stand down, jump commander

It might seem like things have been rough on the romantic front for me -- but it's quite the opposite. I wrote about the difficult spots in the last week not to make Boo or my other friends look bad, but to underline just how crazy I've been for the last few months. I'm finally getting some of the crazy material wrestled to the ground, but it's been difficult to simultaneously work at fourth gear and relax in neutral; I don't drive stick but I can feel the gears grind when I go from work to relaxation.

And my loved ones have been suffering from that grind. It takes me several hours to go from [imagine my internal paratroop sergeant shouting as I mentally dive out the back of a plane]: "deal, cope, deal, write, cross things off the list, go, go!" to a place where I can just spend time with my friends. It's not so much that I'm distracted by not working -- although that happens too sometimes -- but that I'm in a work-overwhelmed state and, for me, my work is frequently a strongly analytic place. Programming requires a fundamental breaking down (Greek ana + lysis, "apart-splitting"), and writing expository text, especially science/engineering expository text, which values clarity and formalism over elegance and grace. Though I like explaining -- I'm doing it right now -- I definitely got tired of explaining things in writing that I figured all my readers already knew. So to get my thesis done, I got into the head space every day of that jump commander i described above.

Even when I recognize that there's plenty of time and the research can wait, and that it would do me good to spend unscheduled time with my friends and loved ones, the jump commander doesn't shut up right away. It usually takes me some time to hit that point, and it's difficult for me to do that -- to stand down the jump commander and relax into "just being". Right the last few months, I haven't been able to do it at all unless I'm with people who love me and treat me nice. And I have that; my friends have been supportive, and Boo has been a steady point for me. But the one thing I can't do is shout down the jump commander. I just have to sit silently and let him rant for a while.

Ultimately

In Cali

I've finally landed and won't be getting on a plane for a while. I'm off to start at [internship] tomorrow a.m., but I'm up far too late.

It's so, so good to be not in an airplane. My ass is sore. Tomorrow night perhaps I'll catch up on LJ.

Baltimore and back

The conference yesterday was really quite interesting. I got to see the work I contributed to explained by the people who were doing most of the summer work. I got treated pretty well by most of the talks, which was nice.

And being tired while I was there meant -- despite my own intentions of shutting up to avoid asking stupid questions -- that I asked a bunch of questions. And I think they were pretty good. A little nerve-wracking that the others doing the same were mostly faculty, but I'm really not self-conscious about asking questions in this context. don't know why. I know I had one very good idea; an undergrad was making a research proposal and I saw a strong analogy between what he was proposing at the discourse level and what the workshop was proposing at the sentence level.

Didn't get to stay very long, though; I had to catch a cab to the airport just before the end of the day. We got stuck in traffic the whole way; the cabbie didn't run the meter and I suspect there was some weirdness about the rate, but I was too tired to be very curious. Checkin told me that I would be assigned a seat at the gate ("which means 'sitting in back next to engine'", I muttered at the machine) and stood through long security lines with cranky B'more TSA telling me where to stand.

I arrived at the gate and was immediately called up and given a seat near the front of coach; so much for cynicism. Nine hours later, I emerged from the intra-spatial bardo that all airplanes and airports belong to, sniffly from too much airline time and too little sleep or quality food. I came back out through the giant long-term parking at San Jose and found my car and drove back to Palo Alto, found the hotel that beckyb, and crashed at the hotel. The clerk asked me if I wanted a wake-up call, which I declined; I hadn't decided when I wanted to wake up. I called imtboo, tired, and missing her, and (since I had internet access there) caught up on some email (though still not livejournal!). When I finally got in bed, I fell asleep in seconds.

First day at internship; don't say boys never ask directions

I woke up on my own, with absolutely no idea where I was. Then I realized that (1) I wasn't at home and (2) I'd woken up rested. I jumped, because it could only mean one thing -- I slept through the alarm. Indeed, I had. It was 9:45a, and I started work today.

I threw on some clothes and hurried out the back to my car, grabbing my notebook on the way. I'm pretty good with directions, but I realized that the first direction that I had written down yesterday said "East", and the sun was behind me. Accordingly, I was fairly sure I was going the wrong way. But then I remembered the map in my head, and realized that I had probably written East when I meant West. Nevertheless, I started worrying. I pulled over in a gas station, and asked the guy "is this the right way to [street]?"
He gave me a blank look for a minute, and said "uh, is [street] in Palo Alto?"
"Yeah," I said, not 100% sure.
"Palo Alto is that way," he said, with a huge wild swing of arm in the direction I had indicated.
"Thanks," I said, and fled back to my car. It occurred to me that I don't have my phone -- I must have left it in the hotel -- and that makes me nervous too, because if I get lost, I can't call for help.
"I can ask at another gas station if I need to," I say to myself. Being tired and alone makes me talk to myself.

Despite my worry, I find the building with no additional trouble. I reach the front door in an anonymous, faceless hallway, with a phone sitting outside. A little card stands next to the phone with a directory of the people behind the door.

I dial one after another of the numbers, and get voicemail after voicemail. I am staring at a completely white door, in a completely white wall, with no frame around the door, so the wall -- except for the seam around the door -- is completely smooth in a Kubrickian-future sort of way. I feel a little like Alice, actually. I experience a moment of vertigo when I find my own name on the card. I contemplate dialing the number, for a minute, just for the existential thrill of it, and because it's something I would do in a Zork-like game when confronted with a situation like this, just to see what little fortune-cookie the game author has included. I decide to not be playful with people I don't know yet, and keep looking down the list.

I find the name of my boss while I'm here, and I call him. After several rings, he answers and comes to find me at the door. He shows me my desk, and gives me my login sheet and points me at the computer. But I can't log in. The password they've given me is wrong, or something. Already late, I don't want to make a stink. My boss says he's going to Stanford and he'll be back for lunch. I still can't log in. I work on my slides on my laptop, and start writing livejournal.

I get bored and start going to find the system admin people. I get a local login, but I am not authenticated properly. I don't have any DNS outside of the company's computers, and by the time I figure out that this is the problem, the acting sysadmin who's been helping me has slipped away for lunch.

I work on slides for my talk, and go to lunch with my new boss and two of the permanent staffers. I give my talk after we get back, and though it goes overlong, most of them seem interested.

(no subject)

After my talk today, I started to investigate the login situation more closely.

My situation is this: I can log in to the Linux box on my desk, but I have only user access and only on that machine. While other data is cross-mounted on this machine, I cannot use the web for very much: gmail and other main mail sites are blocked, and all ports except for http are blocked as well. Thus I cannot even ssh to machines at the lab in the PNW.

To make matters worse, I cannot even get a DNS for those pages. That's right: `ping www.google.com` does not work from my desk, and not because ping packets are swallowed -- though they apparently are. It's because "unknown host google.com".

And if that wasn't enough, the workstation is running RH 8.0, which is a seriously stale distribution. It runs Mozilla 1.0.1, and I can't even install my own Firefox -- the library of glibc is out of date.

Apparently there is a wireless network with better access, but my wireless card doesn't see it. It may be because the network is WPA encrypted, but I don't know if that should matter. My card's been acting weird, so I don't know for sure that's what the problem is.

I went to Fry's -- an impressive store, really -- and bought a D-link wireless USB adapter. But I can't get it recognized. Perhaps a project for later.