Jay McGavren’s Journal

(o)(O)

  __  ---tOo mUcH cAfFeINe!!!

(-)(-)

  UU  ---Cleetus, get the pitchfork...

(O)(O)

  VV  ---I HUNGER!!!

…yes, I’m that bored.

Rush hour was over, but things were still a little slow exiting from the 202 to the 51, so there I sat, waiting for the cars ahead of me to plod forward. My morning stupor was so intense that it didn’t occur to me to be scared when I heard the screeching tires behind me. They must have gone for some 2 or 3 seconds before the THUNK.

Some Mexican in his little pickup forgot that traffic could come to a dead stop there, and had been going too fast for the trailer he was pulling. He had no insurance, of course. Neither of us was hurt, and my car was undamaged except for a few flecks of paint on the bumper, but of course there can be stuff you can’t see. I hesitated a moment, then called 911 just to cover my ass. “You’re calling the police?” he said, trying to sound unconcerned. I felt bad for him, and wondered if I wasn’t being paranoid, but I wasn’t about to let my insurance company screw me later because I didn’t file a police report.

We waited in our respective cars for about 15 minutes for a patrol car to show up, then another 15 while the officer fiddled about in his cruiser. Turned out the reason things were taking so long was that this guy had a warrant on him, and they were gonna haul him to jail.

Meh. Ordinarily I’d have said it served him right for driving without insurance. I dunno. Right now I just wish the whole damn thing hadn’t happened.

One copy of Burning Crusade will upgrade ONE WoW account. Another $40 to upgrade the second, which I wouldn’t even have if it wasn’t required to play from 2 PCs at once. Not only that, there’s no way to purchase a key online (that I could find). I had to run to the store after another freaking box, just to get the %$#@ 26-digit code inside.

Fuck you, Blizzard. Fuck you.

If you hear Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” coming up on the radio, change the station. It’s not that it’s a bad song, it’s that you don’t want something that depressing stuck in your head.

Best Buy is offering a World of Warcraft map for $2 - shipping is free. Pre-expansion, but it could be useful anyway. Just ordered ours.

> More than just a map, this giant lay of the land is a work
> of art. At 24″ x 36″, this two-sided map makes a great wall
> hanging in any room. On one face, the map shows all flight
> paths, including the Horde, Alliance, Neutral and
> Druid-only travel points. On the flip side is an unfettered
> map of Azeroth displaying a beautifully rendered view of
> the topography of the islands.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8206069&type=product&id=1165610667161

Popped next door to Target and bought a Burning Crusade box ($40) as well. Lessee, and we’re dropping, what, $30 a month to maintain two accounts? Man, Halo 2 was a lot cheaper…

This article suggests that a minimum wage hike is essential not just to everyone’s livelihood, but their safety as well…

> If the gap between rich and poor gets too large, and if
> those at the bottom feel they have no meaningful route to
> the riches at the top, then the fabric of society will
> fray, or even come unraveled entirely.
…
> Shortly before I arrived in Brazil, a British tour bus was
> hijacked and robbed in broad daylight on the way from Rio’s
> international airport to a ritzy beach area. While I was
> there, two Supreme Court justices were carjacked on the
> same road.
> Overall, the murder rate in Brazil is five times that of
> New York City.
…
> The New York Times reported recently on a World Bank study
> concluding that if Brazil had the much lower homicide rate
> of Costa Rica, Brazil’s GDP would have been three to eight
> percent higher in the 1990s.
> As one economist explained in the article, “You have money
> spent on guarding stuff rather than making stuff.” And when
> international investors look around the globe, they choose
> safer places.

http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/economist/19750

Boosting the minimum wage is just giving a man a fish, though. Let’s teach him how to fish by raising education funding as well.

It seems I never just sit down and pick a programming language up… I flirt with it for a couple years, trying to convince myself that I really need it.

Well, I’m really liking Ruby now. The reason is the whole “Ruby classes are never closed” thing. Feel like going back and adding methods to a class? Go for it. Want to add methods to an individual object? It’ll create a virtual class for that object behind the scenes. Mixins aren’t so mysterious if you view them as a batch-adding of methods to an existing class.

Diana’s been watching Alton Brown on Food Network. This is a bad thing because it convinces her we need all kinds of kitchen gear. It’s a good thing because this week alone, I have enjoyed from-scratch cinnamon rolls, and this lovely little chili recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_28231,00.html

It still blows my mind that my wife not only understands what it means to “fire up a Perl interpreter”, but appreciates the overhead involved.

I have chosen… wisely.

Annnnd… the car’s back from the shop. $60 to find that a bolt was missing from the brake assembly and replace it. It wasn’t the CV joint at all.

Did I mention the last people to work on the brakes were my father in law and myself? And I doubt the mistake was my father in law’s. I really need to stick to coding.