Tonic - Open Up Your Eyes

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• YouTube

I had a dream one night several years ago that makes this song so much more intense for me to listen to ever since.

I was backstage at an outdoor concert. The crowd was packed. The ring of the electric guitar began, and the crowd went crazy.

I approached the microphone on stage as the ring reached its peak and the rest of the band played the intro. I had thought the crowd was going crazy before, but somehow they found the energy to take it up 5 levels.

The intro was approaching the end and I grabbed the microphone, and just as I got the "ch-" sound out for the opening line, the crowd was still finding new levels to reach.

Then I woke up.

This might seem like a pretty vague description of the dream, but it's really hard for me to paint the picture with words. It was such a vivid dream, and I can remember all the feelings I experienced during it. I was nervous, but excited. I was confident. I walked up to that microphone stand so confidently, you'd think that it owed me money. It was such a wonderful feeling. The crowd's energy fed me. The band's energy fed me. I was full-on experiencing it.

If you think about it, along with the lyrics, you'll see the irony of it too.

Open up your eyes
Don't let your mind tell the story here

My mind was telling the story.

I don't know what it means for my life, at the time of the dream (over a decade ago) or for right now. Am I supposed to explore a singing career? I don't think I'm that talented of a vocalist. Also, who wants someone with a deep bass voice singing lead for a song like this?

When I listen to the song now, it brings a lot of those feelings out, and it's a fun ride.

At any rate, I thought I would log this for my own posterity, but also to let y'all in on how meaningful this is to me.

For years (more than 20) I have been doing things the long way with PHP. One of the examples of this is processing files and putting the results in an array (or object) to serve as key/value pairs.

Consider the following:

Foo: bar
Baz: biz

Here's some content...

If you wanted to match these lines in a way that you only get the Foo: bar and Baz: biz into a key/value pair, you would need to somehow match those values into a variable. Something like this would work:

<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);

But this will give you something like this: Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => Foo: bar [1] => Baz: biz )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Foo
            [1] => Baz
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => bar
            [1] => biz
        )

)

But what if you want to have the matched group [1] be the keys, and matched group [2] be the values? A for loop would accomplish it, as would other array-walking techniques.

It's far easier than that, though!

<?php
preg_match_all('/^(.*?): (.*?)$/m', file_get_contents($filename), $matches);

$keyvaluepairs = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);

If you print_r() that resultant variable, you'll find that it's exactly what you want:

Array
(
    [Foo] => bar
    [Baz] => biz
)

That's all I wanted to share. I hope it benefits you.

In the recent decade, the internet has moved away from written articles with figures and whatnot in them, in favor of things like YouTube videos. This cultural change has spread beyond YouTube and the public internet, though, and even includes major corporations, including the one I work for.

What I've found is that I am unable to really process anything that's presented in a video.

I am a decent reader, and over the last couple of decades or so, I've been able to cultivate a form of speed reading, which I use almost always. This allows me to take in loads of information rather quickly, not constrained to the limits of my ability to process spoken word, or another's ability to speak it. But when I am presented with either recommendations to watch a YouTube video to learn how to configure a piece of flight simulator software, or when I am issued mandatory education at work in the form of a video, I get incredibly frustrated, and I find that I'm unable to retain whatever it is that I observe.

When it comes to important things, where a certain set of steps must be followed precisely, or when it's a thing that I am required to do, PLEASE, I beg of you, don't throw a video at me.

We've lived in this house long enough to have experienced 2 tropical storms: Harvey and Nicholas.

Last night, Nicholas was approaching us at bedtime, and the wind and a bit of rain kicked up. Sometime around 2:30am the power went out. I left it alone, then a little while later it flickered back on briefly, then back out. When the power comes on in our house, several things make a fairly loud beep sound. When the power flickers in the middle of the night, that beeping can be disruptive to my already-light sleep.

I wasn't wearing my watch most of the night to see how I slept, and I didn't take my typical medicines that would assist in my ability to stay asleep. I figure I got segments of sleep lasting about 20 minutes each, with a period of 15-20 minutes awake in between. The awake was partially due to the storm noise, but mostly due to how my body was responding to the weather and the lack of medication. Then when the power went out, those physiological responses got worse, leading to an all around shoddy night, sleep-wise.

I got up around 7:30am and decided that 5 hours off electricity was approaching the maximum for the refrigerator, and it was starting to get warm in the house with the sun peeking through the southern bands of the storm. I somewhat robotically marched out to the garage, flashlight in hand, and laid out the extension cords, wheeled the generator to the back porch, gassed it up, and got everything running. Then I got into the house to get the portable air conditioner going, and Emily helped me with it. Then I sat for a bit to try and recover some energy before I went to boil water on the grill for coffee.

We went for a walk at one point, just to see how the neighborhood faired, and afterwards I decided it was safe to take the meds that I had skipped last night. After I did, I laid down to attempt to sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by a wound up nearly-six-year-old, until I finally got what felt like 10 hours of sleep (it was maybe 1 hour) and felt better.

At that point, Emily had fixed me some lunch and we sat and enjoyed our food together as a family.

We had some errands to run after that, and while we were out the neighbors sent a text message declaring victory against the lack of power. When we got home, the air conditioner had already brought the house down to the "cold" we like, and we went about getting things back to status quo.

Damage-wise, all I have been able to see so far was one branch off a rotted Japanese Wax tree, which I'm already planning to cut down. The loose bark on the Crepe Myrtle trees was blasted clean off the trees as well. Some neighbors didn't do as well: One reported an uprooted, large tree. Others had fences blown over. Some neighbors reported on Facebook that they heard a tornado blow through the neighborhood overnight. That was probably when I was either actually asleep, or just almost asleep and tuned it out completely.

Total time without power was almost exactly 13 hours. The longest cycle I ran between fuelings on the generator was from 7:30am to 10:30am. I think I only refueled it twice after the initial fueling. I've decided to not take storage actions with it just yet, as there's another storm on the maps that I am unsure about for this next week or so. With that in mind, I prefer to just leave everything ready to go, and refill my fuel supply sometime in the next few days.

All in all, it looks like the area did well, and we did well here, so it wasn't really that bad from our perspective.