Ryan J. Allen

Normally when I have change I get rid of it by giving it to the nearest friend or family member who will take it (read: not bums), but lately I’ve been holding on to my change! I’ve even made a number of purchases using the change that I’d normally get rid of. These purchases include things like chocolate milk (which, normally, I would pay for and then have even more change to give away). Doesn’t that make you smile?

I sat at a desk at school today that had “I *heart* cheese” enscribed into it.

Tico likes to eat potato chips.

Well, I’m only hours away from my departure for the Hammer. I am so excited–I haven’t been this happy in weeks. I can’t believe I packed everything that I did into my duffle bag (it’s a big bag), although I just realized that I don’t have my sweater packed yet. I’m so excited!

I can’t say anything more until later. I’ll sleep now, prepare in the morning, and then GO!

If a tree falls in a cavern, and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make an echo?

I’ve thought about the question a lot and used the UNIX ‘echo’ command to solve the problem. First I thought “if something echos you see it on the screen.” So, I thought, simple enough, we can redirect the output of the echo to /dev/null:

     $ echo "whatever" 1> /dev/null

But then I asked myself: does that really mean that the echo is not occuring? No. The echo process is still spawned. This can be seen if we run echo as a background job in our shell. A pid is assigned to echo:

     $ echo "whatever" 1> /dev/null &
     [1] 4617

So, effectively we have an answer to our question. The answer is yes, a falling tree in a cavern does make an echo.

Don’t you just hate buying a DVD that makes a noise when you shake it? I’m always worried that there’s some bad scratching happening on the underside of the disc. Maybe I’ll start shaking discs before I buy them.

Frasier’s on tonight. I missed last week’s to be continued episode.

In 2 days, I’ll be in Hamilton.

I write this update with an intense headache. I frequently have headaches; cause: unknown. I share this with you to let you know why this update is shorter than it probably should be. I’d like to write a lot, but my patience is short when my head hurts like this.

So, where did I leave off? Oh right, Thursday. Well, there’s not much more to say (see paragraph 1) other than: Alex visited us this weekend and arrived Thursday; we (Alex, Cathie, and I) went to dinner at Nana’s and watched *shudder* Survivor. Shelley, Bev, and a little friend of Bev’s were there, too. Dinner was ham and Coke, cabbage, and potatoes. After dinner I had a bit of a lie down and enjoyed a few jellybeans. We left Nana’s very shortly after Survivor was over (a guy named Ryan had to leave the jungle, fancy that) and I remember no exciting event to mention that night (other than Alex watched Family Guy with me).

Friday: I drove Billy to work and returned home. I woke up the lazies who were sleeping in because they had some serious shopping to do. I went to my one class and sat for a good 30 minutes and no one came. I went down to the lab we were in before (I didn’t go) and there was a note that the room was different for the day. I had a big internal debate on whether or not to go, but I went, and it was a shite class about named pipes on the Windows NT platform. After this my TR group had a read through of our SRS document, which wasn’t all that great, and I went to work.

Work wasn’t bad. Adam, a co-worker, failed to show up on time, and also failed to call and let us know he wasn’t going to be on time. On the plus side, there was a lot of food left over from lunch! If I didn’t mention it before, all of the Christmas decorations are up at work now. That makes closing take longer–we have to unplug all of the lights. The day staff left candles burning, which is bad, because I never check for them. Luckily I caught them just as I set the alarm and put them out. After work I went home (to home #2) to an empty, boring house.

I sort of started falling asleep at 9:30, but at 10:00 I was awoken by a phone call. Billy was requesting that I pick him up. So, I went, and returned home, and couldn’t fall back asleep. I stayed up, doing nothing, trying to find something fun to do online (TV sucks). When Cathie returned after 11 I tried to go to sleep again.

I was extremely unsuccessful. I could not get to sleep. I tried, and I tried, but I couldn’t get my mind off of something. Something which, unfortunately, I cannot share. At 12:30 I jumped in the car to go for a little drive. Forcing myself to concentrate on driving was the only idea I had to set my mind free. It, sort of, worked. I was much calmer when I returned home, just after Family Guy began. I turned FG on, but didn’t watch it. I had seen the episode just a few hours earlier. I went back to lay down in bed. By my best estimation I finally fell asleep around 2, only to be woken by the alarm at 5. I had only 3 hours of sleep for my 18 hour day, 14 of which I would be in a pollen-filled room.

I originally planned to keep detailed notes during the allergy study, but I found out that I pay too much attention to detail, and I talk too much. New characters: Computer Guy, and Washroom Girl. Food Guy and Mean Doctor were both there. Cathie had a run in with Food Guy when she asked where to return her dinner tray. I did not have to assert my manliness to Mean Doctor, as I made no errors on my symptom cards all day. There was no interaction with Computer Guy, but he was around all day. And, finally, Washroom Girl knew me by name.

After breaky (5:45 - 7:00) we were subjected to two hours of pollen. At 9:00 we took the mystery pills. I definately got the placebo. I was okay from about 10:00 - 1:00, as the pollen machine was off, but at 1:00, when the pollen came back on, I started to die. It wasn’t all that bad, but I did go through two boxes of facial tissue, and I drank a TON of water. This is where Washroom Girl came in. I died from 1:00 - 9:00, during which time I must’ve went to the washroom almost once per hour. I always introduced myself by my last name, as she was looking it up in a table that is alphabetical by last name, and so she had no trouble remembering me. I’d have to simply walk through the doors and she would say, “Mr. Allen, you may go ahead.” I wasn’t sure she really liked me, but I didn’t care–I needed to dispose of the water that I had collected in my bladder.

We were released from the dungeon around 9:30, home by 10:30. When I was leaving the doctors gave me a single, regular strength Sudafed, which was about as useful as a Corn Flake. At home, I was asleep by 11:30.

I woke up today late–around 11:00. Stephie beat me, though: she slept from 7 p.m. Saturday night until 12:30 p.m. Sunday. I made breakfast for the lazies, who again didn’t wake up, then went into Grandma’s (#2) for dinner (Tacos). I didn’t get back home until 7:30 which is when I finally got to take a Reactine. Right now my allergies are fine, but my headache isn’t (see paragraph 1).

So now, I have a ton of homework to do. When will I do it? I don’t know. Let’s see what I can do before I go to the hammer (this Thursday, and I couldn’t be more excited)! I’ve written enough that it’s not time for the 1 a.m. showing of Family Guy, so that’s where this story will end.

I’m starting to wonder if my life is lacking wonder. I’ve been really excited about having real, live content on ryanjallen.net and that’s what’s driven me to keep the site up to date, so far. I’m noticing that not a lot of real, exciting stuff is happening to me at all. I don’t think that’s a problem with me, but that it’s true with everyone. Everyone gets into a routine, so much so that even things that don’t fit into the routine are expected. Aside from really strange or fun events, what fun is it posting my daily story on rja.net?

I’ve been looking at some other web logs and a lot of them ask interesting questions. That makes for good reading. The problem for me is that I don’t have any interesting questions to ask (see: wondering if my life is lacking wonder). Almost everything I encounter is expected, and I can very logically answer any interesting question I might think up. I think I might be lacking in unknowns. That’s what makes things fun: variables. I don’t mean fun as in the “ha ha, we’re having fun” use of the word, but fun as in “there’s something interesting about my life” use of the word. Nothing fun fits into my action-items list.

I’m not broken, but I could be fixed.

Alright, here’s a quick bit about my day.

I went to work for 9 a.m. this morning to help an elderly lady fix a problem with her iMac. Traffic was backed up to the Army base to get over the causeway. When we drove by the “no wake zone” on the east side of the causeway the reason was evident: there was a body found on the eastern shore of the Cataraqui River, north of Highway 2. Cathie was jolted by the sight of a body bag! The weather was terrible but we made great time after we got over the causeway. I parked in the lot behind the La Salle Mews building and I noticed that the woman who asked me if I was “Joel’s son” was working the booth. I parked and proceeded inside.

I mentioned the elderly lady and a problem with her iMac. Well, she showed up (she was right behind us!) and I was delighted to see that it was a new iMac! I hadn’t had the pleasure of using one before so it was a real treat. It took me a few minutes to resolve the problems she was having which left me with no time to get to school for my class. I stayed at work until 1 p.m. then jumped on a bus to school.

Boy was I happy I went; we learned about how a web browser works in my communications class! Right after the class I had a meeting with my TR group so my trip wasn’t wasted. The meeting was great, and we accomplished a lot.

There’s way more, but I have to go. Family Guy’s on now. I’m easily distracted. I’ll add more later.

My day was a relatively boring one. Sure, I got to wake Stephanie up; sure I had a co-worker, who I called my assistant, wake Alex up; and sure I got to talk to Shannon for a good 45 minutes, but my day was otherwise uneventful. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about something that is very important to me: the tilde (~).

Recently, some of you may have seen my MSN nickname that questioned the designation of the tilde character to its own key. Sure, the tilde shares the key with a back quote, but it seemed clear to me that the tilde had no place in the English language. Many people suggested that there is place in the spanish language, as well as in mathematics, but no one was able to offer a link to the English language. I consulted one of my favourite websites, the , and found no information about the tilde at all. With this discouraging find it may have appeared that I had grown a distaste for the tilde character/key, and this is simply not true. I use the tilde every day, many times a day, in many commands I give my computer systems. In the UNIX world, the tilde character expands to be your home directory, and that’s a major use for me. Also, ~username expands to username’s home directory. This can be handy if you happen to have an ‘ftp’ user, or similar, whose home directory houses all of your favourite mp3s. You can quickly get to the root of the archive with a simple reference to ~ftp.

I was up late last night talking to myself. My allergies were slightly bothersome but bearable. I would have rated them +3, moderate. I was talking to myself because Stephanie fell asleep, and I guess no one else is online at 3 a.m. It was funny.

So I missed my 7 a.m. mark this morning by a little bit but still got to KOS for 9 a.m.. I should have gone straight to the school but the new employee, Rob, was being introduced to everyone this morning. I wanted to make sure that I got to meet him today. When Meredith brought him around to my desk I stood up to greet him. I think that’s my new think–standing up. Oh, and my handshake was more firm than him, so I don’t think I’ll have any power issues.

I went to school for the afternoon. We had a boring lecture about a 3D rendering library in MFC, followed by a boring lecture about how e-mail works, then I met with my TR group. The meeting was productive enough. Each of us is going away and doing some more research into a topic and we are going to present independently to the group on Thursday. Oh, and that reminds me that I want to e-mail our SLC advisor and tell him that we’re going to miss his SRS document deadline by a day (for the better, of course). Finally, my school day ended with a boring lecture about ANOVA (props to all of you statisticians out there).

As I exited the school, heading to the bus platform, a child (who I think has a mental illness) was desperately seeking my attention. He approached me while I was walking, saying “hello” to me repeatedly. I responded with “hello” and moved away from the child along the bus platform, but he continued to follow me. Not knowing what to do, I continued walking, ignoring his cries. I had already answered “hello” to him, what more did he want? The anxiety was building up inside me; my pace increased as I headed toward the end of the platform. Finally I turned and said “hello,” once more.

The child stopped. I stopped. He offered his tiny hand at my waist level and I took it, and gave it a firm shake. He asked my name, and turned his head so that his right ear was facing me to receive my reply. I told him my name and he proceeded to signal to someone further back on the platform. This skyrocketed my anxiety and I froze for a moment. After my ability to deal with the situation in a calm manor was at its full potential I briskly said goodbye and walked away–as far away as possible. This left me walking home, instead of my normal bus, wait, bus journey. I made it to a bus stop on Brock street where my bus (Kingscourt) picked me up and I got home at my usual time. By the time the bus had picked me up I had calmed down after earlier’s incident, as well.

At home, my allergies went ballistic, again. My face feels like it’s sun burnt, when really its just been ripped to shreds by the vicious tissue paper. After talking to some good friends and classmates I went to have a shower in hopes of clearing myself of whatever residual pollen was remaining on my person. My shower lasted an extraordinarily long time and when I was through I accidentally fell asleep (in bed). I woke up after 10:00 p.m. to my mother screaming about toonie Tuesday.

Now, I have a couple of papers to edit; my allergies have calmed down slightly from +4, severe, to +3, moderate; MSN is working, again; and I have a gross taste in my mouth. I’ll leave you with this and then go brush my teeth.

Does anyone else out there think it would be fun if ryanjallen.net sent out a press release? I think I’ll need someone who’s in PR.