Man, I Need a Life

[danalwyn]

So I'm at Fermilab, the best place in the world to get fried by a malfunctioning computer. I spend all day waiting for my computers to do something, and then spend all night recovering from spending all day that way. It's not the happiest of lives. I'm still adjusting to the climate, which is not that bad, but my body's metabolism and such are dangerously off-kilter.

And I know that it's bad to promote violence against women, but my temper is rapidly running out with the unknown female who wakes me up every morning at 6:30 by taking her shower on the other side of my dorm wall. It should be a woman-either that or it's a man invading the women's showers. If I wasn't so chronically lazy before about 8:00, I might do something about that.

And if only the Department of Energy had built us real buildings, I would be a lot happier. Instead, we get to live in trailers. Mine smells. And I've crashed the Test Cluster about a dozen times already-which is why we call it the test cluster. And I'm wasting all my money in the cafeteria (I'm a grad student, I can't afford more than about $5.00 a day on food-and I'm spending about that much for lunch. Arrghh). And I spend all of my time pacing up and down narrow hallways with ceilings only about three inches over my head. Makes me irritable.

On the other hand, I have lots of cool computers I can crash and I get to associate with nerds-which I've been doing all my life, but it's still a treat.

So instead of boring you with that, I'll bore you with the continuing saga of me trying to plan out my story. Which is going swimmingly. Just swimmingly. Let me summarize:

I Don't Like Background Anymore!

My background file is now 35 pages long. My outline file is ten pages long. I've started drawing and re-drawing maps. I've got other characters I've pulled off my standby list. I've begun re-reading the pertinent books. Creating national identities will be the next step after the outline, and then the background to the secondary characters. Then there are trade patterns and price sheets and history pages and all sorts of stuff and I want to write my freakin' story already! Alright?

To be honest, in a few weeks I will be deliriously happy that I actually went through all the bother to write that stuff down, but right now I'm smashing my head against the wall. I need to get a faster keyboard, or a softer wall.

So be prepared to hear a lot of whining about this subject, and a lot of posting of random pieces of background material, in the future here. I'm sorry about that.

And feel free to ask me what I do. I promise that the Department of Homeland Security won't hunt you down and have you executed (because I sure as hell don't know what I do, and what I can't tell you can't hurt you, can it?).

Comments

[crisiks.livejournal.com]

"I sure as hell don't know what I do, and what I can't tell you can't hurt you, can it?"

Famous last words. So. What do you do?

Also, I know how background can be a bitch. I always have the urge to get everything right before I write the story, but the continued adding of background eventually kills my eagerness to write the story. And then the merry-go-round starts all over again...

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Right now I'm working on some group computing stuff, which is probably uninteresting if you're not a computer person. Basically, instead of buying a supercomputer, we just go out and buy several hundred regular computers and sit them in a room somewhere. So then we have this massive central system dedicated toward taking incoming jobs (usually physics simulations or data searches), breaking them into manageable pieces, and sending them out to different individual computers to run. That's what we're trying to get going. We just reconfigured it to have a higher load, and it works fine in operation. The problem is if you have to restart the system while it has jobs running. It will try to re-run the jobs that it was forced to cancel the moment it comes back up, and if you do it wrong, it not only eats all 16GB of RAM/swap in the computer, it also begins to randomly cancel jobs. So I've been sitting there testing restart procedures and generally watching things die on each other. There exists some way in which this works-I just don't know what it is.

I unfortunately need my background. I'm writing a fantasy-type story, and I've got to get my world right. Otherwise who knows what will happen.

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

So I'm at Fermilab ...

Dude, you were in Southern California, right?
What are you doing in Chicago?

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

My advisor decided that it would be better if I moved from where our workgroup is located to where our project is being run. That means that even though I'm still a student of the University of California, I now live in Chicago.

Wonderful that...