"I obscenity in the milk of my shame."

Happy independence day, sheep.

The fireworks were pretty incredible. Emma and I watched them from a roof in Brooklyn Heights; it was the closest I'd ever been. I think my favorite ones were the little gold and white ones that kind of make a small cloud of glitter in the air -- like little bouquets of flowers, even. We tried to figure out which one was the "Path of Gold" or "Golden Shower" or whatever NPR was calling it. I think I know which one it was, and it was a pretty sweet piece of work: Two or three typical big exploding rockets that left an unusual number of long-lasting, glittery streamers as they went down. Before doing that, though, I went to a little party at Katie's house in Pelham and ate burgers and stromboli and drank Corona beers while Katie's brother Andrew set off garage-type fireworks. There was this one that they had like 10 of that would spin around really fast and make this steam whistle noise as it shot out sparks, and then all of a sudden about 20 little flashes and pops would go off in the air within a five-foot radius of it: The thing spits out smaller, invisible fireworks as it spins. It's like a particularly cruel, sparkly mine.

I have a job interview at a company called DataSynapse. I hate this company because it is one of those ones where you can't tell what they do. I think they host distributed computing clusters for researchers, but they don't seem to have that many contracts -- like, they only mention three people they've worked for, and they have a special "Awards" section on their web site, but they've only won one award. They have a big irritating corporate web site with all these stupid pictures but they are clearly not a big deal. And the job is like testing database efficiency. That sounds real fun. I guess I'm kind of dreading it because they're going to ask me more of those fucking think-on-your-feet brainteasers. Maybe I will just say, "Look, I'm a good programmer, I have a college degree (a B.S., mind you), let's just talk about something else." I also applied for the SparkNotes position. My dad called and said I got a letter from CUNY -- probably a Dear John; they would have called if they wanted to interview.

I got something posted on matrixessays.blogspot.com. That may not be terribly difficult, I don't know.

I watched these:

• How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days: Predictable. Bad
• The Truth About Tully: Slow, but good. And it comes with a short film at the beginning (instead of previews) that stars Nina and George from 24, as well as Sandra Bernhard

Here's hoping I can get into 28 Days Later... tomorrow when it's going to be 92 and feel like 95.

I'm re-writing the autoconf schemas for Arianne so that they check versions and so that Arianne supports the new stable version of the Lua scripting language (apparently, most of the Lua functionality that Arianne uses got altered / removed in Lua 5.0). Autoconf is behaving in a typical, hair-pulling fashion; apparently AC_DEFINE doesn't work within a user-defined autoconf macro -- you have to pass it as an argument, like the action to be taken if x is true. I won't even go into how long it took me to figure out that you can't put whitespace before the macro name and the open-parenth. Chalk it up to not being willing to read the manual. Suck balls.