Trying to maintain a day schedule while coming off of nights is something that I wouldn’t really envy anyone. After working three days of twelve hour night shifts in a row, having to get up in the middle of the day to run errands is nearly impossible, when all my body wants to do is stay up all night and then sleep all day. And I know that it’s screaming at me when I pull the rise and shine routine while it’s daylight outside, but I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. My body just demands sleep, and doesn’t want to go to sleep unless dawn is peeking in my bedroom window. I feel like I’m working back at Acer America again, the night shifts five days a week with the broken weekend (I usually had Mondays and Thursdays off) schedule that prevented me from even thinking about going back to days. I used to eat extra-large pizzas whole, and gross the shit out of the local primadonna tech who sat across from me. Hey, I was young and hungry.

This week, though, has afforded a unique opportunity, that so far appeares to be working out well. I had this three page sample of a story idea involving characters within the Hope Station universe, however, the story centers around a group of civilians and a freighter, as opposed to trying to write a military story. I don’t want Hope to be defined by the military stories, but it would seem that the major political changes that occur within the timeline are determined mostly by the military and the government, so a big picture story would have to involve them. In this case, though, we’re looking at the universe from the perspective of the “little people,” while using the timeline as mere backdrop/background events, rather than bringing about these changes into the foreground, but how the background events affected the civilians trying to make a living in the solar system. I spent the past forty-eight hours working on four character sketches and trying to make each character come alive enough for me to understand who it is we’d be writing about and how they might react, each according to his/her personal history and personality. I’m very curious to see what and I come up with.

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I finally buckled down on the first chapter of Knight Commander and after review and major rewriting, I was able to salvage it into what I beleive to be a good piece. I tried my very best to keep my tenses coherent (thanks !) and I beleive that after much writing and reviewing that it’s a solid foundation from which to built future chapters from. So perhaps The Quarterdeck Breed will kindly wait as I hammer out this novel, that has been longer in waiting than anything else I’m currently working on.

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I’ve been agonizing over the title of the “first” Melissa Knight story ever snce I called it Untitled #11 almost a year ago. I had Knight Commander pretty much well-thought out, and as I looked back toward the first story, I went through several title suggestions:

To Dub a Knight
Knight Rising
Knighted
Knight Ensign
Knight Landing
The Dawn of Knight

But none of the above seemed to fit the whole theme of having Knight in the title and yet being as clever as I thought Knight Commander was. I was sort of paying homage to the Alan Lewrie novels by Dewey Lambdin, where (most of) the titles of his Lewrie books have the word King in them. The King’s Coat, The King’s Commission, A King’s Commander, The King’s Captain, and so on… each one has that unique word in each title to let you know you’re about to read an Alan Lewrie adventure. Like I said, I thought it was rather clever for Lambdin to do that. And in sitting down to write my stories out, since I’m following in the tradition of C. S. Forrester and Dewey Lambdin in following a single character through her career in this fictional futuristic naval fleet, I would do the same. Hell, David Weber does it, why not me?

In short, I finally landed on Knight Commissioned as the title for the very first Melissa Knight story. Thoughts?

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I had this huge dinner last night before coming in to work. I made my favorite chicken dish, which of course means that I made a lot of it and then devoured half of what I cooked, while the roomies dived in on what wasleft likea pack of wild animals (or so I thought). I’m currently working on my first shift back on graveyard, after trying hard to kick myself back onto the night schedule.

The first ten hours have gone by without any real fatigue beating down on me, but as soon as the eleventh hour hit, I’m starting to have a little trouble keeping my eyes open and paying attention to what’s going on around me. So I know sooner or later that my head will loll back and I’ll drift off to catch a quick fifteen minute nap here and there, just like I tend to do when I just cannot stay conscious. I will mention, though, that it is kind of odd now to watch the sun rise as opposed to set. I’m used to going to work in the morning and watching the sun pass overhead until it sets and then I get relieved. Now, it’s the opposite: I get to watch the moon drift over the sky and then watch it set, while the DayStar comes out of hiding and blinds the everliving shit out of me. I’m supposed to be a night owl by nature! This isn’t like me… but I guess it’s true that the first grave shift back is always the most difficult.

If the subject line throws you, let me clarify a little bit: that’s what I’ve been eating all night.

o/~ Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed… o/~

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Way back in December, on accessing my work voicemail box after letting it go for three weeks without bothering to check it, I heard a very familiar voice addressing me within one of the messages sent in the middle of December. It was the voice of one of my fellow Japanese students from last quarters, calling me to call him back as soon as possible, because my professor and mentor, Tomita-sensei, was trying to get a hold of me to let me know about next quarter and getting back on track for my degree at Foothill. Well, rather than going through a middleman, I contacted Tomita-sensei directly, and it turns out that the class I’ve been waiting for is being offered in the spring quarter. So, looks like I’ll be going back to good ol’ Foothill College for another go at trying to get my Associate of Arts.

With my current work schedule, though this just won’t do. I work from 0900 to 2100 on the weekends, which means that I’ll be missing at least a whole day of classes. I spoke with my fellow NOC engineers and pretty much the best solution for me was to switch back to nights on the weekends, since I’ll have the weekdays free enough to go back to school and learn what I can. As of today, I have switched from days to nights, and I’m working 2100 to 0900. What does this mean in the long run? That I’m returning to a state of mind that I started out in within this industry. See, I absolutely adore working the graveyard shift, mostly because it affords me those blessed opportunities to be left alone. I hate being asked in the middle of my day for some inane bullshit thing that could have been taken care of by the previous shift. But, it’s my job to deal with the bullshit, that’s what they pay me for. At nighttime, hen everyone is pretty much gone home, there’s very little bullshit to deal with and that’s the way I like it. I’m glad I start today, but like I’ve always said… the first graveyard shift is always the hardest.

Case in point: I stayed up all last night to prepare myself and my body for the change in schedules. My ideal plan was to stay up until 1100 this morning and collapse into bed until 1900. I wrote, I ate, I drank, I played Battlefield 1942, Jedi Outcast, Command & Conquer: Generals, and I watched Ocean’s Eleven with the cast commentary on. I made it to 0800 and then fell into bed where I slept like a log until just barely 1600. Three hours before I was due to rise from my slumber and saunter on in to work. So tonight, it’s going to be slightly hellish trying to get myself back to a regular graveyard schedule again. At least I get four days off so I can be on days for the middle of the week and then readjust every weekend…

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Come visit The Kingdom of Estrellas. I followed this link from someone else’s LJ, for the life of me I’m not remembering since I’ve been exploring this site and trying to figure out how to get my own little nation setup. It’s free and it’s been fun for the past hour.

More Info: I created a WNOHGB ‘region’ for all my VR and RL friends to join, called the Galaxy Alliance. Maybe we’ll get enough members to send a UN delegate to. This site is pretty nifty.

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When I was much younger, sleep was like the worst thing that could happen to me. Mostly, I think, because I knew there were things going on in the house after I was forced to go to my room and close my eyes and sleep. I did not really want to miss out on anything that I might be remotely interested in, or at least the opportunity to engage myself in other endeavors while others slept. I think this is why working night shifts always appealed to me. I love staying up all night for the simple reason that everyone else is asleep and I get pursue anything I wish to pursue without interruption in the general sense. Of course, when you live with other nightowls, that’s not the case any longer.

Fast-forward from childhood to my junior year in high school. My parents were separated; leaving my father and I to live at the house my sisters and I grew up in, while my mother and youngest sister went to live with my grandmother. I recall Dad turning to me and telling me, “Son, you’re old enough to make your own decisions, now. What you do is your business, but just promise me you will graduate high school, and whatever else you do is up to you.” In short, what he was telling me was, he wasn’t going to be uberstrict with me anymore, and allowing me to go out and have fun. All he wanted from me was a high school diploma. Okay, this is pretty awesome, I remember thinking to myself. First thing I did that night was call up the only friend I had with a car, and we decided to drive until dawn. We picked a freeway and decided to see where it would end. So, next thing I know, we’re headed up US-101 to San Francisco. It was really a night to remember, though I won’t go into all the details about it. I just recall thinking how cool San Francisco was, because there literally was a lot of things to do and see there. A huge contrast coming from San Jose, and ever since, I’ve been in love with The City. But when we crossed the Golden Gate and hung out at the vista point on the north shore just south of Sausalito, that was when I really fell in love. It was just barely dawn, with the sunlight creeping up over the horizon and giving off light. All of The City’s lights were on still, and I just wished I had a camera with me so I could capture that moment. Ever since, it’s been my most favorite time of day to visit. To be honest, ever since, I’ve not gone up there at that time. I’ve tried, but lately, that vista point is closed for some reason…

I didn’t get back home until nearly six in the morning, having been out all night and not getting a wink of sleep. I slipped into bed, still not quite sure how far I could push it with my Dad, despite his assurances of non-interference. He was still my Dad, y’know? I was in bed fifteen minutes when he walked in to wake me up for school. With very little energy, I rode my bike and I fell asleep in biology. When I got home, I slept and didn’t wake up until the next morning, getting about 15 hours of sleep. What was I fighting? Sleep rules! Nowadays, I just can’t get enough sleep, even if I go to bed at a proper time. I’ll lie there for an hour or two, trying to force myself into unconsciousness, until the wee hours of the morning, when I’m realizing that if I go to sleep right now, I’ll only get six hours of sleep… five hours… four hours… three hours… then it turns into a nap before work. The next day, when I’m trying to find the drive to work on a personal project, I just don’t want to do it anymore, and it’s beginning to make my writing suffer. I need to figure out what to do, and how to do it before it gets any worse.

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I’d like to think that I’ve been a faithful member of FanFiction.net. I mean, you really can’t beat the price for such a really well-written site like theirs. As an aside, I do purchase the advanced memberships on a quasi-quarterly basis. I figure if I ever leave it, or if it crashes, I’ll be all right. I still have all of my stories formatted in URL form, anyway. I manipulated the HTML 2.0 stuff so my stories over there will look halfway decent, instead of the crap that Word churns out. They’re a big beleiver in using the paragraphing code, rather than just letting the indentation code do its job. I think my method of hand editing makes the story easier on the eyes.

Anyway, so as of tomorrow, FF.net will split into two sites: the same ol’ FF.net, and FictionPress.com, of which I’m already a member. How did this happen? Simple. I already had my Hope Station stuff up on the site, and so that automagically moves my crap over there. But I’m a little confused as to how to manage it all, now, because I’m so used to having everything in one place. Did the original content on FF.net get to be so much that they actually needed to create a dedicated website for it? That’s nearly insane, when you think about it. I mean, the fanfics are enough to make me gag, but I didn’t honestly think original works were in such abundance in the fanfic community.

Right now, I’m working on the same three stories as time permits me to. I think eventually I’m going to have to find a fourth one, because now I’m exhausting myself over trying to get these stories written. But, I did finally come up with my H-ship name. Hood.

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I’ve been working over here at PayPal for one and a half years, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about the way Things Are Done(tm) around her,e it’s that if you ever publish something or make something publicly accessible to corpnet, you have to make it accessible to both Windows and Unix users. We have a tremendous amount of Powerpoint presentations online, but they also have text versions, for those that want them. And that’s kind of what I like about working here. If I really wanted to, I could dive into the deep end of the Unix pool and stay there for as long as I want to.

Of course, this was all before eBay bought us.

eBay is an all-Windows house. PayPal is a hybrid house, and the entire IT department likes it that way. Half of our NOC uses either Debian, Mandrake, FreeBSD or OS X. The other half uses Windows 2K. I have a Windows 2K box (motoko) and a FreeBSD box (haruka) at my desk, and I tend to favor motoko over haruka for most things. eBay prefers to send stuff out in MS-only formats and that tends to piss off some of the guys, even though StarOffice can handle it without difficulty. I guess it’s some sort of principle with them, but I couldn’t care less.

Over the course of the past three weeks, I’ve been slowly migrating my mailbox from Exchange to using the courier IMAP server on the new NOC mail server. See, we get bombarded by so much notification spam, that we needed our own dedicated mail server just to process it all. Why? Because Exchange was bombing big time when 6,000 emails would get sent out in the course of five minutes. The CPU on the poor thing would turn red, and that in itself sends yet another batch of notifications via email. Now there’s a little ironic twist.

Anyway, I spent some time off and on and in between other pressing issues to ditch Outlook altogether and start using a unix mail client with the IMAP Maildir instead of the POP /var/mail/accountname mailbox that I’m pretty used to. It’s not in mbox format, and I’m such a bonehead when it comes to understanding IMAP sometimes, so I had to call the cavalry back in to lend a hand. But after a couple of hours of reconfiguring the IMAP server and then the client a little bit, we finally figured it out and now I have a unix mail client for my corpmail. Yay me! Of course, now, getting used to it is the hard part…

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Beyond the obviousness of yesterday’s significance, I did take the last free day of my week to run some errands and drive around. With the notable exception of a few outings, I had not really gone on a random drive around the local area looking for something to do. I had experienced this sudden desire to get up off my ass, shower, and get ouf of the apartment for a while, just to experience the outside without any destination in mind. I ended up driving over to D&J Hobby to look and tempt myself into buying the core rulebooks for the third edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Wednesday night, I went over to ’s place as I (try to) do every Wednesday night and as promised, we put together a character for me. I tend to favor female elf druids as a matter of testing. It’s either that or male elf bards. I don’t know why, it’s just one of the two, depending on my mood at the time when I make the decision. I know druids, and I know bards. But anyway, I was in the damn store and I was looking around and I realized that the only RPG books I still own are all of those Rifts books. They’re still sitting in the box in my closet. So I started stacking Third Edition books and carrying them to the counter. By the time I passed by the dice pouches, I figured I was about to make a $200 purchase, and I still needed to buy dice! I turned around and I put them back. Christ.

See, the thing is, if I buy a collection of anything, there’s a little voice somewhere inside my head that instantly says, “Buy the rest, moron. You need a complete set.” This is why the economy is bouncing back, because of people like me. I’ll go on Amazon.com and pick up the first of an anime series, sometimes the first two, and then watch it. If I like it, the rest of it is shipped the next day. For example, I bought the first two discs for Hellsing, and after the end of the second disc, I was already adding the rest of the series (that’s available) to my shopping cart and putting a next day air order on that shipment. Of course, it also doesn’t help to have a similiarly inclined anime freak for a roommate. Right when you need someone to intervene, he’s actually cheering you on. Hey, fuckface… you can’t eat anime! “That’s okay, I don’t need food.” … Anyway… Today, while at work, I spent most of the day trying to get myself back into the swing of things, and also bored out of my mind when I finally read the 27,669th email that had accumulated since I went on my “weekend.” I immediately paid bills online (bye bye paycheck), and then I went over to http://www.anime-expo.org to sign myself up for this year’s annual road trip o’ fun down to Southern California. Hmm… ‘cept maybe this year, I’ll fly.

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