Had a fairly boring weekend until last night. Around 2:00AM, I heard this banging and thumping sound that sounded like it was coming from my house. The landlady and her college-age daughters who live can be rather loud at times, especially when they're fighting about something. I wrote it off as that and continued watching Futurama; I have a boring life, what can I say.

After several minutes, I was able to trace the yelling and crashing sounds to this group of several people running back and forth across the street; it wasn't actually coming from the house. People on the street can be loud, so I didn't think anything of it. Then I see these guys who are running around and yelling jump on top of cars and kick off their side mirrors from the doors. I was worried that either my car was going to be next (and therefore I needed someone to chase them away with) or that my car had already been abused (and I needed something to open a can of whoopass on their sorry hoodlum asses). After I retrieved said Item of Whoopass, that I probably couldn't have used anyways because doing so would cause too many problems for me, I saw that the thugs had already made their way down Utica.

My next-door neighbor called the cops, and probably 45 minutes later they arrived. Probably was a long response time, but then again, when they paid us a visit they had already nabbed the kids and had them in the car, so the 45 minutes was probably well-spent on their part. And as far as I can tell, my car received no damage.

While this area of Buffalo I live in is not necessarily a "bad neighborhood", it does have it's sketchier moments. It's sort of like being in a stretch of ocean where most of the time you have normal, somewhat interesting fish swim by, occasionally you have a really beautiful fish swim by, and once in a while you have a shark swim by. Last night, it was the sharks who paid us a visit.

I seriously need to invest in some home security paraphenalia, preferably of the Vermont's finest sugar-maple kind used for hitting baseballs with.

Today, I saw the Prestige. Wow. The critics really have it wrong on this one. Hollywood finally bucks its stupid remake trend and produces a fascinating film with original ideas that make you think just a little, and I wish they would recognize it. It was a little long, and the plot was a little too twisty, but it was really good.

So the first real week of me being a single again has passed. I really don't know what to think of it at this point, other than this general "great, now what the hell do I do" feeling. Part of me wants to get back in the saddle immediately, part of me wants to engage in a monk-like celibate quest for self-betterment, and the rational part of me thinks that either of these choices is taking things to an extreme. I guess it's pointless to mentally debate this, though this is my diary of sorts, so I guess I have a responsibility to record of there being such a debate.

Got a little more work on the improved estrip dashboard widget done tonight. Not enough for another general release, but enough to accomodate a future comments addition. I've still got this question of "just how wide is too wide for a dashboard widget, and how many features will I add before I'm better of just creating an application instead". I do know that being able to see dates on the latest comments on an post would be useful to some folks (including myself).

Finally, what soundtrack would define me as a person? I'd guess the one that makes up my iTunes Library and all the crazy shit on it. This was a total random shuffle, following the rules (e:jenks) mentioned in her post. I'm actually surpised I didn't get any birdcalls from that time I had accidently imported all the Ghost Recon sound effects into iTunes; I certainly don't think that my prom experience was exciting enough to warrant "tufted titmouse". My Lexx Brigadoom stuff did get put into the list on two separate soundtrack elements, and given what an obscure show it was, it might as well be birdcalls.

Opening Credits:
Rainbow Connection - Kermit the Frog

Waking Up:
Even though - Sugar Ray

First Day At School:
Theme song from Lexx (German version) - Lexx Sountrack

Falling In Love:
Oye Como Va - Santana

Breaking Up:
Green Manalishi with a three-pronged crown - Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac

Prom:
Jammin' Bob Marley

Life's Ok:
Theme from Braveheart

Mental Breakdown:
Island in the Sun - Weezer

Driving:
Hannukah in Santa Monica - Tom Lehrer

Flashback:
His Shadow Is Coming -- Lexx: Brigadoom Sountrack

Getting Back Together:
BeOS blues

Birth of Child
Waiting Room - No Doubt (I'm not shitting. This is what actually appeared)

Wedding Scene:
Skeletons of Quinto - The Folksmen (from Mighty Wind Soundtrack)

Final Battle:
Silent E. - Tom Lehrer

Death Scene:
Lluba (Don't Wake Me Up Before the Sun Shines) -ll- Les Yeux Noirs

Funeral Song:
Fire, Water, Burn - Bloodhound Gang

End Credits:
The ending of Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons.

Several significant things happened this weekend.

First off, I'm single again.

Me and the girlfriend in NC finally acknowledged that our relationship was over. We officially broke up Friday. I do feel sad about it, but I almost feel more weird than sad. It's this weird "I must get rid of all the clothes in my closet because they don't really fit anymore and go out and buy new ones" kind of feeling.

In addition to feeling weird about it, I also feel a little worried. After my first girlfriend, it took me two years before I got the second one. After that one, it took me six years before I was with the one I broke up with. If one looks at the "multiples of three" pattern here, it'll be 12 years before I find another girl who'd want to be with me. That's a very long time. I hope the pattern doesn't continue to hold as the six-year dry spell really sucked.

I suspect that this preparation will involve a lot of working towards the body I've always wanted, improving daily habits, and consolation with weekly viewings of the Fight Club DVD. Yeah, I grieve in weird ways.

In other news, Buffalo's gotten knocked off its ass by a snowstorm. Civilization has partially stopped. Strangely enough, I'm used to this. Hurricane Fran turned the place into MadMax, and the ice storm several years ago did to NC what the snow did to Buffalo (but much, much worse). I'm used to living without power, I'm used to living without heat and having to use a fireplace for warmth and a propane grill for cooking. Whenever I see heavy snows, I have this instinctual drive to get bread and milk, as silly as it sounds. That's what we did back home.

I've actually made out fairly well. I live on Richmond, and the "avenue of trees", well, do the math. I actually has power, gas, and the necessities of living. I just don't have TV and Internet, so I have to make due with cafes offering access. I'd like to find a few more besides starbucks, as they tend to charge a decent sum. It's driving me crazy not to have Internet, but I know that others are far worse then I, so I should be thankful.

Oh, and last night, I should add, I crossed with (e:vincent) into Canada. Had a good time in Niagara Falls. Canada was a LOT of fun, and that's all I'm saying.

Mix one part boredom, one part curiousity, and rudimentary text-editing skills, and the result is this silly little thing I created: an estrip Dashboard widget for Mac OS X. It's basically a stock Apple thingy I modified to work with estrip (which probably doesn't even count as real programming work). But I find it useful for getting a quick summary of the latest posts. gather tracking number: 0385317001160110609
In the future, I'd like to add some more features and more customized artwork.

In other news, I go to yet another PHP users meetup. Again, I'm the only person attending. Everyone else has been such flakes, and I can't blame them totally because the people running the group have cancelled so many group meetings or changed venus that not a lot of people seem to have faith in the group. Also, the H.R. guy who started the group (as a sneaky recruiting tool) got fired from the company that had a lot of the members coming to the group. Arrgh. Why can't there just be one tech group I can attend in Buffalo, like Internetworkers back home?

I've sometimes toyed with the idea of creating an informal technologist group that meets every week somewhere (spot, bars, etc) to drink beer/coffee, network, and shoot the shit about the latest developments in digital stuff. I'm still toying, because the PHP group is really not giving me my fix because they're almost never meeting.

Tonight I had a conversation with my girlfriend who still lives in North Carolina.

Me: Do you know yet whether you can come up for my birthday Nov. 17th?

Girlfriend: I'm afraid I can't. I just can't.

Me: Why not?

Girlfriend: Because Buffalo took you away from me.

Me: What? What? (in disbelief)

Me (thinking silently to myself): I waited close to two weeks for you to ask at work and figure out whether you could come up and visit me for my birthday. And after all that time, the answer you give me sounds like something you could have thought up in two seconds and could have given me two weeks earlier.

Me: So, after I've flown down and visited you this summer, you just can't do the same for me? (did I mention I'd be paying for her entire ticket up here?)

Girlfriend: sorry, I can't come up and visit you. It's like me saying 'I've got this really nice friend in North Carolina, and I'd like you to come down and see him.' Buffalo is what took you away from away from me, so I can't go up there.

Me (thinking silently to myself): Me trying desperately to get any computer job I could back in NC and submitting hundreds of resumes and constantly getting turned down, followed by you and your mother calling me "selfish" for staying in Raleigh for a potential job interview instead of driving you to to do work errands for your mother, who's also your boss, that you couldn't run yourself because of your driving problem*, followed by your mother busting on me for being a 30 year-old man without a job who couldn't support her daughter in the future and who should be spending his time sending out resumes--that certainly influenced my choice to take a job up in Buffalo. You should be blaming that BS for taking me away from you.**

Me: Do you know how silly that sounds?

Girlfriend: You just don't understand.

Me: You know, in this entire relationship, I've gone out of my way a lot to come and see you. For over a year I did all that driving back and forth from Raleigh 40-60 miles out to Zebulon and later Wilson several times a week. The whole time, you almost never came to see me in Raleigh. I was kind of hoping after all those times I came to see you, the very least you could do would be to come up and see me.

Girlfriend: You just don't understand.

Me: Well, I need to go to work tomorrow. Goodnight. Bye.

Girlfriend: Bye.

(End of conversation; I hang up).

The irony of this situation is that I just came back from the end of services for Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday which deals with wrongs you feel other have done to do you for which you're supposed to forgive them) and already I have something that I should be steaming furious about. I guess I'll try to rise to the spiritual challenge and look past it. Of course, that means not letting anger dominate my life; it doesn't mean continuing to let myself be jerked around on a string like a Yo-Yo.

• My girlfriend has this issue with driving long distances. Basically, up until a year ago, her mother forbade her from driving distances more than 5-10 miles, even though she was 20. The GF told me, at the start of our relationshiop, that if she were to drive any significant distance, her mother would call the police and report the car as stolen, even though the GF was the one making the payments on the car and insurance at the time. If someone tells you that you can't do something and prevents you from doing that thing and threatens you with punishment for doing that thing, and if they are successful in getting you not to do that thing, then they have basically undermined your ability to do that thing. Whenever the GF needed to go somewhere and her mother couldn't take her, then I had to take her because of what her mother did to her. In the last year, my girlfriend has denied that her mother ever did this, and has basically internalized her mothers feelings about her driving as her own. The end result is that she can't really go anywhere other than a few miles from her house, and she thinks that "this is the way things have always been."

• I tend to see any attempt by the mother to get me to drive her daughter somewhere, or her refusal to drive her daughter to somewhere she wants to go, as a refusal to acknowledge the damage in her daughter's development that she caused in undermining her daughter's ability to drive significant distances. That the mother would refuse to acknowledge her role in making her daughter unable to perform the errand while casting me as the "selfish" bad guy because I would not help her with the errand is something I consider to be intolerable hipocrisy.