Monday, April 24, 2006

Iraqi Spaceship Round-house Kick!

I had a dream that ranked 10/10 on my weirdness scale last night, so I just had to share it.

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It starts out in Iraq, where I'm fighting in the war against the Iraqis. At one point I find myself climbing up this hidden ladder, where I see about 4 Iraqis and Americans in a stand-off with each other (they were holding handguns pointed at each other, not M14s or any other big guns). At one point the tension breaks, and they all shoot each other dead as I watch in horror as I come up from the ladder. I'm walking around and observing the scene, and I find a guy sitting in a leather lounge chair very near to the blood bath. I walk up to him and he's...like...one of those guys from Star Trek. I think maybe the one with the pointy ears. Well anyway he and I have a talk about how this whole war is pointless. If Iraq wins, its not like they're going to go invade the US afterwards. And if the Americans win, its not like we gain anything from it except notoriety. We both agree on the subject matter.

Then a few more troops find the ladder and they all climb up too. Suddenly, OMG its a spaceship and now we're in the middle of freaking no-where (not Iraqi desert, but space)! I guess I should have seen the clue when I saw Star Trek dude sitting there chilling. A long time passes, and now there's like, families and stuff on this space ship too. The main chamber where we all are in (which is also the scene where the earlier stand-off took place) is really cramped. I'm waiting in line to grab some food from our mini-cafeteria/convenience store, when all of the sudden Star Trek dude tells everyone to put on their oxygen masks. So everyone dashes for these masks that are hanging along the top of the wall all around the space ship. By the time I'm trying to find one, most of them are taken except for a couple. I run over to grab these masks (which btw, only cover your nose and feed 100% oxygen to you), but there's not enough cord length on the stupid thing, so I can't pull it down close enough to my nose. I'm attempting to put this thing on my nose, and the girl to my immediate left (who is already masked) just kinda gives me this look like "Well, he's f#*$ed". -_- After a few more failed attempts, I grab another mask that is too my right and try to put that one on. Again the cord is too short, but its long enough to where I can get it as long as I am standing on my toes and aim my head upward. Then, Star Trek dude starts disappearing with some kind of jet pack thing on his back. Apparently he decided on the spur of the moment to travel back in time, and making that jump produces a lot of harmful toxins (which is why we had to strap on these masks). What a freaking bastard, I never did like Star Trek.


Anyway so later on myself and another girl (no idea who) are getting irritated being cramped up in the crowded cabin all the time. So we go searching and find that there is another HUGE part of this spaceship that we didn't know about before. There is an enormously huge room with several large holes in the ceiling. As we walk into the room, a giant, green bug-like creature (about 10 feet tall and 4 feet wide) comes down from one of the holes by this long, elastic looking white band. The girl busts out her handgun and shoots the thing dead. Then another is dropped in the same way in another corner of this huge room (I'm talking like 2 or 4 football fields, that's how big the room is). The girl runs over there, and then shoots it dead too. So then we realize that this is exactly the kind of exercise we wanted, to stretch our legs an stuff. So now more of these things are being dropped and I get in on the action too. Only I don't use a gun. Oh no, I am much cooler than that. Every one of these giant bugs that gets in my way I give it a couple swift round house kicks and its dead. Eat your heart out Chuck Norris.


After a few more of these, I'm getting tired of these weak-ass bugs that can't present me with a challenge. So I yell at the ceiling and tell it to drop harder things to kill. Sure enough, now it starts dropping all other kinds of bugs that are harder to fight, like giant centipedes and crap. They are still all dropped the same way, with this long, elastic white band strapped around them. At one point I realize that its a gigantic spider above the ceiling (the spider is about the same size as that whole room). Even though I didn't see it, its vision became clear to me in my mind. It was dark blue and purple, had giant and powerful legs (that it was using to drop all these bugs), and it had this really goofy face that made it look like an idiot (although there was no doubt that it was incredibly powerful and dangerous). How did I know there was a giant spider there without even seeing it? Hell I dunno, its a freaking dream!

--- from this point my memory of the dream becomes more fuzzy ---

Anyway I'm still round-house kicking all these more challenging bugs and starting to get bored with it now. Some more people from the cabin above had found their way down there by now, so now they are kicking giant bug ass as well. So the original girl and I go off to seek other adventures on our spaceship. We find this HUGE, giant maze through this urban-like complex. We both know that its really dangerous out there though. We go out there anyway and sure enough, there were all kinds of dangerous creatures and stuff we have to fight through.

At one point later in the dream, our spaceship is getting beat up by these giant asteroids. There's one very close to us that is so big, that our ship would be smashed if we hit it. So I put on my spacesuit and fly outside the ship, and start moving asteriods away from the ship, I think by using my famous round house kicks (TM). I couldn't get to that big one though because it was too far away and I was running out of jet pack fuel or whatever. So I go back into the spaceship's airlock and shut the door, and then climb up the narrow ladder (this is the same ladder that I had climbed up and witnessed that stand-off in the beginning of the dream). And then.....

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Stupid alarm clock goes off. So now here I am, writing this out as I get ready for work. Usually I remember more detail than this in my dream (its rare that I can't remember faces or relationships of people I meet in my dream), but I still remembered a lot so I thought I would write it all down. There are some events that I missed that I can't quite remember as well, such as what exactly happened when we traveled that maze area. Well, I hope you enjoyed it.

Monday, April 10, 2006

The Heat is On

Its crunch time at work. The project that I've spent close to 8 months on now must be fully ready for use by April 30th. Its close to being used for its intended purpose (performance analysis), but it still has a lot of fine-tuning and validation work left. In addition to that, I was recently assigned to another project which is spread across at least 3 different engineering groups and is a "very high priority" right now, as both internal groups and customers are pushing for it. Lucky for me, I am charged with getting the code cleaned up, standardized, documented, and ready to roll, and because the code is in such a messy state right now, that's a ton of work. The code cleanup needs to be completed before other developers can really begin their work on it, so there's pressure all around on me to get this out ASAP. My manager told me I should be working 75% on this project, and 25% on my main project with the April 30th deadline. I'm in a state where I don't know what should be my priority. @_@ I've been putting in serious hours at work to get both of these projects ready. For some reason though I have no complaints about putting in the time and I don't really feel stressed out about it. I think I might be becoming a workaholic. >_>


So last week I met with the neurologist to discuss my test results (particularly from my sleep study). The good news is that I do not have narcolepsy. :) They thought I wasn't getting enough SWA sleep (slow-wave activity, found in stages 3 and 4 of deep sleep). But 46% of my sleep was SWA sleep, which is much higher than average (I don't know by how much). Additionally, my SAW voltage levels were extremely high (> 250 mV). Because I'm getting so much SWA sleep and I still feel tired, they hypothesized that some of that SWA activity might not actually be sleep waves, but is rather the recording of a seizure. That's right, now they believe I might be epileptic.

So I went in for another test today. This time they did a full-head (25 electrode) EEG to capture more brain activity. It wasn't a sleep study and only took about 40 minutes once I was all hooked up. But one part of the test required me to breathe heavily so I would hyper-ventilate, and things got crazy. Within a minute of continuous deep breathing, I started loosing control of my body. First it was my hands, then my arms, then everything else. After I was finally told to stop after a disturbingly long 8 minutes, I was almost completely paralyzed. I couldn't form words well because my lips wouldn't move correctly. I couldn't move from the position I was in (lying down on my back). My fingers were "stuck" on top of each other and felt like they were in a tight knot, and I thought that they would break. I literally looked (and somewhat sounded) like I was mentally retarded. I very slowly regained control of my body and after 20 minutes, I was able to control everything again (my fingers were the hardest to get back). The guy who was testing me told me that in his 29 years of doing this test, he's never seen a reaction as exaggerated as mine. It was crazy. And it was scary.


Oh yeah that class that I was bitching about a couple blog posts ago? I dropped it. I got sick and tired of wasting my time trying to decode the professor's messy, archiac, and esoteric notes and decided it just wasn't worth my time, especially since work has been picking up more and more (I'm paid for 35 hours/week now). Instead I'm going to take a class on Intellectual Property in the summer. I usually cringe at the idea of law/business classes, but this is one topic I'm particularly interested in. I still haven't been running, and I don't know if I'm fully healed yet (still need to see the doctor for a re-examination). Allacrost is starting to pick up a little more staem again. We had a meeting on motivation a week or two ago and it has really helped our team with figuring out where our problems are and how to improve them.


Well, I need to get back to working on.....something. I still don't have a clue what my priorities are, since everything in my life is high-priority now. :(