Here are actual journal entries. Generally day to day stuff that only stalkers and the unemployed are interested in reading. I originally started doing a blog to keep an open diary of sorts for all to see, like most blogs. I decided to push this off of the main page when I realized my day to day activies are as boring as most peoples. Since I don't want to give up writing an open journal thingy I decided to give it it's very own home on the site, I don't expect anyone to actually read it since all the good stuff is still on the frontpage but it makes me feel good so what the hell. At the moment a lot of cruft that aren't proper journal entries are being displayed here and in in the journal archive, this is because I used to use the "journal" heading for most random stuff in the website and I need to plow through the archives re-labeling stuff, maybe II'll finish and maybe I won't, it's a mystery :) Last five entries on display here for more check the archives.

Hurricane info and links
Entered: 2008-09-12
Edited: 2008-09-12
Type: journal

Some real good info on Hurricane Ike and his expected effects on Houston:

National Weather Service official forecast - This is for my zipcode, 77096, and is currently giving the expected max wind predictions. At the moment 55-75mph with 90mph gusts. Which is below the level expected to damage most homes.

National Hurricane Center The official forecast for Ike's track and additional information. It's coming right for Houston which is actually slightly better than yesterday's track of 60 miles west of here since the eastern half of the storm is nastier.

Houston Chronicle's Science Blog The best part of our local paper is Eric Berger's science blog. For three years running he's had the best information about tropical systems heading into the gulf, and what they mean to the Houston area. He's a little strung out right now from lack of sleep but still putting out great stuff. Keep in mind that I live well outside the storm surge zone so discussion about it's affects don't apply to me.

Stormpulse.com - Another good tracking site that let's you look at the computer models that go into the forecast track. HWRF and GFDL are the NHC's two homegrown models and get the most weight in the official track.

Houston Hide From the Wind A great zip code map of predicted wind speeds in the Houston area. For my fans click on the 77096. The values listed here are a bit higher than the NWS forecast numbers and don't list the gusts but it's still a good resource.

If you have a twitter account you can follow my storm status on twitter.com I'll try to post "I'm alive" notes here during the storm if I can still access the 'net from home or from my iPhone.



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OMG!!!!!1 Hurricane! It
Entered: 2008-09-11
Edited: 2008-09-11
Type: journal

This is a live image on the NHC's site so at some point this will change and look silly in the archives. Deal.

On the bright side... I don't live in a storm surge zone, don't have to evacuate and don't have much to worry about. Ike is looking like it it'll make landfall as a Cat2 now, and while we might get some 80mph winds (and some 100mph gusts) that's not really enough to do more than minor damage to the house. Only thing I'm worried about at this point is losing power and my friends and family in AK getting worried about me. Oh and losing the A/C would suck but the cars are all gassed up and we can charge cellphones and laptops in them while taking an A/C break if it comes to that.

Also I don't have to go to work tomorrow! Since we got out early today Becca and I have already finished getting supplies and doing what prep to the house we can. While waiting for the hurricane show to start tomorrow I get to hang out in the shop working on this:



The top to my new workbench - a 120#, two foot by six foot slab of solid Ash. It's going to be an 18th century, French style workbench, as discussed in Andre Roubo's L'ART DU MENUISIER (THE ART OF THE JOINER)

Being an inveterate handtool user I can keep working even if we lose power. Hell I can work by lamplight if I need to ;-)




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Visit from Fast Eddie
Entered: 2008-08-05
Edited: 2008-08-05
Type: journal

Thanks to this guy:

Coming into town uninvited I get the day off from work today! Yippee!

The best part is that late last night it took a slight turn to the north before making landfall, which means we're getting lots of rain but not much wind from it. So we're just hanging out enjoying the heavy rain and not going to work. So far we haven't had much wind but it is supposed to pick up in our part of town around 1pm this afternoon and get into the 30mph range. Less than we saw from the glancing blow from Rita a couple summers ago.

I'll be spending the day working on this:



With any luck we'll have some flooding in the low intersections around our neighborhood and have to stay home again tomorrow ;-)


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A day in the life
Entered: 2003-07-07
Edited: 2003-07-07
Type: journal

Ever have one of those mornings where you were up way past your bedtime the night before and were expecting to sleep well into your alarm clock's attempt to rouse you but suddenly find yourself awake and alert about ten minutes before the alarm goes off? Then you decide to just lay your head back down for the ten minutes left before you're supposed to get up and next thing you know your alarm has been going off for half an hour and you're groggy as hell? Do you then begin to question whether or not you really did wake up a few minutes early or if you just dreamed that you woke up a few minutes early? Because that's how my day started. One other thing I want to know is how is it possible to be dreaming, and to feel totally rested and alert in the dream but if you're awakened mid way through you're all groggy and disorientated?

In any case that pretty much set the tone for how I felt all day. Not exactly a bad thing mind you, as a result of being in a groggy dreamlike state all morning I got a lot of work done an was surprise by how quickly lunch time snuck up on me. Lunch consisted of getting a sandwich from Subway to eat while sorting out various and sundry bills that required my attention. I was a good boy today and paid every single one of them all in one sitting: cable modem, phone, Linux Fund credit card and my National Geographic credit card. Unfortunately the movers finally caught up with me and realized that they never got around to charging my Visa check card for the second half of my moving bill. So I had to pay that today, about a grand even. On top of that on the third I had a notice on my door from the apartment managers office kindly informing me that they'd be cutting off my electricity on the 9th if I didn't pay the $400 power bill that had been acruing since I moved in, apparently there was some sort of SNAFU when I filled out the paperwork to transfer the power bill to my name. This annoys me to no end. Fortunatly all of this has occured after I became un-unemployed, so this is merely annoying as opposed to life-threatening. My life has been remarkably well timed as of late.


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Things I did today
Entered: 2003-06-24
Edited: 2003-06-24
Type: journal

This is yet another attempt to keep the journal portion of the site updated more often than the main page. Since the whole point of adding the seperate journal section was so that I could have a place to write about mundane details of my daily life without crowding out more interesting and timeless works of modern literature displayed on the main page.... I forget where I was going with this sentence but I rather like the way it sounds so I think I'll just go ahead and leave it in[1]. Anyway I just thought I'd pop into the much neglected journal and babble on for a bit about what I've been up to the past couple days. In theory I could go waaaaay back to the last time I updated the journal and fill in sort of a daily report card but that would take a while and quite frankly I don't trust my memory further back than lunch today so it would be a rather pointless exercise. For no particular reason I feel like talking about what I did today, and maybe a little bit of yesterday too.

I'll start with today because I just remembered this morning and want to get it written down before I lose it again. This morning got off to a rocky start, for starters I woke up, which is a bad way to start the day. Not only did I wake up, but I woke up an hour later than I wanted to, which threw off my rythym for the whole morning. Ideally I like a good two hours to myself in the morning before going to work, this gives me a chance to drink some coffee in peace, check my email, read comics and news online and generally prepare myself to face the world. When I oversleep I'm denied this luxury and it really throws off my whole day and if I'm too rushed I sorta forget things, like bringing black socks to work, or a shirt, little things like that. Since I woke up early than expected I had to rush and decided to make up for lost time by taking a quick shower before doing anything else. By 8:20 I was showered, had my bike clothes on, had my work clothes packed up in my bag and my coffee was just about ready, I was doing pretty good. This gave me 25 minutes to drink my coffee and get caught up with the world before I needed leave for work. Then my entire world was thrown into chaos when I discovered that my cable modem was down. I stared at the monitor in shock for a while, after I recovered my wits I starting troubleshooting trying to determine if any of my equipment was at fault and if so, how quickly I could fix it. Unfortunately nothing was wrong on my end, the problem was entirely in the hands of Time Warner. I felt doomed, depressed, isolated and cut off. More importantly I hadn't had but a few sips of my first cup of coffee and it was already time to leave for work. I couldn't bring it along in my thermos this morning as I was carrying my framed print of Jin's The Universal Turning Machine to work and didn't have room for both the print and the thermos, and more importantly didn't have time to repack without being late. So I rode off work sans coffee. As a result of this drama in the AM my rythym was off all day and I mostly wanted to just go home. I still managed to get some work done, even though my mojo was running pretty low.

Then I dodged a bunch of traffic, outran a Jeep at a traffic light (on my bike), dodged some more traffic, bunny-hopped the speed bumps in my apartment complex and rolled into my apartment. I could go on but I'm bored of writing about stuff that just happened so I'll stop now.

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[1] I suspect that Tolstoy used a similar approach when writing War and Peace , those that have read it unabridged will udoubtably agree and if not are probably lying about having read the unabridged version.

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