Well, nothing much eventful happened at work this week, we are getting busier, which is good, especially for our bonus. I am going to attend a training session in Bayesian statistical methods for data analysis class on Saturday Oct 4th, looking forward to that. I had to get a forbearance on my student loan, bills are just too tight right now to keep up on it. I rode my bike to work one day this week, it’s not as great a bike as I had hoped, a little small for my body type, hoping to trade it in for an aluminum mongoose i saw. A coworker gave me a crock pot he doesn’t use anymore, which is excellent, since I anticipate eating a lot of beans and rice in the near future, and maybe even the far future if this craziness on wall street keeps up, and while this is usually an apolitical blog, I want to go on record that the wall street bail out is bullshite!!! I guarantee you every single company that was number one had a close number two who deserves a chance to take over, and screw bailing out corporate executives, BAIL OUT us citizens who can’t pay their mortgages, I assure you that will do more to keep our economy stable than bailing out people who own there own islands. The presidential debates tonight were not intense or exciting, but the difference was clear, Obama won, I think the word count was leaning in an obvious direction, and McCain looked old and tired, he really helped us by showing up and being so droll, he seemed more like an economics professor waiting for retirement than a fighter. I like some of the things he says, even though I’m still voting for Obama, but the only thing he really convinced me of was that he doesn’t have energy.

Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” is still one of the greatest books ever written in English.  I especially like the  Insane Asylum story, The Hot Dog Stand on Mars story, and my favorite The Small American Town on Mars story. Do yourself a favor and get this book. Bradbury is a genius, he perfectly and timelessly expresses that in the entire universe, there is no alien quite as strange as the ones right here on Earth.

I got a great deal on a new bike. For seven years I only rode a bike and didn’t own a car, I recently found some photos from that time, and I was amazed at the difference between me then and now, so I’m going back to the tao of the bicycle. I’m gonna have to give it thorn resistant lining in the tires, and fix a peddle, other than that it’s perfect. Here’s a picture…

Took off work early yesterday morning, trying to relax. Got up early this morning and went out to Lake Mead with James and showed him that we do in fact have water in this state. I found a really nice campground near the water that I never saw before, so I plan to go camping there when the weather finally cools down. We stopped at a scenic rest area and played some Go, lot’s of cyclists were around. We came back into town, had lunch and hung out for a while. I made him copies of the walking dead comic series, and now I’m getting ready to relax and watch a movie. There isn’t a whole lot happening, and that’s the way I hope it stays all weekend.

Well my bosses at work have announced that next friday is black friday. Someone is getting fired. I have no idea if it will be me or not, guess if it is me I had to move on sometime. I worked ACI certification test on Saturday morning, then went to copymax to print up 1000 flyers for my GO club, then spent an hour cutting them down to size, even with 1/2 of a percent response that should be about 20 new members. After copymax I went out to sushi with James, we hung out a bit it the barnes and nobles, and then called it a day. I went to quaker worship this morning, and met some nice vistors from quaker church in New York, they seemed very nice. Visited mom, she’s doing well, and she seems to like going to her physical therapy. My dad took his sea-doos out to Lake Mead yesterday and it flipped over on him, his wallet, his gun, his keys, all his cards and ID are now on the bottom of Lake Mead somewhere, of course if the water level keeps dropping out there like it has been, soon he will be able to walk out and find them in the dirt. I have been reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is very good and well written, they tell you who killed bunny on the first page, and yet it is so compelling that you still want to keep reading.

Well, the past month has been ridiculously expensive. My car broke down, and of course it wasn’t a simple clutch problem, I had to replace the transmission housing as well, for a cost of $1500. Then I had to move, and of course, my old landlord isn’t going to give me back my deposit (which was inordinately huge) because he says his partner ran off with it, and he feels that would be unfair to him to be asked to pay it back. I had to put down first and last on the new apartment. Then I had to have the root canal, which thank god, insurance covered, but I still had to pay a hefty co-pay. I’ve been living on microwave burritos and ramen for a month. It’s expensive to be an American these days. I’m lucky I like to read, otherwise my entertainment expensies would really be suffering right now. I wanted to post a picture for this blog entry, but I don’t really have anything exciting, so I’m just going to post a snapshot of my desktop, so without further ado, here is Will’s desktop:

It took a lot of work, a lot or reading and I lost a whole weekend to writing and editing code and compiling source, but it was all well worth it. I now have all my mp3 collection stored into a mysql database, that is php enabled, so friends of mine who have the password can login, browse, and download any or all of my collection. It looks so sweet. PHP and MySQL, two great tastes that taste great together.

Well, about three nights ago, I woke up at 1:00 am with a toothache, I tried to fight it off, used aspirin, but lost in the end. I went to the dentist and he said root-canal. It went very well however, and was painless. Except afterwards, so I’ve been sitting at home, on painkillers, not allowed to drive. I worked on configuring my computer, updating my webpage at http://woh3.freeshell.org and other mindless tasks to fill my day. I did watch a couple of movies, Night of the Living Dead (1990) is still a pretty good movie, and I realized just how much of it was packed into the other Romero remakes. I recompiled amarok to use mysql database, which I am proud of. I have been studying how to integrate PHP and MySQL to make interactive websites. Soon as I recover from all my bills I plan to get a DBA account with my freeshell and turn my entire site into a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) with CSS. Hopefully I can go back to work tomorrow, sitting at home on painkillers is not as fun as it might sound.