up. I've got a red right eye. I'm out of shape. I need a haircut. What should I do?? I should really be working on a lesson instead. Damn... i swear indecisiveness is my downfall...

Ok... I'm going to workout (lightly) and get ready for a low key evening doing whatever... Let's hope I stick to the plan. :-D

Friday Quickies

How about this email:

"Please log into TMORG, the 3rd morg server in the redundant triad."

I'm a fairly geeky UNIX/Security guy and i have no idea what a "redundant triad" is. Whatever it is, it makes me feel like I'm on Star Trek.