Rory's Journal

I have a new job now. I've been working there for almost two months now. It's a local audio and computer install place called Poindexters. Compared to GameStop it's a thousand times better simply because you are treated as an employee instead of a number and a robot. When holidays come up we get to spend time with family, instead of told that we MUST work without fail or we will be replaced with someone that will. It's so nice to have a boss that finally seems to care about us as human beings. It's very different, almost alien in that respect. I do computer programming for them which is a job I've always wanted to have. It brings several good things to the table. Sometimes I wonder why people continue to work jobs they hate or jobs that make them feel like crap. Obviously there is something better out there for everyone. I don't have a college degree, yet I'm working my dream job of computer programming. Of course, I lucked out getting the job. A friend suggested me as a new hire for the office. Still, though, I think everyone is capable of working were they are happy.

The past three months have been a personal nightmare for me. It has been the creation of a new life, yet the destruction of another. All kept as quite as can be, simply because I can't communicate. It's things like these that destroy relationships, both with family and with your love. Unfortunately, against all my increasingly inept attempts, my father was the last to know again.

My fiance is pregnant. She is on her twelve week now, the end of a third of the way to a new beginning. A beginning that I do not welcome with open arms. This was an accident, yet that is an understatement. It was not a mutual choice to decide to try and raise the baby. Yet it has been made. It seems these things decide themselves lately. Although I have concerns about having the money to raise a baby or the time, it seems that responsibility or other matters have made these fears moot. My voice, drown by other people's feelings or will, has fallen short of saving myself from anything that once resembled my former life.

And, at the end of this, I stand. What I have been as a man, and what I will become, are now my concerns. This ever increasing fog over the path I once saw as a road to a future built with my own will, now clouding my ability to even imagine the possibility of doing what I once thought possible.

If I knew that everything was going to be ok, I wouldn't have these feelings. A child of my own is something I have wanted, but not like this. Perhaps this is how fate steers one through their life. Give me strength now to build two futures with what I once wondered was enough for one.

Most of you out there probably aren't serving the same places I am on the net, so you've probably never heard of Folding@Home. That's too bad. Folding@Home is a college funded project that is using distributed processing to fold proteins in the hopes of finding cures or causes to many diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Parkinson's is currently affecting a family member of mine so I took a strong interest in this project. Basically, this means that you download a piece of software they made, it runs on your computer as an idle background process and any time you aren't using the processor of your computer for your own work the Folding@Home program will. This is distributed processing. They give your client a work order for a protein molecule, your client uses your processor to compute what the work order wants it to, then it returns the result to Folding@Home all using your internet connection. In the end they are using millions of computers to calculate cures for bad things. I would strongly recommend that people go to their website, located here, and try it out. It really doesn't cost anymore in electricty to keep a computer running through the night and, in some cases, may be better for your computer since turning it off and on all the time can lead to the power button wearing out and the hard drive heads collapsing after so many on/off cycles. That and Folding@Home yeilds real results, also on their site.

I was thinking today how funny some of the mathmatical or scientific principles of the world are as far as naming go. Usually they have someone's name attached to them as the name of the principle. The thing is, you could probably put any two last names together and it would sound good. Like the Smith-Westen Principle. See? I just made that up. Or, how about the Lance-Hesseinburg Theorem. See what I'm talking about? Soon you'll all see the power of the Brown-Cunnings temporal extremity drive.

The same thing goes with any object and the word drive. Put drive after anything and it sounds cool. The gravity drive, the warp drive, the burnt toast drive. Can't be any worse anyway.

What do you mean I must be bored?