Work
Work is improving. I was stuck on a stupid project that had me writing SQL code to generate system availability statistics. It would be easy enough under normal circumstances, but because I had to introduce rounding rules that are not normal, calculate the number of minutes that are in the business hours a day, treat every location as if it were in EST, use the real times instead of EST but not really, and many other great requirements, it was bad. In fact, I suspect that there is still something wrong, but it's what the users asked for. 16 printed pages later, I can calculate how much downtime a system has had for a specified time frame. Unfortunately, a simple calculation turned into an ugly mess for it.

Also, I've been working on an upgrade to my survey program that sends surveys out to people after they get helped by the helpdesk. It apparently has a bug with the way my exclusions work. It's also an annoying program to deal with, but at least this one was written by my rules which sort of make sense.

Home
Since the weather sucks ass, and since I'd like to save money, the wife and I are looking into corporate apartments. We'll probably be moving into one next month. Besides saving us between $1,000 and $2,000 this year, it should help us with 1) having a garage to park the car in instead of leaving it outside in frozen Hell, and 2) we will have a washer and dryer in the place rather than needing to go outside and deal with the hotel laundromat which is often busy.

I also plan to visit my parents soon, but I have to wait for the wife to get back. We haven't visited them since we came to Ohio thanks to an unfortunate string of bad luck and being out of town.

Also, the wife is gone for a week and a half, due to her family having some issues that required her and her sisters to go down to Mexico and take care of some things. I hope it all goes well, and perhaps she can even come back faster than she originally planned for. We'll have to wait and see.

Politics
For the election, I supported the Democrats because I hate Bush. However, after seeing how horribly John Kerry's campaign was, and seeing how bad the Democrats are in general, I can't support them at all any more than I can the Republicans. The Republicans may be evil, but they care enough about their twisted agenda that they work for it. Democrats pay lip service to caring, but are the biggest wimps in the world. John Kerry really took it up the tailpipe and sucks up to Bush way too much.

Of course, it's not just the politicians that suck, it's the people. Americans are for the most part, ignorant, superstitious, and have no real moral base. Caring for this country is like a woman caring for a husband that hits her. The U.S. is not going to change, at least not until things get so bad that people wake up from their stupidity and selfishness. If I can't even get members of my own family to see what's going on wrong and what they need to do for their own future, why should I expect anyone else to pay attention? I was talking to my mother over the weekend about how dangerous of a future the U.S. economy is going to be facing because people are not intelligent about finances, and she responded with, "They say that young people are getting to be more conservative, so things are supposed to improve." I asked her how that would make a difference when most schools have no financial training. I didn't learn about how credit cards worked until I figured it out on my own, and even then it took me years before I even cared about what my interest rate was. I was never taught how to save money for my retirement or how important that is, which is funny now that my stepdad is on the verge of losing his job, and my parents have very little savings and no real retirement money. Hating gay people or blowing up brown people for oil is not going to make things better here. Saying that classrooms should teach "intelligent design" because it is politically correct to religious people is not going to make people smarter. Teaching history as nothing more than a series of events and dates to remember rather than giving the perspective of what happened and why it happened will not prevent us from making the same mistakes we did in the past. We're not taught proper nutrition, so we go order a "salad" at McDonalds with fatty dressing and fried chicken on it and not realize that it's worse for you than a quarter pounder combo. We are taught to revere our government and love our country, rather than to be critical of it and look for problems that we can improve upon.

People are not prepared for life, and I have found out that I have had to teach myself pretty much everything about how to function as an adult, and I am still learning. I should write about the things I learn, because I think that other people would like a simple concise explanation of things that seem too big or too difficult to understand. I also think that I should take advantage of the stupidity of others. In some cases, people deserve it. With everything I have been learning, I think I'm truly beginning to understand what P.T. Barnum was talking about, and it's amazing. People really are that stupid. In today's world, a sucker is not born every minute, but at a much faster rate. For example, I could go out right now with my broker and sell options on the futures market for oil, for a decent commission, to be in the money if oil hits $2 a barrel within the next few months. There will be some morons out there willing to pay the commission to buy the options from me, be it $200 or more, even though there's no chance of that happening. It's the equivalent of someone paying me $200 to accept a bet that if a horse will come flying out of their mother's butt, I give them $10,000. Sure, if it really happened I'd be screwed, but it's not likely.

Anyway, my point is that I really am a bit paranoid or something about the future, and my goal is not to change the world. I just want to set up my own small slice of the world that will allow me and my loved ones to be ok, even if they are not willing to do so themselves.

So, ultimately the best we can do is take care of ourselves first, and put ourselves in a better position to take care of others. It goes along with the bible verse where Paul told someone that before attempting to remove the splinter from his eye, they should remove the log from their own (or something to that effect.) So, I am taking care of myself first. If you don't like it, bite me. Conclusion
Anyway, I have to get back to work, and I'm not comfortable posting this from a machine that other people can use. I have work to do anyway. If you want to know more, feel free to ask questions. Otherwise, hi. Oh, and to Lost in a Dream, what you say about metal can be applied to pretty much any type of music in a more generic way. Music is the sound of emotion. Metal may help you deal with your frustrations and act as a source of release, but some other form of music may do the same for someone else. That still doesn't cover it all though, because different forms of music cover different emotions. Real feeling is what is missing from most music today. Even the anger in rock/alternative/whatever is synthetic now, which is why it sucks.

Anyway, enough of that. I'm out of here. Talk to you all later.