Entries from November 2007 ↓

Sleep sleep sleep.

Drive drive drive.

…

Eat eat eat.

Do you realize that for the past year and a half I’ve had two peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches every day for lunch?

What the hell is that doing to my system? Probably nothing. It’s very bland food, so it’s probably not having an effect one way or the other — kinda like if I ate rice or jello every day for years as well.

I eat it because it’s cheap and it doesn’t go bad. (I don’t know how the people that I work with can eat out every day for like $10 a pop. That’s like $50 a week. $200 a _month_. Just on their lunches. In a month, for my lunches, I spend about $20.)

Walk walk walk.

I walk about a mile every day just walking between where I work and where I park my car.

Climb climb climb.

I climb up eight floors worth of stairs because I don’t like elevators. The people really cram into them in the morning. Also, it’s good exercise, though during the summers it can get a bit hot walking up them.

Stare stare stare.

I stare at a computer screen almost 10 hours a day. Thank god it’s an LCD screen or else my eyes would be shot by now.

Read read read.

I read a lot at work, conicidentally enough, to give my eyes a break from the screen.

Earn earn earn.

And then I get paid and it’s all worth it.

Bills bills bills.

And then I wonder where all the money went.

*the third ear*
_by curt siodmak_

A quick book — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a translation, but it almost reads like one. In it, a psychologist/scientist searches for a chemical substance that is extruded by psychics/mind-readers in the hopes of synthesizing it.

The book is written from the first person, and the doctor’s sense of paranoia really comes through to the reader — you can’t tell if he really _is_ being hounded by government agents and rival scientists, or if he only _thinks_ that he is.

A very good book, though it doesn’t really have an ending — it’s just, event-event-rising-action-end. No conclusion or anything — just… _ending_. You’d have to read it to know.

*Binary*
_By John Lange_

Not really a SF novel, but a sort of really quick Tom Clancy-esque super-government-agent novel, where a CIA agent has to stop a terrorist from killing all of San Diego! No, really, that’s what it’s about.

But it’s not as black-and-white as that — the book really gets into the the agent’s life and the meanings behind the terrorist’s plot, really making you think.

*From this Day Forward*
_By John Brunner_

A collection of short stories — the book was printed very weirdly in that none of the short stories told who the authors were… all I could tell from the index pages was that one of them was either written by or edited by Harlan Ellison.

Had quite a few good stories in it, including one about Vietnamese terrorists striking the United States in retaliation for the horrors committed during the Vietnam War, and one story (which I take it to be one of the first in this genre) featurning, literally, “Men in Black.”

Just got finished installing my new Pentium III-S in my gaming PC using some wonderful “Arctic Silver Ceramique”:http://arcticsilver.com/ceramique.htm — more later, but I will say this: while I didn’t see much of an improvement right away in raw CPU speed (my clock speed _didn’t_ change, for what it’s worth), my 3dMark score went up by about 300 points.

Hey, not bad for $19!