Ryan's Journal

Life is moving progressively toward perfect. I’m home and insomnia-free, sleeping a beautiful eight to ten hours a night. Last week I probably slept a total of thirty hours over seven days, so this is indeed a wonderful thing. When not sleeping I’ve been out with Aaron and his insane friends, seen the new Lord of the Rings movie, and nearly finished off the Christmas shopping. Tonight I’ll be enjoying a deep-dish Zachary’s chicken pizza, and in three days I’ll be off to fulfill a dream I’ve had for nearly twenty years by visiting Antarctica. I’m not sure how things could be better. In this midst of enjoying my personal utopia I stumbled on this piece of ultimate wisdom and truth:

“Now this brings me to Mufasa the Lion King and the circle of life. Nerds such as myself are usually not mechanically inclined. So when we need something mechanical done, we have to take it to a mechanic and get reamed for it. We readily accept this. Because when the mechanic needs something done on his computer, he takes it to nerds like me, and we in turn ream him for it. This my friends, is the Circle of Life.”

Today is the last day at Warner Brothers, although there’s a good chance they’ll be bringing me back at the end of February. Took a last trip by the Friends soundstage in the hopes that Jennifer Aniston might be there and fall madly in love with me, but they were filming and not even Gunther was around to say goodbye.

In other news, here’s a bit of info about the ship I’ll be on in Antarctica:

M/V Polar Star was built in Finland and served in the Swedish Maritime Administration’s fleet of icebreakers under the name of Njord. In 2000 she was purchased by Polar Star Expeditions, a company of Karlsen Shipping and underwent complete retrofit and upgrades. She was renamed M/V Polar Star after her namesake that served Karlsen’s Arctic cruise program. Today the ship is operated by Polar Star Expeditions formed in 2000. Karlsen Shipping, the parent company, is an old Norwegian family business originally from the northwestern coast of Norway and now headquartered in Halifax, Canada. With over 100 years experience in many aspects of the marine industry, Karlsen has operated primarily in the Polar Regions.

Two hours of sleep last night. Maybe three. The insomnia has GOT to end soon. Luckily I’ve only got three days of work left — I’ve been so tired lately that I think Yar is beginning to suspect that the brain damage has completely consumed my ability to function. Besides looking at the screen and reading things that aren’t there I’ve also started to occasionally mix up word order while speaking — “Yar, broken the code is possibly because of the methods updated.” It’s not a good thing.

In more interesting news I had a great night out Saturday with a friend, then went to the Arclight on Sunday night to watch Chasing Amy, followed by a Q&A with Kevin Smith. Kevin ruled — the guy is one of the funniest people I’ve ever heard speak. And for those counting at home, it’s now ten days, two hours and two minutes until the plane leaves and the Antarctica trip starts.

Insomnia has taken me to a new low: for the past hour I’ve been debating whether the dancing banana in the navigation bar should be visible by default or not. After going back and forth on the issue I think I’ll let him start out doing his jamming in secret.

After barely sleeping for four days, I fell asleep at 10:00 last night and was on my way to nine hours of blissful repose when the phone rang and I was told there was a problem with the Warner Brothers database. An hour later, once the problem was fixed, I was lying in bed, completely unable to sleep again. I can’t help but feel that God is up there laughing at me; let’s hope he doesn’t start playing with the “smite” button any time soon.

Unrelated to insomnia, here are the final effects of the Slashdot link on site traffic:

…and as a result of not being able to sleep the site now has permalinks, the number one most requested feature (“You need permalinks to your blog entries, sucka“). I’m both an insomniac and a geek.

Unrelated, but I’ve gotten sucked into the whole Survivor thing this year — the idea of getting to live on a tropical island while simultaneously testing your ability to fend for yourself is one that seems really appealing. However, in the shows I’ve seen they all kind of just sit around on logs and complain about how hungry they are or who should be voted out. I want to get on the show and be like the professor on Gilligan’s island, making fishing nets out of palm fronds and radios out of coconuts and stuff. All I need are some ideas for a good audition video — “Survivor needs more guys who are losing their hair at a young age” probably isn’t the pitch that will convince CBS to put me on the show. Suggestions are welcome, so long as they don’t involve nudity, farm animals, or both.

I got to sheep number 213 and finally gave up counting…

Exactly ten working days left. The last of the Antarctica gear (waterproof pants and gaiters) was purchased yesterday, so it’s now just a matter of getting everything ready to go.

Twenty-three days and thirteen minutes until the plane leaves from SFO and the Antarctica trip starts. Between now and then I’ve got to finish up at Warner Brothers, move out of JB’s place, and figure out whether it would be easier to survive on penguin meat or leopard seal, should the boat become encased in ice. I would think leopard seal would be tougher to catch, although penguins can be wiley little buggers…

Ahem. Despite the fact that Google has changed their searching algorithms such that this site is no longer the top result for searches on “Ryan Holliday”, I still found the results for miserable failure to be really amusing. Another fun one is to type “French military victories” into Google and then click on the “I’m feeling lucky” button. Last of all, this site is retarded.

Jason is now a man with a mission. However, in typical Jason fashion that mission doesn’t come with a mission statement.

The next version of the Linux kernel, which is the software that this web server is running, is nearing its production release. Here’s an excerpt from Linus Torvald’s release announcement:

Btw, I tried to come up with a good name for this release. But the fact is, that as Scott Adams has so often pointed out, you can’t do much better than “weasel” when it comes to funny. Ever since the “greased weasel” series of kernel releases I have been stuck for a good name.

This release is tentatively called the “stoned beaver” release (beavers are _almost_ as good as weasels, as I’m sure Scott Adams would agree).

If you feel strongly about the issue, please send your votes and ideas to “feedback@beaver-overlord.com”, I’m sure somebody will find your insight fascinating.

Thank you in advance.

One can only imagine the meetings at Microsoft tomorrow morning where high ranking executives will be forced to say “stoned beaver” with a straight face.