Dream Snippets

I'll be doing something (in the waking world, rather than a dream) and it will remind me of something that I've done before, but it'll take me a second to realize that the memory is not something that happened in real life, but in a dream - and sometimes I'm not entirely sure whether it was a dream or real.

hotel maze update

I was walking around the hotel with a co-worker. We went down to see the pool because he hadn't been there yet. We went the way I knew to go and tried to get back a different way. We tried a door that had an exit sign over it and found ourselfs in a stairwell that actually was being used for maintenance equipment storage.

Another Dream Girl

I had another weird dream - this was a few nights ago.

I was in a hospital or some type of medical clinic - in an examination room. It was weird because there were 3 or 4 patients in there - I was not a patient. They didn't seem to mind me or each other, but I felt like an interloper. A doctor was in examining one of the patients, then left. A young nurse came in to administer some treatment. She also was not bothered by my presence - we had a conversation. She was obviously on some serious drugs and physically deteriorated from them. She showed me her left leg below the knee. It was a mess. To my dream self, it was obvious to me that she was on heroin, but the symptoms were more like meth - with severe physical deterioration. She needed medical attention more than any of the patients.

I don't like it.

I'm dissapointed by my username. I'm not going to change it right away or anything. It's just that it's not completely symmetrical. the "q" is just because it is the mirror image of the "p". The "p" is the first letter of my first name and the "marl" is the first 4 of my last name. pmarl was my username in highschool computer class because that was the standard formula for generating usernames. I've used a few different derivations of it since. But I like symmetry and I want something completely symmetrical. I won't likely find one any time soon, however.

Back in the Battle.net days of Starcraft, our crew had a few symmetrical b.net account names. one was all q's p's d's and b's with a few l's and I's thrown in there. In the default starcraft font, "l" and "I" were identical. we had one username made entirely of l's and I's - the intention was that other players would not be able to correctly enter the name. pdbqlpdbq or something like that. and lllIIIlIlI or something like that.

I could make a stretch and say that "m" is it's own mirror. "r" doesn't have one, so I'd have to leave it out. "l" is it's own mirror.

lmqpml

pmllmq

something like that.

Microsoft is loosing control

It seems that Microsoft is loosing it's grip on the computing industry. As open source software radiates, influencing user's expectations of software, MS is forced to comply with those expectations.

I was reading an article about Windows "Vista" (is that ever a dumb name) about how much more resistant Vista will be against spy-ware. One of the things the article stated was that unlike Windows XP, Vista will default to a limited account and administrator accounts will only be used for administration tasks (huh, that's an interesting idea - to bad it doesn't work too well in Windows XP). As MS tries to make windows more secure and more stable, it starts looking more and more like a Unix - but I doubt that it ever truly will be.

I remember how great Windows XP was supposed to be. It ain't that great. I doubt that Vista will be either. Sure, a lot of people will fall for the new eye-candy and the illusion of improved security - wait 2 years (if that) until the spy-ware authors have had time to find the holes.

Remember the stupid Windows Messenger service (not MSN Messenger, I'm talking about the stupid thing that allowed all the simple grey-box pop-ups advertising anti-spyware software and porn - at random without the need for a browser to ever have been opened). That was a blatant "mistake" on Microsoft's part - the service defaulting to always running with no protection from the wild (the internet). Stupid. Notice that in recent versions of XP, it is disabled by default - took them long enough.


Here's a Spyware Anti-spyware rant for which I don't want to start another post, so I'll just tack it on here.

Spyware (in my mind spyware and adware are complete synonyms - or adware is a specific kind of spyware) advertises anti-spyware software. How stupid is this. What kind of a world do we live in where people actually fall for this kind of crap. And they do fall for it. I've seen it with my own eyes. I think that the same thing is going on with anti-virus companies. It's the same as mafia insurance - "Buy our insurance or else "

Strange Dreams

I had some rather strange dreams last night.

One took place in the Tractor Supply Co. store (formerly Farm and Fleet) in Corry, PA. It wasn't really Tractor Supply Co anymore either. It still had the sign, but it was some sort of clothing store that had lots of little kids' clothes - which is not what we expected when entering - I'm not sure who was with me when we entered, but Thomas was there when we were leaving. There was a vending machine that sold some kind of hot dogs, but they weren't pork or beef or poultry - it was some strange exotic, almost disgusting sounding animal. I got one because of the novelty of it and almost couldn't eat it - I only remember taking one bite of it from the dream and it was tasteless. We got into a car.

Then there were a few girls (roughly my age) with us. One was some kind of gas-station regional manager or something. Anyway we stopped at a gas station (for gas), and she was inside checking some paper work or something. Tim was there at this point as well. We were talking with the girls and I was fairly close to one (like maybe she was my girlfriend or something). I was telling her that she wasn't fat and didn't need to loose any weight - which was true.

Subconscious

Today, I left the work site for my hotel room (it's right next door). I didn't think about which door I would use to enter the hotel or which route I would use to get to my room. I didn't even think of which room number I was in or which floor I needed to get to in order to find it. I just walked there - by the best route and throught the best door - without thinking of it in the slightest. I didn't even really look at the number on my door as I inserted the key card and opened it. I've been staying in the same room for a week and in the same hotel off and on for several weeks.

About half way to my room, I noticed that I wasn't thinking about it and it seemed a bit odd. Maybe it was just the effects of the fumes from the chemicals I was using just a few minutes earlier. But this transistion from conscious to subconcsious became very apparent to me. I'm not sure when it happened, but it definitely has happened. I can navigate the hotel as naturally as if it were my own home. I don't have to think of where I'm going or how to get there. Perhaps the desire to be somewhere isn't even fully concsious, but I just get up and let my feet carry me wherever I need to go without thinking about it.

This hotel is a maze. I got lost a few times the first few days that I was here. It's quite poorly designed. There are two direct routes to the lobby from my room - I'm not sure which is shorter, they're probably about the same distance - but both have the appearance of going absolutely nowhere. The halls take seemingly random turns, you go down full and partial flights of stairs. It's a maze. I've had to direct people to various destinations a couple of times because the layout is just confusing and people usually only stay a day or two. There are a few signs on the walls showing which way to go - but they are poorly arranged and not easy to follow.

To get to the pool area from the lobby, you gotta go past the restaurant, into the bar, take a right turn in the bar, head out of the bar, take a sharp left into a short side hall that appears to go nowhere (the sign indicating where the pool is appears to direct you past this hall), take another immediate left to find a door that indicates that it will take you to the pool - this door opens into a stair well that appears to exist for maintenance personnel, but it does in fact lead down to the pool area - after descending the stairs, you find another door that looks vary janitorial in purpose, but opens into the pool area by what appears to be a maintenance entrance. There is a main entrance into the pool - but it comes in from another area of the hotel. You could get to the main pool entrance from the lobby - you'd still have to go through the bar, but you'd have to go a lot further around the pool, down an elevator, etc.

What seems odd to me is that you have to go through the bar to get to the pool. People with kids would understandably want to go to the pool, but they might not want to take their kids through the bar - which is a designated smoking area and everything that you would associate with a bar.

Fingers

Fingers and hands are funny looking things. I don't really have a point, but I've been sick for a few days (and showing no signs of getting any better). But I was looking at my hands in a kind of sickness-induced daze and pondering the strangeness of them.

I recommend that you study your hands and maybe those of a few other people. You may have to be in an other-than-normal mental state (I do not use or recommend drugs).

One thing that I noticed about my fingers is that the last segments (with fingernails) do not all bend squarely at the joints. And some of the fingernails are crooked as well. The one on my left middle finger is noticeably crooked. It's funny because I lost the nail on my right middle finger about ten years ago. It was funny-looking for a while, but now is more normal than the other one.