I was trying to understand void pointers better and I was pointed to Ritchie's essay on the History of C. Ultimately, it did not answer my original question, but it was a fascinating read which I highly recommend to anyone who's wondered why some aspect or another of C is as it is. *wry grin* Admittedly, a large number of quirks of C and C++ come down to "it wasn't standardized and we had to adapt the standard to code that already compiled" but some of the aspects like how it deals with pointer and array definitions... very much worth reading.

Odd dreams

Last night, I dreamt that I was running a store of the occult. It wasn't normally a store of the occult... it was a hardware store (more like a Wal-Mart or Lowes in how it was set up) and some people had been running during the store's off hours something like an occult flea market except a little more organized. Except, somehow they were eliminated from the storyline and myself and other hardware employees had to continue to run this bazaar of the bizarre. Most of it has fled my mind except that the emloyees who used to run it wore stereotypical witch costumes including the pointy black hat with wide brim and that Kevin, my little brother, was working the automatic writing oracle which was semi-intelligent but could only respond to direct questions. Somewhere near the end of the dream, a blond police officer had requested to investigate the premises. As he was rummaging through some shelves, one of the female employees said that she had a bad feeling about this and asked me to intercede. He was grabbing things off of the shelves and looking at them and wouldn't respond to my vocal requests for his attention, so I tapped his shoulder. He immediately wheeled on me and started giving me the third degree about "interfering with an investigation" as I tried to explain myself and request proper identification from him. And I think I woke up shortly thereafter.

I had another belly dance class last night. I think I'm doing alright at it although the hip motions are still a bit awkward and apparently I do a little too much foot swiveling when walking with the hip swivel. ^_^ We do hip circles next week, which I should be well prepared for what with my Elvis impersonations. I'm really glad that I decided to take this course.

Incidentally, my neck is doing better. It's still a little stiff, but it's just my neck; my shoulders are fine. Driving is still a bit of a pain, so to speak. My mirrors don't quite cover the blind spots when I'm merging lanes, so I have to do a bit of twisting my entire torso to see the cars. But I think that between the larger doses of ibuprofen and using a heating pad on it, it's getting better. Now if I only knew what triggered it in the first place... *shrug* Oh well, maybe I'll figure it out later so that I can try to avoid such activities. As it is, I think I'm well enough to head off to Capoeira tonight. ^_^ And I found a place for karaoke Thursday nights, Connie Mac's on 130, so I'll have a place to go tonight. Bit by bit, I'm settling.

^_^ Yeah, test results with no commentary. The quality control for this entry is poor:

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Och. It's been one of those weeks. First off, my apologies for not updating throughout the week. As for events, I auditioned for Babes in Toyland with Haddonfield Plays and Players. Due to a combination of losing track of time and laziness, I wound up with a new song which I had only heard once or twice before, and was still memorizing when I got there. I started in the wrong key and lost track of where I was in the music. For the dance audition, I stumped my way through it... for musicals, what's commonly done is they give you a couple of dance steps to a song, often one largely unrelated to the show, go through it a few times, then have you audition with it. Me... I take a bit of time to learn new dance steps. Add to it that they tend to either use esoteric terms (What's a "toe dip skip hop" supposed to be anyhow?) or teach by saying, "Oh, do this" followed by a sequence of 5-10 movements and that a large number of choreographers don't seem to get the concept of counting beats when writing up the dance steps... ^_^ I know, I'm kvetching. And this one wasn't nearly so bad with a grand total of 24 counts of music with about 6 moves. The choreographer did give us beat counts. I'm just complaining because I dislike dancing up until I have the choreography down. Anyhow, I totally bombed the audition. And I got cast. ^_^ Apparently, they're really short on guys... which works out in my favor, I guess.

Och... for some reason, I've had major neck cramp issues lately. It all started Saturday afternoon. I was sitting at my computer, playing Dwarf Fortress (I'm currently at the more boring middle game where not much is happening while you're marking time between sieges and waiting for more nobles to show up) and all of a sudden, the back of my neck starts cramping heavily. I figured it was something transient until the pain started radiating down my back. I tried stretching, eating, drinking, none of this working, so I headed back to bed for a nap of an hour or two, giving my neck a chance to relax without having to support anything. I woke up feeling even worse, with now my shoulders aching as well (I suspect I was subconsciously bracing myself on them to prevent strain on my neck. The other oddity was that, within the dreams, my arms fell asleep, including one bizarre bit of the dream where I was walking down [hopping down?] some steps when my right arm suddenly went limp and numb and I had to grab it with my teeth [tasting blood in the process] to stabilize it. I remember in-dream worrying that I'd broken it or something). Sunday morning was a bit better, possibly since I slept on a heating pad. I was exhausted by evening and fell asleep around 9 PM. I woke up at 8:15 AM, not a good time for waking when your job starts at 8. I called in to explain that I was running late and made my way in to work, my shoulder still very sore. One of the reasons for delaying was that when I tried to sit up in bed, the shooting pain in my neck and shoulders dropped me again. Similar pains faced me when I tried to roll over by lifting one shoulder. I finally had to wrench myself up by rolling my entire torso to one side so that I could push myself up. I have seen the nurse's office downstairs at work. They told me that it was a pretty standard stiff neck problem and that the whole thing with the shoulders was just a matter of me straining muscles trying to avoid jarring my neck. They authorized me to start taking double-doses of ibuprofen and they have heating pads downstairs for me to use over my lunch break. *grumble* If it's not one thing...

In other news, I think I'd mentioned before that I was talking to a girl in the Jersey area who I'd met over OKC. Well, we're still talking, but apparently dating is more or less off the table for now. Which is Ok, but it would have been nice to have known where things stood from the beginning. ^_^ Eh, at least I'm talking to girls. That's a step in the right direction. I guess I need to start sending messages out again. Most won't be responded to, but I used to do door-to-door sales as a youth and one thing you learn there is that even if you have nine doors slammed in your face for every ten you try, that's still one sale you're making.

Actually, speaking of door-to-door sales, one of my co-workers brought in a fundraising sheet for their kid, selling various goods. When she tried to get me to sign up for some, I explained my policy of only buying when kids are actually selling door-to-door, in part because I feel it's something that breeds character and in part because I always hated how the kids who won the little contests were invariably the kids who had parents high enough up in the management chain to pressure all of their subordinates to buy from them. Anyhow, she said that with the state of the world being what it is, she doesn't think that any responsible adult should let their kid go selling door-to-door, too much chance of them getting snatched. While I understand the fears she has, does anyone else feel like the situation isn't nearly so dire? There are occasional scattered incidents, but for the most part, as long as you teach your kids to be wary and to avoid dangerous situations, the odds are low that anything would happen. And while even low odds are odds, there are so many things that can go wrong in the world, why rob your child of formative experiences in the area of door-to-door sales?

Yesterday, I went to a great deal of trouble to donate blood. First, I started in the wrong place, so that cost me a good half hour of my lunch break. Then, I got one of the slowest phlebotemists I've ever encountered — he asked me to say and spell my first last name 11 times! I couldn't help but start counting &mdash and I bled more slowly than usual (once they get the needle in, I've been known to fill the bag in 5 minutes in some cases. This time, it took twelve). So, I took two hours of lunch without the benefit of actually getting to eat lunch, meaning that I missed the audition at CCC last night (although that was partly by choice. I never did get around to memorizing a contemporary monologue) and I only barely managed to get my nine hours in for the day. So, guess who's having a blood drive on the 1st floor of their building today? *raises hand* Och... normally, they do a bit better of a job advertising it, emails or the like. Oh well, I can comfort myself with knowing that I may have helped save a life even if it did screw up my day.

I will be starting my continuing education belly dancing course today. It took some effort to find the room number and I just now noticed that they asked us to wear socks in (I'm in sandals today), but I think this should be fun. ^_^ Interesting, at the least.

Now if only I were in better shape... I stayed up way too late last night plying Dwarf Fortress. I've really got to amend that. It's jhust that the game has such a feeling of "just one more thing" to it. And, since it runs real-time without the ability to speed things up in game (you can pause and you can increase the maximum update speed in the INI file between playings), it's all too easy to set something up, say "Ok, once this completes, I'll save and quite" and find that an hour goes by and either you're still waiting, or you dealt with that event automatically and are waiting for something else. Like I said before, this game has all of the addictive qualities of The Sims in spades. And, even though the dwarves are just bits of ASCII text and brief descriptions, you start to care for the little buggers to the point where you're on the edge of your seat when they go into battle. {shakes head} Yeah, so I need to avoid even starting a game tonight. I need to just get some sleep. Wish me luck with that.

I just finished helping my sister-in-law, Bev, with a paper. I was glad to help, but it was frustrating because it was all over the phone up until the end where I was able to get Google Docs up to let me revise it for typos and brainstorm the conclusion whilst getting feedback. Well, really, it's frustrating helping anyone with a paper, y'know? You walk the razor's edge between helping them write and writing the paper for them. As it is, I think we were successful at getting it all right.

Saturday, I went to the demonstration my capoeira school did for the Philly Fringe 2008 festival. It was pretty awesome. They demonstrated several aspects of the general culture from dances of three of the Orishas to Maculelê to a demonstration of Capoeira both as an individual scripted routine and in the roda. The latter was the most amazing in my opinion. The sheer speed at which people were moving and the way they meshed with each other, bending and flowing around kicks, seamlessly integrating their attacks and defense, it was breathtaking. It looked like it could have been scripted except that you could see where people had to break off attacks or change esquivas as the attacks shifted with them. Heh, and there was one part where for about 15-20 seconds, the two people didn't actually throw a technique, but were reacting to the beginnings of attacks which were aborted to respond to the reaction and so on. Most of the audience was probably a little confused by it, but I thought it was one of the best parts. Afterwards, I went to a party at Mestre Corisco's house, it having been his 62nd birthday this last Tuesday. Prior to the party, I hung out with a couple of people from the school at a Vietnamese restaurant down the street. Honestly, I enjoyed that more than the party. *wrinkles nose* The party was Ok, but it was noisy and I still don't know people all that well. Add to it that about half of the people speak Portuguese to some degree and in general, it left me leaving feeling like I was standing on the fringes, for all that they did their best to welcome me. I guess to some degree, it's my nature to be on the outskirts or to be the rock in the middle of the stream that just lets everything flow around me.

Originally, I had planned to audition for The Graduate with The Collaborative Act Studio, but the auditions were posted on the Theater Alliance site on Thursday for auditions on Thursday and Saturday and requited a prepared monologue. Thursday, I didn't have one prepared (and really wanted to go to Capoeira to find out the details fo the party) and Saturday, I was singing for the joining of schools mass for church. I probably could have made other arrangements, but I put it off until the last moment. I hope their performance goes well. I still plan to audition for the Camden Community College shows and Babes in Toyland with Haddonfield Plays and Players.

In other news, I will be in Ashland in October for my high school reunion and for the next 2-3 days after (Amtrak does not have the most convenient schedules). It will be nice to see people again.

I feel like I had something in mind to finish this entry with but instead, I guess I'll just stop right he

Isn't it funny how memories can come back to haunt you. Lately, I've had people find this one entry via Google searches about McCubbin's Point and Tan-Tar-A Timber Falls. And... it brought back a lot of memories. There were good ones, there were bad ones, but it all conspired to leave me utterly gobsmacked for a few moments as it all flooded my head. Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.

Och... today was fun at Capoeira. It was Mestre Corisco's 62nd birthday today, so we all had to play with him in the roda. I hope I move that well at 62. Heck, I'm not sure if I'm capable of what he does at the age of 28.

My laptop is back up. My desktop is not. As mentioned in prior entries, my laptop got screwed up after a tech support call from Dell. I reinstalled from the partition on the hard drive and everything seems alright so far other than losing all of my applications and any spare data I forgot to back up. The latter is relatively reduced due to the loan of an external hard drive from one of the people in my D&D group. So far, it seems all I've lost is my chat log history, which I seldom really referred to anyhow. Ah, speaking of chat logs, apparently my ICQ number was hijacked a while ago. I had few enough people that I talk to on there anymore that I barely noticed, but they've changed my user alias, birthdate, and password. They've kept my picture. I've had no luck so far with the ICQ technical support in wresting it back. It's annoying, but it's not the end of the world. I'm thinking of just quietly dropping the account since, as aforementioned, I don't even really talk to people on that protocol anymore. Oh, and my desktop is probably just down due to a power supply. I think I even have a working power supply ion the house to replace it with. I just need to locate it and try replacing it. If that doesn't work, it's to the repair shop, which is dicey because I don't really know the repair shops in the area yet and they really do tend to vary. Which is probably one of the reasons I'm leary of trying out the power supply, since it may not work. Also... I'm just being very lazy, I guess.

I didn't get into The Little Foxes. They didn't go into the reasons, but I'll admit that I didn't have high hopes when, in two auditions, they called me up to read exactly twice, one time for only two lines. Maybe it's the hair. Maybe I just didn't fit their age ranges. Maybe it's because I'm new. *shrug* Maybe I just wasn't good enough. Anyhow, the next one in the queue is Babes in Toyland. Or maybe, it's just time for me to take a break for a while. I'm still doing Capoeira and I'll be starting Belly Dancing at the community college next Wednesday, assuming they don't catch on and decide to be sex-exclusive for the class. In my defense, it's traditionally been a mixed-gender sport, albeit usually with very strict gender segregation (including audience... in some venues, it's still considered scandalous for the men to watch the women and vice versa). Me, I'm doing it for the exercise, the likely improvement of grace and control, and the fact that it is a way to meet people. ^_^ It's worth a try. If nothing else, it will probably give me a few interesting stories to tell.

So, what have I been doing that's been keeping me so busy? Well, I wish I could say it's all been time well-spent, but I'm afraid I frittered away much of the long weekend playing Dwarf Fortress (I've got a fortress that's managed to stay up and running with just one death over the first three years!), reading fanfiction (and two novels), and getting a bit further in Final Fantasy IX (In my opinion, one of the best Final Fantasy games since the original. Clearly defined roles with some customizability, and no "gunblades" or similar silly weapons). No celebrations for Labor Day and I didn't even get around to hitting the pool at my complex (usually, I'm getting back too late in the day to use it, so this was a rare opportunity). And I didn't get around to tasks such as cleaning up the house or the aforementioned computer-testing. Well, at least I'm well-rested.

On a more personal front, things are Ok if slow relationship-wise. I've been talking with this girl here in New Jersey. She seems like an interesting sort. She's into art, specifically computer photo-manipulation and the examples of her work that I've seen are pretty impressive. She has an... interesting history. She's been homeschooled for most of her life and she's one of the unfortunate cases where it didn't quite work out, so she's in the midst of studying for a GED so that she can get caught back up. And somewhere in between it all, she apparently lived a fairly wild lifestyle including living on her own in a few states. But currently, she's trying to work at settling down, complete with a newly renewed faith. As of now, I'm still in the "need to talk to more online to ensure non-creepness" category, but I feel like I'm slowly making progress. *wry grin* I've got various other people on OKC that I've meant to message, but I keep running shy on things to say. And that one girl from the show that I meant to ask out, I still haven't figured out any good excuse to call her. Which is silly, since I should be able to call and say, "Hey, let's go on a date" but you know me and my social insecurities.

So, overall, things are going well enough. I'll try to keep them on that even keel.

Dave — Dave Lyrics
A Boy and His Frog — A Boy and His Frog Lyrics

Quick test for humanity, did you tear up during either of those songs? If so, you're human. If not, you'd best watch out for Decker coming after you.

Ever have one of those waking dreams where you "wake up" and something wrong about where you wake up? It might be subtle enough that you only realize it upon waking ("Oh wait... my dresser's on the right side of my room and there's no closet on the left side") or it might be obvious and/or part of the dream ("I don't remember there being a portal to Middle Earth on my wall. And what's that balrog doing looming over me?"). Occasionally, it manages to straddle both lines like the time when I dreamt I was in a room entirely unlike my own and didn't realize this until after waking. My dreams last night has elements of all of the above. I "woke up" at least three times. One time, I remember I had to walk out to the kitchen for something (probably my laptop, which is currently on my dining room table) and upon waking, I realized that the lighting was all wrong in that I hadn't turned on any lights and yet, my way was lit by a pale glow that all of the objects gave off. The second time, I woke up to the sounds of someone in my bathroom (I live alone). I lay there, eyes partly cracked open, trying to appear asleep so that I could observe who it was, but as the voice exited the room, all there was was a pale nimbus of light, not even in humanoid form. The last incident I remember, there were two other people in my house. One was a co-worker and the other... I don't remember. I remember that in the dream, I was perfectly fine with the co-worker being there — something had come up at home, so I let her sack out on my couch — but waking up to the other person, a friend of hers in the dream, lying on the other side of the bed was sort of jarring. But still, I didn't realize it was a dream until I actually woke up.

Some of this odd dreaming may have been the result of diet. While at the Dollar Tree last night, I grabbed a stew I hadn't seen before, largely on account of it being a very large can of stew (24 oz if I recall correctly, with about a pound and a quarter of food inside of the sizeable can. Well, I nuked a can of it last night, and added salt liberally as I customarily do these days (I came to realize that much of my diet is actually very low in sodium, meaning I'm not getting my FDA-suggested daily amount) and I quickly found that either I had added far too much salt, or there was just a lot of it to start with. Even with liberal amounts of water to drink, I still could only eat about 2/3 of the stew before I got too nauseated to continue. As a result, I did get to bed early, but I was still in a state of nausea. Another possible factor, especially for the non-existent bathroom intruder, is that I had my bedroom window open to take advantage of the coolness of the night, and I know I was awoken a few times earlier in the night by people coming into the complex. Quite possibly, I was hearing someone outside and, since the sounds were coming from behind me and therefore were hard to locate, I automatically moved them to where I would be looking, the bathroom.

Oh, and incidentally, this morning I finished up the remains of the stew from the night before, and I had another bowl this afternoon, this time with no added salt. No problems with nausea (although the morning stew was still far too salty) but I got around to reading the nutritiional facts and apparently that can of stew is worth 1060 calories (about 500 of which are directly from fat), 180% of my daily recommended amount of saturated fat, and about 150% of my recommended sodium and non-saturated fat intake. So yeah, between the already high amounts of sodium being exacerbated by my addition of salt, and the sheer mass of food, it's quite possible that the food caused some of the odd dreams.

Lastly, I did attend the second night of auditions for The Little Foxes. *wrinkles nose* Sunday, they had me read for one person, a bitter 40-to-50-year-old. They called me up once. I asked if I'd be able to read more on the next night, in particularly asking about Leo, the 20-year-old in the cast. Last night, I read Leo. Once. In a scene where he has all of four lines of which one is "Huh?". On one hand, maybe I've just so over-awed them with my ability that they need hear no more. Or maybe I've been disregarded entirely. I really can't tell. I guess I just sit and wait to see what I hear.