Holiday Joy Season

So it's been a long few weeks here... I apologize, as I have been too busy to keep my five readers up-to-date on content.

School:
Done with my last real term, I can finally sit back and breathe easy. My grades were okay, I got a C, two Bs, and an A so far. English is still out, so I don't get to celebrate just yet (in spite of being confident of A or B level work). I did nothing but write papers for the last three weeks of the semester, so I don't know how well they ended up, especially the later of the series. Next term I'm registered for Germanic Mythologies and the survey Shakespeare course. That's it, then: done.

Work:
I'd been getting done preparing for the next Coordinator to take over while I stepped up to be interim supervisor of classroom support operations. I continued doing nice things for the people I thought deserved it, but in my race to get out of the office Wednesday night, I forgot to run reports for the winter term. Oh well, I'll have to do that when I get back. No big deal.

Utah:
I'm in Sandy right now. I've been going ape about the birds outside, though it's led to my Quixotic quest to retreive a reasonably close picture of a magpie. They're afraid of me; it's somewhat depressing. The blue jays here are very tame, though. They'll come down and grab peanuts while I'm standing between six and eight feet away. I've never had a bird do such a thing before, so that's a neat experience. I'll have to share the better pictures of both the jays and the flickers when I get them developed.

I return the fifth of January. Until then, I'd recommend you contact me by way of phone.

For what it's worth, Happy day of rest of your choosing or no day of rest at all depending on your tastes and customs.

I FREAKIN TOLD YOU SO

According to the R.H. Smith School of Business's Administrative Phone list, 4-SNOW is a real campus number. However, this afternoon, as snow was falling at its peak rate, calling 301-314-7669 resulted in "You have reached a disconnected number at the University of Maryland, College Park." 5-SNOW was, however, successful.

What is it, college? Huh? I wanted to go home!

I found a bird

I watched "Winged Migration" last night... that movie is incredible, especially because I'm a bird nerd and a photographer. If you are either of those things, I'd suggest you watch it, but if you are either of those things, you've probably already seen it and I'm just basking in being behind the times and having movies recommended to me based on the (what I feel to be substandard) pictures I put up in the office.



It's going to snow tomorrow. 4-6 inches total, they say, though I don't know how much of that might melt off during the storm. Go snow, cancel tuesday morning.

...

Actually, if you could just cancel my family studies class tomorrow, that would be fantastic.

If it weren't for the customers

I had fourteen things to do at work today.

That is all.

Strong Yeast Flavor

Okay, seriously... I want someone to explain this to me:


Why did sixty-some-odd people reach my website by searching for that exact same string?

We Have the Technology

So here's the problem:

I created a recipie for beer that is incredible in flavor. Very chocolate, very roasted coffee. Problem? It didn't carbonate. I left it in fermentation too long, apparently, and the yeast wasn't strong enough to carbonate. It pressurized some, but not enough to make the gas stay in suspension.

My solution?

I'm going to buy a tube or two of yeast and priming sugar, and make varying concentrations of mixture that I will add to bottles of water, possibly grained water.

What do I hope to learn from this? here goes:

Hypothesis: there exists some concentration of yeast-to-sugar that results in a bottle's worth of carbonation.
Test method: produce five or so concentrations of said mixture, adding each to a bottle. Let sit for a week.
Evaluation: pour each solution. Based on fizz, choose a solution mixture suitable for adding to each bottle of flat beer.

Success? I'll keep you posted.

NERRRRRR

Nat: powers of jealousy, vulnerability, and some other power you don't get to choose ACTIVATE!
Jeff: ?
Nat: well, you're all jealous, then sauron looks at you and you're all "OMG MY HEART SI BURST!!!" then hobbits become invisible because they're shifty and avoidant, while that giant thing was... well, I guess super strong or something.
Nat: I don't know
Nat: I want a ring to give me the power to print money
Nat: or the power to throw explosions
Nat: i get the impression viggo mortensen kind of sucks.
Jeff: yeah
Nat: i bet if he put the ring on, he'd become a geranium.

File this under "apathy"

So I'm in class, and we're talking about abuse/neglect statistics with regard to children in the state of maryland. Funny story, we should be learning material... instead, I get to hear from a classmate "umm... like, my mom told me about this one time in maryland recently some kids were duct taped together."

Why do I come to class? It's nothing but punishment, after all.

I'm a contributor

Look here for the following (which is reposted both because I wrote it and because I don't know that they'll keep it):

Dirt Farming

Dirt Farming is currently the state's primary employment opportunity. Use of the term "farming" is perhaps a generosity; the same 40 cubic feet of dirt have been moving about the state's roads for 5,000 years. Counties often trade dirt back and forth by way of subcontracted dump trucks. These trucks are Maryland's most populous life form, accounting for 84.6 percent of the state's poulation. Most of these large, mild-mannered robots are immigrants from Japan; they chose to reside in the state after growing weary of repeated taunting by Gamera. Sadly, this led to frequent bed wetting once the trucks realized their new home had a slight turtle infestation. Newer models have overcome this disability.

The current going rate per load of dirt is somewhere around 31,200,000 Yen. This fluctuates wildly according to the whims of the state, although a large part of the proceeds go to fueling the 13.4 million truck fleet. Rob Reiner has been implicated in a price fixing incident believed to have funded his 1994 consumption of a castle, but many prominent Baltimorons deny the use of general dirt farming funds for the purchase of snack food items.

Building Apple's ChatServer 37.1

Since google was of absolutely no assistance to me on this, I've taken it upon myself for adding drections on how to build the ChatServer-37.1 as found here in Apple's Darwin Open Source project listing.

First and foremost, the project doesn't have the traditional configure - make - make install build path I've come to expect from open source projects. For this tarball, Apple includes all dependencies (apparently) and the process is rolled into the main Makefile.

The end result of this seems to be that, in order to install this package (providing jabber and iChatServer), all you have to do is cd into the ChatServer-37.1 directory and tell it to make install.

That should be it... I'm currently waiting for the make process to finish. I think the process should result in a fully functional Mac OS X service, but I'll let you know. Not that you care. Like I said, public service.

[appending:]
So this didn't work right. The build failed for a file called membershipPriv.h. This is annoying because nobody else on the internet had this probelm and had google find a result for them. However, further contributing to the public good, I found an alternative: use darwinbuilds.

I have yet to see this complete successfully, but # darwinbuilds ChatServer seems to be doing well for itself.

[appending:]
A lot of things don't work right. I tried to manually install the necessary libraries after darwinbuilds failed to complete its installation properly. As it is now, I got it to compile fine, apparently, but the installation fails during ditto because I already have python 2.3 installed.

Joy. Mucking about with makefiles is enough to make me stay up until 1:30 for no reason.

Also I'm surrounded by suck at the moment.

Grammar Accident

Nat: were you around when I told you someone reached my website by searching yahoo for "content of whiskey" and that not only am I in such a search, I am the first result?
Jeff: I think I was
Nat: ...
Nat: "were you around when I told you"
Nat: great
Nat: good job
Nat: F

Cartoon Network Sucks

haha! this post will be twofold! but I'm not explaining myself until after you read this.

So at 10:30 every night, cartoon network has been showing Dragon Ball Z. I find this compelling and have made it a part of my nightly routine since sometime in June or July. In fact, for various stretches of time, DBZ has been pretty much the only thing I have to get me through the day. Now, instead of something nice at the end of the day, I'll be treated to half hours of Cheap Seats followed by "Why the hell am I awake?" because Yu-Gi-Oh GX is now on every night at 10:30. And every evening at 5:30 or 5:00. And a two hour block on Friday. And I think a couple times every saturday and sunday. DBZ will now be on saturday nights at 7:30.

Not that I have anything better to do, but go to hell, cartoon network. This crap and full metal alchemist and god knows what the hell else, it doesn't matter.

Now. Part I of explanation: I'll get more traffic! God, can you imagine? Search results for Dragon Ball Z, DBZ, cartoon network... wow. Go me, it's my birthday. :-!
Part II of explanation: all the people I used to know will read this "i'm watching dragonball" nonsense and hate me! less work for me! huzzah!

Generalizations

So on slashdot today, someone ranted about how "specs are this and that, but there are in fact distinct cases of each; 'this' specs are good, 'that' specs are bad." They closed with the thought "Generalizations = false."

Yes, yes they are.

However, someone needs to teach the internet an important fact: just because something is not universally true does not mean it's universally false, and that implies that generalizations can be useful, especially if they are true in a majority of cases.

Example, you ask? Gravity! Newton's laws are invalid in cases on the level of quantum physics, but we're still taught them and use them in the majority of cases.

Generalizations! Shut the hell up, Internet!

Oh, uncyclopedia!

The bermuda triangle gets such a bad rap.

I am the King of eBay Feedback

I found this on ebay:

I think that person wins the title of this post.

Begs the question

So okay, example from fark just now:

"One of America's oldest rodeos bans chewing tobacco, which begs the question: Why are nine-year-olds chewing tobacco?"

Of course I immediatley thought to myself "Great now I get to read page after page of idiots going 'THAT IS NOT BEGGING THE QUESTION LMAO'" and sure enough, someone in the first five or ten posts said "That isn't begging the question."

What the hell is it then? "Begging the question" as a logical fallacy is a fallacy of a construct anyway, because arguments that beg the question don't beg any singular question, while Canoe.ca writing about american rodeos does beg a question: why is canada writing about rodeos?

So what is it, then?

Hilarity

I found this on the uncyclopedia, here.

The Spanish Armada is considered one of the greatest military forces in history. It consisted of thousands upon thousands of flamenco dancers determined to carry the rhythm of Latin Music to the rest of the civilized world.
Unfortunately, it couldn't live up to the hype, and was defeated by the Wu Tang Clan in 1972.
Survivors of the battle eventually got together and re-formed as the Groove Armada, with slightly more success.
This article is a pile of crap. The article submitter may also have been huffing kittens . You can help Uncyclopedia by whipping it into shape.

Crapulence

Ladies and gentlemen, my hot water is broken.

Yeah, the water this morning was not only not hot or in the slightest warm, but was actually PAINFULLY COLD. It couldn't have been a hair over 50 degrees. I had to use a pair of boxers as a makeshift washcloth, and even that was painful.

What does this mean to you?

I'm probably leaving early. Oh, also I'm going to be very irritable and quite likely drunk earlier than normal as a result. I might even try beer in the shower if it's still not working!


[edit from 2019: as with the Kevin Smith movies, I'm glad I stopped randomly quoting '90s cartoons]
Circus midgets?

I've had it up to HERE with the likes of you people!

Nerd Commentary

I'm trying the related URL thing here, but if it doesn't work, hit this if you care.

Scott Berkun, a former developer for the MS Internet Explorer UI, changed to Firefox recently as his primary browser due to issues in IE's current implementation. He, however, took issue with some of FF's quirks, especially involving window behavior and its effects on tabs and the find bar.

I don't really have any problem with a developer defending his choices in software, but sometimes, an adversarial response buried within friendly justifications is just kind of revolting (probably not the right word). I apply that to this paragraph from Asa Dotzler (Firefox UI developer):

I'm really pleased that other than those issues, Scott, who worked on IE versions 1-5, is finding Firefox to be a better fit than IE. It's even better that he's offering some good feedback. Without high quality feedback, we wouldn't have the Firefox we do today.

It's that "other than those issues" thing that bothers me. I like hearing that people are pleased with my product, as it's much easier for them to say "Hey, I like your database changes" than it is for them to say "I hate everything about it."

What irks me, though, is the broadcast concept that him taking issue with some design choices is an affront to what they're doing. In this case, leaving out other than those issues would result in "I'm really pleased that Scott is finidng firefox to be a better fit... Without feedback [etc]"

It's more effective that way, I say. I must say, though, that I do like seeing a reasonable set of responses to criticisms instead of the all-too-slashdot trend of simply going "We did tabs because that's what we decided and we're not open to suggestions, thanks for playing."

More importantly, I think it's interesting that Dotzler pushes the extensions. I think that's a great move on his part. As someone who has done some UI work for a project recently, I'd love to have the ability to say "Well, I set it up that way because I don't want people making this change or that, but never fear... since I work in such a great team environment, you have the ability to override my decision and do what actually works best for you, a real person."

I admire that, and wish I could say the same. Unfortunately, filemaker is not friendly for that. Oh well.

Garp garp garp.

Oh the things we realize

I went to weather.com and inspected the hurricane report just now.

I realized something... while I lived in Oregon, I had managed to completely fail to realize that hurricanes happen every year. I don't even remember hearing about Andrew or Hugo or any of that outside of the general "a hurricane came through." Living on the appropriate side of the country changes your perspective, I suppose.

It's not like we didn't have powerful weather; many a winter did we spend ducking away from powerful arctic cyclonic systems that would bring 70 mile an hour gusts along with several inches of rain. I suppose we thought less of those, though, because they were so spread out and banded that it never really registered as one storm if you were a casual observer. Knowing what I do about how weather works now, though, I guess we were fortunate that storms like that couldn't strengthen themselves.

Now, with Ophelia bearing up on the coast, I continue wondering if it'll manage to have any effect on our weather here. This brings about that realization from earlier: every summer, the weather channel gets several dozen visits from me just to check up on hurricanes.

Funny how things work.

There Are No Left Hands

I've taken a couple courses in this room, MMH 1304. Only today did I realize something important about it: there are no left handed desks.

Aside from that being kind of unsettling, as even crap lecture halls in the engineering building where human existence was never a planned-for consideration, have left handed tablets. In this room, however, left handed people are apparently forced to ask those seated a space over to their left if it's a problem if they use the desk between them to write on.

Repulsive.

I have a few thoughts about why there are no lefty tablets, though.

A) The designers of this building were considering the nature of applied psychology at the time, and wanted to make it possible for instructors to force everyone to have the same preferences prior to starting instruction.

B) Gnomes came in the middle of the night and switched the left handed desks to right handed desks. Gnomes are crazy good at welding.

C) This building is a twisting maze of accident to begin with. Each floor spans a set of stairs, the x4xx wing occupies at least 40 percent of the building, and I'm pretty sure there is no x2xx wing. The building was constructed as a shell, then filled with rooms. This resulted, I therefore propose, in a powerful gravity well that pulled all other out-of-the-ordinary objects in this building. Space-time can't handle so much backward in one place, so nature had to sort itself out.

Contemplation

So by now, everyone on the internet probably knows about Apple's iPod nano and Motorola's ROKR phones. I actually feel good about myself, though, for not being a total Apple Fanboy anymore in spite of the fact that I've owned four macs and an iPod mini over the course of my life.

I don't think the nano is a very good product as a replacement for the iPod Mini. The price point for it, $199 for 2GB and $249 for 4GB is not reasonable as compared to the Mini's 4GB and 6GB, respectively. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure the nano is a fantastic product otherwise, with its support of photos and whatnot, but for a product with two gigs less space and (was it?) four fewer hours of battery life, it seems like the only thing you're paying for is minaturization. That doesn't seem fair to me. But whatever, if it does the job for you, it does the job for you. I can say I'm glad I bought the mini, as my only reason for owning it is to put music on it. I have an iBook for pictures.

And shut up about video.

The other product, the ROKR phone, is so underwhelming I don't care about it. $250 from one carrier with 2 year contract is crap for anything anyway, but more importantly, the interface is not at all up to Apple's specs, and apparently the phone's form factor is that of a brick. As the type of consumer I am, that is more or less completely useless to me.

How's the August 2005 iBook working out for me, you might be wondering? It's nice, I like the improvements over the March 2004 version I had last year. The GPU is sturdy enough to do core image, which means I see the ripply whatsit floating over the screen when I open widgets in dashboard (rare!). More importantly, battery life is similar thus far, wireless coverage seems better, and while I don't yet care about bluetooth, I'm glad it's there.

And I won't have to sell this one in 8 or 9 months! Wink!

Oh Google, you so funny!

Someone managed to get to my index page last night by searching for the following string on Google Images:

map vortex i am

I've since been trying to figure out (on and off, anyway) why anyone would search for that string. Everyone else that got here searched either for 'the content vortex' or my name.

map vortex i am?

Reflection

I'm pretty sure that it's a good thing I was too worn down to think today, because had I been able to do that, the only thought in my head from the time I started my shift at work up until now probably would have been

"I want to go home and watch dragonball z"

and that's ... so uncharacteristic.

Hell on Earth Day

Do you ever get that feeling that the feeling you got the day before was one you should have paid closer attention to?

Yesterday, I got out of the car and started walking toward the mall when I said to jeff "Why do I have the feeling that today will make me feel like continuing to get out of bed every day is a fruitless enterprise?"

Today, I braved nobody hearing what I was saying, someone pinning a last minute request by someone who was rantinating about jesus christ only knows what that wasn't getting paid for by the college, then finding out that our calendar system has more or less crashed, then finding out that apparently we no longer do late class starts but nobody told me, then and then and then and then and I want to go home.

I seriously shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning.

I'm a part of the crowd

Well, kind of, anyway.

I'm kicking off the new academic year with an iPod mini. It's silver and the 4 gigabyte flavor, nothing too special. I decided to go ahead and reencode my music into AAC instead of MP3 to save a lot of space. Example: Dream Theater went from 960 megabytes to 630. If I did that for my entire library, it would shrink from 10.1 gigabytes to 7.4 or so. Amazing.

One thing I will mention (and the reason for the "sort of" part of the crowd sentiment) is that I will not be caught dead with white earphones. A) I don't want to be "that guy" that I hate... shows up too early makes a lot of noise, etc. B) I live in and jaunt about the Washington, D.C. metro area. I really don't need to become a mugging statistic, and using "generic" headphones makes it possible for me to tell myself I'm okay. But it works out really well in the end, because iPod earphones don't fit me comfortably and they sound like terrible. Yes, sound like terrible. I got a set of sony in ear dillies, they sound pretty good and come with a cord organizer.

OCD says what?

Class starts tomorrow. I... class starts tomorrow. Guess that's it.

Thus Ends the List

Yeah that's about that, unfortunately.

I hope you all enjoy my little trip down memory lane, each recalling your own individual parts in it.

Do you remember a part of my life that you think I should remember, too???? PLEASE LET ME KNOW IN COMMENTS OMG OMG hey wow 3:45 am WINK!

wow did I ever have ADD

July 28, 2003--
Okay seriously. It's like I turn 21, your guys's's'sss' (stupid plurals) lives are complete and all done with? I'm moving out tomorrow. I guess I'll be offline for a while. KITTY DOGGY, YOU'RE SO KITTY YOU'RE SO DOGGY I LOVE YOU! I want everyone to know that dismantling a BMW's dashboard is very taxing.

on productivity

May 13, 2003--
I've been staring at the blinking insertion cursor for at least 10 minutes. In this time I've reached the following conclusions:

I have eaten no fried food since friday.

Beautiful, isn't it? I'm a veritable world of productive thought today.

more thoughts on berkley

April 30, 2003--
I have to pay the power in the next few days. This angers me. I will never see a cent of money for it. I know it. My angry note on the freezer just seems to have made the troll happier. I won't back down from the cusp though, for I recognize that my position is true and just. And god dammit that bastard ate my ice cream. I think I just saw lightning.

berkley musings

April 24, 2003--
I may pull an all nighter tonight.

I got to thinking about it, I really don't want to go home tonight. It offers no advantages. But that is, of itself, of no consequence.

I live in Berkley, in case you were not aware, which is located approximately in the Ghetto. Some highlights in my history with the building?


Elevators breaking at least once a month
Blood all over floors following a bottle fight in said elevators
Hate crime narrowly averted by virtue solely of my friends race
Beer on floors/walls/celings (don't ask)
Broken locks repeatedly
Management failing to inform us of when entrances would be closed for cleaning

It's quite the experience, if you're into unnecessary tension. I'll be very glad to be done living there. Seven Springs seemed nice enough, but it was quite a bit more expensive, if I recall correctly, and given that I am a poor bastard, it was flat out. Oh well. Now I live in wam lab PG2. And I'm going to plato's in a while, because to hell with home. I may sleep in my car or something, but no way am I going home tonight. so I tell myself, I'll probably crack under pressure.

I tried to do some homework tonight, with Excel (the filthiest program this side of Matlab) because I needed to compute lots of stuff. Well lo and behold, filthy filthy Excel can't calculate sin(90*180/pi()) correctly. It should be 1, but excel gives me -0.954, which is almost no further than can be strayed from the truth. Nothing about it is negative, plus since sin(90) should be 1, it's filth-ridden-ly stupid. (the 180/pi is for radian-to-degree conversion) I love it when I sit down to actually try to do work and God looks down from upon high and laughs, because let's face it, me working is by far and away the most ludicrous thing ever.

Thank you and good night.

apparently some snow fell?

February 7, 2003--
SNOW DAY!
Yeah, you heard me. Time to go try to build things.

February 8, 2003--
SNOW DAY UPDATE:
Some pretty weak snow. No pandas were constructed.

February 20, 2003--
UPDATE ON THE SNOW DAY UPDATE
I apparently forgot that it had in fact snowed and that snow can be used for construction. I will keep you posted via photographic reconnaisance as to what devious schemes I can come up with. Now I must embark upon operation "I had to come into work because Destler decided rt 1 was wide enough to not have people die left and right and I really don't want to be here, especially since I woke up at 10:07 and had to take a shower and leave, and now -- and imagine this -- I am hungry because I didn't have breakfast so it's time for a trip to the dining hall."

February 28, 2003--
NOT YET SNOW DAY UPDATE
So I got home, and what, to my surprise, do I find in the living room? How about everything still on? Wow. Good thing nobody's paying me for electricity anymore.

Ah, gaming

January 24, 2003--
I played NCAA 2003 earlier. Maryland on Alcorn State. I played as us, and won 63-6. I don't know how they scored on me, but I ended the first half with a posession and 2 seconds on the clock. A hail mary call and the a then x buttons later, I had a touchdown with 0 time left on the scoreboard. I was proud. Too proud.

Good thing I'm getting the gamecube thing out of my system before the term starts.

More holiday wishes

no groundhogs... ha ha! I'm a funny guy!

November 28, 2002--
So I promise no groundhogs in this post...

I want to say first "Happy thanksgiving" and I hope your holiday goes over well.

[stupid]

I have taken a mountain dew from the refridgerator and I must say that knowing it wasn't mine only puts a small dent in the number of glasses of mine that spent the last two weeks in the sink.

Thank you and good night.

Apparently it was a good week

I figured out a while later where I lost the card (CDepot), and the tire I was able to fix by getting Jeff to drag me to target so I could buy a fixaflat. That screw was still in the tread the day I rid myself of the mazda in Late July of 2004.

November 6, 2002--
So it's been a great week. Monday I come to find that at some point over the weekend, I lost my check card. I have no idea where it could have gone since I hadn't used it since Friday night. So that's all out of there. I get home from lunch/dinner, and -- lo and behold -- I have a flat tire. Spectacular. I try to put the donut on, and the rim won't come off the lugs. I go to call AAA today and -- WOW, Imagine this! -- my AAA card is in crofton. So I stopped caring.

Holiday Greetings

October 31, 2002--
Hope your halloween isn't filled with LaPlace transforms and Repeated roots: reduction of order.

Wow this is a good one:

October 19, 2002--
Problem:
I am awake and it is 4:23 am.

According to all this...

... I used to be real big on the code red mountain dew.

October 17, 2002--
I just got thrown out of the building. We all stood around in the office like "Should we care?" and then everybody else evacuated so we figured we would too. These two girls across the hall-- i don't think they left. I can't blame them; they had the student lounge, and the door was closed to keep noise out. They came out and asked if it was the fire alarm, I said "I guess so, I mean, there's clearly no fire, but what can I say?" I went to skinner and got a code red. I was all "Screw this, I'm gettin a drink."
I think I'm gonna do something stupid and go to the football game tonight. I probably won't stay for the whole thing, or even the whole first half. But I have to at least show up to all of them.
Back to my code-red mt. dew.

dug up from a different archive

August 21, 2002--
It's a great day out today. I'm stuck inside, but at least I'm next to a window breathing construction dust.
Everyone else has left for the day. Will I get to go home early? I hope so, I really need to get cracking on this business of packing. My grandmother tried to offer me guidelines for moving in; that was interesting to listen through. I just ran out of things to say, so here comes a token expository on cats.

Cats saw extensive use in ancient Egypt, where they were often employed as pets of royalty. More often than not, those lucky cats that were royal pets were treated with the same level -- if not a higher level -- of respect as the people for whom they were there. Yes that sentence ending IS gramatically correct.

From about 2000 BC to the middle ages, cats hid in trash bins in low income areas of cities. Eventually, during the plague, many found employment with psychotic old women who beat them against various objects such as the ground. When the talks between the feline union and old lady management broke down and turned hostile, the cats walked out and found a new activity to take part in: Heathen and Witch Assistantship Skill Refinement. Witches used the cats to let everyday average christians know that they were being crossed with bad luck. This worked out well; the cats were able to get out and excercise, and the people treated the cats with respect and admiration (even if from a distance).

One striking example of cats comes from Edgar Allen Poe's epic story about the black cat who got stuck in a wall.

Today, cats are once again associated with crazy old ladies, although the old lady management organization has since agreed to cease the senseless beatings and instead provide cats with large empty houses to use as they see fit. Cats are also frequently traded as stock through pet stores (djia: CAT +13.47 news).

Remember, have your pet spayed or neutered.

grampalflackal

adifalenra aldjsfln adklsf lakweorh aljfjaf a'djsf n asdlv oieqwr alsjndf aldjnf piqupierh al;sdfn odifh [opqiwf a;ldjsf iadhwf

As if the internet needed any more about this...

I hope my grandparents end up all right, they seem far enough away to avoid the major damage, but I am already deeply saddened by this:

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE
MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA

DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WATCH IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR
HURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE...ARE
POSSIBLE WITHIN THE NEXT 24 TO 36 HOURS.

I have never read anything quite that shocking before.

Best of luck, New Orleans.

Thanks, Babelfish!

I wanted to google for the men at work sign, the one that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. This.

I got this Portugese-language blog entry.

I translated it.

It's strangely compelling.

We promise that it goes to be brief, we are in ways to initiate the new year, with a foot in the future... We will always start for design.... and in front!

Greetings, true believers

Okay, so since my bill at the camera store was 300 dollars (WINK!), I opted to skip on the digital media from the store. Unfortunately, this means i have to scan the negatives by hand. While this is working out well (a couple of my macro shots ended up a lot better on film than on paper!), I had to deal with a trainwreck of events at the EMC today, and I also had to screw around with getting documentation screenshots taken. Anyway, later today or tonight I will at least have the images online and available. I'll be working on the gallery layouts once I get home; hopefully those are done tonight, though.

Photography goed teh wow

Hey...

Since a friend brought it up, I might as well tell you to keep your eyes peeled for four (!) rolls of pictures involving the zoo, fireworks, and some birds I found in the corner of campus.

Is there anything else to live for?

Anyway, they should be coming along rather quickly; I intend to have Ritz (shudder) do three of them and make me CDs at the same time. I'm taking my Kodak Professional 100 film to Techlab, though, because I don't trust ritz to not screw up the prints on those ones.

That and they'll probably scratch my negatives.

I watched a movie

I have to say that the first six minutes of Highlander are, by far and away, the worst movie I've ever seen.

Yes, they stand up as being that bad on their own.

Since I can't shut up about it

This is the camera I want. Yeah, different model name, but you get what you get. Also, I changed the picture at the top there. Granted, the jellyfish came from my MX, but I want to reiterate just how good I am with a camera... I took that with ISO 400 film inside of an aquarium's dark jellyfish area. That means shutter speed of (probably) less than 1/30th of a second, although I don't really remember. I'm only telling you this because I AM FANTASTIC AT WHAT I DO.

Additionally, or something, I'll be taking it easy at work the next couple weeks. This means, to you, that I'll probably clean a real scanner and actually take the time to assemble a web photo gallery. I doubt you need me to tell you this, but I am quite proud of what I do and I'd really like to have a good way to share it with the world at large. Since I can't bring myself to php the tar out of my site, I'm going to do the next best thing: provide you with actual content. This means, more than likely, that I will no longer be hosting audio files here. I just don't have enough space.

Sigh... I just realized some of my best landscape negatives are scratched. They came out of the machine like that. Someone once asked me what I would be most upset over someone taking or ruining, and the reply I came up with eventually was my negatives. The prints don't mean anything, right? Well, they do if the store scratches your backup. ::crying::

ha, you read all that. I just blithered all over the internet, I'm being what I can't stand. Good for you.

HI!

Sorry, I've been busy as of late with life. So much so I can't write about it.

I've actually been out doing things, sort of... mostly work, as I've been trying to get about 35 hours a week in at the office. I'm already a good portion of the way done with my database. The checkout system is done (I hope -- I tried to rearrange one of the databases into the main checkout file and it crapped all over itself; my hope is that I fixed all of it today), so all I need to do is figure out how to generate meaningful usage reports. hah... Hours of fun will come of that, I'm sure.

Photography... is on hold for the moment. Due to my moronic spending habits over the last three months, I don't really have the liquidity to take part in my hobbies. I have a bunch of very good pictures on the rolls I have exposed, though, and I am eager to share them with you as soon as I get them developed. My current wish list for my birthday is (along with a new video card) a Pentax ZX-L camera body. It has a working KAF mount (made of metal, no less), which the current ZX-60 camera does not. Basically, if I buy a new pentax camera that isn't the ZX-M, my three K-series lenses (think 1970s) would become useless for action work. With the ZX-L, I get to use all of my lenses, and a neat trick I didn't previously know about is the snap focus, which involves attaching a manual focus lens and having the camera take the picture when an object comes into focus (birds in flight, anyone?). Very neat. I'd go with the ZX-M... it works with my K lenses and my FA compatible Tamron lenses, plus it has Tv and Av program modes, which is the real reason I want a camera body in the first place... but the lens mount is polycarbonate. This means that, as ADD as I am, those 200 dollars I'd spend on the camera would need to happen again in a couple years anyway. Although, that said, it's not like I plan on dumping the MX. I love this camera, and it is absolutely fantastic for still life and scenery, but my habit of taking pictures of all kinds of wildlife would benefit greatly from a 1/2000 second shutter speed and ProgramAE modes. 1/4000 is icing on the cake, as are the different things like bracketing and multi-exposure. Autofocus for my tele/zoom lens would be nice, too.

Uhh... music. Put me in your band.

School. I made the dean's list last term. Bask in my glory.

I guess that's about it.

So I can't do work

I came in to do database stuff and ACS rebooted about the time I sat down to work. Still not up, as I learned by trying to log in. Amusingly enough, however, the window that informed me of this was one of the funniest I've seen in a while. Large and unspecified. Heh, you silly Windows.

Hi lady

I came back, it took me 14 hours 40 minutes. I didn't get out of the car from the VA/NC border until Columbia. My legs didn't work right, and I really wish I had someone here to sit on my lower back, but you take what you get, which is a shot of whiskey in the hopes of getting some sleep so you can go to the beach tomorrow.

A proper update (with photographs... hah) will be coming up in the next week or less.

I almost forgot

I'm going to Florida today. I'll be back briefly next Monday evening, then I'll be max super plus grade back Tuesday (did I just say that?).

Uh... leave me a message, I guess. Or you know how to get me on the horn.

I'm done with finals

Yeah... uhh, done with finals. Spring 2005 ended with me having a B- in some class, an A- in corrections, a B in family studies, and a god knows what in Race and Crime. My grade in that class is still out, pending an investigation of the 2.5 pages of completely made up "I think race is necessary if only to curb racism" [edit from 2019: I am sure I no longer line up with where I thought about that in 2005, as I've been alive and paying attention to how the world works for the last decade-plus].  Anyway, I may make a 3.5 this term. That would be supernice. As it is now, I'm happy expecting my 3.3.

So what have I been up to? All last week, I spent most of my time sleeping or being awake at 6. Needless to say, this led to me being utterly unproductive. Since finals ended, I have taught myself many things. The last couple of weeks have been good for the ol' interpersonals. That's an as-it-happens though. Uhh... work is good, I'm waiting to propose that I work full time until it's time to work.

I leave for Florida on Tuesday. I think. I may wait until wednesday, but who knows at this point. I'm taking my bass and amplifier; I want to maybe have my brother experience what life is like on a pro-grade rig and a mid-level bass. This also makes for a convenient excuse to show you what I did today.


I fashioned a custom bracket to mount my SansAmp bass driver to my amp and cabinets.

Why? Well, many a year ago, my dad presented me a SansAmp Bass Driver DI for christmas. I loved it because, at the time, I had a super-el-cheapo bass that it magically forced into sounding good. Eventually, I bought a better bass, and used it to make my little cheap amplifier sound good. Then I had to sell my bass in November of last year because I had to go to California. In February of this year, I bought my Warwick, and that's been nice, but in March, I had to sell my practice amp and bass processor (because I had to go to California), leaving me with only my stack.* My SansAmp had been, up until today, sitting on the floor where I had been using it with my practice amp. I got sick of this and decided to do something about it. A trip to Home Depot and a couple of bucks later, what you see above is what we have now. It's nice because it can create some natural sounding distortion without worrying me about tube life. More importantly, though, is that it's at an easily adjustable level, which allows me to turn on and off the "sweet spot" more easily and effectively than trying to build a pedalboard to control my amp's equalizer sections. So yeah, that's that. I'll probably update you with how my trip down to Tallahassee goes. I'm planning on showing my brother I already wrote about this.

sigh.

At least I get to go to the beach when I get back.

* - The rack is as follows:
ETA Lighting systems PD9
Shure LX Wireless Receiver
Korg ToneWorks DTR-2 Tuner (somewhat comparable)
--blank--
Ampeg SVT3 Pro

all of that in some plastic 6-rackspace ... rack

Then that sits on top of two Bag End S15X-D speaker cabinets (one of which has casters attached to the bottom).
Yeah... Music. Basically, 450 watts of wireless bass goodness that I never use because I'm not in a band. I'm good enough, dammit... you've heard me play if you've read this long enough. I taught myself "Too Many Puppies" today, for crying out loud.

Never mind.

Hey, look at that

I redid the header. It's all fancy now, what with the picture and some margins and a box. You like it, I know you do.

You're jealous?

No? Oh, okay, I can only ask so much, after all.

So yeah, concert was good. Gin Blossoms put on a pretty good show, although the one guitar guy kept staring vapidly at the closed concession stands behind the endzone. Their singer crowdsurfed and sang into cell phones. Good times.

Chevelle was allright, although the sound person was something of a moron and mixed everything too hot, so all you heard was raspy distortion. Additionally, one of the drummer's toms was on too loud. The bass player didn't sing half as much harmony as he does on the recordings I've heard, and the guitar player did almost nothing but yell. Good high energy at first, but the "power ballads" toward the end just made everything seem to drag on.

Nancy and I left after three songs. She managed to get me to say they were boring; I guess that's true. I maintain they weren't that bad, but certainly as a follower to chevelle and as closer to a late show, it wasn't high energy enough to keep me interested. That and Guster fans anger me. Not quite as much as chevelle 'fans,' though.

Anyway, we shivered about the mall for a while before heading our separate ways, then the rest of the weekend, I was trying to recover from yelling and being pneumonic (is that a word) all day Friday. I consider it worthwhile, though.

In Other News
I installed Tiger Friday. Runs fine, a bit faster graphically speaking than Panther was. I've made an automator workflow already, it moves files and opens them for me. Dashboard is neat, but it takes up too much memory to justify using right at the moment. When I get around to buying a new system later this year, I'll probably put a gigabyte of RAM in it, and then I can really start dinking around with things.

This leads me into my stylistic change. I like it. The real purpose of this particular update was to move images off the main screen so I could tell if it looks good. Hopefully this is the case, as I don't feel like changing it, nor do I feel like reverting it.

I'm so lazy.

I'm still not dead

Title says it all, I'm just out of energy this weekend. Concert to tell you about, that was hot (in spite of the fact that it was quite the opposite in temperature). uhh... yeah. pictures coming monday, too. Now, here's what the taco has to say [edit from 2019: I believe there was a drawing of a talking taco I had here that I don't remember anything about except for the context of the post]:

I have a paper to write

I don't know what I want to do with this space... but I do know that there are a lot of things I want to write down. It's a paradox that's been with me since about October, during my miniature bout with depression. I want to write, but I don't know what I want to write because I don't know who my audience is. I can't write for nobody, just as I can't talk to myself about anything important. I think that's why the content here has been so hollow and distant, if not outright stupid: I'm talking to either myself or nobody. It's rare that I get that email from anonymous, so I ask myself "why the hell am I still trying?" as I type up a 1200 word rant about crap nobody outside slashdot cares about.

It pains me to say it, but I agree with Jeff: I miss Terrapins Gone Wild. As much as I hated most of the people there, it was something to do. I knew who was there, I knew who cared to click on my topics. Nothing else I've tried since then has had any degree of success in replacing that environment. People on fark are either idiotic or oblivious, and nothing on there is anything I care about anyway. On slashdot, you're ignored if you don't post in the first thread, or on the first page even. I've had, to six posts or so, one response, and one moderator point spent on me. Again, like here, it's just not worth opening up.

Next weekend, I am going to go see my grandmother. I'd like to talk about that, but I already did so where I think more people will appreciate it, so that's out. I've been avoiding talking about how happy I've been in the last five weeks, but I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Yeah, I was miserable while I was out in California, but I guess it's awfully hard to be happy when you're in the midst of a weekend-long breakup of ... well, I'll call it a relationship that lasted two months shy of two years, and you're dealing with that and the sacrifice of having gone out there, and the depressing reality of what's going on around you that you're only observer to. Worst of all, I still cared, and care now, although that's hard for me to admit. I tried to be happy... but I couldn't manage it all that well at the time. I've come to realize now, though, that I probably should have let go earlier. It was selfish of me to expect all that to work, so if she has someone more accessible, then everyone's happier in the end. Call it a load off my shoulders, I suppose. I'd like to brag about how good I am at music. Unfortunately, I don't have any structured environment to tell people to come watch me in. Why? I'm too busy. I don't feel like recording myself all that often, either, for the simple reasons that A) I know it's not going to get me work, and B) only two people download the files in the first place, and one of them doesn't remember anything about them after the fact. I have too much crap to do for school. I'd like to whine about that, but I'm absolutely certain that if 'you' did read this, you wouldn't give a shit about that, either. I'd love to pimp myself for finally being in a position of power at my job after five years of dedicated service, but there's little more to say than what I've said already. I've worked for the university for so long, I should be receiving a service commendation in October.

This summer, I don't know if I have work. That scares me, because I have work I need to get done for the EMC (database redesign), and they're paying me enough to actually make me want to do that, but they haven't cleared any funding for our office. If that doesn't work out, I'm not going to be able to live through the summer. I have already sold my laptop, and I'm not getting rid of my bass again. I like this one far more than the last. I can't sell any of my amp equipment, because I sold my practice amp in March to live through April. I don't have many more CDs that CDepot will take. Worst yet, I don't have much in the way to offer other employers, simply because I don't have the ability to continue working beyond the summer. It's like, I need a job, but I won't be able to get one and have no other way to support myself. Frightening times. Well, only one more semester of this nonsense, then I'll have to find a temporary job to live out the lease on the apartment and go find a job in a juvenile justice department somewhere. Probably Florida, although I have to look at Utah, too.

I can't leave behind family, I've seen what that does.

Now less nerdy!

So I got to campus a bit later than normal today. The State Highway Administration was doing something on 212 at this rickety old bridge that made it so we got to go by one lane at a time. I made it to my classroom at 10:55, still before class. As it turned out, I guess everyone showed up for class today, including this assbag who tends to sit next to me (and I mean next to) and drum on the table while sitting as far askew in his chair as possible. It's a complete intrusion of space, basically, and I hate him enough for that. Well today, he sat in my space. I always sit in the same place in that class... fourth row from the front, first seat right of the centerline. Everyone knows this; on many occasions, Dr. Gaston has called me The Cable Guy (not to be confused with The Cat's Meow) and I've had to force my way out behind all the shitheads that sit as far back in the aisle as possible. It's like they're trying to disrupt the learning process. Anyway, he sat in my space and I was angry because the seat next to him was being made useless by his aforementioned sideways posture (you know, ass on one edge of the seat, back on the other). Fine, okay, I'll sit up there. One row back, other side of centerline. Except nobody in that row wants to let me in. Idiots. Dr. Gaston shows up, and of course the projector's stuck on some setting that doesn't exist. I have to get up and go down there, again dealing with everyone's sloth. Get back up to the top, and he starts teaching.

Assface in my seat isn't even paying attention.

He showed up, as far as I can tell, to listen to music on his filthy iPod, sit so far askew as to be pissed off at the person that actually had to sit next to him, and review notes from some class dealing with types of evidence.

Go home, stupid. Go waste your money somewhere else. I want to come to class to learn, especially when the instructor is as weathered and knowledgable (and entertaining, even) as Dr. Gaston. It's not every day you'll have a chance to take a course from the man who ran Rikers Island. Types of evidence... sigh. Bet you'll fail that class, too.

I hate college students so much. At least the view to the left was much less wholly angering.

On Freedom and Free Software

For those of you who don't care about the nerd laden aspect of my life, please stop reading now, or don't. I warned you.

Linky Link link link.

I like what RMS has done for the world at large. I draw a great deal of hobby from the challenge of getting things to run on my mac that a lot of other people wouldn't think to run. Well, not a lot, necessarily, but I like doing things by hand instead of by fink, especially since fink forces me to rely on people to do package updating for me, which I believe to be a time consuming enterprise, which is why the packages aren't updated very quickly (as a brief example, gaim-stable nonssl is sitting at version 1.1.4; I run gaim 1.2.1). Were it not for the open source nature of packages like GTK and its dependencies, all the way down to the software that comes from the GNU project, I wouldn't be able to do that. Yes, it takes a lot of time and involves some degree of physical pain, but the rewards are great: I have software that only I can accept blame for not working right, and I gain that much greater an understanding of how all this nonsense under my pretty graphics works.

As such, I can't argue with the idea that free software is liberating: it gives me the ability to use my computer the way I want to. I guess that's the dream behind the free software movement, or at least it seems to be from what I've read.

I'm sure my position's been taken a thousand times before, as it doesn't seem that hard to accept as plausible. I believe free software and proprietary software can peacefully and successfully coexist. My setup works that way for me every time I sit down, and that's before I start accounting for /usr/local. As you are probably aware, Mac OS X is a pretty apple interface perched aboard an apple services saddle, all of which rides a GNU/BSD horse, replete with standard tools and GCC. I may not have total access to the inner workings of the things I see, but that doesn't affect my ability to use the computer how I want. I can edit text files using textedit, I can edit text files on the command line using emacs, vi, or pico. I can compile other applications, like nedit. I can download other free and open source programs in many places online. I can buy things like Microsoft Office, or I can download and install from binary or source packages OpenOffice or NeoOffice.

What I really don't understand is why Linux developers using BitKeeper was such a horrible stumbling block to the freedom of the community. Stallman repeatedly states (along with about everyone else speaking out against the apparent travesty use of proprietary CODE MANAGEMENT software would seem to be) that using a proprietary tool, even if free as in beer, is a mortal sin and we should learn that proprietary software is harmful to the community. The only harm I see as having come from use of BitKeeper in kernel code management is Andrew Tridgell (go do a search on Slashdot if you want details, but he pretty much agreed with Stallman and, against the author of BK's will, reverse engineered its protocol [which is far more unethical than using proprietary CODE MANAGEMENT software]) engaging in actively pissing off someone upon whom the Linux community, for better or worse, depended upon.

Why do I emphasize code management? Simple: the words I type in pico are the words I type in Microsoft Word are the words I type in Text Edit are the words I could write by hand using a pen and paper. The important realization in this statement is that the tool I use to direct my creativity has no bearing on my creativity. Apply that mold to the Linux kernel. The source code, which is the important thing here, and is open no matter what, could be managed using BitKeeper, subversion, CVS, or God knows what else I don't know exists. The upshot is that, as long as the code is and remains free, the tool used to keep track of it matters not one bit. If the software allows the developers to use their computers the way they want, then our freedom hasn't been abridged. In fact, what good is Tridgell's open source replacement for BitKeeper if its featureset is dictated by the need to interoperate with a proprietary tool? You can't very well force BK's developers to add features you'd like.

The proper solution to this problem is twofold. First, staunch F/OSS supporters need to come to terms with the reality of proprietary software. Some people wish to receive compensation for their knowledge and efforts. This is perfectly reasonable, given the nature of the society we're forced to live in. Change is gradual, yes, and it won't occur without impetus; however, open source software is, at this time, not strong enough to be that. I agree that freedom in computing is important and that should be an eventual goal among the worldwide community of developers. This is not, however, even a remote possibility today or any time in the near future. The userscape simply isn't well-formed enough to support such an environment. Interoperation is a key element to success; as long as windows exists, for example, free and open source software will have to exist alongside it, for better or for worse. That requirement isn't hindering GNU/Linux or any other open source project. Linux does many things better than Windows for many people, just the same as Windows does many things better than Linux for many people. "Use the right tool for the right job" is a mantra that could really stand to be accepted more widely than it is.

More importantly, though, and certainly instrumental in my desire to share these thoughts with you, is the idea that simply copying the featureset of a proprietary product in an open source implementation doesn't free anyone from anything. The real way out of that bind is to conceptualize, develop, and deploy a set of software that does the job better than the proprietary software package you don't want to use. If the feature set is important and compelling enough to you to warrant effectively breaking the license you agreed to by downloading it, why not duplicate it on your own time, improve it, and pitch it to Linus and the other developers on its own merits? Simply stealing the work of others, proprietary or not, is wrong no matter what. Again, as long as the code remains free, the tools used in turning that code into software remain free, and the final result remains free, it doesn't matter what tools you use to simply keep track of that code. If the way you want to use your computer doesn't fall within the license agreement of proprietary software, don't use that software. If you're gifted enough, come up with your own solution. Most of the people that have problems with proprietary software are talented enough, so even if you weren't, propose it to a newsgroup and agree to lead the project. Just don't reverse engineer things against the license agreement and ruin the way that dozens of other people want to use their computers.

Personal freedom doesn't mean you get to abridge the freedom of others.

Status Report

So... I made a few changes "under the hood."

I've become sick of looking at source code, so I haven't made any progress on my other project. My hopes for the future are as follows:

Move the bulk of my website to my home machine. This really has one and only one advantage: I get to use PHP/sqlite to run the site, allowing me to cut way back on the amount of maintaining necessary to bring you a "quality" web experience. What will this mean to you? Well, it's my intention at this point to keep all text and small images on my home machine. Reducing my dependence on wam will be a good stepping stone to doing what I want with the internet, instead of the internet doing what it wants with my content.

Continue serving media on my tech fee's shoulders. WAM gives me 100 megabytes, and that's it. Between the textual portion of the site, my picture thumbnails, the myriad MP3 files I've uploaded, and all of the preferences that every damn computer on campus insists upon storing on my server space ensure that space only goes so far. Moving half of that away will make ... well, something.

Have a full and working GTK+ 2.6 X11 environment working. Since I have to sell my iBook, I need to have a way for me to get work done while I'm here or there. The easiest and most painless (in eventuality; my knees and hindquarter are practically screaming at me for having waited through Firefox building in X11 mode) way for me to do this is to enable a web browser, IM client, and editing software usable either via VNC or SSH tunneling. I'd prefer VNC, but I'm not keeping my hopes up for the realVNC supplied x tree patch doing its thing correctly, much less the software working well with x.org's 6.8 release. Anyway, to be able to serve applications remotely to myself is my eventual goal here. I am, I believe, about 80 percent of the way done with this. Firefox is almost done, gaim is almost ready to go (waiting on Firefox's nss libraries, as I understand it) and I have dynamic DNS updating installed. Anyone willing to donate a small USB flash drive? Bogarthlet (the cruzer micro my dad gave me for Christmas) was laid to rest by an airport xray machine, and apparently you're not supposed to put things that shouldn't be shorted out by those sorts of things through security, anyway. I need a replacement to keep an ssh client, an sftp client, preferably an scp client, and a VNC viewer or X11 client. Not likely any time soon, I realize.

Continue being happy. I am now the student coordinator for the College of Arts & Humanities Academic Computing Services/Classroom Support Services Equipment Loan Program. This means, among other things, I finally am working a meaningful position that requires me to do database redesign. Oh boy. The promotion, though, means apparently I get to "live" though, and hopefully when I have less to worry about as far as paying rent goes, I won't have to deal with needing to do stupid crap like wasting money and then having to sell my laptop.

Anyway, that's that. I'm going to try to work out my php scripts tomorrow and at least have the new address up and running half-time so you can become acquainted with it. I'm looking to either next weekend, two weeks from now, or three weeks from now as when I do my migration. I will be trying to include all blogger posts along with all of my old handcoded content. Ambitious, I know, but my hope is that I can just dump the two in somewhere and start anew with PHP and sqlite.

ugh, 4:17am. Later!

I'm in School!

[edit from 2019: rip pictures, you are gone and mostly forgotten but I find the alt text entertaining]

here is woops! click for larger versions!!1``13

I lost my head.


Power of tangent circles?


I can't even pay attention in the class I love.


This is a gomper, apparently.


I moved into a chinese take out box.


I thought you deserved a break from the inanity.


At some point earlier in the term, I thought a ferret in a tank would be a good idea.


... would you eat yourself?


Summon me a dead fish.


This fish is messed up.


I stacked some caps and then started drawing them.


Jeff did this to the EMC's whiteboard once. We got yelled at for the monkey business, so jeff later drew a monkey next to the words monkey business. Too bad I don't have that one, too.

The Downwardly Adjacent Renter is an Ass...

... or, how you too can be yelled at for beating on the floor to request a reduction in bass emissions.

See, the apartment I live in is kind of crappy. The walls are thin, the floors squeak, it generally lives like it's been built out of cardboard and chicken wire. That said, we try to keep things quiet in here. I walk gingerly throughout the apartment, I take care not to run my amplifier too loud after 5:00 (and even then nowhere near the 450 watts it's rated for), I don't listen to loud music at all hours of the night.

That obviously isn't why I'm writing.

Jeff walked into the apartment this evening and immediately started beating on the floor due to the obscenely loud subwoofer operation in the apartment below us. Good old 89, prior known for its knack for running music entirely too loud for entirely too long entirely too often. Usually on Sunday, usually starting around 11 or 12 and lasting until whenever in the evening they had apparently gone deaf and needed to sleep off their hearing loss.

Not surprisingly, this didn't stop them; it never does. I say "never" meaning "in the three or four times we've resorted to that, it hasn't worked." It was actually so bad last year, I had to go to the office to figure out what the procedure for noise complaints was. They told me, "We don't handle that, you're going to have to call the police." We eventually found a correct phone number for "hoco popo" non-emergency calls, although by that time, they had cut back on the bassfest.

Until this week.

Whenever that was that they did thumpthumpthump in the last seven days, they did it until 11:45 or so. At night. We were like, "this is some shit right here" and then it stopped. Think nothing more of it?

Then today. Jeff beat on the floor, and what happens? Nothing.

Then... Knock Knock.

The asshole actually has the nerve to come up here and become offensive with me simply because we've beaten on his ceiling a few times. I explained to him that "you run the bass loud enough for us to hear it and feel it through the couch, you've run the bass until 11 or 12 at night on several occasions, and we actually suspect that you were the impetus behind the people that live down there [note: staggered terracing means we have a half neighbor] moving out." He said "No, you say past midnight, except once that's a lie, it's lies." He said "Those people, they move out and [unintelligible, not? do?] complain to management, that's bullshit, you come down here and knock and I'll turn it down but I can't help it how this place is made, how you hear, you know you guys we can hear you walk and we don't complain."

I don't get it. I don't get how us walking is akin to you playing your arhythmic shit bass for hours on end. Walking is necessary for life, bass isn't. I live in a damn apartment, not above a concert hall, so keep it to a dull roar, alright? The only shame about the way I handled myself (aside from the fact that apparently I hold absolutely no "cred" with [expletive deleted] who live below me) is that I should have explained to him that the only way you get to complain around here is by calling the cops, and that's what the management says, so it's not something we're making up. Be glad we didn't do that."

Sigh... I hate living here. Nobody around here is at all aware of the people around them. It makes me sad and fills me with desire to go back to my small mountain town with stories of the intolerant ways of the city.

A great idea

(12:45:54) Chris: i try not to drink when at dinner, cause you get railed with cash
(12:46:19) nurrwick: railed with cash what?
(12:46:23) nurrwick: I drank at drinking
(12:46:26) Chris: like, taken from you
(12:46:30) Chris: oh, ok, nevermind
(12:46:35) Chris: i gotcha now
(12:46:45) nurrwick: "I drank at drinking" needs to be a t-shirt

I demand the head of the style attribute

Quick Note: this is a piece I've been mulling over for some time now, it's only now that I've gotten around to having enough desire to actually document it. Essentially, I apologize for any slight logical mistakes or terrible grammar, but I believe them to be on the account of the time, not having not thought the issue over. enjoy!

Since it's after 3 am on a school night and I have "nothing better to do" (read: "insomnia"), I decided to go ahead and indulge myself and peruse the archives over at daringfireball.net. I don't know anything about the site or its author, but I find myself "uh huh"ing in agreement when presented with his arguments. I don't think I've ever read anything so reasoned and clear on the internet.

I did notice, however, that he uses a lot of inline style changes, i.e. denoting things as code or italicizing things. This made me think: the style attribute of XHTML tags needs to be deprecated immediately.

I didn't have any particular desire to investigate daringfireball's code, but I do know that I see a lot of sites on the net that use formats like <span style="colodygoop: #333;"> to denote a section of code that needs to render as a different color from the rest. I operate on the level as something of a minimalist purist, in that I think things like tables and image files need to be removed completely from the HTML layout ideology, allowing for faster render times and vastly decreased bandwidth expenditures. You may have noticed that, over the course of my own site's existence, I have severely decreased my dependence on anything graphical, and I've actually avoided entirely use of nonstandard stylistic elements with the lone exception of the font tag.

When I started doing "web design," I used Claris HomePage (I think that's what it was called, anyway) because I didn't know any better, and, more important than that, it was free to me and easy to use, especially given my frail mental state immediately following the utter asskicking Pascal programming unleashed upon me in 10th grade. I had some frames, some images next to my content links, and then nothing else but text in a funny font. Then I got to college, and at some point during the 5 year odyssey that's ensued, a friend opened my eyes to the relative glory of XHTML and CSS, as well as the heap of good their pairing can unleash upon the world at large. I then went through my "codebase" and stripped all the font information, closed all my tags appropriately, and designed a stylesheet. Not long after that, I decided to do things properly and redesigned my site from the ground up. It was a good deal of effort initially, but it's really paid off since then, as it made dealing with updates a lot easier while I was still doing everything by hand, and made dealing with blogger-as-an-update-agent a lot easier to transition to while maintaining my individuality, which I have quite clearly put to good use [looks around, sees boring ass layout, runs away /].

So why remove the style attribute? Well, one of the things my friend and the reference material he pointed me toward collectively taught me about the web is that standards exist for a reason, and that reason is generally to make everyone's life easier. In the case of CSS, the motive is simple: maintain the original spirit of hypertext without subjecting everyone to horrible quantities of obfuscation in code while maintaining an interesting presentation media. Stated cleanly, CSS's goal is to "separate structure from presentation to maximize portability and accessibility" (thanks webstandards).

It is almost needless to say that total separation of presentation and markup is neigh impossible, at least in the confines of the English language. Our native devices of emphasis are differing presentation of text, that is to say that italic and bold text are necessary sometimes, as are larger and smaller typefaces. w3schools.com claims that the tags I just used to provide that example text can be set aside for richer presentation using stylesheet elements and, I can only assume, the span or pre tag. Technically speaking, this is correct and possibly even valid, but there comes a slight problem when you start adding stylistic information inline: you're no longer separating structure and style. In fact, you're actually clogging your otherwise clean markup with things that belong in a stylesheet. Example being, let's say I want a section of purple italicized text (for God only knows what reason), and I want to do so inline. I can do this two different ways:

Choice a: <span style="font: oblique 16px Tahoma, sans-serif; color: #808;">go text</span>
which renders like this:
go text

Choice b: in a stylesheet, define a specific-use id or even class for span or em, like this:
span.wackyemphasis {font: oblique 16px Tahoma, sans-serif; color: #808;} which, when paired with a <span class="wackyemphasis"> tagset, renders this:
go text

[edit from 2019: apparently I lost the battle or my stylesheet broke in the intervening years, because these no longer look the same and I don't know or care why anymore. I actually kind of can't believe I didn't turn caring this much about web standards into a profession somehow, and I also can't imagine summoning this much energy for something that doesn't matter anymore]

Those two things should look exactly the same to you (note: users of Safari or other .css caching browsers would need to clear their cache if they've visted my site recently), but I accomplished them in two very different ways. I am maintaining a clearer codebase by writing things in <em> tags than I am by writing <span style="font-style: oblique;">. It's better for everyone that way; the WAM server has to send you less, you have to download less, your computer has to chew on less before you see the page, and if you need to read the page by source somehow, it's a lot easier to read two letters than it is to read twenty, as it would also be much easier to universally strip out.

I can only speculate as to the reason for the continued use of the style attribute, but it seems to me a lot easier to put any inline style information in either an import style tag in that particular document's <head> section or to choose a style that you might actually want to reuse from time to time and add it to your site's primary .css file.

... if only I were in charge of the internet.

Risk!

I found an open source risk game cause I had a craving, so I played it. 12:26am to 1:53am.

I was responsible for all three of the computer players leaving the game. Yeah, I beat the computer, but you know what? I'm awesome so shut up and be envious. The Final Push, where I traded in three artillery cards and at that point got the bonuses for the Americas, Europe, and Africa, was 59 armies leaving from wherever it was in Russia. It came down to a battle in Western Australia, where we fought 44 v. 19. He took 14 from me, but at that point he only had two territories left, each with one army. I stopped after the second to last one, and attacked his last army with 61 of my own.

Yeah, I'm a big man.

This is kind of disgusting.

I found this in iTunes.

[edit from 2019: missing is an image of a table from iTunes showing a disproportionately large number of plays for a track]


I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused "Acid Rain" but it's such a good song. Oh and, for those of you who don't know, Liquid Tension Experiment is a side project featuring John Petrucci, Mike Portnoy, and Jordan Rudess (before he joined Dream Theater), as well as the legend Tony Levin.

Reconciliation

[edit from 2019: this is some really overwrought whining about getting dumped while on the other side of the country, followed by distraction by things I like. I removed a very nonsense story about trying to find donuts for coherence]

Perhaps that title is both a bit grandiose and somewhat misapplied, as after five or six days of contemplation, I still haven't come up with a good way to write about what happened this weekend. In fact, my journal program's been stagnating with that title waiting for me since the flight from Atlanta-Hartsfield to BWI. I guess emotions and feeling are enough to break an INTP after all. Blindly floating down a stream was more fun than knowing I had already gone over a waterfall, I guess, but I'm doing pretty well with myself. I only [edit from 2019: drank to excess] Monday night.

Well, rather than depress myself with discussion of how much of an ass I was this past weekend, what I'll do instead is describe what we did this evening. I made what is fast becoming my favorite thing to make, if only because it allows for more individuality than spaghetti: chili. Spicy chili, that is, the kind that, in tasting, makes the whole of your mouth burn on the outside. It's glorious, especially because I hand pull the chicken and then cook it in olive oil and chili powder. This time, I also added cayenne pepper and allspice for something different. Glory ensued, though, as my face started sweating in the first five bites.

That was done, and then nothing happened for a while. I played some difficult material on bass, as is becoming my wont, and so on. Then adult swim started. Then we stumbled upon the greatest idea ever.

Let's get donuts.

Yeah, now it's 4:00 am. I'm listening to music and puzzled about why I'm still awake, but there you go.

If only I had a digital camera...

[edit from 2019: there was some incoherent rambling about someone that drove a Rav4 walking on a sidewalk as flavor text for what I think was a missing drawing?]

I've been hanging out at the Starbucks in Seaside, CA for the last two days because I came on a Thursday to visit Katy. We had dinner last night, but she's got school and homework and all that stuff today, so that was pretty much that. It's been fun, though... yesterday I was here from 3 to about 5:15 and I got to witness four rushes... that was pretty entertaining, I guess. By the end of my first half hour there, I had moved into a chair quite literally in the corner well away from the action. As I had remarked to Jeff, it was more interesting for me to watch the Grackles outside being dumb little birds than it was to watch the ebb and flow of people who look better than I do. I wouldn't fit in here if it weren't for the mac.

Today, my table's been occupied by a naval aviator, or aviation candidate, I'm not sure. He's studying or something, and so that's cool I guess. The other tables are occupied by old people, so I'm back to the door and getting a blast of cold air every time a customer comes in.

This starbucks is staffed by actual friendly employees, which is a drastic change of pace from most Starbucks I've been to. Go west coast. Also, I was awake for 38 hours between wednesday and thursday. I just thought you should know that.

Um... well, that's my mamma.

Gone Fishing

It's been a week since I last wrote "to you," meaning that absolutely nothing has developed in my life, save for an amazing amount of skill or knowledge or whatever you might want to call what it is I develop on the bass guitar. Good news, I guess. Also, it's 4:30 am as I write this, which of course means I'm at BWI waiting for my flight to Atlanta where I will undoubtedly wait for six and a half eternities for my flight to San Jose.

As oft is my wont, I planned on complaining at great length about my trip through the TSA's desolate valley of hellish terrors, but I just don't have the energy to do it correctly right now. That said, I do want to explain that this time, not only was I required to optionally take my shoes off, I also had to place everything I own directly on the belt AND have my boarding pass out and in my hand so the flunky at the scanner could inspect it and make sure (for the second time in a set of downs) I was headed in the right direction. I won't be able to post this until I get to Atlanta, which is unfortunate, but ... yeah I don't remember what I was saying there.



nah nah nah nah nah nah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha STOP

[add:] Well, wireless internet at my gate in Atlanta doesn't work. Whatever. The flight here was actually somewhat enjoyable, if slow. According to our captain, we were fighting headwinds of up to 230 miles an hour. Zing! Initially, I was seated next to the most evil ass who ever lived. The man was old, said nothing, and was traveling with someone seated directly in front of him. The woman was chatting it up with a younger guy who was quite amicable, and he actually ended up trading seats with the first dude, who asked for access to his seat by simply pointing in my direction and grunting. I was offered a movie (Half Baked, and I had to decline because I needed to try to sleep), I was offered conversation on the way down, and for once in my life, I was seated next to someone who was polite, free from foul odor, and most importantly, laid back about the whole flying thing. So good times, I guess, I hope he made his connecting flight okay... the obscene headwind left him with a whopping 10 minutes to deplane and catch his next flight. I suspect they probably rebooked him, but he deserved to make it so I hope for the best. Meanwhile, I hope the three frat kids who were drooling over the backs of three girls heads about five rows up missed that same flight. Hopefully.

Oooooopsie

So I told you I'd have pictures... turns out, it rained the day I wanted to scan them and couldn't take the chance of carrying them around. And by "rained," I do mean "the sky covered everything in a sheet of ice covered in snow." So that fell through.

I'm reinstalling OS X to fix an interesting little issue (my computer thinks its name is "Localhost" everywhere but the command line) that didn't really have any impact on my life, but i'll try to upload my recordings when it's done. That is, if it doesn't eat garage band.

In the meantime, I'm anxiously awaiting 12:30 when I get to more nyquil!

reason number whatever why "I'm better than you"

I just [now] taught myself the 12 major scales on a bass guitar. I'm that much closer to being able to read music on the bass guitar, further marketablizing myself. Now just for hours of practice...

It Rang Out As Pure...

... as an imposed sub-octave wave on an open D guitar string. The sound of silence was outright overpowering.

"... It's two in the morning, Nat. Why in the hell are you still awake?"

He chewed on the question for about five minutes before realizing that it was taking so long to do everything because of all the music he was listening to. Ever so slightly earlier, he had six free songs on the iTunes music store to redeem, which he naturally chose to pour into Dream Theater tracks he'll end up having to buy the actual albums for, due largely in part to the fact that 128 kilobits per second is not now, nor will it ever be enough data to coherently digitize audio while maintaining enough clarity to warrant calling said audio "music."

The philosophical approach he takes to music can best be described by watching and writing about what his hands do while he listens to a new piece. 64th notes, fermataed trills, kick drum triplets, on and on and on, thumping away on the corner of his bed; in fact, it's more often than not the parts of the music he can't play that he tries to keep up with. There's no need for 64th notes on the bass! he'd think to himself while trying to match the obscene pace of a guitar/keyed bells duet. Why would I need to bounce around four octaves of the same scale? on the trip from the left corner to the right.

Only thinking about the events of the evening is enough motivation to stop. "Tappa Tappa Tappa, indeed," he said to himself as he started to stare at the disgusting amount of definition in his hands, a fact itself only made apparent now by the dim glow of the backlight on his laptop. It's the kind of definition that results from five years of trying to play songs just outside your reach. They say that's how you learn and grow; they say that's why getting outside of your comfort zone is important. Some others say "Bollocks!" to such sentiment. It depends largely on what perspective the person in question chose that morning when they woke up. Writing about such a topic made him remember – and almost choke on – the fleck of ice his frappuccino tried to kill him with earlier this morning. Oh, it was hours gone indeed, but that didn't stop the situation from confusing his stupidly rational mind anyway. Never in his life had he understood why physical sensation was so strongly tied to memory, and only lately had he begun to understand just how important his sense of touch was to him. Just flapping his hands wildly through the air would be enough to give him goose bumps; the sensation of his shirt caused seizure-grade spasms from time to time. Just feeling his fingertips was good for 15 minutes of entertainment at a time. "They're different every time," he'd explain if anyone bothered to ask why he was staring so intently at his thumbs as they circled his index finger's callused tips.

Nobody bothers, though. Sometimes, he wonders if the people at the Starbucks really hate him for making them use the blender. He can't think of a reason why they would hate him, but, to him, that's more than enough cause to believe they should hate him. "Call it making it more work than necessary." Such is the story of the Sunday trip to the place he never goes anymore. "Funny how five years will turn you from daily trips to the coffee stand across the street for triple shot iced drinks to 'hey, it's bi-monthly tasty treat time'," he pondered as the songs just kept rolling on. He had graduated from Dream Theater to an old standby, 311, proving once and more that homogeneous musical selection accounts for having absolutely no taste. His friends would give him a tough time for listening to such popularized tripe, even more so for being able to say "I can play this song," but that didn't stop him.

It's all about the rhythm.

---------

And if you carry something away from this ill-conceived pile of horse dung I decided to put together for you, let it be that. All the changes in time signature you want as long as you manage to tie it together sensibly enough for yourself. If only I could take that advice, I'd have been lights out three and a half hours ago.

Look for pictures and a couple new recordings tomorrow. Of course, if you don't read this today, then it won't matter, will it? "And, in case I don't see you... Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and Good Night!"

oh and one more thing

Since I remembered it by tugging at my eyebrows...

I have fantastic eyelashes. I know this because Katy told me once. You should all be jealous.

Now for some actual content:

So uhh... I hate the internet so much I'm taking a break from hating the internet to actually play show and tell for once. I don't have anything to show right now, unfortunately, as the camera store hasn't called me back about my film yet. I'll go check tomorrow or something, maybe.

In other news, I don't care about school. I also had yesterday off, and didn't care about that. Everyone who reads this knows that, or so I can only assume. Uhh... been playing a lot of bass as of late, getting better with technical right hand operation. I'm also working on doing some two handed tapping. I have some carnie hand issues, as some of you know, so it's hard for me to do octaves off of D, or really any octave or three-fret interval from anywhere shy of the 12th fret. I think it's some kind of intervention of fate that I discovered things like the Chapman Stick and Warr's guitars around the same time that I bought a bass I can actually play that is responsive enough to convey my ghosting, dynamics, and voicing. I'll have to record what I'm talking about to make it clear, but I can do some really meaningful driving lines now. A bit more practice with it and I can possibly do two part lines or engage in more advanced chording or arpeggios.

I guarantee you the only person that means anything to doesn't read this anymore. [edit from 2019: so I've noticed at this point that someone that used to leave comments on this blog must have deleted them all somehow, because I've seen these references to specific people and yet my posts are all uncommented... I'm pretty sure I wasn't writing to literally nobody at this point? I don't know]

Well, I'm done writing about my life for now. I'll post pictures when I get them.

sigh

I know it's your plan to try and piss people off by writing these reviews, but it doesn't make sense. You criticize all music. What do you listen to that is so good. Give me some bands and im sure i could write as much bullshit about them as you do. Thanks for amuzing me with your stupidity.

no amount of commentary will do stuff.

One for the ages

I put this away message together while waiting to see if I had to go to sleep or not:

One basic tennant of any legal system is that none may ignore the law

sigh... the internet is a festering cesspit comprised of atrocious grammar and fetid spelling. I am going to sleep in the hopes that, at some point in the distant future, the university's administrators see the Mack truck of a snow storm headed our way and call "Game Off" before little Jimmy gets run over while trying to match Todd's call of "from just in front of the mailbox, bounced off the ground and swished to fall into Mrs. Apfelsaft's flowerbed."

Yeah it was a long way to go for a HORSE joke, but that's okay, you don't have to laugh at it.

go go gadget internet moron

2005-02-25 08:52:12 AM newton

those sprays do work. they add an unnoticable gloss that
creates an overexposure of your plate. there is no law against altering your plates, as long as the number is visable to the eye. i do not enjoy robot enforcers. i do not enjoy robot check-out lanes at the store. i walk past over 100 cameras a day on the streets of the city. I am famous.

Sigh. You go from the laser guided traffic tickets to convenience at checkout lines? How about the anonymous nature of self checkout? All the porn and condoms you can buy and nobody has to see it. Self checkout is a godsend when you don't have to deal with people who don't trust it. I was always sick of waiting in line at those behind people who clearly had no business using them, checking out 300 items or more all the while doubting every price they showed... list goes on. Anyway, I don't care about how many damn cameras you walk past. I walk past the same 10 or 20 cameras every day, the people behind them probably know my "routine" and all that. You know what, though? I don't care. Neither should you. [edit from 2019: my views on privacy have changed now that there are cameras everywhere in a way there weren't in 2005, and now that facial recognition is a meaningful point of contention in policing/law enforcement]

In other news, comments are, according to blogger, now easier to post. Chop chop!

NO NO NO NO NO NO

2005-02-22 09:47:30 PM m4tt3
I kinda enjoyed their most recent CD. I'll...admit to it.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. GOD, SHUT THESE PEOPLE UP PLEASE. I want internet licensing NOW. [edit from 2019: I would no longer advocate for needing a license to get on the internet as a joke; it's become clear the internet was a mistake overall and licensing wouldn't fix it]

Seriously.

2005-02-22 09:58:59 PM Doolspin

im up too 2500+ items copied right now. Good luck with dial up :)

Look, I'm sick of the internet. I am sick of everyone's horrible grammar and spelling. [edit from 2019: I had a comparison link to something I wrote here and it's gone. I then bragged about being a better writer than an internet rando. Truly, 2005 Nat got 'em]

Shut up, internet

in re: script for downloading all the calvin and hobbes strips from whenever to 1995:
2005-02-22 09:35:54 PM naturalbornposer
Ditto on the script. Open source would be nice so I could adapt it to, umm... candid photos?

No. Shut up.

Tool.

Seriously, I want off

MacAddict Forum Post

HOW DO YOU SPELL WARRANTY THAT WRONG? Logical flaws aside, that person should be ignored just for spelling.

Oooh. I should be granted peremptory challenges for internet users.

Daniel Ewing thinks so...

So the question is, why doesn't the rest of the Duke population see a rivalry?

On playing against Maryland:
"Over the last couple of years, it has been a big rivalry between us. Both teams get up to play each other, so it is going to be a tough game every time we meet. Both teams have good players, both teams always get up for the game and it is going to be a pretty good rivalry."

I'm such a nerd

I found a replacement driver via slashdot today that allows me to scroll on my iBook in a manner only just announced on the PowerBook G4: using two fingers at a time. I'm proud of myself because it's really quite cool, quite handy, and, most importantly, it was free and required using the terminal to install. Go nerd!

In other news, I was sick Wednesday. Now I am not. Uhh... I guess that's about that.

When metal goes bad...

chris: damnit

me: this is not rock

chris: thin lizzy should only play the boys are back in town and jail break

me: mine died

chris: you are lucky

me: oh good, it fixed itself. :-!

me: brb YO

chris: ok

me: I gots to make sure the elevator is working

me: wow now it almost rocked for a second there

me: then it went back to crap



Thanks, hardrockin80s.com!