My PC has a capability I seldom use. Most people would probably consider it very strange to use it in the way I currently am. But once in a very great while, it works for me. Am I going crazy?

At this moment, my headphones are playing:

• Tool -- Pushit
• No Doubt -- A Simple Kind of Life
• Xena soundtrack
• A Noam Chomsky speech as background

All simultaniously.

Now an Enya track is starting.

Differet musical patterns rise and fall, in and out of the foreground. My mind follows one for a while, and then latches on to another as crescendos change, the tunes collide, and rhythms clash with one another.

The feeling is akin to drifting on the ocean, as the waves toss a bout amidst the currents. Sometimes, several wavses coming from different directions collude to toss it high above the baseline. Then there is a relative calm. Maybe you can pick out a lull in one song or another. Then another takes over. And the mind follows.

Does willfully listening to all this make me a certifiable nut? Why?

Because just one signal is not enough. One tune alone cannot satisfy my hunger, even while overwhelming the mind. So don't take it away. Add another to the mix. It dilutes any pain that might be evoked, even as the stimulation is increased. If that works, add another.

Eventually, you're listening to the peacefully cacophonous soup that's flooding my ears right now.

NIN, Crystal Method, and a different No Doubt track now. Pure bliss. Thank you.

Meanwhile...

This morning, I journied with my dad to the Pepsi Center to check out the job fair. Historically, I have had little luck with such events, but I figured it would be worth checking out at any rate.

Well, not expecting much, I can't say I was terribly disappointed. There was jack shit as far as any halfway appealing employment opportunities there. I always feel like a fish out of water at such events in the first place though, no matter the ecenomy. Damn.

Spend a good portion of the afternoon hunting down wierd bmas bugs. After attempting to dig down into all sorts of obscure subroutine calls, it turned out that the problems were being caused by stray records in the database referencing non-existent rows in other tables. So much for referential integrity. Doh.

When jaeger got off work and came online later, Scott and I consulted with him. The cause of one of the problems was known. (And has since been fixed.) The rest were just as I suspected: Some obscure bugs, which neither of us had any idea where the cause might be. Since the errors were apparently unreproducable, the only evidence being a few stray rows, we have no way to reliably find the cause. Oh well.

Jaeger invited me to the Boulder Compound for a viewing of Alien, which Captain Logan would be seeing for the first time.

It was about as I remembered it. Really grim and dreary, in the middle of outer space, as outer space would really be. But with a super-nasty monster thrown in. That being the primary subject of the plot, of course. Yes, it's Alien. Duh.

Now I'm reading Slashdot. I should go to bed, so I can get up and go find a job tomorrow!

[/me tries not to laugh cynically.]

Goodnight.