Dale Miller

I was planning on driving around the state today snapping courthouse pictures. However, I stayed up too late last night, woke up with a headache, and decided that sleeping in had far more appeal.

When I sleep late, I have some of my better dreams (or at least I have dreams that I can remember for a little while, which amounts to much the same thing). One of this morning’s was a first for me. I was driving along and spotted some unusual telephone booths that I wanted to take a picture of. I stopped the car, grabbed my camera, and got out. As I was walking away from the car, it started rolling forward. My initial reaction was to jump back inside and try to stop it, but I thought “Oh, don’t worry about it. This is just a dream.” That’s the first time I ever remember realizing that I was in a dream as it was happening. I took my picture and then the dream took me elsewhere. Very odd, that.

It has been a busy, mostly enjoyable, and even occasionally fun week.

Sunday the Trippin’ Balls had a late-night kickball game against Die!. We, naturally, lost. It was fun anyway, and that’s the whole purpose of playing from my point of view. There are some seriously cute girls playing kickball. Now if only any of them were sans boyfriends. Oh well, I can still look.

I spent a good portion of this week messing about with hardware. I replaced controller boards in the new residence halls (the vendor that was supposed to supply them didn’t have them on time, so I scavenged from my spares. I have my spares back now). I also worked a bit in the new Residence Hall Commons building. Of course, the doors there couldn’t be standard. I had to be a bit inventive to get those controllers to work with the supplied locks, but reason and a soldering iron prevailed.

Thursday after ballet I went to a salsa dancing class being held on campus. It is co-taught by one of the more attractive women in my ballet class and a former instructor of hers. That was quite fun. I have had almost no ballroom dance instruction, but I try hard. It’s nice to try to dance in a manner that doesn’t require me to hold my feet in a position that is as unnatural as ballet.

Choir rehearsal was nice Thursday. We worked the Rutter Gloria rather than the Mass of the Children. I think I’m going to enjoy that piece. What I have heard of it so far has some very nice passages.

That and dealing with the day-to-day work trivia has pretty much been my week. Oh, I also finished watching Hunter X Hunter and read a couple of books. I *did* say that I had kept busy.

Oh, as I was leaving campus today I stopped by the commons building to check on a door. When I got back to my car I noticed a note under my windshield wiper. I’m not sure if it was put on there or while I was in the parking deck and I just discovered it.

I have no idea who left it, but it brought a smile to my face anyway. Maybe I have a secret admirer somewhere.

I really, really need to write in this thing more often (and get back into the habit of reading my friends page regularly). I keep composing LJ entries in my head and then never sitting down and typing them in. How many times have I said something similar recently?

Happy autumnal equinox! Okay, I know that technically the equinox is a point in time rather than a day, and that point was actually 23:03 last night (in Little Rock), but it’s the thought that counts. :)

In my ongoing quest for a four-day workweek, I took today off and lazed about the house. While I was home my phone rang on five occasions. There were two charaties soliciting money, a recording from First Electric Co-op telling me that my area would be without power early Sunday morning, and two financial institutions attempting to sell me insurance. Obviously enough people respond to those types of calls to make it worth their while, but I can’t imagine why. It would be nice if the do-not-call registry had a “I really mean it” option. I am remiss in not telling each of the financial institutions to add me to their do-not-call list, but I’m usually annoyed enough that I just want them off the phone.

As I was driving home Wednesday evening, Mark called and asked me a question about a homework assignment he had. This is rather unusual, because most of his homework deals with subject I don’t understand, and couldn’t possibly help him solve. In this case, he was asked to construct a deterministic finite automaton with the alphabet {a,b} which would not accept the substring bba. I was pleased to not only understand the problem, but be able to tell him over the phone the solution. The only issue was that he didn’t quite believe me. I will admit that has been several years since I’ve dealt with state machines, but I felt I was right. The contention was whether a DFA can have multiple accept states. It can, of course, so I felt vindicated.

I just had a strange thing happen. I was sitting reading a book when the home phone rang. This isn’t terribly unusual, and it’s usually a telemarketer of some sort. It was a bit late for telemarketers, though, so I was curious when I answered. I heard a fax tone, and decided that someone had just dialed the wrong number. I hung up, and a couple of minutes later it happened again. Assuming that someone had set their fax to auto-redial, I headed upstairs, dug the fax machine out of the closet, plugged it in and waited for the next call. When it came through, I punched the machine, and received a one-page fax, with no identifying number and the handwritten message (in large letters): Fax # 739-2059. That seemed a very strange way to communicate a fax number — especially to the *wrong* person. Oh well, I wonder who they were trying to contact. It’s amusing to consider what deal may fall through, marriage break off, or shipment not reach its destination because someone sent a fax to me instead of their intended destination. If the message had included an area code, I would be tempted to fax back and tell them they had the wrong number, but I don’t want to risk calling a wrong number this late in the evening. Assuming it’s 501-739, that would be somewhere in Marion, Arkansas — over by West Memphis.

Hopefully my phone will quit ringing now.

Another week passes by. Nothing too exciting going on either at work or at home. This is Jay’s last week at UALR, and that’s going to be a less-than-pleasant change. I get along with him better than any of my other co-workers. I really need to work on my resume and consider another job myself. I’m just afraid I’ve been in one place far too long.

I spent much of today dealing with email. It seems that’s much of what I do these days. Kevin and I worked on installing a new spam appliance at the UA System office. We don’t quite have it working the way we would like, but it’s close. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like it will do much of anything that Exim/Clamd/Spamassassin can do, but the fact that it’s a commercial product makes some people think it’s better. We shall see. I need to run some metrics on it vs. the open-source solution.

I haven’t been sleeping well/enough recently. I’m not sure just what is wrong, but I end up dragging in the afternoons. Today that translated to skipping step aerobics. I would probably have felt better if I had gone, but I just wanted to come home and collapse. I should try to get to bed soon and maybe get a good night’s sleep.

I awoke this morning and waited around for Mark to call. I slept fitfully, mainly due to a group of loud people that wanted to spend all night beside the pool talking. At around 4:00 am I decided to check online for a cheaper (and hopefully quieter) motel room. I found one at the Motel 6 at I-35 and Lundberg. So, around 10:00 I checked out and thought I would drive around a bit while waiting for Mark to start his day. As I was getting settled in the car I decided to check my text messages. Imagine my surprise when I had one from Mark that said he didn’t feel like doing anything today. Since it was already late morning, I decided to spend the day in Austin and another night just because I could. I sat for a couple of hours in Zilker Park reading a book and people-watching, and then had lunch at Schlotsky’s. Then I drove out to Bastrop to take pictures of the courthouse. By the time I got back my room was ready, so I checked in and spent a bit of time lounging by the pool. I was just getting ready to head out for dinner when Mark called. He had apparently had a change of heart and wanted to go to dinner and the “Mister Sinus Theatre” showing of Xanadu at the Alamo Draft House. We had sushi, enjoyed the movie, and called it a night. I’m planning on heading back home tomorrow.

So I made it to Austin okay. I started later than I had planned, but not so late as to really throw things off. The drive from Little Rock to Dallas was actually pleasant. Dallas to Austin was another matter. The traffic became progressively worse, and I think there may be 20-30 miles of I-35 that isn’t under construction. I found out why the traffic was so bad when I arrived. It seems that this weekend is the UT-Ohio State game. It stands to reason that when the two largest universities in the country play football, there’s going to be a big crowd. The down side from my viewpoint is that all motel rooms in the county are double the normal price for the next two nights. :(

I took Mark out to dinner at a local Italian place. The food was good, and Mark seemed to be in a good mood. I have no idea what’s on the agenda for tomorrow, but I shall find out.

It’s so nice to once again have a car with power steering. I won’t be getting those excellent forearm workouts on my drive to work, though. :)

It seems that most of the auto parts places in town don’t have a listing for the belt I needed. Finally I checked at O’Rielly and discovered that yes, there really is a belt for power steering for a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider 4-clyinder without air conditioning. They didn’t have it in stock but I ordered it and it worked nicely (once I figured out ho to install it).

That should make my drive to Texas this weekend much more pleasant.