SoylentNews

Like many, I prefer purchasing hardware from Newegg to support their war on patent trolls.

Today, however, there seems to be a new reason to shop Newegg: Free shipping if you spend just $99,999.00.

Oh, and "restrictions apply".

Seriously, what the actual heck.

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.

From the i-dunno-what-to-eat-anymore dept.

I was thinking about this kind of thing:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170213131150.htm

And was thinking: the article is saying "Go gluten free and increase your chances of getting cancer!"

What it really should be saying is "WTF? Our food supply is killing us because we are tooooooo stupid to not poison our food supply?!?!"

Kind of surprised me for some reason: i've looked at articles from various sides before (Hey, Hillary vs. Trump articles!!), but didn't at first look at this one except from the "it was probably sponsored and written by someone in the bread industry" point of view.

We are poisoning our food, and the best we can do is: don't go gluten free... it will kill you, just like all the other food we are poisoning but ignore that elephant behind the curtain.

Humans are so stupid: i guess we DESERVE to die as we chase after that Dog almighty dollar. I guess if i ever get RICH, i'd better create a food biome: somewhere i can have uncontaminated soil and air to grow my food supply in.
Maybe that's why there's such a rush to Mars: rich people need a place to grow food in an uncontaminated environment (that is until they find they can make an extra dollar by contaminating it).

Today I learned that fake medicines can work even when patients know they're fake.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161124080626/http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/12/22/meet-the-ethical-placebo-a-story-that-heals/

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.

Not to take potshots at the "other site" but damn.

I had mostly stopped checking it because the comment signal-to-noise ratio had become so bad. But now they're running these giant floating ads that cover half the comment-text so you can't actually read them anyway.

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 finally have a farm large enough that i felt i could do a sampling:

mealworms DO taste like popcorn, with maybe a bit of peanut.

I took 6 out, fairly large, froze them for a bit, and put them on an oiled pan (with some tofu i'm trying) and cooked them for 15 mins at 375F : the worms were, actually, better tasting than the tofu (which i marinaded in a soy sauce, vinegar, ketchup, etc mix).

Crunchy, ate 3, then 3 more without thinking too much about it. Stayed down, lol.
Next, i might bake them with some soy sauce or something... still not at a good, self-sustaining size, though. :(

The plan continues: maybe someday i'll be a tofu eating, bug digesting animal: kind of a meat eating vegetarian, lol.

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.