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I have many many online friends but very few meatspace friends.

Monday I felt tired and depressed, today too. But after work both days I visited with a couple of the few IRL friends I've got. And I wasn't so tired anymore, nor depressed.

A while back Anonymous Coward drove down to Vancouver and took me out to lunch. I'm going to email him to suggest I return the favor. He'll still have to drive here - he lived about forty miles away - but now I have the cash that I could buy us both lunch.

I've been sleeping excessively. Time that I could otherwise spend with other people, I spend sleeping. This is bad - excessive sleep makes me depressed, depression makes me sleep excessively. Clearly the solution is to sleep less, but when that alarm clock rings, I am immune.

A new guy moved in across the hall from me, that's in the same housing program I'm in. Chris is a good guy. I'm going to invite him in for coffee.

He said "Do you need any food? I got food". "No I got lots of food" I replied. "I'll get you anything you need - food, girls, you name it."

Just spending a little while having coffee with me would be all I need.

I know waitresses and baristas all over the Pacific Northwest, but there's only one I know well enough to see outside her work. She said she wants to come visit, but she's been very busy. She works a lot of hours, then her troublesome sister keeps her busy. She babysits her sister's kids.

I'm planning to buy a car with the money from my next project. (I've been asked to do a second project!) That should help quite a lot as it will enable me to play Open Mics with my keyboard. Performing live music is a good way to make friends. Musicians are a lot more fun than computer programmers.

Spring is here. It's still cold but many of the trees are covered with blossoms. It gladdens my heart to see them.

I still have to wear a coat but I no longer have to wear a sweater under the coat. Soon it will be warm enough to go out without a coat.

I haven't been singing on the street since I've had this client. I'm thinking seriously that I should resume singing. As my Newfie ex-wife said, it would blow the stink off me.

It's evening twilight as I write this. I like it that the sun is up later and later in the day. When I get off work there's still a couple hours of sunlight left.

With daylight savings time it's hard for me that the sun is still down when my alarm clock rings. It's not quite dark, it's morning twilight but there is very little light at that time. Soon though the sun will rise before my alarm.

Krddit's tdillo suggests that I need a hobby away from the computer. Really my music should be that hobby but my depression leads me not to practice. The crazy thing is that I feel good whenever I do practice, I know that I will, but even so I dread practicing.

The dread I have of doing just about anything is delusional. But just knowing that you're delusional doesn't make the delusion go away.

I'm going to ask my pshrink to change my happy pills. The ones I'm presently on - two different antidepressants - do help but not enough. I don't feel bad exactly but I sleep too much. When I talk to other people I speak very slowly. I have difficulty talking at all.

Well I'll post this and head home. The apartment manager will be replacing one of my light switches tonight - when this switch is turned on, the bulb flickers dimly. I don't know for sure that it's the light switch but it seems a reasonable explanation.

My first paycheck is nearly spent. I've received my second paycheck - the second half of the total for my first project - but their accountant made the check out to "Soggy Wizards" rather than Michael Crawford. My credit union wouldn't permit me to deposit it.

I could open a business checking account but that means I need business licenses with both the city and state. But my first paycheck is almost gone.

What did I spend it on? Might as well be hookers and blow, I'd have as much to show for it. Actually I spent most of it on restaurant meals. I'm fortunate that I spent some on items of lasting value, like my spiffy new Mac Mini, and some new clothes. Otherwise I would have spent the whole thing at restaurants.

Fortunately a close friend is willing to lend me the money for the business licenses. I will apply online later tonight. This friend of mine is well aware of my fondness for hookers and blow, but frankly I'm shocked.

I used to enjoy cooking at home. It's my depression that discourages it.

I could take sandwiches for lunch but every morning I feel too wiped to make my sandwich. Starting tonight I'm going to make my sandwiches the night before.

Rice and Beans. I like rice and beans, but my bean pot is dirty. I have two kitchen sinks. The left-hand one I actually use, and do a good job of keeping it empty. My bean pot is in the right-hand sink, and has been there for months, unwashed.

There is no excuse. Depression makes me lazy but even so I must not give into it. Among the best ways to overcome depression is to act as if one is not depressed. If I were to wash that damn bean pot I would be rewarded with wholesome nutritious hot meals each evening.

I don't really have any plans for this second paycheck. But that means I must be extra careful or I will spend the lot of it at the taqueria down the street.

It wasn't looking so good to start with. I was still awake at 3:45 this morning so I shut the alarm off. But I got up in mid-afternoon, ate breakfast, showered and shaved, then went to Starbucks. Here at Starbucks I read a few pages of Benjamin Lunt's "USB: the Universal Serial Bus". I'm reading about xHCI Host Bus Adapters in particular.

That book is so detailed you could kill a man with its register definitions. Even so I managed to read 11 pages before losing patience. If I do that each time I sit down to read it, I'll read the chapter on xHCI hardware in a total of four days. That's not so bad.

(xHCI is the register-level controller standard for USB 3. It also supports USB 2 and 1.)

I bought two new pairs of pants at the mall Saturday evening. I'm wearing one of them now. I feel good, wearing brand-new clothes. I'd been reduced to a raggedy pair of blue jeans. Now I regard it as acceptable to wear worn-out jeans specifically, but these were rapidly losing ground.

I had plans to meet a friend at a restaurant tonight, but he had to reschedule for Thursday. My plan was to ask one of the waitresses out to dinner. I don't know whether she's interested in me, but she liked it when I kissed her on her hand. If she's working Thursday I'll ask her then. I want to take her to a sushi bar in downtown Portland.

I was feeling dismayed at my cluelessness about the low-level driver knowledge required to complete my next project. But the Engineering VP and their regular programmer are confident I can do it. We got together to talk about it last thursday. "I want to set your mind at ease" said the VP.

I suppose I'll take on the project. That gives me at least three more months work and enough money to buy a car.

Now I don't really know that it's safe to drive, as I was having seizures for a while. I didn't have many but they were quite severe. A couple times I lost consciousness, yet was up and walking around talking to people, but not making any sense at all, as if I was completely out of touch with reality. The first seizure I had while I was driving. I found myself driving a strange car is a strange place with no memory of how I got there - but I didn't crash, which leads me to believe the seizure was very brief, but with a big loss of memory.

I eventually figured out that I set out the previous afternoon from my Mom's place just north of Vancouver Washington, that I got pulled over by a cop for a busted taillight during the night, and that I want to a restaurant in Medford, Oregon during the very early morning. But I don't remember anything else. I don't remember eating anything at that restaurant, just sitting at my table writing a journal on Kuro5hin.

Eventually I passed mount Shasta, and I realized I was driving back home to where I used to live in San Jose.

My psychiatrist and my regular doctor both think it's safe for me to drive, but both of them want me to get checked out by a neurologist. I have a referral but haven't made the appointment yet.

There is a total eclipse of the sun visible across the United States on August 21 of this year. If I understand the map correctly the totality will be visible in Salem, about an hour south of Portland. If I buy a car I'll drive down, otherwise I'll take the bus or train.

Burning Man may have to be cancelled this year. There has been record snowfall in the nearby mountains, with the result that the dry lake bed is no longer dry. The fear is that it won't dry out enough by labor day. It would be Muddy Man.

I don't have a ticket but was thinking of buying one during the sale during the summer, when those with extra tickets have active support for selling them. We shall see.

I've been there three times before. It was lots of fun.

I lost a second button off my coat. I managed to retrieve both buttons with the intention of sewing them back on, but the sewing kit lay untouched on my desk for a week.

I am very much a creature of habit. I do certain things, I don't do things that I don't usually do. I'm not used to sewing buttons, so the prospect of doing so struck me as terribly onerous.

Even so, it's still cold here in the Pacific NorthLeft. Leaving my jacket unbuttoned was not only cold, it permitted my shirt to get rained on.

When I got out of bed tonight I was completely overcome with self doubt with respect to my next consulting gig. I wrote an email to two of the client's people to tell them so, but that I had done lots of projects that were far more difficult. That is, my self-doubt does not make sense.

I went out for coffee and started to feel better.

When I came home I was determined to sew those buttons, dammit, and I did.

It wasn't hard at all.

This is a problem I have: the prospect of doing many kinds of work strikes me - ahead of time - as far more difficult than it really is when I'm doing it. So I put off starting it.

I worked an entire quarter at AMCC without doing a damn thing, then checked myself into a psychiatric hospital where they told me I had Attention Deficit Disorder.

I have no lack of attention, but I don't do well at volitionally directing it. If I can get started at a task I have no problem carrying on, but I have a hard time getting started.

That I know this is the case doesn't make it go away.

My client asked me to bid on a second job. It requires a deep understanding of USB. I didn't understand much of the spec, so I ordered "USB: The Universal Serial Bus" by Benjamin David Lunt.

Just now I emailed my client to tell them that I'd need to study the book before I could produce a sensible bid. I said of course I would charge them for reading it, but I needed some time before I could produce that bid and get started on the actual job.

I expect they'll respect me for being honest but I fear they'll shitcan me for being an idiot.

It couldn't be any more difficult than firewire, which I was once quite good at.

They're even paying me to prepare my bid. That is, I'm getting paid just to tell them how much it will cost them.

This is really good news. These people really like me.

This despite the fact that I constantly feel like I'm fucking up. Sometimes I don't go in to work because I sleep all day. But as a consultant, I'm not particularly required to show up, I'm only required to deliver a quality product on time.

Which I did, for my first project. It had a hard deadline because our customers were scheduled to go to manufacturing March 1. They wanted a whole month for QA so I absolutely had to finish by February 1, which I did.

Everyone at the client company likes me. I like them too. It's good to work for good people, that makes a lot of difference to me.

I bought a Mac Mini with some of the money from my first paycheck. I worked at home tuesday and wednesday, and will work at home tomorrow (Friday). I brought one of their evaluation boards from work to use at home.

In other news, I busted a button off my coat. I briefly considered purchasing an entirely new coat, then thought "What a colossal waste of money, I'm not that lazy, I'll sew the button back on." Then I braved a torrential rain shower as I went to but a sewing kit on the way home today.

I recently griped that I sleep more than anyone, but that all that sleep does not make me feel rested. Actually it makes me feel terrible; when I first wake up in the morning I feel as if I've been beaten with a baseball bat.

Back in the day I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, a phenomenon in which one stops breathing during sleep. It partially wakes you, reducing the quality of sleep.

But I had surgery for it in 2008. As far as I could tell the surgery worked. Actually for some time my sleep was just dandy.

In response to my comment, AC recommended I take Vitamin D. Now I am skeptical of nutritional supplement treatment, but at this point I'm willing to try waving a dead chicken over it. I googled it and found what appeared to be a credible report of peer-reviewed research that indicates Vitamin D deficiency diminishes the quality of sleep.

For several months I've had a low-sugar, low-cholesterol diet. I'm pretty sure that diet is low in Vitamin D as well. It's been a cold winter here in the Northern Hemisphere; I haven't had much of the exposure to the Sun that causes our skin to make Vitamin D.

I stopped at the drugstore on the way to work just now and bought some 2000 IU Vitamin D3 tablets. I also got Vitamin B12. The article also recommended Vitamin B5 but the store didn't carry it. I took my first doses when I stopped at Peet's for a coffee.

A while back I complained to my witch doctor that I often slept all day, that no amount of sleep made me feel rested. In response he prescribed the antidepressant Welbutrin. It's working partially, in that, if I didn't have to get up, I would sleep until noon.

My present contract has a long commute. I don't have a key to the office. To work a full day I need to get out of bed at 7:00 AM. It is uncommon that I manage to do that.

I just bought a Mac Mini. Soon I should be able to work from home, but even so it's not going to work if I'm sleeping all the time, especially if that sleep is not restful.

Rusty Foster, the site's owner, said the site went down when its entire data center was decommissioned. While he promised to post a read-only archive, it's been a long time. We speculate that he did not have offsite backups.

Kuro5hin provided an outlet for our cynicism; for example I myself am responsible for the meme of "Ignorant Mother Fucker" - "Mother" and "Fucker" being two separate words, as I feel it sounds more obscene that way.

It also published much-longer essays and stories than one sees anywhere else. My own Living with Schizoaffective Disorder, first published there in 2003, is fifty pages in hardcopy form.

The problem I've got is that I'm bored out of my mind. I really like Soylent News, but it would be inappropriate for me to urge my fellow Soylentils to, for example, "Die In A Fire".

I need something more interactive than just reading what others have written. I like to write, I need a venue for my writing. I have my own website but it's not set up for discussion. "K5" provided that.

To be a Mac software consultant without actually owning a Mac has been awkward. I've been able to work recently because my client is lending me their equipment, but not all have been so cool.

I bought the 2.6 GHz Mac Mini for $699. I don't recall all that's in it as I picked it out a while ago. I also bought AppleCare for $99; in my experience, AppleCare is a good deal. Finally I bought a DisplayLink to VGA adapter so I can use it with my ancient crufty monitor.

It's a company run by engineers. There were electronic bits all over the place. I said I liked that about them.

They are asking me to quote them on three different projects. The first one is only a week or two of work - heh: "only" - the other two I'm going to have to study before I can quote them.

If these three work out OK they said they'd have lots more work for me.

I shouldn't say who it is because that would preannounce that they will be supporting Mac OS X. Mostly they need drivers.

There are very few Mac driver consultants, as most who know how to do it have perm jobs at apple.

I'm both excited, and greatly relieved.

A couple months ago I lost a good contract because I don't have a Mac. I had a really tricked-out MacBook Pro, but it died shortly after the AppleCare extended warranty expired.

They were completely cool with that, and said they have macs I can use.

I specifically asked to work on-site. The vast majority of my clients are remote, but these guys I can get to on the bus and light rail. They were very pleased by that.

I asked to work on-site before I asked them to lend me a Mac, so they would understand I didn't plan to take it home with me.

I should be able to buy a new MacBook Pro with my first paycheck. That will be the third I've owned. I have no complaints about the first one, it lasted six years.