Last night/this morning, I was certain that whatever demon it is who continuously conspires to deprive me of sleep was hard at work. After I finished the rambling which kept me up an hour later than I had initially planned, I quickly went into a peaceful sleep.

I was dreaming, I don't quite remember what (Note to self: investigate the possibility of creating a "Dreamlog" in place of the movielog, which seems to be falling into a depressing state of non-update.) Whatever the dream was, it got rudely interrupted when the continuous hum of the PC fans was halted, the barely audible tone from my monitor's CRT ceased, and the LEDs on my alarm clock (whose alarm I never use) went out. Translation: The power was off. I awoke immediately.

I felt dead tired, but I had no idea what time it was. Could have been almost dawn. Could have been only midnight. My brain's auto wake up sensors just don't know how to tell the difference anymore. Sometimes I'll wake up at 0100 and feel ready to go for a new day, only to find that there's over five hours left to wait, or sometimes, Dagobah's dialy cronjob will fade in the the music shortly after 0600, and I'll feel like I could use at least another four hours' sleep. There's just no predicting it.

Having no idea what time it was, I opened my door, looked out at the rest of the house, and saw no traces of solar light. Not quite wake up time yet. But this had me worried, because if I were to go back to sleep, there would be nothing to prevent me from sleeping in when morning did come.

I decided the first step would be to protect the most precious assets. I stumbled over a few piles of debris in the pitch black to unplug the power strips, physically disconnecting all PC hardware from the sometimes quirky power grid. My paranoia level over such things has been higher ever since bouncing's hideous incident with his so-called "surge protector", that didn't do its job after a power outage x number of years ago. His whole PC was fried, and it literally took him nearly of year of hassle, legal threats, and assistance from the Wal Mart purchasing department (they had to threaten to stop reselling brand name: "Waber") to finally get the sleeze bags to give him his money which they had supposably "guaranteed" in the event of a failure.

Anyway, back on the topic. I unplugged all critical hardware, then went back to the bed and just sat for a while, wondering what time it was. I didn't feel like wandering around the house in search of an analog clock. Even if such a clock could be located I'd have to find a way to see it. Such a procedure would have just been too tedious for my sleepy brain. Even now, I can't think of anywhere in this house that an accurately set analog clock resides. Maybe there's one somewhere that I just never pay attention to.

The idea struck me to try using my walkman, locate a radio station, and find out the time using that method. I stumbled around in the pitch black some more, found the walkman, and then the headphones, went back to the bed, and proceeded to surf the dial. It was at this point that I became especially conscious of a phenomenon I have always been aware of, but never given much notice to: The radios stations that actually have something worth listening to (i.e. music) never bother announce what time it is.

Oh well. I was enjoying the music, and didn't feel like tuning to some station that would have nothing but boring crap between then and the time they would announce the time. I must have listened to various musics for around a half hour.

I finally decided it was time to get informed, bit the bullet, switched over to the am dial, and found 850 koa. Fortunately, it didn't take them more than a couple minutes to tell me what I needed to know: 0305. Yipee.

I needed my sleep, so I decided to take the chance that the power would remain out, making me sleep late, unless by some chance my freakish internal chronometer would choose to reactivate consciousness at the right moment. I left the light switch on to alert me in case the power came on. That way, should public service decide to get things working, I would be able to reboot all the machines, sit through a nice boring fsck, and have my happy wake_up_dammit script ready to run again at the right moment.

Just after I had gotten back to sleep, it seemed, the lights were shining in my face. Aw, fsck! I plugged everything back in, rebooted Dagobah and Illian, and waited a few eternities for my e2fs partitions to return to working status. Synced with the time server. 0402.

"Oh goodie! I get to go back to sleep, only to be re-awakened yet again when it's time to go to work." I considered the possibility of just remaining awake, but discarded the option almost immediately. I just wasn't in the mood. Back to bed yet again; this time with things working normally again.

The wake_up_dammit script did indeed awake me, but it took much longer than usual. It was 0630, and the speakers had grown exceedingly loud on my morning-sensitive ears before I finally got out of bed. Grrrrr.

After that, the routine went pretty much as usual, except for the excessive snowfall which was still coming down hard on the way to work. In a way though, it was nice, because it seemed like the traffic was significantly lighter than on a typical day. I arrived early easily, with time to spare.

I spent a nice, boring morning at the office doing lots of nice, boring things. My theory is that even the best jobs have some amount of grunt work. Although.... one oddity that seems to be true, as non-intuitive as it may sound: In my line of work, the higher one rises in the ranks, the more grunt work and annoying tasks one gets. On would think it would be the opposite (with status and experience should come better tasks, right?), but perhaps not. Since I personally have not risen in the ranks, I can't speak for the validity of the statement. My knowledge is based purely on second-hand information. I have no reason to doubt that information, however. Anyway...

[Off to grab a bite. Back in a sec...]

The afternoon was certainly a change of pace. Myself and several other eSoft employees of the geekier variety took a field trip to south Denver to pick up our badges for tomorrow's event. (I don't know why I bother with the link. By the time the DNS gets fixed, it will surely be over.)

The organizers said in their literature that each and every individual was required to show up and present an id at the afternoon registration before they could obtain a badge. A needless waste of gas, time and manpower to be sure, but a nice excuse for a bunch of cube-dwellers to get out and see that rare phenomenon known as daylight for a few hours. Well, sort of. Although the snow had cleared up, the sky was still very overcast.

So, we drove down, and took a late lunch, eating at some wacky little Indian restaurant near the tech center. Pricier than the usual fare, but the food was good, and it was an all-you-can-eat buffet with a wacky variety of tasty items. The pictures on the wall, and general atmosphere of the place vaguely reminded me of the Xena episode "The Way". (How cultured I am! lol.)

After the meal, the group of five got back into the two cars, and journied a whole two blocks to the hotel where the event would take place.

As luck would have it, we were early (having planned nasty weather, which had miraculously cleared up), and the event organizers ended up taking longer to get ready for registration than the schedule dictated. The bunch passed the time, wandering around the hotel, and attempting to amuse ourselves with what I'm sure mainstream society would consider a very odd variety of topics. (I knew there was a reason I wanted to work at this company! :) )

After a time, the badges finally obtained, we returned to the office, arriving there at 1600.

At this point, I wasn't feeling especially productive, so I surfed by Jaeger's site (the dorm version, since festing's dns is screwed) to find out the nature of his much-hyped contest. I decided it looked like an interesting challenge, but did not yet attempt to divise a solution.

I then did manage to do a little real work. A new concept for the day! (I'm sure management types would consider what I was working on this morning to be "real work", but I consider it a necessary evil, done to please the poities, and extraneous to the true goal.) Looked a little more in-depth into something that had turned up as a pesky problem, divised a solution, and managed to implement a rough but working proof-of-concept in under an hour. Putting the "Research" back into R&D! :) Woohoo! (Sorry, no details. Confidential.)

While I waited for bouncing to come pick me up, I read a little slashdot (yeah, there were a few people having beer-o-clock, but I just wasn't much in the mood to participate on this occassion). Feeling really tired upon leaving work, I thought I'd just crash for sure on arrival at home. I'm now feeling kind of pumped up. Must have something to do with the Threat Level 5 that's cranking those hard rhythms, melodic vibes, and piercing vocals out of my speakers. :)

I think I'll get to bed extra early tonight, both to make up for last night's hideous ordeal, and because I need to get up extra early to begin tomorrow's fun. Yes indeed. Life rocks.