Tough day at work today. Client requests for information from reports I did a year ago. I hate looking at work I did in the past. It's like, OH MY GOD, did I actually do this? This client was the first client we did these particular type of reports for, and since they were the first, they were the guinea pigs. The reports have come along way since then, so it's painful for me to see these dinosaurs.

Looking at old programming coded, even my own, is scary. It's like looking into someone's brain and how they think, how their logic works, how they process information or don't process information. I'm sure if a fellow programmer looked at my code, they'd freak out. I'm looking at my own programming code I wrote a year ago, and freaking out.

The client is requesting detailed information from this old report, and because the report is a year old, the information has already been deleting due to space limitations on the server. I've been spending the whole day trying to recreate the report to get back to the same numbers I had a year ago. What a pain! I'm finding so many mistakes, mistakes that we corrected later for other clients and their reports. I hate this. How do you go back to a client and tell them? It's not that the information is that far off, I just can't get back to my original numbers. However you look at it, it just looks like one big damn mistake.

I'm like so stressed out. I would get killed in an audit, and I'm bummed because I've always been so good about making my work audit proof. You should always be able to get back to your original numbers, no matter how many years later you go back and rerun the job. Stress, stress, stress. Thank god, it's Friday!

H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A...

I'm watching great musical moments from MTV's award programs. I forgot how much I loved Jay-z's song IZZO.

H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A...

I'm going to have to buy Jay-z's cd Blueprint.

Then Staind came on and sang that one song that I had to listen to for hours on end, "Fade". And now Eminem is on. I know, I know, he's a bad and evil boy, but I like him He's got a way with words and I love his anger. He's controversial and he makes you think, and I think behind all the BS lies a very intelligent and incredibly angry young man.

H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A...

Good advise from from the Writer's Digest August 2002 issue. Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring", said the following when asked "Do you have any advice for writers starting out?"

"Write about what you're interested in, not about what you already know. Don't write about yourself--you're not as interesting as you think! There's a whole world out there to explore."

My thoughts exactly. I get alot of flak from well meaning friends, who want me to write about my life. My first reaction is, how boring. I'm not interested in writing a memoir or a biography. I'm a fiction writer, and fiction means the following (dictionary.com):

An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
A lie.
A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.

Word History: To most people “the latest fiction” means the latest novels or stories rather than the most recently invented pretense or latest lie. All three senses of the word fiction point back to its source, Latin ficti, “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Ficti in turn was derived from fingere, “to make by shaping, feign, make up or invent a story or excuse.” Our first instance of fiction, recorded in a work composed around 1412, was used in the sense “invention of the mind, that which is imaginatively invented.” It is not a far step from this meaning to the sense “imaginative literature,” first recorded in 1599.

n 1: a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact 2: a deliberately false or improbable account [syn: fabrication, fable]

It is still difficult for me to write about what happened on 9/11. Right now, I feel like crying and it' hard to type, and I'm at work waiting for my query to finish.

It's almost been a year, but I'm not sure I've processed what happened that day and that week. I wonder if I ever will? I wonder if the tears and sadness will dry up some day, only because there will be no more tears left or sadness to feel. Strange how I have such strong feelings about what happened on that day. I don't personally know anyone who died, but I feel such extreme sadness mixed bitterly with the furious white heat of anger. My body and fingers shake, tremble with my feelings. Stranger still since I'm not the most emotional of people. I'm not quite sure how to explain my feelings about what happend on 9/11 to myself or anyone else for that matter.