Not counting my two 5-10 minute power naps, I've been up for about 30 hours.  My body doesn't seem to like doing that anymore.  Part of it may be all the medication.

I was about to go to sleep earlier when Rachel got a call from work.  They wanted her to come back in and close because someone got sick.  She already worked from 8:15 to 11:30 this morning.  So I had to take her there.  Now I have to figure out another way for her to get home or pray that the alarm clock wakes me up to get her.

But the alarm is set now and I'm back to watching Stargate SG-1 again.  i really like this show, despite what Rachel says about it.

While I'm sitting here waiting for morning, I decided to fix a problem that's been bothering me.  For a long time, I've been using a perl module called Convert::IBM390 to access data from our AS/400 at work.  This module is not available in the FreeBSD ports collection, but it is available from CPAN.  Every time I upgrade Perl though, I have to reinstall this module manually.  I've been waiting for someone to port the module.  I finally broke down and did it myself.

The module doesn't require any patches or anything to install on FreeBSD so I figured it would be pretty straightforward.  After reading through the FreeBSD Porter's Handbook, it really was.  I've got the package on both my FreeBSD servers so that it can be upgraded from portupgrade automagically.  I've also submitted the port to the FreeBSD ports collection.  We'll just have to see how long it takes for them to add it.

Well, it doesn't look like MaxDB will compile under FreeBSD. I might try it on a Linux box in the future though.

On the bright side of all this, I did find an official MySQL connector for .NET. Unfortunately, it's going to make me want to recode all of my apps at work to use it. At least as a way to learn it. Hopefully it will help one of my programs that is having some issues with query errors.

I found an introduction to MaxDB on mysqlfreaks.com.  After looking at it, MaxDB may not be as useful to me as I though, except that it supports stored procedures.  Still worth looking into though.  That website might be helpful in the future as well.

I've missed a lot of work this week because I haven't been doing well.  I've decided I'm going to work tomorrow no matter what.  I've also decided the only way I'll make it is if I don't go to sleep tonight.  Silly Lortab causes me to be an insomniac.

Right now, I'm sitting here watching Stargate SG-1, S01E10, "The Torment of Tantalus".  I think it's funny that this episode directly contradicts some things that were said in an episode of Atlantis last season.  During this episode, a man goes through the gate with a rope attached to him.  The gate shuts off and the rope severs, but the man comes through unscathed on the other side.  Last season on Atlantis, they said the gate operates with "discrete units" that can't be seperated.  According to them, the man wouldn't have materialized because the whole thing didn't go through.

So as not to be completly wasting my time, I've been doing some research online this evening.  I came across MaxDB from MySQL.  It's an enterprise class database server.  It is also open source (as in free).  It looks like it might be a viable alternative for our in-house database needs at work.  I'm especially interested in the fact that it has ODBC support without a third party add-on.

Part of my problem using MySQL is that it requires a third party module for me to use it from .NET code.  The add-on I'm using now is free, but no longer supported.  The one I would like to use is to expensive for me to purchase for work due to budget contraints.  So this is definately something I'm going to look into more.  The only problem I'm seeing is that it runs on Linux and Windows, but not FreeBSD, which is my server OS of choice.  That's a solvable problem though.

I was watching the first season of Stargate SG-1 today (because I don't feel well enough to do much else).  It reminded me, in a sense, of Star Trek and much older Science Fiction.  Science Fiction has long been used as political satire.  For example, the episode of Star Trek titled "Patterns of Force" is a satire on the Nazi regime.  There are other numerous examples of that.

Stargate SG-1, S01E03, "Emancipation" deals with a Mongol society and their repression of women.  Throughout the series there are numerous episodes that deal with other forms of social injustice in "primitive" societies, much in the way that the original Star Trek did.

It's interesting to note that a lot of this disappears later in the series.  It might be interesting to look into whether this was because the series had a more developed storyarc to deal with or because of writer changes.  Unfortunately, I'm not going to be the one to do it because I don't feel like doing it.

As a side note, it makes me sad that this entry took me about an hour to write because of how I feel.

The last month or so has been really strange for me.  I think a lot of it has to do with the pain and the drugs.  It's been four weeks as of today since I shot myself.  I'm amazed how much it still hurts, even though it's been healing really well.  If I don't take the pain pills, I'm in excruciating pain.  If I do take them, it stil hurts at times, but it's bearable.  There's a whole different downside to that though.

When I take the pain pills (all the time because I hate pain), nothing feels right.  It's depressing.  And beyond that, they have a tendency to make me nauseous, which is only amplified by the fact that I'm wearing my glasses instead of my contacts because I have pink eye.  The last few days, it's been hard to even stand up for very long. 

My glasses have astigmatism correction that my contacts don't have, so the world is in the wrong perspective.  That's a good metahpor for my mental state.

Hand hurts... clowns will eat me...
Hand hurts... clowns will eat me...
Hand hurts... clowns will eat me...
Hand hurts... clowns will eat me...

Wait.  That's not right.  But it does hurt a lot today.  Started hurting pretty bad last night.  Still does.  I've had to take some extra pills for it, so I didn't get to go to work today.  It's hard to drive on that much Lortab.  It doesn't hurt that much at the moment (because of the pills); it just makes me worthless to do much.

So I got the ircd server up and running as well as the IRC services using bahamut 1.8.3 and ircservices 5.0.53.  Then I decided neither of them had the features I wanted and switched it to UnrealIRCd 3.2 and anope 1.7.10.  One of the big things I wanted was the hostmasking features of Unreal.  I also liked the services from anope better.

On that note, I've also go a PJIRC module for PHP-Nuke installed on three of my sites, as well as set up the channels and eggdrop bots for them.  I found a nice little tcl script for eggdrop that let me write a list of current users every minute, so that I could read from it in PHP-Nuke.  It works pretty well.  You can see this at work on OklahomaFitness.net and OKCbyNight.com.