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At the last place I lived (University Village), they thought it was ok to turn my basement into a bus depot. For a most of the winter and all of spring, I had diesel engines revving and idling for hours on end below my bedroom window. After trying to get them to care for 6 months, I moved. Oh, and when I moved in, the place was so coated in oil and tar that I had to scrape the stove clean with a spatula.
When I first moved to Williamsburg Square, I was quite happy. I was astounded that I didn't have to clean the place before I could move in. The place was huge (to me) and the neighbors were quiet. Then I was even more excited when I found out the my girlfriend and one of my best friends would be moving into the unit next to me.
Once they took possession of the new place, things began to turn sour. There are a fair number of problems with the girls' place, and they're not getting resolved. The worst is that the back door doesn't fit. It's too small, leaving a 1/4" gap between it and the jam on all sides. The real problem comes when it rains though. Since the door doesn't seal, the water comes right in and floods the kitchen. And the basement. And for the last month, the complex has done nothing about it. So now the linoleum has puffed up from the water damage, and the subflooring is all squishy because it's falling apart. Beyond that, the carpet has been peed upon by a few hundred too many cats. Mich has already put several dozen hours into cleaning the carpet alone. It's gone from so bad I couldn't comfortable enter the unit to just smelling mildly obnoxious. And still the complex does nothing about it.
And now the whole place looks like a cross between a trailer park and the Balkans. Today, they began a massive project to refurbish the complex. Supposedly, we're getting new gutters, soffits, door trim, back porches, fences, and the basements are going to be re-wrapped. Which is all well and good until you consider what they really mean.
...new gutters and soffits...
What they actually meant is that they're going to prance around on the roof at 7am, knock a whole bunch of sharp, pointy trash onto our steps, and leave us without gutters during the rainiest weeks in Ohio's history
...new door trim...
Ah, now this one I was happy about, our doors and jams were peeling like an Irish person in the Caribbean. Until it turned out that they were merely encasing the water logged (no gutters, remember) doorjambs in vinyl, never to dry again.
...new back porches...
We actually have... had... what were pretty nice back porches for a lower-rent apartment complex. Granted, they were mostly concrete, but they had a few square yards of dirt to plant in, and they were big. Now, enter the jackhammers and bobcats. The old pads are to be replaced with one long pad the size of the entire building. The gardens will be poured over. The whole thing might be smaller. The whole thing might be a rip-off. Oh, wait, it is.
...new fences...
Now the old fences were in quite bad repair. They needed stripped and painted, and in some places, repaired/replaced. However, they were nice fences, quite tall and pretty hard to see through. The new ones will be much more open, and only hip high. How are these going to be the "privacy fences" touted in the advertisement? Supposedly, it's for security. I guess the half height fences make our patio furniture more secure from the prying eyes of midgets.
The only good thing that's coming from all of this is the basements getting re-wrapped so that they won't leak anymore. Actually, mine didn't leak to begin with, but I suppose it'll make someone happy. The downside is that everything I signed the lease for is gone.
Ty, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.
You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.
By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions
When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.
Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.
To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.
Insomnia really sicks. I thought tonight was going to be a time for me to catch up on sleep and get back on a normal schedule. :::snorts::: Oh, well. I don't know wether it's because of it or the cause of it, but when I can't sleep, I can't stop thinking. Tonight all sorts of things are going by. Mainly, I miss being a photographer. I've got bits and pieces of things I want to shoot, or make into a shoot, but I don't have the money to do anything about it. I also miss working with models. Shooting was, for me, always a fun thing to do. I enjoyed interacting with people. And I liked feeling like I was doing something. This trimester, I've felt like my life is pointless. I've been quite badly depressed and missing a lot of class again. I'm probably going to fail math and EET lab. I just don't believe anything I'm doing is making a difference... there's no point to any of it. If it doesn't matter, then why should I go do it? After a while, the fear of how far behind I am makes me not go back... which just makes everything worse. I think that's why I'm trying to do so much handy-man stuff. I'm trying to do something that makes me feel like I've done something that matters. It's why photo was important to me... when I was shooting and printing, I felt like I was contributing something to the world. I need something in my life to matter right now, and I just can't find anything.
I think I'm also bothered with how things are with Mich. I wanted to propose to her, and I made it clear to her that I was interested in doing so. She... seemed to want none of it, which bothers me a lot. I understand it from her position. Things between started poorly, and didn't get any better for a long time. I've certainly given her reason to be nervous. It seems like she's still so unsure... it just really bothers me. But I'm not even sure we should get engaged. She doesn't want to stay in Ohio. I'm not ready to leave. I don't want to leave my family until I'm capable of supporting myself and Mich, the same requirements I have for actually getting married. If she goes, I don't think I will, and I know that would be then end of things between us. I know that since I love her I'm supposed to support her in whatever she does, but if I'm still beholden to my parent's to support me, I can't help her. I don't want to follow her to go knows where just to leach off of her, god knows I do that enough now. It's just such a bad idea to leave now. I'm not comfortable striking out on my own when I know for a fact that I can't support myself. I'm also still upset that she won't tell her parents about us. She finally, after several years, introduces me to other people as her boyfriend, but she won't say it to her parents. Which is stupid, because they've got to know by now. Since she introduced me to her grandfather and aunt, they must have told her parents. So why the hell am I not good enough to talk to her parents about?
In the last 24 hours my scanner has broken, my server has crashed, I've lost almost 100 rolls of negatives. In response to this, I've become pissed off, stayed up till 5am reinstalling the OS on the server, turned the house into a disaster area,
swore some more, found a lot of negatives that I had been missing long enough to have written them off, and spent hours cleaning up the mess I had made.
Positive things I have accomplished:
So why do I still feel like I'm behind the eight ball?
Oh, wait. I lost 3 years worth of negs, killed my server, and trashed my scanner. Fuck.
...without sounding like a racist. Today, I came face to face with the apparently growing problem of illegal Mexican immigrants in Columbus. So I guess the problem really isn't a racial one but a social or legal one. Whatever. It's still bloody hard to talk about the issue without sounding like a racist.
I suppose I should back up. One of my best friends was in a car accident today. She was stopped at a grid-locked intersection, just behind the stop bar, as she should have been. The light was still green, and she was hit from behind by some who never even touched the brakes. When the police arrived, no one in the guilty car had a license. Or spoke english. Or had US citizenship. So there's no way for the insurance or courts to contact the driver as soon as he leaves the scene. The police officer says that this is becoming a large problem in Columbus. We have several tens of thousands of illegal aliens with no ID, no permanent place of residence, and therefore, no accountability under the law.
How do you deal with this. You can't arrest every mexican on sight. You can stop each one you encounter and demand to see their papers. You can't arrest them at the scene of a crime of a lower class than a felony. They're not going to pay a ticket or make a court date because they know they can't be found. How do we deal with this ethically?
On a more fun not, look! No more lavender!
I wake up to an extremely obnoxious truck under my bedroom window (insert flashback to UV here). Turns out, it was loading the my friend's car that was hit yesterday. After discovering a surprising and rather intense pain between my shoulder blades, I go to school. Upon arriving at school, I buy lunch and got to my math class, which I haven't been to in several weeks. It's exam day. As I set my stuff down, my cup of iced tea decides to try base jumping. Insert 10 minutes of mopping up here. Mercifully, I get excused from the test until Friday, giving me 48 hours to learn 200 pages of math. I go back to the cafeteria to buy another drink. It's $1.06. I use my last dollar and discover that I didn't put any change in my pocket today. The lunch lady has mercy on me and dips into the penny tray. I set down in the Technology lounge (where I am now) and find out that the 802.11b network is down. The only functioning RJ-45 port left is next to this guy that smells really bad. I only have a 3' ethernet cord.
The Writeback page now looks like the main page of the blog. Thank you for pointing that out, I had no idea it looked like that. Secondly, you're a bitch. You're not allowed to enjoy my suffering, I do that to other people. It doesn't happen to me. :::sticking out tongue:::
It's been a busy weekend. Jenny (Michelle's sister has been visiting. She came down for the purpose of sailing, but that hasn't really happened. On Thursday, we took the boat over to the Scioto River at the intersection of SR257 and Home Rd. There was no wind. Well, there was enough wind to get us 100 feet from the do and then we stopped. Sigh. So Friday I spent most of the day trying to get the wiring harness on the car to pass signal to the trailer lights correctly. I got the harness fixed and then we went to the farm to pick up the boat. When I made the connection the lights didn't. I fiddled around some and found out the connections were too corroded. After cleaning them, the connection was still poor enough to result in pretty poor light. I don't know what my next step will be. Once hooked up, we took the boat over to Alum Creek Reservoir. We rigged and launched and started out ok. Then we broke out from behind the headland. Wow. Um. Yeah. It was blowing. I turned the boat to go back to the dock and found myself trying run in a 20 knot wind with 3 foot capping swells with a boat that tried to broach on every wave that came by it. I managed to get it back to the dock without any casualties, but I think the girls were a bit shaken. I asked them if they really wanted to go out in the weather and they said yes, so I re-rigged with a much tighter setup. On out second outing, we were overpowered even before we made it to the headland. The wind had picked up while we were on the dock. Again we turned and headed for the dock, this time to pullout and de-rig.
This is Erin's fault too.
Protector
The ULTIMATE personality test
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This is the first time I've ever used a computer in bed. It's kind of surprising that it's taken 23 years to happen. Although, I do use the computer from the couch all the time and I do sleep there occasionally. I bought Final Fantasy X today. It was finally released on the Greatest Hits label and therefore dropped to $19.99. Yay. Also yay is the continued awesomeness of my new phono cartridge. I like having the record player in the house, and I think I might actually now own more records than CDs, which is quite an achievement since I've only been buying records for three months.
I think I actually did well on my electronics test today, I actually had all the equations I needed this time. No guesswork is always a good thing.
Alright, time for something important. This is pretty dense, but please read through it as it affects you in a serious way. A few days ago (September 15th, 2003) a company in charge of running an important aspect of the Internet changed something that fundamentally broke the way major portions of the net function. This change appears to be motivated solely by the desire to make more money. The internet relies on something called the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS changes the address you type in into a machine-readable number. For example, you're reading this on williaty.dyndns.com. However, your computer has no idea who, what, or where williaty.dyndns.com is. So it makes a DNS Request. Basically, it asks its neighbor "Hey, have you ever heard of this williaty.dyndns.com guy?" The neighbor can say "Sure he's at this number." or, "No, I've never heard of him, but I'll ask my neighbor on the other side." and so on, until a server finally knows the answer. The server who finally knows who williaty.dyndns.com is will say "Yeah, I know him! You can reach him at 65.31.10.28!" Your computer actually asks for http://65.31.10.28/ to reach me. Try it. Type http://65.31.10.28/ into the address bar of your browser and hit return. See, got my site anyway, didn't ya? Unless I've moved to a different IP Address by the time you read this. If by some chance, nobody knows the person you're looking for, the question is passed to the Top Level Domain (TLD) Server (a.k.a. The Root Server) The TLD Server knows everybody. Right now, the TLD Servers for .com and .net are owned by a company named VeriSign.
Let's recap: You type in williaty.dyndns.com, which is a Domain Name. Your computer makes a Domain Name Service (DNS) Lookup request and finds out that my IP Address is http://65.31.10.28/. And you get to see my site in all it's glory. Which is exactly how it's supposed to work. But we have to add one more thing. Wildcards.
A Wildcard is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's something that can take the place of something else. In terms of the DNS, a wildcard is a bit of a Domain Name that can be changed without changing the IP Address that you get from a DNS Lookup query. It is represented by the "*" character. Wildcards are a good thing, they have lots of legitimate uses. For instance, my Domain Name is Wildcarded. My Domain Name is really *.williaty.dyndns.org The wild card can be anything, or even nothing. The reason I use a wildcard is so that people who type www.williaty.dyndns.org by mistake still come to my site. But you can put anything on the front. Try foo.williaty.dyndns.org, ilovecookes.williaty.dyndns.org, or even 123456.williaty.dyndns.org. They all point to me. This is how wildcards are supposed to be used.
On September 15th, 2003, VeriSign decided to change the way the net works, without asking anyone. They added two little lines to the very end of their massive TLD Servers. They added *.com and *.net With these two little additions, they completely broke the way errors are handled by DNS. Let's say you were trying to come to williaty.dyndns.com, but you goofed and typed qillliaty.dyndns.org Prior to September 15th, you would have seen a message saying, basically, "Yeah, um, that person doesn't exist, try again". Which, as things go, is actually pretty useful. You know you made a mistake and you get a chance to fix it. This is because qwilliaty.dyndns.org doesn't exist, therefore, none of the DNS Servers know who it is. Now, with the entire .com and .net TLD Servers being wildcarded EVERY POSSIBLE DOMAIN EXISTS So that typo actually takes you to a web page that VeriSign owns. A page on which they list helpful suggestions that companies paid VeriSign lots of money to put there. And you'll never know exactly what went wrong. If you try it, you'll find out that anything you type into the address bar and end with .com will take you to a web page. This is wrong. This breaks a lot of things.
One of the most important things this breaks is email. Yeah, email has to use DNS too, only it uses a lot more of it than the web does. Email uses DNS to figure out how to get from place to place and uses DNS to eliminate some kinds of SPAM. With the wildcarding of .com and .net, mistyped email addresses no longer "bounce" back and let you know something went wrong. That all important email asking for an extension on your term paper just disappeared into the ether because you made a typo. Also, many email servers use DNS Lookups to try and decide if a message is SPAM. If a mail server gets an email and it finds out that the domain it claims to be from doesn't exist, it deletes it as SPAM. This too, is broken by the wildcards. Since September 15th, a lot more SPAM is getting through.
Obviously, this is pissing a lot of people off. It should piss you off. VeriSign has been asked to stop this by all the governing bodies of the net, the very people who gave VeriSign its job. VeriSign has told them to fuck off. Why? Because VeriSign is making a lot of money off of this. So do something about it. Call your ISP (the people you get your internet from) and tell them you don't like what VeriSign is doing to your internet. Call you Senator and Representatives and tell them you think it looks bad that VeriSign is ignoring what the government is asking it to do. Basically, just call anyone higher on the totem poll than you and say "Fuck off VeriSign"
If you want to know more, read this, this, or this. Also, talk to me about it if you want to know more.
Not having a car sucks. Mine's in the shop and I'm stuck at DeVry because Michelle is still at work. So I've been sitting around DeVry for the last five and a half hours. I got a lab and a half done before I lost the ability to pay attention. Then I talked to people online for a while. Then I got bored. And cold. Cold is a big problem. It's 68 degrees here, and I'm in shorts and a T-shirt. The cold is also worsened by the fact that I need to eat and therefore have no energy to heat myself. On the plus side, the car won't sound like it's eating itself when I get it back.
Well, I suppose this is what happens when you let republicans into the White House. Today a translator at Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba was charged with crimes that could see him executed by the US government. Listed among the crimes was "transferring classif ied information to an unclassified computer and unlawfully delivering baklava to detainees. Oh, my, whatever shall we do? The prisoners were FED. By the way, the reason we're holding the people that have been Disappeared under the Patriot Act and so called "enemy combatants" (a.k.a. people with dark skin that voted for Nader) in Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba is that it technically isn't US soil. If we hold them there, they have no rights, because the US Constitution can't protect the innocent ther e.
I've found out how to keep an eye on you all. Apparently, Apache, the webserver that MacOS X runs, keeps a log of what IP address fetches which document off my server. So I can watch you all look around, hours after you've left. I have no idea what good this is... but... eh. The problem with having a life as boring as mine is that there's so little to blog about. My car came back from the shop and is doing pretty well, I hope I can have it in to the muffler shop soon. My new scanner is the bomb, or at least it seems like it is, though sorting out the software is kind of a bitch.
The unwashed masses of humanity just piss me off. For a species allegedly possessed of intelligence, we really suck.
First of all, there's driving. Jesus christ people, I don't think cars require that you check your brain at the door, but you all act like it. Half of you wallow, the other half attack. Why do people have to accelerate to close the hole I'm about to merge into? For god's sake people, it's not hard to be nice. Lately, I've been practicing a technique that helps to eliminate the mysterious slowdowns for no apparent reason that occur within larger traffic jams. This causes me to, at times, carry a large space in front of me. Now what amazes me is that I daily see people jump out of the faster-moving lane beside me into the hole in front of me. The thing is, the traffic in front of me is stopped. People leave a flowing lane only to stop, just because they say a few yards of open pavement. Fuckers.
Then there's just people. Why do parents have to be so mean to their children? If you just treat them with respect and a little kindness, they won't grow up to be fucked up. I don't think parents know how effective they are at driving their children away, especially in multi-children homes. Praising or being interested in one child while ignoring or condemning another for the exact same this is the pathway to large therapy bills. I'm amazed at the number of people I see that are unfit parents.
My car was in to the exhaust shop today. This was necessitated by it being slightly louder than most geologic events. The problem was, that as wall as having rusted out the muffler, it has rusted out most of the hangers and, most critically, the down pipe that connects the headers to the catalytic converter. That pipe alone cost $160. Total cost: $377.51. Oh, the muffler was free because I had a warranty. Oh goodie.
As you all know, I'm pretty pissed off at the American government. One of the most stupid things it has done it to enact a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (full text of law HERE.) The DMCA didn't even have to go through the Constitutionally mandated process to become a law. It was a treaty draft by the WTO and the WIPO that just became law because the US is a part of those bodies. What the DMCA does it prevent anyone from owning, creating, using, discussing, or sharing copyright-circumvention technology. Sounds like a good thing, right? It went horrible wrong. Ever downloaded a mp3? You're a felon. Ever ripped a CD? You're a felon. Ever played a DVD on a non-Windows or non-Apple computer? You're a felon. Ever owned an Apex DVD player? You're a felon. Ever tried to get a new CD that doesn't like your car CD player to play? You're a felon. Ever told someone you've found a flaw in the student ID card you use (BuckID or Blackboard)? You're a felon. We've lived under this draconian law for 5 years now. For the next few days, I'll be posting examples of how this law has violated 1st Amendment rights, punished the innocent, and stifled scientific advancement. Call your Congressmen.
Blackboard is a system of ID cards used on hundreds of campuses nationwide. Recently, as a research project, a student at one of the universities noticed several security vulnerabilities that could result in thousands of dollars being stolen from students. The student tried to give a lecture to security professionals from major universities. The result:
Blackboard Threatens Security Researchers
In April 2003, educational software company Blackboard Inc. used a DMCA threat to stop the presentation of research on security vulnerabilities in its products at the InterzOne II conference in Atlanta. Students Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith were scheduled to present their research on security flaws in the Blackboard ID card system used by university campus security systems but were blocked shortly before the talk by a cease-and-desist letter invoking the DMCA. Blackboard obtained a temporary restraining order against the students and the conference organizers at a secret "ex parte" hearing the day before the conference began, giving the students and conference organizer no opportunity to appear in court or challenge the order before the scheduled presentation. Although the lawsuit complaint Blackboard subsequently filed did not mention the DMCA, its invocation in the original cease-and-desist letter preceding the complaint contributed to the chill the students and conference organizers felt in challenging the complaint and proceeding with the scheduled presentation.
John Borland, "Court Blocks Security Conference Talk," CNET News, April 14, 2003. http://news.com.com/2100-1028-996836.html
Or another case:
Professor Felten's Research Team ThreatenedGo the the Anti-DMCA Website to learn more.
In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton Professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.
When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers' employers and the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research was published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit.
After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field.
Pamela Samuelson, "Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science," 293 Science 2028, Sept. 14, 2001. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/293/5537/2028
Letter from Matthew Oppenheim, SDMI General Counsel, to Prof. Edward Felten, April 9, 2001. http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm
Because of a lot of the things I've been reading and watching lately, I've been thinking quite a bit about our government and our country. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of things must be broken. Some of it has to be down to the fact that the world the Constitution was written in no longer exists. The Framers set into motion a system that divided power among offices, but looked to one man to wield and take responsibility for that power. I think that idea may no longer work. The whims of the man in the Oval Office send the world careening on too tilted a course. And when that course leads to rocky shoals, one man bears the burden of the failure of a nation. If, by chance, the man holding that office is a good man, the strain placed upon him by other people's follies surely must be too much to bear. One person cannot possibly be capable of dealing with the demands of a world gone mad. Another stumbling block, I think, is the misconception that we live in a democracy. At a Federal level, the United States is not a democracy, it is a Republic. The people are under the mistaken impression that we make the decisions for the country by voting. We don't. At best, we get to elect the people who make the decisions. The only time we have direct affect on the governance of our country is when a Constitutional Amendment is ratified by a vote of the people. Anyone remember when that last happened? Now, even that system is broken. We no longer have our voices heard in the process of election. The President of the United States was not elected by the people. Due to our flawed and corruptible system of election, a man whom the majority of America did not vote for controls our country. But even there, I misspeak for someone controls him. We have sold our country to the highest bidder. We are now a nation owned by corporations. When at a time when the economy is faltering, and the dollar is falling faster against every other currency than at any time in history, how are we supposed to make our voices heard against corporations that can afford to lose USD40billion just so one of their products may succeed? Our civil liberties, the very reason this country was founded are being systematically stripped from us, and the American people remain quiet. Those voices that are raised are extinguished by the hands of shadows and those to prominent to disappear are discredited. Once the people begin to awaken to the loss of freedom, will they be allowed to leave?
Some scientists recently completed a study in which they found a strong link between something called Latent Inhibitions and genius/creativity. Basically they found that really creative people don't have a built-in filter to stop thinking about things. Most people look at a lamp and see a lamp. Someone with low latent inhibitions would see the lamp and not bother to stop there. They'd think about electricity, and fire, and light switches, and lightning. The fact that the light coming out is yellow would take them down a path along which they'd find Big Bird and bananas, and Sponge Bob, and the sun, and yellow submarines, and the Beatles, and insects. The study indicates that creativity is potentially the brain just not knowing when to stop. The problem with this is that without a high IQ and good memory to filter out the noise, such runaway lines of thinking lead to schizophrenia. So there really is a fine line between genius and madness.
Which side am I on?
The article is in the September 2003 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The title is Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated With Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals
It was written by Shelley H. Carson, Jordan B. Peterson, and Daniel M. Higgins
On Sunday, a large group of my friends went to the Ohio Renaissance Festival. I attempted to join them, but was greatly hindered by the Columbus Marathon. Sidebar: Typing that just made me realize that it's been a year since all the drama last year with the blonde cow. Somehow, that's just disturbing. Anyway, the marathon kept Amanda from being able to get to my house so we could leave. Two hours late, we finally set out on the road. Driving down there was a trying experience. I never want to drive like that again. Traffic was flowing between about 83 and 87 MPH the whole way. Taking into account the areas of 55 (construction) and the distance we weren't on the freeway, we still averaged 76MPH. Ordinarily, I won't speed, but since the slow lane was moving that fast, I just went with it. My car does not like to be driven upwards of 70MPH I found. It's a lot of work. Also, in that heavy of traffic at that speed, it's really intense, I had to pay way too much attention not to kill us all. However, we did manage to get there in only 2/3rds of the time it usually takes. Once we got there we eventually found everyone else at the Chess Match. My god, was it bad. I have never seen stage fighting that bad, and I've done high school theatre. Most of the people then went to watch the human equivalent of Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog, but 5 of use went shopping. Mich found a blue silk scarf she liked. I managed to convince her to let me buy it as a present. One of the other girls with us was acting very cute. She normally doesn't like her looks much, but she found some things she thought she looked very cute in and was quite happy. I like it when people are happy. Truth be told, she looked very cute by anyone's standard. Another one of the girls bought a cloak, which is one of the most ridiculously overpriced items at any Faire. However, it is quite pretty, and quite petty. I was teasing her about her needing a minute alone with the cloak, or having a nice candle lit bath and then wrapping up in just the cloak. She laughed the laugh of the guilty. And so the day passed on, and I came home with nothing, which is better than I usually do. However, all of this got me interested in making a cloak for myself again. I think I've figured out how to do it, but I won't know until I get the money to try.
Yesterday was my EET final, my first for this term. Most of it was pretty easy. It was well written. If you paid attention in class it was pretty much just plug and chug. However, if there was a bit you were missing, it was a bitch. Which happened to me on the last question. It was 2 equations in 2 variables with differential calculus. However, the prof had taught us a method for solving the specific case relevant to the design of a 555 Timer that didn't involve anything esoteric. I forgot the method. So I had to do it all long hand. For 2 and a half pages. It was ugly. I was the first person to get to the last problem, and almost the last person to leave the room. Oops.
That evening I spent helping friends. Michele is trying to get together a Halloween costume that looks like one of the drawings by Alberto Vargas (scroll down a lot). So we fussed around with the computers for a few hours. While I was looking through the pin-ups, another of my friends IMed me rather upset. So I grabbed her from campus and we went out into the "country". Or to be more precise, different places around Hoover where there weren't lights or many cars. Setting on my ass on cold ground really makes my hips hurt these days. We drove around some too, for a total of about 100 miles, all well after nightfall. I got home very late and very tired.
And now I sit alone, on the Dark Side of the Moon.
I know that in the context of causality that is a self evident statement... deterministic universe and all that, but on a practical level, it's kind of interesting. I was driving around today over near Color Plus, which is near 5th St. and Spring. I saw a gate at the exit to a parking lot that was a little different. The turn-pike was about 10 feet off the ground. There was a semi truck setting behind it, waiting to be let out. After a moments surprise, I could see semis past plowing through the gate because it was too low to see. I was amused.
On a related topic, thanks to the British, I finally know what a semi truck is only part of. It's semi-articulated, meaning that it can bend between the cab and trailer but not at the rear axles of the trailer. So a big-assed Ryder truck is a non-articulated truck and a fire truck with a joint behind the cab and a tiller steering at the rear is fully-articulated. I'd like to know if there are any other fully-articulated trucks.
I received my copy of Panther mid-day today, and I've had my install up and running on my laptop since about an hour before the official release for my time zone. As far as I can tell, it's kind of a mixed bag. Some of the stuff is great. Expose, Fast User Switching, and better security all are major pluses. However, there are some major setbacks. It feels slower. I'm not sure why this is. Most of the pre-release reviews remarked on how much of a speed boost there was, so I suspect that something is not optimized in my system. The new Finder flat out sucks. Since OS X Public Beta, Apple has been moving further and further away from the UI model for the pre-OS X Finder. Personally, I find the new Finder much less intuitive and much slower to use. The process of learning OS X has been one of coming to understand how my expectations for using the computer had been broken. The new interface is much more like Windows XP, a format I find frustrating. Hopefully, I'll come to adapt to it. The switch was pretty smooth. So far, I've only noticed three programs that broke. First, and expectedly, ClearDock broke. I don't think there has been an update yet that didn't break the hacks people apply to the dock. Second, and only a small surprise, uControl broke. uControl does key remapping and a few other things. Since it's a non-Apple-sanction kext, it isn't at all surprising that enough changed to break it. Finally, and quite surprisingly, Excalibur broke. Excalibur is a UNIX-compatible spell checker. I have no idea why it broke, but suspect it can be fixed by reinstalling the application. Hmmm, I can't launch X11, so I guess that broke too. I have that on disk with me (I'm currently in BFE and have no Net access), so I'll try reinstalling in the morning. Good news is: no crashes and nothing OS-level is broken.
I'm starting to find some of the less flashy features that are still somewhat amazing. The Fast File Search lets you run a search from within a Finder window. It starts the search in real time and refines the search as you add more characters to your query. It's default behavior is to search all local disks, a function for which I think the Find command still takes the cake. More useful is the Selection setting, where it searches amongst the current folder (recursively) or amongst the currently selected items. This makes it easy to open your Documents folder and find all of the .doc files with the word fish in their name. Unfortunately, I think this feature will confuse new users greatly. As soon as you enter a character in the search field, it begins sorting results. If you delete the characters from the search field, it still shows only those files that were a result of the query. You have to click the little X at the end of the search field to exit search mode. I suspect this will lead to a lot of users being confused because they see nothing in the search field, but aren't seeing all of their files.
Second is the Action pop-up menu. It's an icon in the Finder tool bar that duplicates the menu accessed by right-clicking (my method of use) on a file or folder. However, there are two additions. First, labels are back, which, to me, is marginally useful. Second, and most usefully, you can now create zip archives from the pop-up menu. This is really freaking convenient. It would be nice if you could set it to create tar.gz, but I'll go with what I can get.
Well, now that I've got net access again (ughghhehhghghhhhhh... sweet internet), I've been able to fix all of the apps that Panther broke other than uControl. Turns out uControl relied on a bug in the gcc 3.1 compiler. Panther was compiled on the gcc 3.3 compiler, and therefore, uControl can no longer get into the system. It's kinda surprising that uControl doesn't break Panther, poking around in it's innards like that.
I just took a quiz at a sound website. It said:
Congratulations! You have received the Mix Master award. Somehow your keen sense of the obvious combined with an in depth awareness of the nuances of the auditory profession has allowed you to navigate your way to being a Mix Master. You are on the right track and somehow figured out that all you hear is not to be believed. Good luck and congratulations!
Although this entry is about cars, it's probably still amazing even to people who aren't gear heads. My car has started making a whooshing sound from the exhaust when I stand on the gas. It got me thinking about what volume of gas (in the chemistry sense) the car has to expel. The math on this is kind of amazing. Take a 3 litre, 6 cylinder engine (like in my car), rev it up to 4000 RPM (shift point on my car). Since it's a 4-stroke engine (suck, squish, bang, blow), each cylinder is filled and emptied at half the crankshaft RPM. So each cylinder is filling 2000 times a second. 3 litres x 2000cyc/min = 6000 litres/min, or 100 litres per second flow into the engine. Now, all that air and fuel have to get bigger when they burn, or else the car won't go forward. The combustion process makes the stuff entering the engine want to be about 10 times larger when it leaves. So somewhere around 1000 litres/second is trying to leave the engine. That's the rushing sound I hear from the tail pipe.
Well, there was a security update for my server, so I was finally going to have to restart it. Which meant that the long put off upgrade to Panther for it was upon me. The install and patching of the OS took me about 90 minutes. Well, it took the computer 90 minutes. I only had to push buttons for about 5 minutes. Now, three hours later, I've got most of the major services back up. Hopefully you'll all be reading this on my new install in a few minutes.
On another topic, apparently I am an
to take the quiz yourself, go HERE.
So Mich and I are currently engaged in PsyOps (psychological warfare). On the first floor we have a half bath. I went in to it the other day and noticed a bare cardboard tube where there should have been toilet paper. Apparently, I've used the last of the paper and forgotten to get a new roll in the past, so I thought this was Mich sending me a message. So I left it sit for a day or two, all the wile getting the paper I needed from where it was kept in the vanity. Eventually, I pulled the dead tube off and put the spindle back. I'm letting her stew.
I'm on Christmas break, finally, more that 2 weeks after everyone else I know got out. So far, it's terribly boring. Oh, I found a place I might be able to get back into Theatre.
So I'm worried that I'm about to cause a ruckus with/because of Mary. Somehow, without me really noticing, she has managed to slip her way into my innermost level of friendship. It's a level of friendship no one has attained with me since Theatre (well, Mich has, but then there's the whole romantic thing to confound that). Having her be my most-loved friend that's not my girlfriend isn't the problem. The issue is that the last time I had a friend like her, I was in an environment that was much more physically demonstrative. We re-enforced our social ties by hugging, setting together, holding hands, cuddling, and kissing non-erogenous areas (i.e head, shoulder, etc.) when someone was in need of comforting. Much to my annoyance, in this group, that's going to cause much gnashing of teeth. First of all, cause all the people who are overly mindful of other people's affairs think I'm unfaithful to Michelle, and my affection towards Mary, though totally Platonic, will be seen as confirmation that I am, in fact, cheating on Michelle. The other problem is that the childish busybodies in the group think that it is wrong for Mary to be ok by herself. They see something wrong with the fact that she isn't pair-bonded. This has led several of them to say that she is "up to something" or that "she thinks she's too good for anyone in the group" (which, frankly, she is). So someone who is allegedly unattached, which is a position they don't like, is receiving affection from someone they think cheats on his girlfriend. Can you imagine the fun?
That being said, my being nice to Mary isn't something I think about until I've done it. So how do I keep the furor from arising?
Well, today was Christmas. Woo-hoo and all that. Or something. Mom
and I delivered corn souffle to the firehouse today since Jeff had to work this year. We were standing in the bay and the dog wondered off into the equipment repair room. It was am
azing how good the smoke coming out of the gear smelled. With how much I hate most smoke, I find it amazing how much I like the smell of house-fire smoke. Well, not the roof or any plasticized stuff. It makes me wonder if I can escape my heritage and n
ot become a firefighter.
I ended up doing tech support for almost the entire time I was at my cousin's house this evening. They have a Dell WinXP box. Kelsey, the daughter, got an MP3 player for Christmas and it wasn't working. Upon trying to do anything with their computer , I was struck by how amazingly slow it was. Checking out it's hardware config, I was amazed that it's a PIV 1.3GHz with 512MB of RAM and it moves slower that a Celeron 333MHz. After waiting forever on Windows Update, I rebooted only to discover that Wi ndows Update had killed the video card driver. So revert to previous state it was (the only time I've ever used this feature). Meaning I had just waisted an hour of my life running Windows Update. So back to W.U. to grab the updates other than the driv er for the GPU. Reboot again, fight through the pop-ups to AdAware, DL and run AdAware. 218 instances of spyware/adware found. Get a virus warning, attempt to fix virus, find that McAfee has been compromised by said virus and cannot remove the virus. Sigh. Eliminate virus by hand, clean up Registry, reboot. Computer now boots in 1/4th the time, but is still godawfully slow. Process manager says there are now only 44 processes running (down from 75), memory usage is ok. Don't know what's going on. Set up MP3 player. The online music buying service works, the transferring to p[layer software works, the player doesn't. The player will play the included demo MP3 but not any WMA content. Surprise, all the purchasable content is in WMA. Hmm... MP3. com is out of business, other services provide RM or WMA. Fuck. Give up, go home, mail Mandrake CD to cousins.
| I am the Rake A woman never quite feels desired and appreciated enough. She wants attention, but a man is too often distracted and unresponsive. The Rake is a great female fantasy-figure - when he desires a woman, brief though that moment may be, he will go to the ends of the earth for her. He may be disloyal, dishonest and amoral, but that only adds to his appeal. Stir a woman's repressed longings by adapting the Rake's mix of danger and pleasure. Symbol: Fire. The Rake burns with a desire that enflames the woman he is seducing. It is extreme, uncontrollable and dangerous. The Rake may end in hell, but the flames surrounding him often make him seem that much more desirable to women. |
polite_society Or at least they suck all the goodness out of the power grid. Or maybe they put bad harmonics in. Or maybe we recently got an equipment upgrade somewhere up the line. For whatever reason (I suspect it's because I'm nearly the only one in the building), the power is clean enough that the stereo sounds better than it ever has since moving here. It's nice to site and listen to pretty music. This is the first time in a long time that I haven't been disappointed in my stereo. Though I am now very sad because I scratched my Tracy Chapman New Beginnings CD while sanding it. Well, polishing compound tomorrow.
I spent the day up at my dad's. I went up because the rocket he's working on was at a point where he could stack the pieces together and stand them up for the first time. We carried the pieces outside and set the up against the house. I was surprised how much thinner it all looked outside. I think it's because inside you never got to see more than a 6ft section of it at once, which made the 16.5 inch diameter look much fatter. Getting it outside and standing it up, the proportions are much slimmer. At 21 feet, it reached just above the 2nd story eaves. It's going to launch off of a M and 2 L motors. Think roughly enough thrust to lob a Volkswagen Beetle over the Empire State Building. It's definitely a big rocket.
He had some questions to ask me about RockSim, which is a program that designs and simulates rockets. The things the program will do are amazing. Unfortunately, it is only easy to understand the build screen if you're familiar with class/function hierarch. So he had a lot of problems with it telling him the motors wouldn't fit because he had accidently defined the motor tubes as part of the class Nose_cone. The annoying thing is that the program still drew everything correctly, so there was no visual feedback that something was wrong. Dad, like me, has problems actually processing information (read: instruction manuals) off the computer screen. He downloaded the RockSim instruction manual off the internet, a task which took him several hours (sucky dial-up). Turns out it's 80 pages. After 5 minutes, it's 20 pages into the job. Spooling the job, not printing it. So I use my laptop to spoof his XP laptop into thinking it's connected to an ftp server and get the manual on mine. 30 seconds late, all 80 pages are spooled and it takes the printer about an hour and a half to get through the job.
And I just re-discovered how much nicer sarongs are w/o underwear underneath. Yay for laundry.