Pretty Shiny Bits

Unexpected Downtime -Tuesday, January 13, 2004 -7:42 pm-

I was reading Slashdot yesterday when someone tried to make reference to Token Ring Architecture. Which would have been fine if they hadn't misspelled it. I saw Tolken but read Tolkien. This cause me to wonder, is this some new protocol from MordorSoft? One ring to rule them all and in the darkness BIND them?

I woke up this morning wondering why I couldn't make my alarm clock snooze. Turned out the power had gone off and the UPS was screaming at me. Out to the pole I went. At first I was looking for the popped bus bar and was confused when I couldn't see it. Then I noticed the dead squirrel on the ground. Sigh. Stupid freakin tree rats. I called maintenance, who took 10 minutes to get here and then another 20 to figure out what I already knew. Eventually the called AEP. In the mean time I left for school. I was watching the server and UPS via ssh. Eventually the charge got down to 21% when something odd happened. The computer rebooted itself! I emailed the guy who wrote PowerGuardian, the program I use to manage my UPS, and asked what the hell had happened. He said the APC UPSes almost never report remaining charge correctly so his software will do an emergency shutdown of the computer whenever it gets the LOW_BATT signal from the UPS, regardless of the alleged charge. Which I suppose I'm ok with, it's better if the computer shuts down cleanly a few minutes early rather than a hard crash at the last possible moment. He didn't know why the computer had rebooted. He said he was going to pull the APC BackUPS XS he had in storage out to play with for a while. I'm pretty impressed with how quickly he responded and how willing to help he was. Yay independent software developer!

Griffin is in town for a few days, so he and a bunch of people came over last night. We had a pretty good time. We played a little bit of DDR and then switched to Karaoke Revolution. It's an interesting game. It's karaoke that scores you. It seems to reward for pitch accuracy, timing accuracy, and strength. My first try I was booed off the stage. I was soon joined by Griffin and Michele. Eventually I figured a little bit out and got a decent score by singing Don't Know Why. Soon enough it was midnight and everyone went home. We're getting together on Thursday night to having dinner with Griffin at the Golden Coral. You're all invited.

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Sadness. -Friday, January 16, 2004 -3:28 am-

Sometimes I look at my past, and I look at the people who are still there, and I am greatly saddened. My time at South grows increasingly confusing as my distance from it increases. So many good things came of my being there... theatre, an amazingly good education, my friends. Those were the impressions I took away from my time that as I left. But there are still people I know there, and they remind me of the rest of it so that as time passes I am more and more horrified by the experiences I, and others had there. I'm thinking about this tonight because I read the blog of someone who is still there. Someone who is, in fact just beginning their journey. Her latest entry describes the attempt of her and her friends to establish a Gay Students Association at South. They managed to get approval from the administration, but were surprised by the opposition from the student body. From her blog:

the GSA posters went up 4th period, less than a period later half of the posters were of the wall and on the floor and in the trash cans, the science wing trash can was filled with them, someone trashed a poster and replaced it with "fuck you". i didn't think the posters would come down so quick. what's wrong with people? [name] looked like she was going to cry when see was talking about it. well, we're just going to keep putting the posters back up. no wonder the GSA in a previous year failed, everyone was too scared to go because of our little suburban prejudice town

My immediate reply to her was:

I was... best friends?... soul mates?... whatever, with the first girl to come out during the 4 years I was at South. It was pretty ugly, people found out she was gay because she started holding hands with her girlfriend in the halls. That year I had to leave all my classes early and arrive late to the next ones because I had to walk from her from class to class because she was being physically attacked. The administration didn't want to do anything about it (remember, at this time, wearing a symbol from a religion other than Christianity would get you sent home to change) because they didn't want gays in their school. By the end of the year, she was physically safe but never comfortable in school again. After her, a lot of people, well, girls at least, came out, but none of them had their relationships visible to the school. I don't know what it's like at South now, but never forget, Westerville is a scary place. There's all this latent hostility hidden just under the surface that explodes whenever someone violates the publically held myth of suburbia. I'm sorry you're there.

I've been thinking about South, and about Westerville, since. There's so much I remember now that I just didn't understand then. There such a culture of image in Westerville. Everyone is terribly concerned about how they look. Not just in terms of clothing but their house, their lawn, their children's activities. How it looks is all more important than how it is. I think a lot of this stems from Westerville being full of New Money. New Money isn't having money, it's having debt. Everyone has to agree that all the things they've gone in debt for are real because the illusion has to continue or else all they're left with is a house they can't afford to furnish. The people there are terribly afraid of anything that isn't a part of the agreed upon story. This seeps into the children who are brought up to understand that they have to fit themselves into the narrative. Westerville has exactly the literary amount of Troubled Youths, Football Start, Lonesome Prom Queens, and Upstanding Minorities. There isn't room in the story for people to change because they might change everything.

Towards the end of my Junior I had just walked my friend to class and was standing at a discrete distance while she said goodbye to her girlfriend. Coming up the hall, I spotted two preppy girls walking together. They notice my friend kissing her girl. They stopped. Stared. Pointed. One of them exclaimed, "Eeeewwwwww! Look at the little Lebanese girls!"

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3 Days Later -Friday, January 16, 2004 -4:47 pm-

Dunno wither any of you have noticed or not, but this page has been through a bit of a reworking. The only thing that should be visible to you all is the addition of the little boxes on the left. You should all see thin black lines boxing in each sectio n over there. If you don't, your monitor is set wrong. Well, the Archives section is a new thing, and the links section just got cleaned up and contained. Oh, there's a Next Page link at the bottom now. Most of the real work was restructuring the code to be HTML4.01 Strict compliant and use CSS1. Considering that the blog you see is generated by 14 scripts that assemble 3 separate html documents, plus all the blog entries themselves, getting anything to agree with itself was a Herculean feat. The fi nal blog still won't validate because of the way the cgi script pulls in the entries, but I'm content with the parts I can actually do something about working better. Once I learn CSS I'll learn perl and then get it all pretty. Page code length is down by about 30%, meaning it'll load faster on dial-up, as well, I've capped the main page to 10 entries, further reducing size. However, server-side page rendering times are up because it's all generated dynamically and the Archives section is computational ly and disk intensive. Someday, when I know what the hell I'm doing, I'll make it cache the page only re-render it when it changes. Please let me know if something mis-renders in your browser of choice.

Looking to the future, I need to add something to the upper left corner, cause it looks fugly. I don't want to repeat functionality that's already in the page, so I don't think I'm going to put one of those calendars showing the dates of entries up th ere. Some sort of a masthead stretching the width of the window might be nice, but I'm not sure what to use. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

And you all know that the little "Writeback" link under each entry is for comments, right?

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Freakin A -Friday, January 16, 2004 -10:53 pm-

I was rummaging around trying to get the actual body of the blog to validate and I eliminated the file mod dates for almost all my blog entries. I've gone back through and touched them back to the dates as close as I remember, but who knows. Anyway, if things don't seem to be in chronological order, it's cause they aren't.

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Rennie Craziness -Monday, January 19, 2004 -12:13 am-

So we have all kinds of people over here right now for Michelle's birthday party. There's 12 of us here now. Mike, Michelle, Betsy, Aaron, Mary, Griffin, Michele, Heather, Ann, Amanda, Dan, and me. Right now we're doing Karaoke Revolution. It's kind of a fun game, though somehow it can't hear me. It's nice to see so many people here. Friday night, all of these people were supposed to were supposed to show up and no one but Heather and Aaron ever did. Earlier tonight I was worried that the same thing was going to happen tonight. Everyone eventually did show up though. It's pretty fun.

The only problem for me is Mary. I think I've really pissed her off and I can't get her to talk to me about it. I don't like this situation much because I really care about her and don't want to lose her as a friend. At the same time, if she won't talk to me about it, what the hell am I supposed to do? Sigh. I just hope I haven't screwed this up.

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Burn It Down, Gentlemen. Burn It Down And Salt The Earth. -Tuesday, January 20, 2004 -5:19 pm-

As I was sitting in my car waiting for it to warm up this morning, I started to wonder about the concept of "salting the earth". Over the weekend, I used salt (of the NaCl not the uber-expensive CaCl variety) to get the ice off our back steps, porch, and walkway before the 13 party-goers came over. Well, I suppose only 12 of them had to walk in, Alana came in on a modulated stream of electrons. Anyway, this morning I was looking at the salt on the sidewalk, I began to wonder if I needed to go sweep it up so girls would be able to grow things in the spring. Since I had about 5 minutes before the car was ready, I continued on and began to wonder about the practicality of actually salting the earth of a city conquered. For one thing, it would take a bloody lot of salt. If I remember right, salt also wasn't cheap. So why would someone mine hundreds of tons of salt at great expense just to spread on the ground? I mean, you'd really have to hate someone to be that determined. Frankly, I don't see the percentage in it.

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I Am Employed -Tuesday, January 20, 2004 -6:47 pm-

As of today, I officially have a job. I have not been employed since January of 2001. In the last 3 years, I have accrued about $8,000 in credit card debt. Hopefully, that number is about to begin a steady downward trend. My plan is to use 100% of every paycheck to pay of my VISA debt because First Financial is a bunch of capitalist bastards who call me every day to harass me. I've stopped answering my phone if it's a number that I don't have stored under someone's name. But I have a job, so it's all going to be alright.

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I Am A l337 Haxor -Wednesday, January 21, 2004 -2:11 am-

Well, not really. But I did achieve an effect today that I think is pretty cool. I messed around with the Terminal and setting backgrounds that has transparency. There's a image here. I'm not making it an inline bec ause it's somewhat large, and I don't want to slow down the page loads for people who don't care.

Moving on, does anyone know why the jpg compression is murdering the color of the text in the terminal? It's supposed to be #00FF00, otherwise known as pure green. For some odd reason, it's getting rendered as some fugly orangey color.

Finally, IE must die. If any of you are using IE, go away and come back with a real browser. For god's sake it won't even support CSS, and there's not an upgrade to IE coming out till 2005 and only then if you buy the next version of Windows. Get a browser that follows the rules!!! If anyone knows how to get IE to respect the A:hover { foo: foo;} rule, let me know. Oh, and how to get it to respect the .foo { right: 5px; } rule.

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Hodge Podge and Then Some -Thursday, January 22, 2004 -3:17 am-

This is going to be a collection of a bunch of stuff, no real order...

Cars. They seem to always cause... entertainment. Today, for example, my horn decided not to work. It's amazing how impotent not being able to yell at other people makes me feel when I'm driving. Not to mention how much harder it is to not get run over. On the way to the girl's house on Monday night, we got stopped at the light for the shopping center on Bethel near SR-315. I was driving Mich's car and needed to get ahead of the car in the lane to my left because there was a merge coming up. When the light turned, I got the hole shot on the other car and make a leisurely shift into second because I assume I'm ahead clear. Then I see this red nose start advancing in my peripheral vision. I notice it's nose dip violently before springing back up, a sure sign of a badly executed speed shift. Somewhat disbelieving that someone is actually racing me, I make a smooth speed shift (shifting without using the clutch, allows for less time out of gear) into third to prove my point, pulling ahead before hitting the speed limit and dropping behind for the merge. When I made the shift into third, Mich notice and her head snapped around at me. A very indignant "You've got to be kidding me" followed. Once safely merged, I asked her, innocently, "What?". A conversation ensued about me not racing them as a power thing but as a "He he he, I can make them act stupid kind of thing". I think I did make them look stupid cause they raced on to about 60mph in a 35mph zone. In the past, I've actually caused someone to do that right by a cop. Yay, reckless-op. Mich says I shouldn't mess with people's heads. I think I should. Oh, best part was, it was a blonde girl in a Abercrombie shirt.

So IE must dies, and all its users will go to Purgatory. The amount that IE sucks astounds me. In addition to all the stuff I already knew about how it's insecure and prone to adware/spyware, I have found out that it has this whole other dimension of suckiness in the direction of not supporting standards. The biggest problem is that IE doesn't implement CSS correctly. Specifically, IE ignores a:hover when a javascript is also being triggered from the same action. Even without the JS head-butting, IE will often ignore a:hover if the hover rule doesn't size/location match the rule for A (e.g. a:link { border: none; } a:hover { border: 1px solid white; } I found out that IE also has a few conditions where inheritance is broken. It also doesn't consistently respect the { right: Xpx } rule. To top it all off, Win32 IE also cannot properly display the PNG standard. Win 32 IE won't read the alpha channel in PNGs so you end up with an opaque image rather than a transparent one. Because of that, there is no way to do variable transparency in Win32 IE when it's quite easy to do in browsers based on the Gecko engine or KHTML engine and even in Carbon IE (IE for MacOS 9/MacOS X). Factor in to this that the next update (not patch/bug-fix) to IE will not be until Longhorn (Q4 2005 - projected), and will in fact require you to but Longhorn to get it, and things look pretty bad. All of this together makes me thing I should just brush off the people who come to my site with IE and tell them to go away until they get a better browser. Oh, Aaron, wtf did you need to reload my site 566 times for today?!?!?!

Ironically, IE identifies itself as Mozilla/4.0 because, when it was still a fledgeling browser, it was so bad that many sites wouldn't serve pages to it. Eventually, as complacent Windows users accepted IE, sites had to be written to be broken so that IE could read them. This lead to sites not displaying correctly in browsers that follow the rules. Now we have browsers masquerading as IE to get pages. Isn't there a Greek Tragedy about this?

As one of my previous posts talks about, we had a great party for Michelle's birthday on Sunday afternoon, evening, and night, and some of Monday morning too. It really was nice, everyone was happy, everyone stayed involved, and Mich had a great time. I was very disappointed that Beth didn't come because it was Mich's birthday, and Griffin's last night in town. She had IMed me in the late afternoon saying she was puking and wouldn't be attending. At the time, I felt bad for her. Today, I read her blog and find out she was hungover. This angers me. First, because she made everyone here worry about her being sick (nasty flu season and all). Secondly, because she let alcohol get in the way of her coming to something important. Unfortunately, this comes hard on the heels of a snafu on Friday night. Friday, many people were supposed to gather here for DDR, Karaoke Revolution, and drinking. At 7 Heather and Aaron showed up. No one else did. Frankly, the four of us had a pretty fun night. At about 1am, Beth calls saying she was done with gaming and was considering coming over (this had been the plan all along) and wanted to know if we were drinking. At that point, none of us were, so she said she'd think about it. I told the other the others here what had been said and we sang some more. About 5 minutes later, she calls back and says she and Peter want to come over and get drunk. Upon hearing Peter had been added to the mix, I felt I had to ask everyone else if it was ok because he's not well favored. The girls here decided they shouldn't come over. One of them because she didn't want drunks to deal with, and the other because she didn't want to fess up her booze to people who sounded like they were only coming for the alcohol, not the company. I relayed this information to Beth, and hung up. A few minutes after getting off the phone, it occurred to me that I don't particularly want Peter over here. After The Blonde Cow Incident, Peter got all up in my face about how I was never allowed in his house again, and the proceeded to get all angsty whenever he had to be in the same place as me. Oh, not to mention that right after the Incident, he was part of a little caucus to determine who got Mich when she dumped me. So it occurred to me to wonder why I would allow him into my home. I still can't decide what I really think. For now, I'm operating on the principle that I don't want him around, but I won't deny him the right to come over because I don't want to prevent someone from being able to hang put with their friends. Sigh... The real issue for me is Beth I suppose. I really like her and genuinely enjoy her company. The problem is how easily we piss each other off. Heh, I'm sure this entry is probably going to get me in trouble. It annoys me greatly that I can more easily be friends with. I definitely value her friendship,, but I can't seem to keep things with her on a even keel. I also have a very hard time talking to her about problems between us because she doesn't seem to want to do it. The impression that I get is that when she's upset with me, she doesn't want to work it out, she'd rather just ignore me. Which I find confusing and hope I'm wrong about. Sigh... perhaps it will all work itself out, hopefully with us being friends.

In a terrible profanement of all that is holy, I had to install OS 9 on my laptop today. After nearly a year of being free of anything non-UNIXy, I had to install Classic Mode. For what you ask? The Diablo II LoD installer. I'm so ashamed.

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Bygones -Friday, January 23, 2004 -4:39 am-

In my previous post, I referred to The Blonde Cow Incident. I now regret doing so. It was petty and uncharitable and I'm sorry. Habits die hard. Lately, she's been nice to me, so I'm going to return the courtesy.

I managed to stir up a ruckus by writing some things about Beth. I have a reply written below her comment. It's drama and unless you like poking into other people's lives, there's probably no interest for you in it. What I do want to say about the whole thing is that I think it's a perfectly valid thing for me to write about. This is, at least sometimes, about my life. If I have a problem, it's likely I'll write about it at sometime. In writing about things in my life, I hope to explore them more fully. Writing to you all means I have to understand more fully what I'm thinking. The side effect of this is that you get a little better idea of what's going on in my life and in my mind. If things are going ill between you and I, it'll probably end up here, but before that, I'm going approach you about it.

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And Now for Something Completely Different -Friday, January 23, 2004 -5:14 am-

I fixed the horn on my car today. Well, maybe fixed is too strong of a word. I made it work by other means. Picture this in you head: Battery(+)--->Horn--->Switch--->Battery(-) Anyone with electrical experience see the problem? That's right, the switch is on the ground side of the load. Tell me how fun that was to troubleshoot. The problem seems to be that the wire between Batter(+) and the Horn has broken somewhere I can't get to. Solution? Jumper a new hot wire onto the Horn and resume normal function. Problem? There's a hot wire in there somewhere just waiting to find a ground.

I bought myself a Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 Pro today. I'm taking it back tomorrow. It sinks so much current that it causes the computer to turn off the USB port thinking there's a short. That aint gonna fly. Damn.

cunning

Cunning. Through use of many of life's faculties, you've managed to succeed greatly. It may not seem so to many, but isn't the the point most times? It's only a matter of knowing more then the others, right? I'm scared of people like you, but in the same time, admire the ability to see more then just the big picture; you see yourself in it every time. You survived the end by knowing who to knock down so you got that last spot in the bunker... nicely done.
How would you survive the end of the world?

europe
Which Eddie Izzard line are you?

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Tremors -Monday, January 26, 2004 -4:56 am-

About a week ago I came across a page called Mixmaster. It takes the style from one website and plugs in the content from another. For example, here is what happens when you plug the front page of Slashdot into my blog, or this is my blog piped through the OSU mainpage.

In other news, my bloggage has been lacking because I have been working every night with the computers. First up was getting some decent stats about what you all are doing. After much hating of the manual and finally just reading through the config files, AWStats is giving me all kinds of data about you all. 77% of you use some version of the MacOS, while less than 1% of you run Linux. Firebird is the most popular browser at 65.7% while MSIE (Mac + Win) is a distant second at 24.3%. The plurality of you have your screens set to 1280x1024. The most common entry page is my weblog followed closely by http://www.yahoo.com/, which is strange, cause it's not on this server. So far, only Heather W, He'er, and Alana have linked to my blog.

The second major task has been re-writing the code behind my blog. I wanted to add a third column and was pissed that MSIE wasn't displaying anything properly. Many hours later, I have a layout that shows all the columns to everybody, but MSIE still aligns the top improperly. The other huge benefit is that the page size is less than half what it was when I started my blog and things like cell phones and Lynx can read the page much more easily.

Oh, and I almost died several times today... maybe I'll tell you about it tomorrow.

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The Last Paragraph Will be the Least Boring to Most of You -Tuesday, January 27, 2004 -3:34 am-

So I said the the other day that I almost died several times on Sunday night. The issue was driving Mich over to babysit her cousins and then picking her back up. Of course, Sunday night, Ohio decide to try to get its season's worth of winter weather in. She drove us to the house in Upper Arlington at which she would be babysitting. Going over wasn't too bad. It snowed at a medium rate all the way over and the roads were covered, but not deeply. It took about 25 minutes to get there. She went in and I drove off. Getting back to my house was a little more interesting as the freeway now had about an inch of snow on it and it was coming down hard enough that you couldn't see where the freeway went (get in the left lane and follow the Jersey barrier). The drive back home took about 35 minutes. I waited at home for a couple of hours before prepping the car to go get her. I added 100lbs of sand to the rear of the 4Runner and spent about half an hour getting it warmed enough to start thawing the windshield, getting all the snow off of it (by this time, about 4 inches), and getting fluids in it. I headed off to pick up Mich at about 7:30 or a little before. I should have known it was going to be bad when not 2 miles from home I parked the car completely sideways across the road (still getting used to a locked rear diff). Once on the freeway, things deteriorated rapidly. The first mile wasn't too bad, but it began snowing harder. Soon, it was all I could to to get the car to go 40mph. By this I mean that at 40mph the drag exceeded the traction of the tires and the rear wheels just spun. The other growing problem was the state of the snow. It was beginning to get chewed up into these little dense clumps that reminded me of heavy packing peanuts. They were massive, so as they piled up into ridges and ruts, they really pushed the car around but at the same time there were completely loose so the car didn't have any traction to push back with. In other words, the snow was making the car slide all kinds of crooked and there was little to combat it with. Eventually, the left lane cleared somewhat and driving got saner. Until just before the Livingston Avenue Curve. For some reason known only to go god and McArthur, right on the line in the pavement where it ceases being straight and makes a right hand, downhill turn onto the straight before the L.A.C., There was magically 6 inches of torn up snow stretching forward as far at the eye can see. Let me tell you, you'll never know how strong your bladder is until you've been in a quarter-mile long, 50mph Scandinavian Flick (nose pointed into the turn, butt out of the turn, steering wheel on the lock opposite the turn). Surviving that experience, back down to 30mph it was. At this meager speed I continued up and around the L.A.C and into the Splits. As I crept down the hill to get to the 315 onramp in the Splits, I had to downshift to second, which broke the back end loose. But I couldn't quit slowing it down to gather it back up because if I did, I was never going to make it around the right hand, uphill turn on the ramp itself. So I slithered down the hill all the while wondering if I was going to spin around backwards, slam into the Jersey barrier in the turn, or meet some fate of which I had not conceived. Using every last bit of road, I managed to get around the ramp and up onto 315. Too fast you say? The speedometer says that I was sliding down the hill at about 10mph and turning at about 4mph. Once on 315 I thought I was safe. No. All was well until the packing material from a frozen hell decided I needed to sideswipe the Jersey barrier. The snow started pushing left, and I didn't have enough friction to assert my will to go right. A seeming eternity later, the rut in the snow began to go to the right and along with it, my car. Mind you, I had nothing to do with the not dying there. Finally making it onto Lane Ave., I again mistakenly thought I was safe. The conditions on Lane were bad. Very bad. I felt comfortable doing about 20mph. The peril? Middle-aged yuppie women in all-wheel drive luxury sedans traveling in excess of 40mph. They seemed oblivious of anyone else on the road and of the fact that their car's nervous system was on red alert and locking individual brakes like crazy to keep the nose pointed forward (fancy cars modulate braking while the car is accelerating or travelling at a constant speed to prevent spins). Having twice been run onto the left side of where the double yellow line probably was, I was relieved to turn onto a side street. A few minutes later I slid up into the driveway of the house Mich was at. Total transit time: 1hr 15min. That includes three stops on the freeway to de-ice the wipers and windshield (fuck you -20F proof wiper fluid). During the times when I had the ability to look around, I counted 30 cars in the ditch or otherwise mired along I-70. Thankfully, by the time we headed home, the snow had stopped and I-70 had been plowed down to about an inch of snow. The trip home only took 40 minutes. All in all, I was damned glad to get out of the car when I got home.

Aaron made me feel like a dumbass again today. He's my local encyclopaedia of computers. It took him almost 2 hours to talk me through what I had thought was a simple question. I think much of the problem is that I insist on understanding that he's telling me. If I were content to just blindly paste whatever he sent me, I'm sure it would go quicker. By the end, my websever logs were doing something I found much more productive than merely deleting themselves every week. It sometimes amazes me how much I have learned in the last few months about computers, and how much I have left to learn. The problem is that I have always considered myself to be well educated with respect to computers. However, I am beginning to see that this was only true more than a decade ago. A lot has changed since then and even back then I knew most about the telephone system and other forms of networking (yay DARPA). I now find myself amazingly adrift amongst things actually developed during my lifetime. I'm trying to catch up.

Finally, I have found this, quite possibly one of the coolest shirts ever. It even has a lace up back. Note, both of these images are offsite. I think they're probably work-safe too. Alana tells me this is a snoort, or Snood Shirt. Unfortunately, because of that damn game, I can't give google to cough up info about such a thing. If anyone knows of such things, inform me! I think it's a cool shirt and would like to shoot someone in it.

Speaking of shooting people, I have discovered a great flaw with one of the male rennies. I could only kill him once :(

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Pattern Recognition -Tuesday, January 27, 2004 -5:45 pm-

In the car on the way to school today I was listening the the first CD of UltraDance 02. The song Heaven cam on. What was running through my head? Left left back... right front back... left right left hold... two... three... four... jump!

I used my Big Red S for the first time today. Even though everyone calls it the Big Red S, the S is actually clear. It's really a red circle with an S cut out of the middle. It's roughly equivalent to a central campus B pass at OSU. Funny thing is, the whole lot here would be an A lot if it were at OSU cause it's all so close to the building. Here, it means I'm in the front of the row one row away from the door. It joined my regular DeVry parking sticker in being taped to the back window. Yes, I have stickers taped to the window. I'm sure as soon as I actually stick them permanently to that glass the car will die. By not committing the stickers, I keep my car running.

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Sometimes Life Is wonderful -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -12:06 am-

Normally, I manage to find tangible evidence of evil. Well, today, I found proof of god. Two of my favorite things have met. Finally, Once More With Feeling and The Lord of the Rings are combined into One.

Sung to the tune of Going Through the Motions.

BILBO:
Every single year
The same arrangement
Fireworks and food and beer
But this time I feel
A strange estrangement
Nothing here is real
My departure's near

I don't think he knows
But when I go
This will all be Frodo's
'Cause I've been going through the motions
Walking through the part
The open road is calling to my heart

Soon I'll leave the Shire
To write my opus
But I find I'm wavering
Now I feel desire
To keep my precious -
No, I'll leave the ring

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I Need Y'Alls Help -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -7:10 pm-

Several days ago I recoded the blog for the nth time to use CSS more properly. One of the things I did was to specify all the sizes in em, which is an odd relativistic unit. The em is defined to be the hight of a capital M in the default font and size for your browser. This means the actual size of em is not within my control. The reason this is actually a good thing is that it allows users to set whatever font size they need to see the page easily (try it, the site scales well until the base font size hits about 36pt). I chose .7em for the body font because it makes it about the right size on the three systems I have to test on. I need to know how the font size looks to you. PLEASE add a comment to tell me how you feel about the font size. If need to, you can temporarily change the font size by using View:Increase/Decrease Text Size in Mozilla et al or with View:Text Zoom in Internet Explorer.

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11th Avenue Tryptic -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -11:11 pm-

Alana saw the Night frame of this series in my galleries and wanted one as a desktop picture. While I was at it, I figured I might as well make deskotops of all three. Don't download these unless you mean it, they're not small. They're 1024x768 righ t now, if you really want a different resolution, let me know and we can talk.

Sunset

Twilight

Night

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-Friday, January 30, 2004 -3:02 am-

Rest in Peace

"Let me rest in peace. Let me get some sleep. Let me take my love and bury it in a hole six foot deep. I can lay my body down but I can't find my sweet release. So let me rest in peace."

Which Once More with Feeling Song Are You?

You Are Jesus

You are Jesus Christ. Hey. Good on ya. My obsession with you is demented, to say the least. I'm not one of your followers, but I would follow you anywhere. Sorry about that time I went to church and commented on how hot you were. It was odd and inappropriate.

Which One of My Obsessions Are You?

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The Omnipresent Book Meme -Saturday, January 31, 2004 -7:12 pm-

Well, I saw the Book Meme appearing in other people's blogs and decided to have a go at it. god was the original version badly coded. If you want to take it, save yourself some time and copy the code from mine.

As usual, i've read the ones in bold

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch, George Eliot
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Maerquez
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm, George Orwell
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
The Stand, Stephen King
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
Mort, Terry Pratchett
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
The Magus, John Fowles
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
Perfume, Patrick Sulskind
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Ulysses, James Joyce
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Holes, Louis Sachar
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
Magician, Raymond E Feist
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Katherine, Anya Seton
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K Jerome
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
The Beach, Alex Garland
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Point Blanc, Anthony Horowitz
The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged , Sue Townsend
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Dare Game, Jacqueline Wilson
Bad Girls, Jacqueline Wilson
The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Shogun, James Clavell
The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
Lola Rose, Jacqueline Wilson
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
House Of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Possession, A S Byatt
The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Danny The Champion Of The World, Roald Dahl
East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Girls In Tears, Jacqueline Wilson
Sleepovers, Jacqueline Wilson
All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
It, Stephen King
James And The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
The Green Mile, Stephen King
Papillon, Henri Charriere
Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
Master And Commander, Patrick O'Brian
Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Secrets, Jacqueline Wilson
The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Cross Stitch, Diana Gabaldon
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
River God, Wilbur Smith
Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
The World According To Garp, John Irving
Lorna Doone, R D Blackmore
Girls Out Late, Jacqueline Wilson
The Far Pavilions, M M Kaye
The Witches, Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web, E B White
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
Dustbin Baby, Jacqueline Wilson
Fantastic Mr Fox, Roald Dahl
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Suitcase Kid, Jacqueline Wilson
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
Silas Marner, George Eliot
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Goosebumps, R L Stine
Heidi, Johanna Spyri
Sons And Lovers, D H Lawrence
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Man And Boy, Tony Parsons
The Truth, Terry Pratchett
The War Of The Worlds, H G Wells
The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
The Once And Future King, T H White
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews

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Everything New is Old Again -Sunday, February 01, 2004 -4:52 am-

I've noticed a trend sweeping through the industries of America. It started during the 80's in the recording industry with the advent of CDs. Some bright, money-grubbing devil monkey at one of the major labels had an epiphany and said, "Hey, we've go t all theses old songs and it's easier to re-release them than come up with new stuff!" Soon thereafter, every popular song from the past was coming out on CD. Two decades later, the labels' catalogues are exhausted and the money has stopped flowing. T he industry's response? Send shock troops into the streets wearing tactical gear with RIAA emblazoned in large, yellow letters on the back to sue families on Welfare.

The RIAA was soon joined in this imperialistic drama by the movie industry. The creation of DVD was a huge boon to the MPAA. For a very low cost, movies could be re-released at bargain prices onto DVDs. At $6.00 a pop, it didn't matter if anyone lik ed the movie, people would buy it anyway because it was a "good deal". With the production costs long since recouped, the DVDs were all profit. For slightly larger outlay, the studios could release a DVD with "Special Features" and "Director's Commentar y" for outrageous prices and people would gladly pay for the scenes that were too bad to put into I Know What You Screamed Last Wedding IV. Eventually, the MPAA began to notice that, like the output of the RIAA, their products were increasingly not being bought. The first round of MPAA court cases followed.

Alarmingly, Ford Motors has started down the path clear-cut by the RIAA and the MPAA. Ford's sales are dropping because everyone is realizing that American cars suck. The SUV cash cows have gotten caught in a feature-war that requires R&D, thus negat ing their original economic advantage. The only car in Ford's line turning a profit is the Focus (designed in Europe, by the by). Ford's solution? Re-release popular designs of the past. So far, we have the New Thunderbird, the New Mustang, the New GT -40 (which, admittedly, makes me drool excessively), and recently, the New Shelby Cobra. I expect that before this decade is out we'll see UAW suing drivers for giving their friends rides and letting their kids borrow the car for a hot date.

Somehow, I don't see the computer industry escaping this pattern. I fully expect Windows 3.11 Programmers Build to appear on shelves before the release of Longhorn. Though since Longhorn is expected slightly after the Second Coming, we may h ave some time to get our credit cards ready.

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Sorry I Didn't Make It To The Club... -Sunday, February 01, 2004 -5:37 am-

...I was off practicing electromancy and becoming... well, tired mainly. Mich and I went to take Mary out for a while tonight before I went off to the club for the second night in a row. While we were being deafened at Scottie's, she mentioned that she needed my to come by and install ZoneAlarm. I remembered doing this recently, and I was a bit confused. Turns out she got a new laptop (the lucky bitch). Her new toy is a Sony Vaio PCG-V505DX (Picture). After finishing our drinks, we went back to Mary's house so I could pop her computer's cherry (it had come out of the box and onto the charger and she never booted it, I don't get it). the thing is god damn tiny. I've never felt like my PBG415" was huge before. On a stupid note, the 60GB HDD in it is formatted into a 5GB recovery partition, a 15GB C: and a 35GB D:. WTF is that shit? That's severely stupid with how quickly the system drive bloats. I'm going to have to ask someone how to get the whole My Documents\ tree onto D: without pissing off Windows. On a stupider note, it came with XP Home. I happened to have ZoneAlarm on my thumb so I got that up and running and then worked her through setup and WindowsUpdate. By the time I was done, it was about 2am, and the club was unappealing. I managed to get Mich and myself up off the couch at the same time and we headed home.

With the new month turning over, I was anxious to see how the stats package I'm running would cope. Thankfully, it's stateful and is perfectly ok with the old log files going away. Nicely, it also stores the results by month (with the option to sum them into year) so that the bad data created by setup and testing are now out of the picture. Now, some of you out there are scaring me.

For one, a lot of you are running old versions of Internet Explorer. This is really, really bad. Not patching and upgrading to the most recent version of Internet Explorer is irresponsible, it's the computer equivalent of walking around with waving a sword. Eventually, someone's arm is going to come off. Second, Internet Explorer of any any version has become unsafe. I'm serious this time, this isn't just the typical MS sucks line you hear out of me. If you don't feel like reading the article, it boils down to any website can get Internet Explorer to run any program it feels like on your computer without ever asking you. This is different than the traditional Spyware and Adware in which you had to be stupid and click yes to get infected. With this newly discovered hole, you get infected merely by loading the webpage. Once you've viewed the page, everything is possible. Anything stored on your computer is vulnerable. Banking history, account numbers, your address and other data people can use to steal your identity, your BuckID number, your drivers license number. Anything you've ever typed on into your computer, any personal data (bank account) you've ever viewed on the computer, could be stolen. Or it could just as easily all be erased. Please, please, switch to another web browser. Any other web browser. This is so important I'll even help you do it. I suggest a browser from the Mozilla Project. I, myself, use Mozilla Firebird because it's small, fast, and works well. Netscape and Opera are also options. Just switch, please.

The other reason the statistical results are scaring me is the search terms some of you are using to arrive here. For god's sake, I don't want to know why you were searching for Sawtooth Lap Dance, Duck Tape Party, and Roxy Hart Naked iSight -rugby. If you are responsible for any of this, please seek professional help immediately.

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

That Which Has Passed Behind -Tuesday, February 03, 2004 -3:24 am-

Tonight's The West Wing scared me quite a bit. The major premise of the episode is that C.J. Cregg return home for her highschool reunion to find out that her father is afflicted with Alzheimer's. Watching the people on screen made me think a lot about myself. I don't know how much about my memory most of you actually know, it's mostly a joke now, but really, it's a fairly big problem. I don't think any of you were around when it first started happening. I think it must have been Sophomore or the beginning of Junior year that I noticed things becoming different. I was missing meals and not knowing why I was hungry. I was going to classes that had been canceled or moved and wondering where everyone was. I would do things and not remember with whom I had done them. Two years later, I'm not sure where I am compared to that. That bothers me a great deal. I sometimes thing maybe I'm doing better, but that just makes me wonder if I can no longer remember what it's like not to forget. I know I cover better now. I build little pauses into my life to give me time to try to guess at the parts I'm missing. I phrase retellings and remembrances to avoid being specific about when, or where, or whom. More and more, I is start something, or come into a room, only to find out that I have no idea why I'm there, or what I had wanted to do. I rarely know when it is anymore, and can only decide how long ago something was by literally figuring out when it is now and calculating backwards to find out how much time has actually passed. I'm always unnerved to find that what I thought was a matter of day has in fact been many months.

Over the Christmas break, I went with my parents to see my paternal grandparents. My grandfather has had a series of strokes over the last few years. Watching him, I was... I don't know what the word for being bitter and resigned and depressed and scared all at the same time... to see him making the same little breaks I do to try and make the time he needed so that other people wouldn't know that he couldn't remember. I see that, and I see the tv, and I wonder if that's my future. Am I going to forget all of my life, slowly, and wondering all the while if anything is actually changing? Right now, I'm getting along ok, I think. But how long is it until I begin to forget names, or switch them? I look at my future and wonder if I'm going to be there for it, if I'm going to want Mich to be there for it?

/docs/daylog | 3 writebacks | permanent link

I'm Going To Be Moving... Again -Tuesday, February 03, 2004 -7:30 pm-

It looks like I'm going to be moving again, either in June when my lease is up, or after an extension to make my lease end with Mich's. I really don't want to move again because I have a pretty nice place, lots of room, a basement workshop, nice hardwood floors, and low rent. However, we've found out it's not a safe place to live.

Friday night we ordered pizza. When the driver showed up, he told us that they usually won't deliver to our neighborhood after dark. The reason we got it then was that the girls who took our order had just started working at the pizza place and didn't know. Talking with the driver for a moment, it turned out that there was so much gang activity in the area that they were loosing drivers too often. Great. Then, today as I was leaving, two police cruisers came racing up into our parking lot. I was on my way out, so I didn't do anything about it. Later, Mich came home and found them still there. She talked to one of the officers about what was going on, and crime in our area in general. Turns out they were there arresting someone who had been stealing cars out of our parking lot. The officer recommended that if we could, we should move out to at least SR-256. Great.

So I'm in the housing market again. I'm looking for a 2-3 bedroom townhouse with a full basement and a back porch for around $500-$550 a month in an area with low crime. Anyone have any ideas?

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

I Love the 80's -Thursday, February 05, 2004 -8:16 pm-

So yet another abouse of the meaning of meme. As usual, I've fixed the code so feel free to copy it. Things of which I am guilty are in bold. My commmentary is in italics

You've ever ended a sentence with the word "PSYCHE"
You watched the Pound Puppies so comfy until you get their eyes in your face
You can sing the rap to the "Fresh Prince of Belair" chilling out, maxin, relaxin, shootin some b-ball outside o da school
You wore biker shorts under your skirts and felt stylish
You yearned to be a member of the Baby-sitters club and tried to start a club of your own
You owned those lil Strawberry Shortcake pals scented dolls
You know that "WOAH" comes from Joey on Blossom I can't believe I thought Blossom was hot (I'm so ashamed)
Two words: MC Hammer For shame
If you ever watched "Fraggle Rock" yay for drug induced hippie political commentary with little people making bridges
You had plastic streamers on your handle bars
You can sing the entire theme song to "Duck Tales" *Duck Tales wooo oooo D-d-d-danger lurks behind out there's a stranger out to find you* I still want to know how to swim in coins
When it was actually worth getting up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons I was young, and stupid. Nothing is worth getting up for.
You wore a ponytail on the side of your head
You saw the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" on the big screen Just shove it through the grate!
You got super-excited when it was Oregon Trail day in computer class at school The squirrel had it coming
You made your mom buy one of those clips that would hold your shirt in a knot on the side
You played the game "MASH" (Mansion, Apartment, Shelter, House)
You wore Jordache jean jacket and you were proud of it
LA Gear Stupid, overpriced shoes
You wanted to change your name to "JEM" in Kindergarten
You remember reading "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" and all the Ramona books Dude, Ramona was soo cool!
You know the profound meaning of "WAX ON, WAX OFF" K, Disney, a girl Karate Kid? WTF, mate?
You wanted to be a Goonie
You ever wore fluorescent clothing I was a cyclist, what did you expect?
You can remember what Michael Jackson looked like before his nose fell off /me shudders
You have ever pondered why Smurfette was the only female smurf All your smurf are belong to smurf
You took Lunch Pails to school
You remember the CRAZE, then the BANNING of slap bracelets WTF were they banned for?
You still get the urge to! say "NOT" after every sentence Yup, we abused language a lot in the 80's
You remember Hypercolor t-shirts Dude! Coolest shirts EVER! I want one now.
Barbie and the Rockers was your favorite band
You thought Sheera and He-Man should hook up Incest was such a popular theme in the 80's
You thought your childhood friends would never leave because you exchanged friendship bracelets
You ever owned a pair of Jelly-Shoes
After you saw Pee-Wee's Big Adventure you kept saying "I know you are, but what am I?" Needs to die. All of it.
You remember "I've fallen and I can't get up" I also remember the jokes that refused to die.
You remember going to the skating rink before there were in-line skates
You ever got seriously injured on a Slip and Slide I wonder if that's why I have back problems
You have ever played with a Skip-It And the very best thing of all is the counter on the ball
You had or attended a birthday party at McDonalds And we set off the fire alarm
You've gone through this nodding your head in agreement oops
You remember Popples worst bastardization of Tang ever!
"Don't worry, be happy" Suck it, Rasta boy!
You wore like, EIGHT pairs of socks over tights with high top Reeboks
You wore socks scrunched down Um, dude, that's where they end up by themselves
"Miss MARY MACK MACK MACK, all dressed in BLACK BLACK BLACK"
You remember boom boxes vs cd players And the 42 D-cell batteries
You remember watching both "Gremlins" movies and being terrified
You know what it meant to say "Care Bear Stare!!" Gotta kill those happy bastards
You remember watching Rainbow Bright and My Little Pony Tales" MLPs are such great projectiles
You thought Doogie Howser was hot
You remember Alf, the lil furry brown alien from Melmac Ha!
You remember New Kids on the Block when they were cool They were never cool, I don't know what people were thinking
You knew all the characters names and their life stories on "Saved By the Bell", the ORIGINAL class Kelly and Jessie are fuckin hotties
You know all the words to Bon Jovi - SHOT THRU THE HEART I hate you so much
You just sang those words to yourself Cause now it's stuck in my head
You remember watching Magic vs Bird I had little green and white pom-poms
You cut your t-shirts in half and wore it with your homemade Levi shorts(the shorter the better)
You remember when mullets were cool!
You had a mullet
You still sing "We are the World"
You "pegged" your pants
You just knew Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper would end up together Fugly children though
You know who Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper are What would you do if I sang out of tune
You know what Dan vs Dave means
One word, Atari XBox can suck my shiny Atari ass
"Rock On!" Ahhh... long hair and power ballads

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I Am An Impressive Geek -Saturday, February 07, 2004 -6:47 pm-

For oh so many reasons. First of all, because I thought it would be amusing to take the quiz below. Then, because I knew what the answer meant. Finally, because I as I was pasting the html into my post, I noticed it used a table to lay out the answer and re-wrote the answer form to use good HTML4.01Strict/CSS1 code. It's now half as long and will render correctly in any browser I care about.

What Irrational Number Are You?

You are φ

Of all the irrational numbers, you are considered to be the most beautiful. Those who know you well have called you by many names, all golden. However, most people don't know you by name and probably won't even recognize you by sight, but they do like to see you. Despite your pretty face, you are by no means shallow. You are involved it many things: finance, biology, architecture, art, music, and much more.

In some ways you and e are a nearly perfect match. The power and intensity of e excites you.

Your lucky number is approximately 1.61803399

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There Is a White Flag Upon My Door -Sunday, February 08, 2004 -3:57 am-

I've been househunting since Wednesday last. So far it has been nothing but heartache and trouble. Every place is either too small, too expensive, too dumb, or in too bad of a neighborhood. In the last three days, I've been to about 20 complexes and have yet to find anything I think is a good move. Stone Ridge Crossing (or something like that... I should write an apartment complex name generator... just a list of geological features and verbs-that-are-also-nouns that get randomly assembled), which I stopped at yesterday and was rather excited about turned out to be rather unimpressive. It was small, or at least all the walls were close in so it felt very claustrophobic. All of the other places, save one, that we visited were too small for our needs. We need to come up with a bedroom, two offices, a kitchen/diningroom, living room, and a basement/workshop. We did, however, find one perfect apartment. It was a two bedroom townhouse built into the side of a hill. It had an awesome kitchen with big bar, a huge dining room, a nicely sized den, two bedrooms, a giant livingroom with wet-bar, a basement, and a garage. The failing of this place was its $1100/mo price tag. God damn it.

In a further display of geekiness, I have KDE 3.1 up and running in Xnest. It's pretty cool, there's this whole other GUI just setting around in a 1024x768 window inside of Aqua. I think I might try GNOME next. Hmm... I see a screenshot showing Aqua, Classic, KDE, GNOME, and Win2k running all at once. My other geekly achievement for today was finally spanning the displays on the server with the display on the laptop. What this means is that I plunk down the laptop on the desk under the server's monitors and if I need to work with something on the server, I just push the mouse up off the top of the laptop's screen and the mouse and keyboard for the laptop magically start controlling the server. Keeps me from grabbing the wrong damn mouse when I'm running both the laptop and server at the same time.

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Hit Where I Stand At the Turning of the Years -Sunday, February 08, 2004 -4:52 am-

I'm getting to an age where I'm realizing what good parents I actually have. The downside to this is that I feel like guilty for being such a prick to them for a few years in the middle there. I feel worst about how I was mean to my stepfather because he really is a nice person and he was doing an amazing job considering the difference between how he was raised and how my mom raised me. I'm sure I'll write about this general topic again, but tonight I'm mostly thinking about my dad. There's so much I'm realizing I owe him for. Some of this has been brought on by my own introspection, and some of it by Ann. I few months ago, she commented that one of the reasons she finds me so interesting is that I can actually do things. It took a while for that to actually sink in, but she's right. My dad always had me in the shop with him, or holding the flashlight, or handing him tools as he worked. Heh, there was also this 1940's Popular Mechanics Encyclopaedia of Tools and Uses or something like that that I read through all twelve volumes of while I sat and waited for him to be done with the grinder. While at the time I was mostly glad just to be around him, now, I can't believe what and advantage that has been for me. I watched him do things for himself and watched him figure out the things he'd never done before. Somehow, all of that managed to instill in me a belief that I can learn and do anything. This has be invaluable living on my own. The amount of things that I have fixed, repaired, or replaced in my apartments would keep the maintenance people busy for a month. The other benefit is that I feel... worthwhile when I do something constructive with my hands. Quite a long time ago the little end table I use to put my laptop on broke a leg. It set around for far too long before I fixed it this week. It was really an easy fix, all that was necessary was for it to be taken apart, the mating surfaces on the leg chiseled clean of wood splinters and glue and then it had to be glued and screwed back together. The operation took less than 15 minutes (plus 24 hours curing time for the glue), yet I felt as if I had accomplished more that night than I had in the months previous. I feel the same way about my dining room table, which I made with my dad. I'm often depressed, sometimes severely so, because I don't feel like I'm doing anything, I'm not bringing anything into the world no matter how much I do with the computer or at school. 15 minutes of furniture repair is enough to keep me happy for 2 days. Anyway, I've lost the point of whatever it was I was talking about, so I'm headed to bed.

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Let the Wine of Friendship Never Run Dry -Thursday, February 12, 2004 -4:33 am-

Talking to one of my friends tonight reaffirmed my conviction that I am more than a little odd. The specific dimension of my oddness is, tonight, friendship. For most of my life, I didn't have friends, and certainly I didn't associate with anyone less than 2 decades older than myself. This changed, abruptly, at the end of my Sophomore year of High School when I became mired in Theatre. My Theatre troupe at South was my first experience with having people care about me who weren't obligated to. That is to say, it was the first time I encountered people who liked me for some other reason than that they were family. Theses people that came so suddenly crashing into my life cared deeply about their friends. The environment in which I learned to socialize loved each other more strongly than most families. This love was given without hesitation and reciprocated without obligation. Acceptance was instant and persisted until overwhelming reason to retract it was given. Because of this, I had no concept of friendship without unconditional love and no concept of not becoming instant comrades. Eventually, I moved on to college where I found... nothing (Mich is a special case and not counted amongst the ranks of normal friends). This didn't seem odd to me, after all, for the first 16 years of my life, I hadn't had friends. Then, at the end of my Junior year at OSU, Mich introduced me to the Rennies. At first, it seemed I was home again. Everyone acted open, talked the same talk, had the same flamboyant characters that I knew from Theatre. The rules of friendship I had previously learned in high school came back. As time passed, I came to realize that, for the most part, this similarity was totally superficial. The was the impression of openness, the act of caring, but behind the facade, the was nothing. Again, this is for the most part, there are several exceptions. I became confused, here was a social group who were outwardly similar, who professed to be the same as, the people I had known before, but the soul of the thing wasn't there. Adapting to the new rules, I shed my expectance of true familiarity with anyone. I now had a class friends, and a class acquaintances. I was saddened (and still am) at how small the first class is and how large the second. In the time since then, thankfully, a few people have turned out to be as I first thought they should have been.

Tonight, I was talking with one of those few who are as they should be. Today, she went through something I have far too much familiarity with. I told her that I had been through this too and talked a little about how I had felt, and how I had dealt with it. She told me she appreciated the effort, but that it wasn't the same because it was family. My thought was, "You're right, it wouldn't have been so bad if it had been family." It was in that thought that I realized my difference from other people with respect to friendship. I value the family I earn much more than the family I was born too, and I expect others to do the same. When I am teasing my friends and they claim to be fed up with me, I often say "hey, you love me" and actually expect that they do. This caused much confusion on my part when I did this to another one of my friends and her reply was "no, I don't." At first I thought she was joking, then I realized she meant it. I was hurt and very confused at the time. Now, I get it. Not everyone thinks that having many people whom you love, and whom love you in return, is the greatest aspiration in this life. My friends get this from me until... well, I haven't found an until yet.

/docs/think | 5 writebacks | permanent link

The Web is a Special Place -Thursday, February 12, 2004 -2:41 pm-

This was linked to on a blog I read. It's funny, but only read it if you're not a prude.

/docs/net | 0 writebacks | permanent link

I Had No Idea the Song was About a Drink! -Saturday, February 14, 2004 -11:58 pm-

You're in the Gangster box.

Seductive

Seductive Vampy: You were made to make a grand entrance, from that revealing ensemble to those come hither eyes. You are the sex scene. It's because of you that Goth girls have reputations as being total sex bombs. Go on, you know you're gorgeous and so does everyone else. This makes it a bit hard for your friends not to backstab you, they're so jealous of you aren't they? Your life revolves around what parties/clubs you are going to attend and which sexy new boi you are going to snare. You can dress yourself well, regardless of how much money you have to spend and you always look glamorous. Most people tend to think you are a shallow slut; however there is more going on then they could ever know. You're certainly not stupid. You've realized that life is too short to be chained to one unappreciative guy. You wear your slinky, sheer dress and skirts so that maximum flesh exposure is guaranteed. Your motto is "Catch me if you can"
What is your style of Gothic Beauty?

You're a tequila sunrise
Which cocktail are you?

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Unfathomable Antipathy -Saturday, February 14, 2004 -11:59 pm-

On Friday night, one of my friends suggested I take a look at Jeff's blog because of some of the things he was saying about me. He's not someone I pay any attention to and it took me a while to track down his blog. The then current entry did, in fact, make reference to me. He was talking about everyone going to Kentucky to see Alana. For some reason, it angers him greatly that we all go to see the people in Lexington. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why that would bother him. His comment was, and I'm paraphrasing because i'm off the net right now, "Kentucky parties may lose some of their lustre after Mike goes to grad school and everyone realizes Ty in an insufferable asshole". This confuses me a great deal. First, what in the name of god does Mike and Grad school have to do with Kentucky? He's not the instigating force, how is he responsible for going? Second, I'm not there, how can I have an effect on people going? His continuing point (both in the current post and his other posts that rant about people going to KY) seems to be that there's nothing of any worth in Kentucky other than alcohol and everyone is a bunch of pathetic alcoholics for driving down there. All in all, it was rather surprising to read.

I am continually surprised that he will no express any antipathy directly to me. I have heard from others that he still tells girls they aren't safe alone with me, which is quite a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As far I as know, I have never done anything to him directly nor, as far as I know, have I ever done anything to any of his loved ones. He is in my presence, at most, two to three times a year. I do not think that can possibly be enough exposure for me to begin to grate on him. I am left with conjecture based on other people's descriptions of his personality. Do I upset him because I refuse to submit to the manipulation he doles out to everyone else? Do I anger him because I am not on his approved list and yet socialize with people he believes belong to him? All in all, I cannot believe I can draw such rancor from someone with whom I have little to no interaction.

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Off In the Corner by Myself -Saturday, February 14, 2004 -11:59 pm-

I found a website called The Political Compass. It's an interesting test because it places you on two axes, rather than just Lefr/Right or Liberal/Conservative. For you Americans, Libertarian doesn't mean the Libertarian party in the context of this poll. It simply means someone who is socialy liberal. The questions in this poll are much better than average, some of them are actually difficult to answer. Once you get done with it, take a look at some of the other graphs they show. I find it interesting that all but two of the Democratic party canidates are Right-Authoritarian. No wonder I can't find anyone to vote for. My score was: Economic Left/Right: -7.12, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.56, meaning that I'm a liberal freak way out there beyond Gandi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.

My Political Compass Results
Take the Compass

/docs/quizzes | 3 writebacks | permanent link

Philosophy is the Talk on a Cereal Box -Monday, February 16, 2004 -6:05 pm-

Beth and I were, as usual, arguing today. This time it was based on The Political Compass thing I blogged about earlier. As usual, we didn't get anywhere with it and failed to do anything other than, well, nothing. She blogged the text of our IM conversation, so I'm not going to repeat it. It amazes me what the two of us get into. I start taking up astoundingly hard line positions that, while actually reflecting what I do believe in, are more extreme than I am (which is hard to do, mind you). I do believe that your morality and your attempts to follow it are what make you a good or bad person. However, I'm not going to personally condemn someone for having an idea I don't like. If they started enforcing that idea on others, well, then we're gonna have a rumble. I also think I stated my position on charity wrong. I don't think people should feel obligated to give to others, I think that the desire to give should be intrinsic.

I keep flipping back and forth on what the source of morality is. I definitely believe that a moral system stems from something other than a god. A moral system can be derived in the absence of religion and because the god/insert-random-holy-book-foo says so is not a valid basis for a moral system. I also totally disagree with Absolute Moral Relativism because it can be used to justify things such a slavery and genocide. I think this leads me to the conclusion that there is some absolute moral standard. Saying that makes me very uncomfortable because it means there's a possibility for condemning other people and restricting their freedom. At the same time, there has to be something that clearly says, "Bad despot! No biscuit!" when someone starts killing all the people who butter the toast on the top. I'm left with the desire to come down hard on those who infringe upon the rights of others and not knowing if thinking that way make me one of them. This is definitely, for me, an unsettled, and unsettling, issue.

/docs/think | 10 writebacks | permanent link

An Amazing Hack -Tuesday, February 17, 2004 -2:22 am-

This is, without a doubt, the most amazing ASCII Art I've ever seen. I've pulled a pic of the hottest person in LotR and placed it here. BE CAREFUL, the file is HUGE and rendering will rain down firey death on your CPU. If you want to see more go here (warning NOT work safe). Wow, just wow.

/docs/net | 0 writebacks | permanent link

All Your Uterus Are Belong to Ashcroft -Tuesday, February 17, 2004 -9:09 pm-

Every time I think I've head the most astounding thing yet from our Federal Government, they do something I couldn't even have imagined. A while back, the Fed passed The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which has the interesting effect of making it a Federal offense for a doctor to perform a partial-birth abortion when it's the only way to save a woman's life. There's been a temporary injunction against the enforcement of the law, and a set of doctors is suing the Fed to have the law revoked. The Justice Department, at the direction of the much reviled John Ashcroft, has subpoenaed the medical records of hundreds of people who have had such abortions to determine whether the procedures were medically necessary "or if it was just the doctor's preference to perform the procedure." Obviously, this is a violation of the Doctor-Patient Privilege. Ashcroft had this to say in reply:

"There is no federal common law protecting physician-patient privilege. In light of modern medical practice... individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential."

Everyone got their torches and pitchforks ready?

/docs/world | 3 writebacks | permanent link

1. Offend the Religious Right ... 3. Profit!!!!! -Thursday, February 19, 2004 -4:12 am-

One of the very few non-infomercials on in the middle of the night is Wild On. I have no idea what the alleged topic was (does it really matter?). The thing that I was struck by is how amazingly rich porn publishers are. It didn't really strike me until I realized that most of these publishers only have one, or at most two, products in the market (i.e. a magazine, or a magazine and a website, or a line of videos). Most of the big time mainstream publishers have dozens of publications in markets all over the world. Yet the porn magnates are still raking in big dollars. This rather implies that A LOT of porn is being sold somewhere. In America, at least, everyone claims not to have bought porn (yes, I know some of you reading this are exceptions). Obviously, a huge percentage of people are buying porn. Or one rich, lonely man is going crazy. Somewhere between our nationally professed morality and our economic reality, there's a huge disparity. Why don't people grow up, join the 21st century, and get the hell over it?

/docs/think | 1 writeback | permanent link

The String Cheese Incident -Friday, February 20, 2004 -5:00 am-

Mich got us a Jumbo-Mega-Pan-Asia-Industrial-Kitchen-sized pack of Meijer brand string cheese. Lacking anything better to eat tonight, I had one. As I opened the damn thing, I was struck by something so funny that I couldn't eat the thing for a while. They're packaged just like surgical instruments. Heat-sealed plastic blister packs that one side peels back from via this little unstuck bit at one end. For some reason, opening cheese like it was a syringe just set me off. I'm better now, I promise.

I spent a lot of time wondering around the web today. Mostly looking at design issues as they relate to the web. There's some pretty stuff out there. I'm trying to decide if I like my layout as it is now or if something more adorned needs to happen. I'm normally much against adornment, but there's some really impressive stuff out there that I know how to do now. One decision I came to is that I'm going to quit supporting Internet Explorer in all its forms. This is a bit of a move because 65% of the hits on my site are from Internet Explorer. The next 34% are from one of the browsers based either on the Gecko engine or on the KHTML engine (means they render correctly and equally). However, Internet Explorer 6 still doesn't support some of the standards in CSS1 and hasn't made any move to support any of the standards in CSS2. The Gecko and KHTML based browsers have full CSS1 support and damned impressive CSS2 support. Internet Explorer is holding back the advancement of the web and that won't (according to Microsoft) change until Longhorn (slightly after the second coming of Christ). I'm moving forward, much of the rest of the web is too. Perhaps people will start to notice that their Internet Explorer isn't doing all the pretty, fancy stuff they see on other computers and get with the program. Probably not, but I don't give a damn. One of the things I came across was this hilarious description of working with Linux. This guy is a programmer for Opera, on the W3C CSS2.1 Working Group, and a member of the Mozilla Foundation and he still stumbles around with package dependencies like I do. I believe there is no hope.

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

And the Herd Thunders -Friday, February 20, 2004 -8:07 pm-

Dude, WTF is up with the mass exodus of people to LJ? LJ sucks, Xanga sucks, blog-city doesn't want anyone to see your blog, and... well, what's all the shuffling about for? Especially to LJ, which requires you to have an LJ account before you can leave a comment? Grrrrr

/docs/net | 4 writebacks | permanent link

More Quizzes -Saturday, February 21, 2004 -3:53 am-

Check out my Morality! 78% liberal, 22% conservative

Canadian Flag
You're Canada!

People make fun of you a lot, but they're stupid because you've got a much better life than they do. In fact, they're probably just jealous. You believe in crazy things like human rights and health care and not dying in the streets, and you end up securing these rights for yourself and others. If it weren't for your weird affection for ice hockey, you'd be the perfect person.

Take the Country Quiz

You are Schroeder!

Which Peanuts Character are You?

You're Element is Flame.
fire

You have a strong, independent, fiery personality and you obviously don't ley other's push you around. You like being in charge and don't care what other people think. In fact, you like to stand out and be yourself. You're probably shy when people first meet you but your a ball of energy that could explode at any given moment. You like to laugh and whether you admit it or not, you like to fight. You're personality that is wild and untamable. You're beauty is physically fit and a little sexy and you have a very pretty face.

What's Your Element?

Tramp Bear

Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You?

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Colophon -Saturday, February 21, 2004 -4:13 am-

As I'm sure you've noticed, I've made some changes to the blog. To produce what you see now (and the more radical restyling that moves the columns around that you might see next week), I didn't have to change a single character of HTML (or in this case XHTML cause I'm with the standards an shit). All of the styling is done it a separate CSS stylesheet that doesn't influence the code at all. The typeface used is Times New Roman (it was Verdana, btw) set to 1.0em. If you don't like the font size, change it because it's not under my control. Yes, that's right, it's you, not me, that gets to control the size of the text. The rest of the page is designed to not break regardless of what you do to the text size, so have at. To those unfortunates among you who are running Windows, I'm sorry. This is my first layout that looks VASTLY better on MacOS than on Windows. I was not aware before tonight that there is a big difference in the way MacOS and Windows handle fonts, but there is. The colors are also coming out much muddier on Windows. I have no idea why. Finally, IE draws a fugly looking border around the boxes, whereas Mozilla is doing a nice, clean, double line. Oh, even more finally, MacIE is a bitch and doesn't collapse horizontal margins, so the few of you running MacIE might see some boxes on top of each other. Get a different browser.

At this point, I'm soliciting comments about the styling. Do you like it more or less than the old, gray way? Is there anything you'd like me to change? Anything you'd like to see? Let me know!

/docs/computers | 1 writeback | permanent link

Nearly Swallowed the Car Whole -Sunday, February 22, 2004 -5:53 am-

Today was interesting. I had to get up in the middle of the night to go help Heather move. Oiy, that sucked. I was asleep for all of about 2 hours. We got there late, and the truck was in the process of being unloaded at Heather's Parents' house. Quick work of it was made, and then we took the last bit to Aaron's place. Both of the son-to-be-newlyweds were ecstatic. We had a pizza lunch and then Slave Master Mike called them off to Madrigal practice.

Mich and I went home to sleep while everyone was off practicing at merrymaking. We cam back over that evening to meet Heather and Mary at the Caribou Coffee on Lane for First Dinner. It was fun hanging out with them, though I was a bit scared when they both readily agreed they'd sell their soul for mint mocha. The four of us then went to the Glee Club concert. Unlike normal, this time it was the Men's and Women's. The God Squad (Women's) came out first and sang the word "Hallelujah" for twenty minutes, and not well for most of that. Then there was a bit with a drum and random saxophone. Finally, after a fake intermission that had the Men's ready to storm the stage, the girls finished by announcing that they felt sorry for men. The Men's stomped their way down to the stage as usual. It always amazes me how much better the acoustic at Weigel in the house than on stage. They need to give the concert from the aisles. They did the usual stuff and sounded usually good doing it.

After the concert, and more bashing of the God Squad, Mike and Aaron decided to go to Mac's Cafe. Four became eight, became 10, ended at twelve. Mac's was a bit annoyed that we hogged three of their tables, but they seemed ok once we spent more than $200. We sat around for two hours eating and yelling, in which time Michele L left home, drove to Mac's orbited for parking, gave up, and went home. We found this out after she'd gotten back home. After Mac's we moved to Aaron's place, which is a zoo with that many people in his living room. At Aaron's we... well, I don't think we did a damn thing. several people fell asleep. Mich cause Mary to disobey the laws of Physics in an attempt to get away from me (she changed position by about four feet without traveling through the intervening space). Mich now feels bad that she chased Mary away from me because she was trying to tease me, not make Mary move. Once more than half the people were sleeping, or trying to, we finally broke up for the evening. It was a good day.

I've been sucked back in. After getting home, I installed Blender. Modeling always eats up vast quantities of my life. I'm hoping to get through finals week before I get to into it. Eck, speaking of school... This weekend really should have been spent doing nothing other than schoolwork. I have most of the quarter's work left to do and it starts coming sue on Tuesday. Gulp. And we're supposed to have a visitor in tomorrow and possibly Monday. I hope I don't fail more than one of my classes. Well, it's frelling late and I'm not saying anything anyone's going to want to read. Bye.

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

What the Fuck? -Sunday, February 22, 2004 -10:18 pm-

Mich and I usually get along fairly well, understand each other, communicate, all that bullshit. However, sometimes, she just fucking pisses me off. Griffon was in town tonight and we went with him to HBM's to watch movies. They were showing Underworld first, which Mich and I had seen. While I was watching the movie, I was, as usual, online talking to people. I got ahold of Mary and told her what was going on. I offered to pick her up and bring her over, and she accepted. I put my shoes on and Mich came back into the room. She announced that if I was going out, I had to take her home first. She wanted to hang out with people, not be shushed while a movie was on (which I can understand). I told her there was no way I was taking her home, coming back, hanging out, then driving home again. It was fucking stupid to add an hour and a half to my drive time for the night, not to mention a waste of money. She insisted that I take her home. I call Mary, tell her no one is coming for her (she sounded a little upset about it, which didn't make me feel any better) and then leave with Mich. We get home, and I sit down in the livingroom. She asks me if I'm going back. I told her before we left HBM's that she was ending both our nights, why the fuck does she act surprised when I stay home? She said she wasn't really excited about hanging out with people tonight because she'd had a bad day (she's tutoring my mother in Spanish) and only went because Griffon was here. Why the hell couldn't she have told me before we left so I could have driven my own god damn car?

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

Gray Tuesday -Tuesday, February 24, 2004 -5:06 pm-

The change in the blog colors is for Gray Tuesday. Fuck EMI, fuck the Beatles, and fuck Eminem.

/docs/media | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Well Then -Tuesday, February 24, 2004 -5:26 pm-

Over the past few days, there's been someone IMing me whom I thought I didn't know. I was confused because the addressed me by name. Turns out, it was a friend of mine from high school. AIM had kept her screen name and buddy list through the four years during which she didn't have a computer. Recently, a friend loaned her a laptop. Hence the calling out of the blue. It's so odd to hear from her again. Long unused subroutines are being called back into action. She was someone I cared about greatly but who had to be handled quite carefully. She was, is I suppose, very different from all my other friends and I had to modify my behavior around her. It'll be interesting to see if I can be friends with her now without scarring her. The other thing I had forgotten about her was her body image issues. She's one of those people who is freakin gorgeous and thinks she's ugly. In an interesting twist, this is completely her mom's fault. It still boggles me. She's one of those lucky girls who can play with the boys and look hot when sweaty and dirty and then clean up and look fucking gorgeous in a ball gown. Grrr for people not listening to reason!

I have no idea why the other night got me in such a tiz, it was odd and pointless. Sigh. Oh, well.

/docs/daylog | 0 writebacks | permanent link

The Incestuous Circle Remains Unbroken -Wednesday, February 25, 2004 -6:31 am-

I am scared/amazed/not surprised. I was sucked in to OKCupid tonight. After answering all 928 currently available questions, the first eleven matches are all local rennies. God save us all. I see some of you have pretty poor pictures up. If you want to improve that, let me know.

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Yay, I Like This Season -Wednesday, February 25, 2004 -9:55 pm-

season 03
Season Three - A lot of people say that you're the best, and who could really argue - you're pretty, witty, and you've got one of Buffy's best adversaries: the Mayor. Pound for pound, you're why so many people love Buffy.

Which Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Are You?

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

sudo rm -rf /Library/WebServer/* -Friday, February 27, 2004 -4:14 am-

Messed up a backup, wiped the drive. Trying to figure out what to do about it. This is sort-of backup from the laptop. Don't expect anything new from me till it's all fixed.

/docs/computers | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Derf! -Saturday, February 28, 2004 -6:51 pm-

derf'

1. The sound a of a dry, yet still pliable, brain running into a solid concept

I've been fighting with this whole webserver thing for a while, with dramatic results yesterday. UNIX divides, for the purposes of file permissions, the world up into three classes of people. The (u)ser who owns the file, the (g)roup the file is assigned to, and any (o)ther person. To each of these classes or people, you can assign a combination of the three permissions of (w)rite, (r)ead, and e(x)cute. You tell the computer how you'd like this done with cute little statements like ug+rwx (ignore the number method for now). The previous statement would have given the user who owns the file and everyone in his group the ability to read, write, and execute the file. That's just background for the problem I've been having. All of the files for my webserver are supposed to belong to the user www who is a member of group staff. To make things a little more secure, it would be nice if any random user on my system couldn't just root around at will in the webserver, so I set all the files to be ug+rwx o-rwx, which should have allowed the webserver and I to merrily work with the files whilst keeping them safe from the grubby hands of a mere user. Problem was, it locked me out too. Grrr...

Off I go, rooting through the cold and heartless realm of NetInfo. It turns out that even though I'm the owner of the box and an Administrator, am, in fact, not a member of group staff. After serious perusal of man files, I find out how to add myself to staff. Done and done. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. I was still locked out of the files of group staff. WTF, mate?. Three days later, I had an epiphany.

You have to log out and back in for the changes to the NetInfo Database to take effect.

Derf!

/docs/computers | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Pastime With Good Company -Sunday, February 29, 2004 -5:10 pm-

Yesterday, at the very end of a long day, we went to the Madrigal Cast Party. Er, no, not the Cast Party, cause youngins can't drink at an official Cast Party. It was merely a Party at which the Cast happened to be. And they sung a lot, which was odd. Anyway, we went to a party. It was pretty cool. When we first got there, everyone was sedentary and quiet. Then they managed to get enough booze into themselves to come alive. Eventually, the kitchen got noisy enough that I had to go in to see what was happening.

For some completely unfathomable reason, it has been decided that in the girls' kitchen, everyone's ass is fair game. The ass-fest was kicked off my Heather, He'er, and Mary having a giggly little circle-slap. They are very confusing girls. Later, as I was standing by the end of the counter, I completely broke Mary. Kelly tried to walk by the bench (oi, the bench...) and someone smacked her ass. Her ass happened to be within my field of view and I was rather impressed how sexily it jiggled upon impact. I said, "Kelly, I hope you don't mind me saying so, but your ass jiggles really sexily." Mary screeched and fell to the floor laughing (Mary == VERY tipsy). Then everyone else had to look at Kelly's ass as they smacked it.

The next to fall was Dave. Mike and Aaron were on about something, and someone asked for someone to get them started on another topic. Being a civic minded person, I said, "Hey Mike, what about Dead Babies?" Mike and Aaron promptly launched into the Liturgy of Dead Babies. Actually, I'm not sure if I want liturgy or litany in that case. Four or five psalms in, I hear this odd whining, choking sound from my right. It's Dave, laughing so hard he can neither stand nor speak. His response, "Let's set things on fire!" After the entire party raced out into the back yard, it turned out he was just a tease. He had given away all his fire. Once back inside, the jokes got worse. I was a bit worried because we were all standing so close. I was afraid that when one was struck down by god, we'd all be collateral damage. The joking took an ugly turn with Mike's Pizza/Scream joke (of course, he was to much of a pansy to tell it, so I did it for him, even though he had merrily told it in the past) and then it devolved into an odd sprinkler joke.

There were a lot of people there I didn't know. One of whom was a interesting girl in a black tank top. Speaking of the top, she was in desperate need of not bending over that far in that shirt, cause DAMN. :) Thanks whomever you are! Anyway, I found her instantly appealing for some reason I could not immediately figure out. Much later, it came to me. She's a Thespian. I was recognizing in her a behavior pattern I found comforting. I need more Theatre people in my life. :(

Then, all of a sudden, everyone bailed on the party. It was like rats from a sinking ship. You would have thought the booze had run out (it hadn't). We had to cart Aaron's drunken ass home. As we were driving down Kenny, Aaron says:

"Ohhh!!! I can see the stars!!! Well, ok, one star. It should be the North Star, but that's not very North."

"Ohhhh!! I can see the speedometer!

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

All Mixed Up -Tuesday, March 02, 2004 -6:25 am-

You're all invited to bring music over because I am finally happy (at least for the moment) with my stereo. Last night I built speaker stand-ish things that have made a world of difference. Basically, all they are is a open-topped, open-bottomed box with 50lbs of sand inside. The speaker sets directly on the sand and the sand sets directly on the floor. All the box does is keep the bag of sand from bursting. They're only prototypes, of course. The next revision is going to be twice as tall (you have to set on the floor to get in the sweet spot right now) and a little more than twice as heavy. For a seven dollar investment in parts, it certainly blows away $1000 spend on electronics. Come listen!

I was thinking about some things today with the intent of blogging, only to find that Kuro5hin had beat me to it. I'm going to blather anyway. I'm sure it surprises none of you to learn that I oppose the possibility of a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage to be just one man with just one woman. What will likely surprise many of you is why. In the specific, limited context of a Constitutional Amendment, I don't find the my beliefs about the rights of gays to marry relevant. To clarify, I don't care that the amendment would do something immoral. What upsets me is the direction? polarity? of the proposed amendment. Looking at the words and actions of the Framers, Constitutional Amendments are meant for two things only. The must either fix a problem with the operation of the government (see Amendments XII, XVI, XVII, XXII, etc) or secure to the People a right (see Amendments I through IX [with the exception of III, cause III is dumb], XIII, XV, XIX, etc.). The one time the country broke this ideal (e.g. Amendment XVIII), organized crime thrived, the economy suffered, and most of the People were criminals. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plague of frogs in there too. This oversight was corrected swiftly (on a governmental timeline). To me, the fact that the proposed amendment would deny rights to a group of people is the key point. It doesn't matter who is being excluded, or why, or from what. Words obstructing the rights of the people have no place in our Constitution. Laws, however, are a different matter. I strongly oppose any and all laws defining marriage as only one man and only one woman on moral grounds. To deny to others rights you yourself enjoy (with the noted exception of the criminal justice system) is immoral. Interestingly, there are some conservative Republicans starting to make oppositional statements based on this same logic (well, the don't want gay's to marry, but the agree with me about the Amendment).

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

Scaring the Danes -Wednesday, March 03, 2004 -5:15 am-

I fenced tonight for the first time in quite a while. That was seven hours ago and I've almost got the feeling in my thumb back. Obviously, all the equipment I was using was borrowed. The jacket wouldn't zip, the glove wouldn't go most of the way on, and the grip was several sizes too small. The end result was the grip pressing on a nerve bundle in my hand somewhere and my thumb going numb. Only the tip of it is tingly now, but the space bar is still interesting. It was kind of odd to be playing at combat in the Lane Lounge in the Ohio Union. We drew lots of odd looks. I saw sabre for the first time tonight. God damn, that's a weird thing to do. It amounts to two people rushing at each other, swinging their swords, creating a thunking sound, and a Director claiming only on of them really hit the other. Definitely not for me. I think epee is the only form I'll ever bother with, because the rest of them have rules about where you can hit, and when you can hit, and other random, insufferably French ideas. Considering it's origin, I'm surprised there isn't a procedure for surrendering in fencing.

When I got home, I started scanning negatives, as I do almost every night. Tonight, I started to scan my first large format negative. Oi. 4x5 inches of film is a lot to scan! The file starts at 568MB. Think about that for a second. That means I can write one file per CD! For the black and white ones, the mode can be changed to grayscale, resulting in a filesize of 158MB. The scanner takes about 35 minutes to get the data off the film and put it into the computer. The computer then takes another 5 minutes to assimilate the data and display it to the screen. Writing out the file to disk takes about 3 minutes. Setting levels takes however long it takes, and then about 2 minutes to preform the calculations on the data. Then another 3 minutes to write out the modified file. Then comes the removal of dust and scratches. The time taken for that obviously varies greatly depending on how clean the negative is. I scanned a negative tonight that was in excellent minus or excellent condition. I worked for 90 minutes on it before my eyes gave up. I'm about half way done with it. I'm thinking I'm going to get one of these (if that) done a day. I have more than twenty of them to do.

Stay tuned tomorrow. If I remember to get my ass out the door before sunset, I'm going to take picture of something that will hurt all your heads or make you laugh or maybe both.

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

Your Taxdollars at Work -Wednesday, March 03, 2004 -4:54 pm-

Several months ago, the goverment decided to annoy the living crap out of us by installing a bunch of speedbumps and odd little platform thingies in the middle of intersections. A week or two later, they came back to texture and pain the little platforms to look like brickwork. Yesterday, they came back. Apparrently, someone, somewhere, decided that small changes in elevation confuse the hell out of drivers and cause them to get lost. Their solution? Arrows!

You know, just in case that double yellow line doesn't mean anything, there's arrows now to help.

/docs/world | 2 writebacks | permanent link

No Title -Friday, March 05, 2004 -4:41 am-

Today was fun. As soon as I got up, I had an IM from Mary saying she was done with school several hours early. I boldly made my way through amazingly bad traffic (took me almost an hour to get there) and met Mich at Mary's place. The three of us headed off to Polaris mall for no real reason. We walked around for a good while, just wasting time. Eventually we wondered into Hot Topic. When did Hot Topic go goth? Hell, when did goth go mainstream? Last time I was in a Hot Topic (admittedly about a decade ago), it was a lot like a Claire's. Not anymore. Anyway, they were playing some great music. So good, in fact, that I bought the CD. You all must check out Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. You won't believe it. After Polaris, we went to Westerville to Pasqualie's to eat. I think the girl's beat up on me throughout the entire meal. After dinner, we tried to go to Barnes and Noble at the Lennox. On the way there, one of Michelle and my friends from Junior year called me absolutely frantic because he computer was cracked out and she was going to have to reinstall Windows and had things due the next day. I tried to work it out with her over the phone, but it was going nowhere fast because her install of ME was so fucked that it wouldn't fileshare. I dropped the girls at Mary's house and went over to back up her data to my laptop so she could wipe the drive. By the time I got over there, they had figured out they could use AIM to backup her HDD (pretty clever, actually). Once the backup was done, I walked her through getting XP installed. She was in the never-ending hell of Windows Update when I left. Amazingly, while XP was installing, she asked me if there were anything better than Internet Explorer. I smiled, much like the cat that ate the canary, and told her about Firefox. Yay. Oh, and when I came out, I was parked in. Took me 30 minutes to get free. Guess how happy I was after fucking with Windows and then getting trapped. I rejoined the girls and we hung out at Mary's for several hours.

The Windowsness leads me to the conclusion that I am following Aaron and dropping support for all versions of Windows. I will spend whatever time it takes to work with you to get a fully functional Linux or BSD system on your existing hardware, or help you come up with a Mac to run OS X on. Don't bother me with Windows. Of course I'll still answer a quick question or help you migrate away from IE or whatnot. But no more reinstalls or severe troubleshooting! If you want my help, don't make my job harder!

My appreciation for Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine andMe First and the Gimme Gimmes, as well as many of the other things of that sort, make me wonder about my sense of humor. It seems I find most funny that which contains the antithesis to itself, or at least a surprising twist. I think this is why I find puns so amusing, the tweak the English language. I dunno, random early morning musing. Speaking of early morning, Owen was writing about sunrises for several weeks. I always found it amusing that the sunrises he was getting up to see were the same ones I went to be just after. A Jackie Chan movie I had never seen was just on. It was called Thunderbolt. While it ended with some of the most comically bad racing sequences I have ever seen, the main fight sequence was out of this world. Jackie fights a large number of men in a casino/pachinko palace. There's bits with trampoline-like decorations and tens of thousands of little silver balls that just astound me.

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Unexpected Downtime -Friday, March 05, 2004 -1:30 pm-

Well, it's been more than an hour since I've had electricity, and still no AEP truck in sight. I'm assuming that means I will not outlast the outage. I expect to be going down sometime within the next 30 minutes. See you all when power is restored.

/docs/computers | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Damn, Yo -Sunday, March 07, 2004 -2:35 am-

I caught my first episode of Tripping the Rift tonight. The word Michelle and I came up with for a summation was "Wow". It's... special. On the surface, it is crass and sexual, slightly deeper, it is crass and sexual in twisted ways, even lower than that, it is witty, scathing, and sarcastic. It was funny over all, carried along by moments of disbelief at delivered lines. I don't know, she's probably off doing something religious, like bombing an abortion clinic. The major premise of the episode was the nature of the creation of the universe and the necessity of god. I'm not sure if the writers wanted god to be necessary or not. Throughout the majority of the show, they seemed to be adamant that god was the universal source of strife. In the end, they decided they needed to go back in time and not kill god because he was the source of morality. However, they were so sarcastic about the whole thing, that I'm not sure what they actually believe. It definitely earned itself another watching. The android's breasts scare me. Think NASA footage of water blobs in zero-g. /me shudders.

Go on, watch it.

In other news, the Michell?es, Mary, and I went to see Mona Lisa Smile. It was an interesting movie. Sort of a Dead Poet's Society or The Emperor's Club for girls. It was moderately good, not stunning, but worth the price of admission. I was, however, disappointed by Julia Robert's performance. Normally, I quite lover her acting. Tonight I was left a bit cold. Eh.

/docs/media | 1 writeback | permanent link

Inta-Stella Blogga -Monday, March 08, 2004 -2:58 pm-

So this blogging thing thing is WAY out of control. Go read Spirit and Oppertunity.

/docs/net | 0 writebacks | permanent link

We Will Fight for our Bovine Freedom! -Tuesday, March 09, 2004 -1:44 am-

I found this today. I thought it was merely funny. However, someone very smart (Mary) told me it's actually a political commentary piece on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Avian Influenza (H5N1), both of which have recently been found in America. Avian Influenza can be transmitted to humans and is fatal in about 33% of cases. It is not known if BSE can directly infect humans, though it is possible that the recently discovered Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is potentially caused by exposure to BSE.

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More Quizzes -Thursday, March 11, 2004 -1:10 am-

quiz result
What Classic Movie Are You?

quiz result
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Enneagram Test Results
Type 1	Perfectionism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	44%
Type 2	Helpfulness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	73%
Type 3	Image Focus	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	54%
Type 4	Hypersensitivity	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	38%
Type 5	Detachment	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	37%
Type 6	Anxiety	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	69%
Type 7	Adventurousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	75%
Type 8	Aggressiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	76%
Type 9	Calmness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	46%

Your Conscious-Surface type is 8w7
Your Unconscious-Overall type is 8w7
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

It's All Happening -Saturday, March 13, 2004 -2:26 am-

Well, all sorts of goings on in the last few days. It started Wednesday with my COMP217 class. The class is supposed to be Introduction to the UNIX Operating System and C++ Programming. It's being taught on Windows. This seems to be because Microsoft provides free software to DeVry and it's students. Part of the contract for this software apparently decrees that DeVry students can't have direct access to a computer running anything other than Windows. So we're learning UNIX through Windows. Right. This is being facilitated through the most excellent PuTTY, otherwise known as the best program for Windows ever. We log into Windows, fire up PuTTY, and ssh into the Sun box on campus. Right. In bigger and better news, the Sun box can't be sshed into from off campus because Open ports are a security risk. I can't believe I'm saying this, but OSU's IT department is SOOOO much better than the one at DeVry. Anyway, 2 hours of lecture drip by. It's amazingly painful to sit through. I spend most of my time chatting with other people online. Then there was lab... Imagine you trained a large, but finite, number of monkeys to drive elephants. But you only trained them to turn left. And the elephants were cranky and would only move at full stampede. And then you let them loose in downtown London during lunch hour. That would be a mere shadow of the charlie foxtrot that was lab. There are 45 students in my class. A lab section gets 2 FAs (Faculty Assistants, DeVry's name for TAs) and there was also the prof. Out of all of those people, precisely 2 of us had ever touched UNIX before. Me and the professor. Most of it was tragic. People dropping like flies, giving up left and right, banging things around, but the was one shining moment of wonderfulness. There was a boy who noticed my laptop when I first came in to lecture and started making fun me for owning an Apple. All throughout lecture, he asked stupid, pointless questions just to prove that he knew more than the rest of us. In lab, I made him wait for my help. He didn't know how to quit out of the text editor we were using (VI). My response? Oh, just hit Esc : w q. Wait, I thought you said you knew how to use computers? Is this your first time using a real OS? Huh, you don't look like a Script Kiddie Actually, he did look quite like a Script Kiddie and I suspect he is. Two hours of carnage later, it was all over except for the crying. I had high hopes for this class, but now I'm not so sure. The worst part is that it's one of those New Wave 80's labs where the terminals are set down into the tables, so you constantly staring at you feet to see the screen.

Thursday, I woke up sick. Blah. I missed all my classes, which is bad, because for two of them it was the first meeting. I spent the day wondering what I had done to deserve the way I was feeling. Eventually, I tried to install FreeBSD on the textbook of a laptop I recovered from my parents. It's an old HP OmniBook 5700CT. It barely runs Win98SE and 2k is out of the question. Owing to how slow it is with 98SE and the fact that I wanted something more secure, FreeBSD seemed like a great choice. Until it kernel panicked while the kernel was still trying to load. Then I tried Mandrake 10.0, which doesn't have the driver for my CD-ROM drive on it's boot floppy. It asked for the Additional Drivers Floppy. This is confusing, because there is no Additional Drivers Floppy in the distribution and there's no mention of this disk anywhere that Google knows about. Grr on the dumbassed laptop. I want a real OS damn it!

Today, I missed all my classes again because I could not breathe well enough to sleep for most of the night. This means there are two classes of which I have missed the entire first week and two classes of which I have missed half the first week. Shit, shit, shit, this term I was supposed to do better. Sigh. On a positive note, my calibration hardware and software arrived. Michelle got me a ColorVision SpyderPRO with OptiCAL and ProfilerPLUS. The Spyder and its software allow me to properly calibrate LCDs and CRTs. This means the colors the monitor is showing are really the ones the computer thinks it's showing. ProfilerPLUS allows me to calibrate output devices like printers. This means the colors showing up on the print match exactly what's on the screen. Ah, joyfulness. The major disaster turned out to be the main monitor on my server. It's maximum luminance is only 53cd/m^2. The minimum acceptable for graphics work is 80cd/m^2. Most new monitors reach as high as 120cd/m^2. The fact that my monitor is 34% bellow spec is a big problem. Making matters even worse is the fact that the blue and green phosphors or guns have shifted their black point way up. This would only be annoying if red had come along with them. The net result is that the red channel is doing all the work to get the blackpoint luminance to 0.30cd/m^2. In other words, the blacks are very, very red. Dropping the black point until all channels can be matched results in all of the shadow tones falling out to black. The monitor looks and works great until you need that last little degree out of it for graphics work, so if there's anyone out there who'd be willing to trade for their monitor, please let me know. Oh, it's a Sony CPD-200GS 19" Short Neck Cylindrical Tube.

On the human front, there are two interesting developments. First, a friend on mine from long, long ago IMed me today. Sarah was my best friend in high school. She was very, very important to me. She was the person with whom I went through most everything that didn't involve Amelia. We went off to our separate colleges and things started not going so well. We started to loose contact with each other. The last few times I saw her, she made me very angry. She seemed mean, judgmental, and bitchy. I had written her off as a total loss over the last few years. Today, she seems to be a much changed person. For one, she's renounced religion, which is shocking because she was Super Christian Girl. She seems much more open minded and liberal. I look forward to re-establishing a relationship with her.

Second, Michelle's sister Jenny is moving back to town. She's coming down to attend a 12 month school on massage therapy. I'm really excited about her coming back to Columbus. For one, Michelle is much happier when Jenny is around. I, also, am quite fond of her. Another great thing is that we do a lot more when Jenny is here. She's not much of a stay at home sort of person, and she drags us with her. As a bonus, she's an absolutely fabulous model, potentially the best with which I've ever worked. She starts classes on the 29th and is arriving tomorrow to look for a place to live. Yay, yay, yay.

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Here Quizzy, Quizzy, Quizzy -Monday, March 15, 2004 -9:25 pm-

Enzyme
You are an enzyme. You are powerful, dark, variable, and can change many things at your whim...even when they're not supposed to be changed. Bad you. You can be dangerous or wonderful; it's your choice.
Which Biological Molecule Are You?

morally deficient
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent family values makes you dangerous, but we can count on some right wing nutter blowing you up if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?

bottoms up
You are a total fashion whore! Gothic lolita, Harujuku, and Visual Kei run in your blood! Cosplay ahoy!
What kind of Anime Whore are you?

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

And Yet More Quizzes -Monday, March 22, 2004 -8:24 pm-

Mulder
You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.
You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!
Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!
You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

You are the troubled ghost of wings. You wonder around looking for freinds and being beautiful. You are graceful and full of untapped love and talent. Open yourself up.
What kind of element fey are you?

You are a white dragon, pure and noble, you would help humans if they desprately need you. You are kind and wise with a heart of gold.
Which Dragon resides in your soul?

bust of homer
You are Homer! An epic poet circa 800 B.C., Homer is the expression of the ancient Greek ideal. His characters embark upon long and wordy quests and engage in battles of heroic length. Monsters are slain and cities are razed. Fun and glory all around!
Which famous poet are you?

anime chick
You are a human shadow. If a loved one needs you, you are always right at his or her heels! Your deep social connection with human beings produces your qualities of genuine caring and charisma. However, at times you are naive to the true nature of your loved ones. Remember that humans' gift of free will does not always lead them in wise directions. But your essence of love and friendship represent the other precious gifts of humanity. Overall you are a strikingly valuable and innocent being who has a lot to give.
What Kind of Shadow Are You?

Michael
You are Michael the fast-fingered hacker genius! Seemingly glued to your screen, you have the world digitally at your fingertips and provide unexpected knowledge to others
Which Witch Hunter Robin Character Are You?

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Audio Reviewers Have a Hard Job -Monday, March 22, 2004 -10:49 pm-

Saturday, I was wandering around CompUSA while Mary and Michelle wandered around World Market. In the discount pile, I stumbled onto a Pioneer DV-563A. The DV-563A plays Red Book (CD), Orange Book (CD-R/RW), White Book (VideoCD), Blue Book (Enhanced CD), Beige Book (Kodak/Fuji PhotoCD, Digital Versatile Disc - Video (DVD-V), Digital Versatile Disc Minus Recordable (DVD-R), Digital Versatile Disc Plus Recordable (DVD+R), Digital Versatile Minus Rewritable (DVD-RW), Digital Versatile Disc Plus Rewritable (DVD+RW), Super Video CD (SVCD), Digital Versatile Disc - Audio (DVD-A), and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD). It contains an onboard PAL->NTSC converter. With a single chip, it can be rendered region-free. It originally listed as a $300 player, then was marked down to $150. The floor model was there in front of me, selling for a lowly $100. I called home and begged for money. I'm now the proud owner of a universal disc player. My only question is do I want to keep it.?

The player has been singing to itself somewhat quietly for two days now and I installed it for evaluation tonight. The trouble is, I only own two SACDs and no DVD-As. I have Norah Jones - Come Away With Me and Ralph Vaughn Williams - Symphony No. 1 (A Sea Symphony) on SACD. Obviously, this isn't a big sample on which to make a rational decision. However, I plunge ahead regardless. My initial impression is that the SACDs are superior to the Red Book CDs but not Earth-shatteringly so. I think I could probably identify the SACD version of both albums in a blind comparison. The muddying factor is the Red Book playback. I don't have enough inputs to have both the Pioneer and my reference Sony (which only plays DVD-V, Red Book, and Orange Book) plugged in all the time. In other words, what ever player I settle on will be primarily a Red Book player regardless of what else it does. I'm not so sure the Pioneer can hold it's own with Red Book. The bass is sloppy and uncontrolled. The upper end is not as extended. There might not be as much clarity. It is, however, slightly more lively than the Sony. At the end of the night, I'm left confused. Tomorrow and over the next several days, I 'm bringing in some hired ears to help me confirm or deny the things that I heard. If you fancy a listen, stop by, but be warned that you'll have to give an opinion!

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Solitude Equals Trouble -Tuesday, March 23, 2004 -2:14 am-

Saturday night, a bunch of people were sitting around at Michele's place talking. The discussion eventually became an argument about atheism versus faith. Michele was adamant that atheism was a more logically and scientifically defendable position than faith. At first, I was going to agree with her because, after all, I do tend to lean towards science not faith myself. After thinking about it for a while, I have decided that I disagree with her. I think both are equally valid because they are both, at heart, hanging on the same issue. For the purposes of typing less, by faith I mean the belief in a god or gods and by meeting god, I mean actually meeting god or obtaining concrete proof of the existence of same (whatever that may constitute).

Consider the position of atheism. The major premise, hypothesis, of atheism would be God does not exist. The null hypothesis of atheism would be God exists. If one were to meet god, the null hypothesis would be proven, thereby disproving the hypothesis. If god were never to be met, neither the hypothesis not the null hypothesis would be confirmed or denied. Seeing an infinite number of white sheep does not disprove the existence of black sheep.

Considering the position of faith, one finds the hypothesis to be God exists, making the null hypothesis God does not exist. Meeting god would disprove the null hypothesis and prove the hypothesis. Never meeting god would neither prove nor disprove the hypothesis or null hypothesis.

Both views are waiting on the same data. For either one to be proven or disproven, god must be met. Both views have a either a hypothesis or null hypothesis that is testable. Neither is more more rational than the other.

In other dangerous thinking, I have arrived at the conclusion that both faith and science are belief-based systems. Faith, largely, comes down to taking someone else's word for it. The overwhelming majority of humanity will never meet god. Almost all people will learn of god through the words of others. It is possible, however, that any one person or group of people might meet god. Science is much the same. It is possible for any one person or group of people to preform experiments that confirm a particular theory or concept. However, it is not possible for any one person or group to preform all experiments to confirm every theory and concept. At some point, knowledge of scientific concepts comes from believing what someone else has to say about the nature of our universe. You just have to have faith that quarks exist.

/docs/think | 6 writebacks | permanent link

Knights and Days -Monday, March 29, 2004 -5:39 pm-

I am stranded at Tire Kingdom. This is the nth time this year that one of our cars has gotten a flat in our parking lot. I was sitting here looking for something, anything, to do when I noticed a blog entry from late Thursday night that I hadn't posted. The first part of this entry is the misplaced stuff and then I'll see if I have anything else to say.

I spent the evening with Mary, He'er, Tom, Aaron, Betsy, and Melissa. Well, I spent the most time with Mary, then we joined He'er. Tom showed up with all the wrong food and left again. Melissa eventually arrived back from Cinci and then Betsy got home from work. Aaron was forced to come over in order to render tech support for He'er. Melissa was only interested in communicating with people via NWN. Tom soon left. To recap the main cast of characters: Sleepy Aaron, Horny He'er, Knitting Betsy, Bored Mary, and Mischievous Ty. With those players, you can guess where the conversation soon turned. Yes, you're right. I'm not sure why every conversation with Aaron, He'er, and I will turn to her boobs, but there it is. It's a basic quality of the universe. Turns out Aaron is a terrible visual judge of cup size. Of course, when contention arose, both he and I gallantly volunteered to check manually. Now, mind you, this isn't what we were supposed to be doing. We were supposed to be watching the director's commentary for A Knights Tale. About the only watching that went on was He'er and I lusting after the female lead. Aaron also introduced us all to iSketch". It is an amusing game. Go try it. Eventually I got sleepy and took Mary home. On the way, the boob discussion got re-started. I don't know how. I told her that whilst big boobs are fun toys, they're no fun in the long run. I revealed to her the Truth of Boobs. There are only two questions a guy needs to ask to rate boobs. A positive answer to the first question makes them good boobs. A positive answer to the second question makes them great boobs. The first question is: Can I play with them? The second question is: Are they sensitive in a good way? That's all you need to know. Everything else is irrelevant. Size, shape, coefficient of elastic rebound, all of that's just eye candy. What really matters is interaction. Mary, and later Michelle, thought that was hilarious.

Both coming to and going from the girl's house, I reproved that I am, in fact, the kiss of death to my fellow drivers. For the last week or so every time I travel along I-70, on on the cars immediately next to me is pulled over by the police. Even though I'm in no danger of getting ticketed myself, this is not doing good things for my heart rate. I guess just take this as warning that you shouldn't drive anywhere near me.

I have also, over the last week, proved that I am very much still a bachelor. I have A) glued a bowel to the kitchen table with milk and B)Turned a substantial fraction of my laundry pink. The bowl thing was quite surprising. I expected to pick the bowl up with very little effort. Instead, it was ripped violently from my hand by an obstinate table. Grrr. I did approximately 6.02x10^23 loads of laundry this past week. Into one load of darks, I placed an old maroon towel. I thought this would be a safe behavior. I was grievously in error. I now have many pink-gray shirts that were intended by god to be merely gray. Oops.

Which brings us up to today. So far, I have 1)Been very ill, 2)Paid rent, 3)Discovered a bolt (that's not a typo) shot through my tire, and 4)Sat in Tire KIngdom for an hour. Can you guess how fun of a day I'm... wait, just got little better. The manager said he thought I looked like a college student and my money would be better spent on parties than tires. Yay! Free patch!

/docs/daylog | 5 writebacks | permanent link

Quizilla Images Don't Load? -Wednesday, April 07, 2004 -3:34 pm-

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?

Galadriel and Celeborn
Your ideal Middle-Earth parents are Celeborn and Galadriel! You live in the beautiful woods of Lothlorien. You are an elf! Your parents are very wise and will always be fair with you. They also give very good presents that seem cheesy until you realize that they are exactly what you need. Your mother is as beautiful as the dawn, which means that you will be either handsome or beautiful yourself and your guy friends will want to hang out at your flet all the time to look at Galadriel. Arwen, Elladan and Elrohir are your niece and nephews, and Elrond is your brother-in-law.
Your Middle-Earth mama is a psychic, which means that you can never, ever lie to her. She is the disciplinarian and will do her best to see that you become a wise and noble elf.
Your Middle-Earth dad will try to be your best friend. He is the one to ask when you want money for concert tickets or permission to go to a party. Since he will really want to impress you with his hipness you shall be forced to listen to him butcher teenage jargon. Example: What up, homechild! Thou art trippin in that tunic, yo? Try to keep him from doing this in public. Even with all that, Celeborn will spoil you, which you will enjoy, so live it up!
Which Lord of the Rings couple would be your dream parents?

Claymore, power and strength rule your fighting, these swords were only used by the non faint of heart and were wielded by the most fierce warriors.
What sword would you use?

/docs/quizzes | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Behold My 1337ness -Thursday, April 08, 2004 -11:12 pm-

You are HP-UX. You're still strong despite the passage of time. Though few understand you, those who do love you deeply and appreciate you.
Which OS are You?

World Map
create your own visited country map

/docs/quizzes | 0 writebacks | permanent link

Ah, Well, Look at That... -Friday, April 09, 2004 -3:04 am-

It's amazing how my whims come and go. When I first couldn't get pizza here I was all about leaving. Then reality set in and I gave up the dream. Now, I have a vastly renewed interest in moving. Someone just emptied an entire clip in my back yard. I called 911 (it's amazing how often I call those guys) and walked the cop over to where it sounded like the shots had been fired. Sure enough, still-warm shell casings littered the grass about 110 feet outside my back door. How quick is my lease up again?

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

And Another -Monday, April 12, 2004 -3:31 am-

Hey, Joe.
Temper, temper... Although, under the circumstances, you restrained yourself quite well. Extremely altruistic, the thought of selling out a friend (no matter how much they've taken advantage of you) never crosses your mind. Which can be a good thing and a bad thing. You have a low bullshit tolerance and you're not particularly good with the ladies, but you're working on it. Which Empire Records Character Are You?

Threat Level Oarnge!
You are a Slutcom 3, and are on the prowl. A hook-up each weekend isn't unusual; the distance a hook-up will go is high. Your friends talk about you behind your back, and even you're shocked you haven't broken your bed yet. You for some reason are semi-proud of your track record. After all, not many can claim they've gotten as much tail as you.
Take the slutcom litmus test!

/docs/quizzes | 1 writeback | permanent link

Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out -Friday, April 23, 2004 -3:52 am-

I am soon to have a conversation with my parents that I ought to think about first. As a way of thinking through things, I am going to write about it here. I am strongly considering dropping out of school. This is not to say that I intend not to get a degree I am, instead, saying that the time is not now and the place is not here. First of all, DeVry is very expensive. Far more expensive than OSU. Base fees start at $48,065 for the degree I'm in. Add to this about $8,000 in books and required electronic supplies. Before even considering housing, food, and transportation, as well as other consumables, I will be about $60,000 in debt when I graduate from DeVry alone. I'm also carrying about $10,000 in loans from my 4 years at OSU. All of this is gathering interest. Obviously, my earning potential would have to be quite significant to pay this back in a reasonable amount of time. Keep in mind that most house loans for $70,000 are financed over 30 years.

Were I to make the amount of money the DeVry recruiters implied that I would, this would not be such a large problem. The recruiters claim that the average starting salary for a DeVry graduate in EET in the state of Ohio is $45,000 a year. Inspecting this statement more closely leads to some concern. This average is not, as one might reasonably expect, the figure for the most recent graduating class, or at the very least, a graduating class from the last year. It is the highest average from the last five years. Incidentally, it happens to be from 5 years ago. The average has gone down every term since. I think the reason for this is the loss of jobs in the tech sector. The US Dept. of whoever the hell studies these things (in other words I can't find the bookmark now) predicts that the US will loose 3.3 million Tech Sector jobs (mostly programmers and EEs) in the next decade. In an absolutely amazing coincidence, the same US Dept. predicts that within the next decade, US companies will employ 3.3 million Indians in Tech Sector jobs. The average pay rate of a programmer in America is $40/hr. The average pay rate of a programmer in India is $10/hr. Can we guess what the autocrats in office think about this problem? Put it all together, and I don't see a job in EE for me by the time I graduate, let alone long enough to pay off my debt. Even if the Tech Sector in America isn't killed completely, it will be gutted so severely that the glut of unemployed programmers and engineers will allow companies to pay minimum wage for what used to be considered skilled labor. If has the choice of paying me $6/hr or paying someone with 10 years of experience $6/hr, whom do you think they're going to hire? I just don't believe that with a collapsing Tech Sector I'll ever work myself out of debt.

On another government site, I found an interesting study on job stability. It is predicted that a person of my age will have 15 jobs spanning 8 careers by the time they cease working (I found it ominous that the study did not call this retirement). That's just insane. It mean, implicitly, that whatever you get your degree in is not what you will spend the majority of your life doing. Getting a degree from DeVry worries me for this reason as well. DeVry happens to be a well respected school for technical degrees. However, when I'm looking for my second or fifth career and it happens to be in the wombat facilitation, how well will the HR director respect a degree from "just a tech school"?

Finally, I'm not sure a college degree in any major is going to pay for itself (note, I mean BS/BA/BFA here, I think jobs requiring a Masters of Ph.D. will still hold their own). Of all the people I know around my age that have Bachelors only, one of them is working in a job where a college name was even looked for on the resume. In America there's this idea that you can't get a good job without a college degree. I think this was true 10 years ago, 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it will be true in 5 years. I think you might not be able to get a good job even with a college degree. If that's true, then people who go to college are starting themselves in a $60,000 dollar hole.

My plan, at the moment (we'll see if this plan survives first contact with the enemy), is to leave DeVry and to try to find work, any work. In the short term, I'd like to pay off the large amount of credit card debt I have, then pay down the school loans I have. After that, I'd like to become financially independent and maybe even be able to buy a car so my parents don't have to keep fixing mine. Someday, when I'm not standing in a hole deeper than I can see out of, I'll go back to school and get a degree to take that next step in job advancement.

Sigh... we'll see how this plays

/docs/think | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Perfidy -Saturday, April 24, 2004 -3:05 am-

I am betrayed. By what, I do not know, by whom I can not name.

Today, I spoke to several more people, was processed through several more offices. Then the math was done. It is worse than I had imagined. I am in debt. Massively so. Instead of buying a house, I will spend 30 years working to pay off the debt I incurred before I even got started. I will have to make better than $10 an hour working a minimum of 40 hours a week to hold even. No vacation, no days off. Not to get ahead, not to pay things off, not to move forward, but simply to not make it worse. Twenty thousand dollars a year that get me nothing more than stasis.

I want to know how this happened. I did what I was supposed to do, what, in America, means you did your part and will be rewarded with a white picket fence and 2.4 kids. I stayed in school, I got good grades. I went to college. I stumbled there, but I tried to keep moving forward. I don't drink heavily, smoke, or do drugs. I don't gamble, cheat, or steal. Now I am told that all I have achieved is to disadvantage myself, to increase my coming poverty. I did what I was supposed to and am rewarded by a future without hope. I do not believe that if I work hard I will get ahead. I do not believe that I will do honest work for a living wage. I do not believe I will attain what my birthright alleged to promise. I do not believe that I have a future that is desirable. I want my American Dream. When did I say it could be sold to someone in India?

I want my American Dream...

/docs/think | 1 writeback | permanent link

Those Were the Days -Sunday, April 25, 2004 -4:03 pm-

For long periods in my life, nothing goes on, and then comes a night when it's all happening. Last night, all of it was happening at Outland.

Michelle had gone home for a wedding and a funeral and I had spent the day trying to get something to happen. In the mid-evening, the person with whom I was supposed to hang out before going to the club bailed on me, putting me in more than a little bit of a cross mood. I sat at home, cussing at the computer for a long time, leaving just in time to catch up to people before they went to the club. I got the the girls' house just in time to see everyone finish getting ready. He'er and Melissa rode with me to the club while Heather and Aaron went to pick up Brian and Cassie. While we were rolling down 315, He'er was talking about how her car had been broken into last weekend at the Lennox. She talked about standing there dumbly, looking at the door, not quite knowing what was going on while Heather had already called the Police and started taking care of things. We got the the club much before Heather, Aaron, and the young kids, so we just kind of milled around.

Outland was packed and much darker than usual. They've changed the lighting routines to a much more minimal sequence. Finally everyone was there and we all started dancing. Well, almost all of us started dancing. One person just stood around the whole night. I'm not sure why, but I did at one time hear her protest that if she danced things would bounce. This struck me as rather the point. Anyway, we're flinging ourselves about randomly when He'er reaches over, grabs Melissa behind her neck with both hands, and kisses her within an inch of her life. Now, I must say, the look on the danes' (Cassie and Brian) faces was truly to be treasured. I am told my face was amusing as well, though this was more due to the fact I was wondering how that was going to work the next morning.

Speaking of He'er, she was in fine form last night! She was so much fun to be around. She was gettin' freaky with everyone and amusing the hell out of me. At one point, she came on to Cassie. I have never seen a little girls so scared in my life. Later in the night, He'er was facing me and we were dancing quite close when Aaron came up from behind her. She was pressed into the middle, which might have been enjoyable for her in other circumstances. The problem was that Aaron and I could not get in sync. All we achieved was to beat the hell out of her with our pelvises. Watching her try to get her freak on with Brian. He just didn't get it.

I think it was about this time a totally hot girl in skimpy black underwear, black pasties, and a tight, completely sheer dress came in. Holy fuck was she hot. He'er, Aaron, Mel, and I were all "DAMN yo!" The girl proceeded to move around getting it one with any mammal she found. At on point, she was in a booth in the corner flat on her back with two other girls working her over. We all watched her for a while, well for most of the rest of the night. Eventually, I got distracted by being the Ice Pimp and kind of lost track of her. This ice thing... yeah, that was a bit over the top. I had a cup of ice. He'er wanted some of said ice. In the mood that I was, I decided she couldn't just take it out of the cup, she had to take it from me. My teeth to be exact. This started a game that would last the rest of the night, eventually ensnarling Heather and Aaron in its devious web.

I met a shitload of people I knew last night, it was really kind of odd. There was about half my theatre there, as well as about 4 people from the photo department at OSU. I talked with Ann, who was a grad student in photo when I was there. for a while about what she had done and about the photo program. It's even worse than when I was there. Ardine, the professor who really was holding the department together, was promoted to Chair of the Art Department. Of the two professors left, on of them quit and the other one doesn't give a damn about anything other than getting his own books published. So there's no one around to make sure that the program stays together. All of the classes are being taught by adjunct professors who earn $1,500 per quarter per class. They're also only contracted one term at a time so they never know if they've got a job before the start of classes. When I left, there were 22 students in the program and all program classes were capped at 18 students (see the problem). Now, there's only 9 students in the program. It's kind of sad.

One of the times I was grinding He'er from behind, I caught, in the corner of my eye, the hot, mostly naked girl's face illuminated for an instant by a strobe. Now, all night, I had been looking at her as some random person putting on a good show, but in the flash of light, my facial recognition instincts were triggered. I kind of blew it off at the time. A little while later, the Heathers, and the youngins had gone outside. For some reason, a neuron fired. I stopped dancing. I looked at the girl, I looked at Aaron. I leaned over to Aaron and said, "I'm going to do something, and the best possible outcome is that nothing at all happens." When next the hot girl looked my was and was relatively close to me, I shouted, "Melanie!" The girl didn't respond, and I turned away, relieved. Mere moments I was hit from behind at Mach 5 by something with 4 arms and 3 leges (I could count because they were all wrapped around me) and screaming the word "cousin". Yes, that's right, that is, in fact, not a typo. I attempted to turn around to say hello, which was greatly difficult (re: arms and legs). There was a half, dressed, very friendly, utterly hot woman hanging onto me, and she was family. Sigh. Melanie went off into some high pitched squeal about how great it was that I was there and how she didn't know I liked such places. "It's been so long since I've seen.... OH FUCK YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO SEE ME IN THIS DRESS!!!", she cried. You see, she was very drunk and possibly other things as well. She hadn't realized or remembered what she was wearing and how much of her I could see until that moment. After taking a some time to reassure her that I wasn't about to tell the entire family, I asked her for her phone number. It came out of her mouth so fast that the Micro Machines spokesman would have stood slack jawed. Eventually, I got it out of her slowly enough to put it into my phone. At that point, her friends decided enough was quite enough and took her home. I went outside to find the Heathers. They much enjoyed what I had to tell them. He'er asked if she could fuck my cousin. I think only if I get to watch.

I had gone down to the bar with Melanie to get her phone number out of her. On my way back up the steps onto the dancefloor, I small woman stopped dead in front of me and looked up and said, "TJ?" I said no, but I know why you mistook me for him. I looked at her and I was thinking, theatre, with a lot of weight loss since then. Shit. Oh. God. Her topless under my cape. Me painting glitter all over her boobs. What the hell is her NAME?!? She said, "Oh, you went to South though, right?" I told her I had and I remembered that I had been in theatre with her, told her my name. "Ok.", she says, "Do you remember me? Ring around the nipple?" "Yes, I remember, and I feel like such a schmuck that that's all I can remember. I'm so sorry I don't remember your name." She giggled and reminded me her name was Renee. We went down to the bar area again and sat and talked for a while. She too, has had to leave college because it was too much money with to little hope for a job after. I think there's a whole generation of us getting lost. I wonder what we'll make of it? What will be our protest? Anyway, as I was putting her number into the my phone, Heather cam up and told me it was time to go. I finished with Renee and went over to join my group. It had been an interesting night. I had danced, ground, groped, kissed (-ish), and scored two girls' phone numbers. Of course one was family and the other an old friend, but hey count em if ya got em. And thus we left.

The plan was to move on to some kind of food. We walked to the cars and Heather led the way. She got to the passenger side of the car and was just kind of staring at the rear passenger door. I could tell something wasn't quite processing. I thought of what He'er had told me on the way to the club. I looked at the ground at Heather's feet. I pulled out my phone and called the cops. I was told it would be at least an hour before a office could arrive. I talked with Heather and the others and started arranging ways for people to get home. I got this random guy to go to the club and get a trash bag to cover the window. Amazingly, the cop showed up minutes later. Heather worked on giving him details for the report while I cleaned the glass off the back seats and bagged over the window. We gave up on the food and everyone went home. As I was driving home, it became apparent that I had manages to get all kinds of glass shards embedded in my pants. It was not a happy thing. I got home, showered, and went the hell to bed.

As I'm writing this, one thing has become apparent... vintage Doors vinyl KICKS ASS.

/docs/daylog | 6 writebacks | permanent link

Once More Round the Bend -Monday, April 26, 2004 -3:58 am-

OK, it's computer education time again. Please read it anyway.

Spam is a problem most people have to deal with because other people are assholes. One of the ways admins have chosen to deal with this is a concept called blacklists. Blacklists are a list of servers on the internet known to send spam. The mailserver will refuse to accept mail from any server on the blacklist. Effectively, the server drops off the face of the earth. All email, spam and letters from grandma, is rejected if it comes from a server on the blacklist. Originally, the idea was employed on a company by company basis with each admin developing their own blacklist. Since lazier is better, someone eventually got the idea to collect all the blacklists into one big list and then let admins around the world download it so that the local admins didn't have to work as hard. In doing this, the local admins gave up control to a set of people they did not know and over whom they have no authority. This, too, worked ok at first. The problem was the spammers caught on and decided to change server addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could keep up. In response to this advance in the arms race the blacklist maintainers began to block classes of addresses. Ooofff, we need a short summary of classes here. When you type in a server name the computer doesn't care about the words it resolves it into an IP address. There's a little bit about that in this previous blog entry. The IP address is four three-digit numbers (if there's leading zeros you can pop them i.e. 065 is 65) in the form 111.222.333.444 For instance, as of this writing the IP of this blog's server was 65.31.10.28 A class is a range of IP addresses. There are three classes of IP addresses that differ in how many addresses they cover. A Class-C is the smallest, it just varies last number of the IP address. So all numbers, for instance, from 192.168.8.0 to 192.168.8.255 (extra points to anyone not Aaron or Owen who knows why it's 0-255). Another way we can write that is 192.168.8.* because the * character means "everything that could go here". A Class-B holds a much bigger number of addresses because the last 2 numbers in the IP address change. In other words a Class-B might be 172.16.*.* Finally, a Class-A is the biggest of all. It holds A LOT of addresses because all but the first number can vary. Or, in our little notation, 10.*.*.* Ok, back to the main point. As spammers got smarter, the began to jump addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could be updated and passed out to mailservers all over the world. So the blacklisters started blocking entire classes of addresses. Let's say a spammer was bouncing around in the Class-C 111.222.333.* so on any given day he could be 111.222.333.444 or 111.222.333.456 or whatever. The entire Class-C gets blacklisted this means the spammer plus 254 other servers are now blacklisted. In response to this spammers started bouncing around Class-Bs which means to blacklist a spammer, you block him and 65,533 other servers. We've now reached the point of blacklisting Class-As which kill 8,257,284 servers at a stroke. Now, obviously, if you blacklist a Class, you're refusing communication from WAY more normal users than spammers. The people who run the uber-blacklists and those that use them will tell you that by hurting innocent bystanders (a.k.a civilians), you put more pressure on the service providers who's networks the spammers (a.k.a. the enemy) ride on to get rid of the spammers. It means that hundreds of thousands of people get denied the ability to communicate to silence a few spammers. In essence, grandma's email becomes collateral damage.

Today, the entire nation of Spain was blacklisted.

There's a term for using the harm of civilians to influence policy to combat your enemy. It's called terrorism.

/docs/computers | 9 writebacks | permanent link

Yes, Yes It Would -Thursday, April 29, 2004 -11:53 am-

Take the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz.

/docs/quizzes | 1 writeback | permanent link

If It's Longer Than It's Wide -Friday, April 30, 2004 -4:50 am-

I went up to my dad's place with Michelle today to help him test some parts of the recovery system on his latest project. This is his latest project:

The first thing we did was to confirm that 6 grains of blackpowder was enough to seperate the two upper sections of the rocket. Well, it worked. And then some. It blew the two pieces of rocket about 20 feet apart, one end only stopping when it ran into a brick wall. Considering this was substantially less blackbowder than the formula suggests for the volume we were pressurising, it suggests that the rocket is damn well built. After we knew the rocket would seperate, we needed to prove that the drogue chute would fill and then pull the main free. The drogue willed without problems and the main released easily. I was a bit hard to fill the main chute due to it's size. This is the main chute as we're trying to fill it:

Once the chute filled, Dad ran down to provide a sense of scale.

We played with it a bit before it took a dive for the trees and started draggin me, Dad, and the John Deere across the yard. This is just before the tractor began to move while we were still trying to keep it out of the trees and not worrying about sliding downrange.

Since I'm sure this looks fun to at least three of you, a word of caution. This is a 30 foot diameter parachute. It is dangerous. It is completly capable of amputating a limb or head, or even crushing your ribcage if you get between it and wherever it wants to be. People have died when a chute of this size inflated unxepectedly. If you want to play with something like this, find someone who has real world experience with large surface areas and wind.

If you want to learn more about high powered rocketry, start at Tripoli Rocketry Assocation. This rocket is supposed to launch Saturday the 15th of May. If anyone wants to go, I need photographers and videographers!

/docs/daylog | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Meh... Tired. -Monday, May 03, 2004 -2:22 pm-

The pictures of U-Ren on Saturday are up. They're over in the My Life section. Not gonna waste bandwidth and post them here.

Update: HIT RELOAD IF YOU DON'T SEE THE LINK ON THE MY LIFE PAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

/docs/daylog | 0 writebacks | permanent link

There are Stars in the Southern Sky -Thursday, May 06, 2004 -4:40 am-

Well, it has been and interesting 24 hours. It started yesterday with me going to Bre's again to preform the phoenix thing with a winbox. It took the usual 5 hours and then I hung... err... laid in a pile on the floor with the girls until 3am. Walking down 9th to the car, someone a long ways behind me hollered, "Sir! Excuse me, hold up a sec!" Hearing that whatever was going on was a long way from me, I stopped and turned to see what the guy wanted. I felt my attacker just before he landed. I managed to turn to him and get my forehead into his nose or mouth. I'm not sure which, but it crunched a lot. Next, he got a knee to the groin. I'm not sure I did that on purpose. I'm thinking my legs had started to run without asking my eyes if the way was clear and he was just kind of in the way. I proceeded to run like hell, jump in the car, and race off. I'd like to claim that I was a big studly man and beat off my attacker but I just freaked out in a useful manner. The only smart thing I did was to run like hell. I have one hell of a headache and a bit of a limp today. I'm not entirely sure I wasn't struck in the hip with something because it's really stiff and sore today but there's no bruise. Today, when I told the girls what had happened as I left, one of them mentioned that the night before someone had hailed them from down the street the same way I was hailed. Being infinitely much smarter than I am, they ran like hell and skipped the getting attacked stage.

Wednesday, today, I took off because I felt I could use the time. While sitting at the server working in Photoshop, the server made an odd noise, kind of like a very short phasor burst. I looked at it, confused. Several seconds later, it happened again. I wrote it off as some random thing the sound card felt like doing. When I turned back to my work, I found that the machine had locked up. This is the point at which my recent immersion in the world of Windows played me false. My reaction to my Apple locking up, and event that has never happened to me on that computer before, was simply to reboot and figure it would fix itself. It did, or at least it seemed to. About 2 hours later I noticed that my desktop was a bit bare. Hmm... count the icons... One! ... um... did we already do one? Ahh, yes. Two hours ago the computer asked the discs to spin up for a read/write, something made an odd noise like a phasor, the computer froze, and now I'm an icon short. It makes perfect sense. I lost a hard drive. I contacted the First National Bank of Mom and secured the purchase of a new drive. When I got home (see adventure below), I took most of the machine apart and booted it again. I was able to get the failed HDD to mount and pull the data off of it. Thinking back, the innards of the server were really hot when I opened it up after the HDD failed. By the time I got home with the new one, everything was at room temperature. My HDD died the heat death. Needless to say, there have been steps taken to reduce the internal temperature of the case. As an interesting side note, even though the HDDs and the graphics card were uncomfortably hot to the touch at the time for failure, the CPU core temperature was only 37C. God bless PowerPC chips.

My final great ordeal occurred as I was trying to leave CompUSA with my new HDD. As I moved our of my parking spot, I felt a disturbance in the force. All was not right with the car. I quickly realized that the left rear wheel was behaving less as a wheel and more as a, well, skid I guess. Stop goes the car, out comes the jack, up goes the wheel. The left rear hub is frozen solid. looking under it, I see that that parking break cable is very slack. Operating on the idea that said cable should merely be loose when the brake is off and connecting that idea to the fact that the parking break only operated the rear brakes, I decide that the brake has seized in the on position. It turns out that I am right. The problem with being right is that it doesn't let the car roll. After much comparing the right hub to the left, I notice there's a difference in position in two pieces. Hoping that this is the lever that activated the parking brake, I attempt to force it to move. This lead to the idea of beating the hell out of it to get it to move. The only problems are that I do not have a hammer and that the space in which I have to beat is about two inches. Seizing upon the Multi-Function Blunt Object (a.k.a. jack handle) that Toyota has thoughtfully included at no extra cost to me, I beat the hell out of the brake. Of course, accounting for the space in which I was working, this ends up sounding like someone calling the farm hands to lunch with a large and badly tuned triangle. Thankfully when the clattering is done, the wheel spins freely. Of course, as soon as I pull into the parking lot at my apartment, I pull the damn brake on, so I'm back where I started.

Oh, and I bought pants. The 13th pair (literally) fit.

/docs/daylog | 3 writebacks | permanent link

Woot. My life is complete. A Something*Positive Quiz -Saturday, May 08, 2004 -3:33 am-

Jason
which member of something positive are you?

And if you don't read Something*Positive, go do it before I send a cat up your drain to steal your god damn panties! It's for his girlfriend, 'kay?

/docs/quizzes | 2 writebacks | permanent link

Burning Money -Monday, May 17, 2004 -2:27 pm-

Some of you might have noticed I was out of state overnight. I was in PA attending my father's launch of his new rocket bubba. I blogged about his parachute a while ago. There's a new page about the launch up. It's not done, so you may as well wait a few days before you go look at it, but there it is. The interesting bit will be that my dad now has a link to my website. I wonder what will happen when he finds my blog?

/docs/daylog | 1 writeback | permanent link

My First Intro to Drawing Grade -Tuesday, May 18, 2004 -12:46 am-

Ty -

There has been minimal improvement and you are still having problems of proportion, perspective, and value relationships. Also, your drawings fall short of their full potential. -Spaces are indistinguishable forms and volumes are not fleshed-out.

C- Insufficient!

And you wonder why I didn't like the art program at OSU!

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Um, like, OK, so... -Friday, May 21, 2004 -5:00 am-

People are dumb

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I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane -Wednesday, May 26, 2004 -4:16 am-

However, I do know when I will be back again. I'm flying out on Wednesday morning to go to Florida for a few days. I'm supposed to be back very late on Sunday or mid-morning on Monday. During this time, I don't expect to have net access. I'm hoping to get to a Starbucks or the Orlando Apple Store every other day or so to collect email and touch base with the outside world. If you need to get to me in a hurry you can send an email to 16142863904@mobile.att.net. A very short email that is, my phone will only show me the first 255 characters. You can also send an IM to +16142863904 to SMS me. I'll be checking my voice mail but not answering my phone as I will be roaming. You can also call Mich since she'll be with me.

As I was getting ready to leave tonight, I was describing to Michele how to power cycle the server should it become necessary. I deftly pointed to the BRS with my toe, forgetting that the reset switch for the PSU was just below. That was a bong I did not want. So I'm back to <1d of uptime. Sigh. Oh well, 10.3.4 is supposed to be out this week or next so I'll have to reboot soon anyway. God damn laptop has been up 20 days and the stupid server hasn't been up 20 minutes. Grrr. Oh, I managed to pack in 2 cubic feet, I'm relatively happy with that.

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At the Rickenbacker Cafe -Friday, May 28, 2004 -12:41 pm-

So far, this is trippy. We don't fly out of CMH. Instead, we are flying a Public Charter out of LCK (Rickenbacker). LCK is an ex-(ish?)military base. It is... very odd here. The place is trying so hard to be a real airport. There's a cute little two gate terminal, a cafe that's just two vending machines, and a single check-in counter. The building is designed in that uber-modern industrial ethos that was so popular at the end of the 90's. Somehow, it fails to escape feeling like it's the 50's. Looking out onto the tarmac, there's planes sleeping casually at seemingly random stations. A DC-3 sets next to a civilian C-130 cargo plane. Off to the left, a row of DC-9's screens off rank upon rank of military heavy-lifters. Inside the terminal, ethereal strains of early rock are barely audible over the talking heads. The place is almost totally empty, furthering the temporal displacement. It's a vignette from a creepy art flick.

Oh, we're flying on a plane labeled "Hooters Air". Don't ask, I don't know either

I'm in Orlando now. Ass it turns out, we did not fly Hooters Air. At the last moment a different plane showed up and we flew on that instead. The flight was... interesting. First of all, it was odd to be able to roll straight away from the gate, taxi onto the runway, and take off. I can dig this no waiting thing. We flew higher than I've ever been before. Unfortunatly the captain never made the usual flight statistics announcement, but of the 2 hour flight, I would guess that we were in level flight for only about 20 minutes. We were high enough that the top of the sky was noticably black. It was kind of cool. 2/3rds of the way there, the cabin was filled wilth a piercing high pitched tone. Upon investigation by the flight crew, it turned out to be the emergency exit window. Dunno if it was leaking air or some kind of an alarm was going off. Upon landing, we arrived at two gates. We pulled up to the first one and sat in place for 30 minutes. The damn gantry was broken. So they hooked us up to a tug and pulled us next door so we finally could get off the plane. My parents met us at the airport and drove us back to the condo. I slept for the next four hours and am about to do so again.

Why do we go on vacations? It's the same stuff as home, just more expensive and hot.

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Dear God -Friday, May 28, 2004 -12:41 pm-

Florida drivers are bad. Seriously. I'm from Ohio, I know about bad drivers, and DAMN, yo. Everywhere we drove today I thought I was going to die. We first went to Universal Studios, not the main part, but the Adventure Island (or something like that) part of it. Some of it was cool, some of it was damn lame. The hulk coaster is just stupid. It's a long wait for no point. There's no real drop and the twistings aren't creative enough to make up for it. We did the Spiderman ride next, which is actually kind of cool. It's a 3-axis motion simulator on a tracked vehicle. The ride is set within a typical movie/theme park type environment with 3D (via polarization) movie projections to tell the story. There's a great bit where you appear to be dropped down a giant apartment building that does an amazing job of fooling your brain into ignoring the signals from your butt and inner ear. We rode Fire and Ice next. It's a pretty basic suspended metal coaster (think Raptor but not as groundbreaking) of the racer variety (a la Gemini). While fun overall, it's nothing to write home about other than the outside loop where the two tracks run feet to feet. It looks like you're about to kick the other train. Finally, we went to Poseidon's Adventure, which is a stand/walk through SFX show. Overall, it was kind of dumb, but if you're of a technical theatre persuasion, then there's some really cool bits. To leave one of the rooms, you walk through a tube of flowing water. There's a large tube of acrylic (>10ft diameter) which is dry when first exposed. High velocity water is fired tangental to the inside of the tube at the bottom. The water is travelling so fast that it sticks to the inside of the tube all the way up and around and back down on the other side. You then walk through a gentle rain on a suspended catwalk to get to the other side. When you eventually get to the final room, there's a series of projections done onto falling water. This is a really clever way to make a movie screen because the location of the screen can be changed simply by varying which nozzles are active. Oh, aircraft navigational strobes should be illegal for indoor use!

We're staying at one of my parent's condos in Kissimmee (the city Disney is in). Tonight we went to dinner at a little grill in the back clubhouse. It was wonderful! It was also surprisingly cheap for Florida. Dessert was a inhumanly good chocolate cake layered with malted chocolate mousse. Mmmmmm. After dinner, we went over to Disney's Boardwalk where Michelle and my mom spent 10 minutes catching a damn cockroach. One of Mich's friends collects bugs. Oi. Boardwalk is a recreation of a early- to mid- nineteenth century east coast American boardwalk. It's actually kind of cool and worth walking around just to look at. The only thing I actually like about the Disney properties is the fanatical attention to detail. I appreciate that everything is done and done well. Nothing gets left out or overlooked. So many places you see a interesting idea with half-assed execution. Not so at any of Disney's properties.

On the way home tonight (we got a little lost), I saw a sign saying "Internet Cafe", so I hope to post and check mail tomorrow. We'll see if they live up to their signage.

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I Saw Shrek 2 Tonight -Saturday, May 29, 2004 -12:08 am-

Eh.

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The Stepford Village -Saturday, May 29, 2004 -12:20 am-

Disney created Celebration, an entire community for people who don't live there. Celebration is at the junction of I-4 ad FL-192. It's composed entirely of buildings so individual they all look exactly alike. It has exactly one of everything. One bank, one movie theatre, one Japanese restaurant, one ice cream parlor, one relator, one fire station, one dry goods store, and everyone drives eggs. So really there's a lot of eggs, but everyone has one. The eggs are to golf carts what a Segway is to the scooter you had as a kid. I don't think anyone really lives in Celebration. It would spoil the perfection of the image. Even the people who stay there year-round just kind of have their stuff in long term storage in their attic. Driving through it is a very odd experience. It's a kind of horrific post-modern performance art piece writ large. It feels exactly like any one of Disney's other rides (It's a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, or The Energy Pavilion) and somehow a fake version of life is the theme. If you'd like to enjoy the Celebration experience without travelling all the way to Florida, just watch any 1950's anti-Communist propaganda film. Remember, the milkman always knocks twice.

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Insert Title Here -Saturday, May 29, 2004 -7:22 pm-

This morning I set off in search of the elusive Net. Leaving the house, we drove west to the far end of the strip. Arriving at the "Internet Cafe!" we had seen the night before, I inquired about WiFi. That was a resounding no. I then asked if there was an empty port to plug into. Again, no. Call it a miss then. Of course, they had no idea where else there might be Net access. Driving east along the strip, I decided to look for a Starbucks. We called home and asked them to look one up in the Yellow Pages. In the meantime, I thought I recalled having seen one is Celebration (yes, it's really called that). Having only a vague idea where the town in question was, I set of in that direction. Vaguely. After having circled the shopping district several times, I gave up. Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks. East again we travelled, this time in search of Sand Lake Rd. The strip is labeled with a series of Markers. We're staying somewhere around Marker 3. Way out in the uncharted territories beyond Marker 15, we decided that Sand Lake Rd did not, in fact, intersect Florida 192. Turning around, for about the 12th time that morning (thank god u-turns are legal in FL!), we headed west. Around Marker 10, Michelle spotted a banner proclaiming "INTERNET!" below the sign for a coffee shop. Stopping in, I discovered that they had no problem with me plugging in rather than using one of their terminals, but the price was $5 for 30 minutes. I bent over and took it. Some of you caught me online. While I was there, I grabbed the 10.3.4 update and D2X. For those of you out there old enough to have earned your stripes, D2X is a wrapper that ports Descent 2 to MacOS X. Feel free to rejoice. Descent 2 was one of the coolest games of all time and I was hard-core addicted to it. NWN can go suck it, D2 is in the house!

In the afternoon, we tried to go have fun at Wet n Wild. Wet n Wild is a water park like Wyandotte Lake or The Beach back home. No, scratch that, not like them at all. Those things are at least fun, this place SUCKED ALL ASS. The wave pool was tiny, crowded, and pointless (i.e. the waves weren't fun). All of the rides were shorter than I had ever seen before and featured hour-plus lines. I think we were there for all of 40 minutes. There, were, however, two activities that we would have liked to have done. The first was a giant (100ft diameter), air-filled rubber hemisphere with water flowing over it. There were ropes so that you could climb to the top, bounce around, fall off, and slide back down into the pool. Mich and I were both too tall play. :( The other point of interest was a funnel into which you could shoot yourself. For those of you that remembered COSI before it sucked, think of the penny funnel where they went around and around getting faster and faster before they plunked into the bottom. This ride let you that with your body. It woulda been cool. The line wasn't. We went home.

Actually, that's not quite true. Before going home, we had to play an exciting game of Hunt the I-4. Florida has this huge problem with signs. They place them, if they bother to at all, precisely .75 seconds beyond the point at which you could possibly have acted on the data displayed. Given the speed at which traffic flows, this means most of them occur about 25 feet past the point at which the turn disappears over the horizon in your rearview mirror. So leaving the park, we followed the large sign pointing to the right bearing the inscription "TO I-4 EAST/WEST". This was, as you will see, a grave tactical error. This is because, and it's very important that your understand this, is that each location in Florida gets only one sign. Let that settle in. Yes, I do, in fact, mean that if there are 5 turnings between you sighting the sign and reaching your goal, you get only the one sign. So, there we were, going round and round, waiting to reach some kind of escape velocity of frustration and leave the consumer driven hell of neon and Cheap T-shirts Here. Eventually, we got lost into the Universal Studios parking lot, which has it's own private on ramp to the I-4. By some oversight during the road-planning process, it actually pointed the way we wanted to go.

Ah, that's another thing about driving in Florida. Though the urban and tourist centers are very dense, there's a lot of space between them. So, if you miss your exit/turning (see: signs, paragraph III) it's a long god-damned way to a way to the next exit. A half second's hesitation can easily cost you 30 to 45 minutes of driving. I never thought I'd miss driving in Ohio

Oh, on the way to the water park, we noticed a sign (strangely, before the turn off) proclaiming the existence of World of Orchids. On a whim, we dove for it (Explorer across 3 lanes of traffic denser than rush hour in Columbus, moving at 60mph [in a zone legally 35mph]). It turned out to be really cool. There were some really cool looking orchids and a lot of other neat stuff. There were some of the biggest carp I have ever seen, as well as some other odd fish I couldn't identify. There were four or so different species of terribly toxic frogs and an assortment of very fidgety lizards. One side of the conservatory had many kinds of parrots. Interestingly, none of the birds had their wings clipped. It was cool that they left them as birds. We spent about half an hour looking around and sweating our balls off (we were in Florida and they were actually adding humidity to the air in the greenhouse. Uck.). So I guess that made the day worth while. We're supposed to go to Shrek 2 tonight. Hopefully that will be cool.

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The Right Stuff -Sunday, May 30, 2004 -1:19 am-

We went to the Kennedy Space Center today. The cape is about 100 minutes from where we're staying. Let me reiterate the stupidity of Floridian drivers and the DoT sign department. The Center is much reworked since my last visit. Unfortunately, the Then and Now tour was sold out by the time we arrived. The TaN tour takes you along the launch sites of the Cape Canaveral AFB where the US space program started. You visit the launch sites of the early test rockets as well as the Mercury and Gemini launches (You can't visit the Apollo launch pads because we shoot the shuttles off of them now). I took the tour when I was very little and enjoyed the hell out of it, so I would have liked to do it again. The basic ticket now includes a lot of cool stuff. You ride a bus out past the VAB and the 3 OPFs. Lemme tell ya, the VAB is HUGE. It's such a shame that it's out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to which to compare it. After moving past the OPFs, you go past Launch Control. You see the inside of Launch Control in every shot of NASA technicians hunched over consoles ever, but I had never seen the outside of it. As it turns out, the big blue clock isn't in front of Launch Control as the media makes it seem, it's really across the road by a pond. Both of the Crawler-Transports were parked in the same area. I was surprised to discover that the orbiter is not directly on the C-T. I had always assumed that the C-T and the platform with the mounting points for the orbiter were one piece. As it turns out, the mounting platform is a passive jig that the orbiter gets assembled onto. When it's time to move from the VAB to the pad, the C-T scoots under, lifts the jig and orbiter off it's stand, deposits the jig and orbiter and the pad, and takes off. The C-Ts look funny without their hats on. Eventually, you are deposited at a observation gantry about a mile from LC39-A/B. You walk up this observation gantry and can look all around at the surrounding area and see LC39-A/B as well as most of the pads at Cape Canaveral AFB. Suspended in the center of the gantry structure is one of the main engines from an orbiter. It extends through three stories of the gantry. The thing is god damn big and it's still dwarfed by the SRBs or an engine from a Saturn V. There's also some displays and a movie of questionable value onsite.

The bus next deposits you at the Saturn V Complex. This is quite new, and fairly cool. You first see a movie about the Russians launching Sputnik, the Gagarin. It leads into an overview of our Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, replete with funny footage of rockets falling down and blowing up, turning over and blowing up, stopping in mid-air and blowing up, and finally, not blowing up. The film does a wonderful job of making the space race interesting while not trivializing the science or the loss of human life involved. The next room is a re-creation of Launch Control as it was during the Apollo Program. The machinery on the set is the actual machines used during that period. It's a wonderful setup with the stations actually functioning and processing their way through a launch (Apollo VIII). The set it topped by three large screens showing footage of the launch timed to run with the events on the set. It was pretty god damn cool. Look at the launch of a Saturn V sometime. The first few feet after the main engines are the very fires of hell. Passing through another set of doors, you enter a theatre with a screen and a stage textured like the moon. A movie is shown about the first lunar landing (Apollo XI) accompanied by props moving around on stage. I never knew the landing of Apollo XI came so close to catastrophic failure. The telemetry from the Lunar Lander kept dropping out and then the computer threw Error Code 1202, shortly followed by Error Code 1201. The problem with these codes was that the engineers had considered the failure mode so unlikely that they'd never practiced it or worked up a response to it. The was further complicated by the fact that no one knew what Error Codes 1201,2 were and the documentation couldn't be found. Eventually, as the computer tried to smash the Lunar Lander into the rocks, the astronauts took manual control and landed somewhere else. I find it interesting that so much attention has been focused on Apollo XIII, yet no one seems to realize how close Apollo XI came to getting the crew killed. Outside of the theatres was an actual Saturn V rocket. The thing is motherfucking huge. No, seriously. It required the creation of the largest building ever built (by volume, record stands to this day) to house its assembly. It's amazing that so much had to work so hard to launch so little (the bit that made orbit accounted for <10% of the launch mass). Fun facts to know and tell:

The Saturn V is composed of over two million individual systems, the most complex machine ever created at the time (by more than an order of magnitude, and this is before CAD, mind you)
The only time a sound as loud as the launch of a Saturn V has been heard by human ears was the explosion of Krakatoa
The sound of the Saturn V could be heard in New York
The tracking, guidance, and control systems contained less processing power than a digital watch
Stage I of a Saturn V burns 15 tons of fuel and oxidizer per second
A Saturn V is the heaviest object ever to leave the surface of the earth

Upon arrival back at the Visitor's Center, there was still a lot to see. There was a mockup of the Orbiter to crawl around and an actual SRB/EFT combo to look at. More interesting to me was the Rocket Garden. In the Garden, many of the rockets from the space program stand about, as well as some of the capsules. It's amazing how tiny everything is. Having looked at the Saturn V, or hell, even the Saturn I-B, it's amazing the poor little Mercury-Redstone was able to lift a chimp, let alone a human. The Mercury-Redstone is so small as to be almost cute. I could probably wrap my arms more than half way around it's circumference. Mich is taller than the capsule. I can't believe they shot someone into space on it. Even the Gemini rockets are small, though those at least don't look like models. The difference between the Mercury-Redstone and the Saturn V is just staggering. Without the real benefit of computers, NASA went from making planes to putting people on the moon in 12 years. To do that, they went from launching a few tens of thousands of pounds, to launching more than 6 million pounds. That's one hell of a roman candle.

I guess that, more than anything else, is what struck me this time. Scale. The scale of things are impossible to relate to normal life, or even to each other. The buildings and machinery are immense beyond imagination but seem no larger than construction trucks due to the vast amounts of space in which they set. The program started out with a small rocket, it's capsule shorter than Mich, barely capable of pushing a man outside of the atmosphere and ended with a beast taller than two Statues of Liberty and wider than a city bus is long capable of launching three men out of our gravity well and three-quarters of a million miles to the moon. The difference in scale are too staggering to really put into words. All you can do is stare, awestruck.

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A Call to Arms -Tuesday, June 01, 2004 -2:30 am-

One of my long-time friends is about to leave an abusive relationship. She is currently processing all the paperwork to separate her affairs from his and to prevent him from having contact with her or her daughter. Once the paperwork is complete, we will be doing a rapid extract from her current residence. We are in great need of movers. You shouldn't have to haul anything yourself, so vehicle size is irrelevant. There should be no risk to you because the extraction will be done while he is at work. I'm also going to arrange for a spotter and, if I still have the contacts, arrange to have a few professionals in the area should anything go wrong (yes I'm serious).

What I need are people to carry things out of the house and into the moving van. The complicating factor is that I don't know when this is going to happen. Those of you who can make yourselves available on short notice (as in drop what you're doing and come), please let me know and provide me with the quickest way to contact you. I'll provide you with a map to the house and let you know when it's time. Don't just reply to this entry, make sure you catch me in person on IM or on the phone.

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See You Later... -Thursday, June 03, 2004 -10:53 pm-

my cowboy bebop theme song is autumn in ganymede
what's your cowboy bebop theme song?

Lawful Good Human Fighter Paladin

Follower Of Tyr

Alignment:
Lawful Good characters are the epitome of all that is just and good. They believe in order and governments that work for the benefit of all, and generally do not mind doing direct work to further their beliefs.

Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.

Primary Class:
Fighters are the warriors. They use weapons to accomplish their goals. This isn't to say that they aren't intelligent, but that they do, in fact, believe that violence is frequently the answer.

Secondary Class:
Paladins are the Holy Warriors. They have been chosen by a God/dess to be their representative on Earth, and must follow the code of that deity, or risk severe penalties. They tend towards being righteous, but not generally to excess.

Deity:
Tyr is the Lawful Good god of justice. He is also known as Tyr Grimjaws, Wounded Tyr, the Maimed God, and Blind Tyr. He appears as a warrior, missing his hand. Followers of Tyr are concerned first and foremost with justice - discovering the truth and punishing the guilty for their crimes. They wear blue and purple robes with a white sash, a white gauntlet on the left hand, and a black gauntlet on the right, to symbolize Tyr's lost hand. Their preferred weapon is the warhammer. Tyr's symbol is a set of scales resting on a warhammer.

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Lawful Good ----- XXXXXX (6)
Neutral Good ---- XX (2)
Chaotic Good ---- XXXX (4)
Lawful Neutral -- (-2)
True Neutral ---- (-2)
Chaotic Neutral - X (1)
Lawful Evil ----- XX (2)
Neutral Evil ---- (-3)
Chaotic Evil ---- XXX (3)

Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Half-Elf - (-2)
Elf ------ X (1)
Halfling - (-7)
Dwarf ---- XXXXX (5)
Half-Orc - XXXXX (5)
Gnome ---- (0)

Class:
Fighter - XXXXXXXX (8)
Ranger -- XX (2)
Paladin - XXXXX (5)
Cleric -- XXX (3)
Mage ---- (-1)
Druid --- (-5)
Thief --- (-2)
Bard ---- X (1)
Monk ---- (-4)

Does anyone happen to know what all that means?

/docs/quizzes | 1 writeback | permanent link

Daylog20040604 -Saturday, June 05, 2004 -3:24 am-

I had most of a good night tonight. I started with trying to go to the Arts Festival with Squish, Scarlet, Deuce, and Cassie. I got there, found a solitary Scarlet, then a solitary Squish. Briefly saw Cassie's head. As it turns out, Squish was moving at the breath taking speed of the Great Molasses Flood of Aught-Six. So Mich and I headed out on our own to look at the booths. I was pretty lame, really. Most of the work was unoriginal and self-similar. There was nothing I which I would have bought (and not just because of the prices!). There was one thing I would have hung in my house, had it been given to me. In the booth of the guy exhibiting prints from the Polaroid 20x30 camera, there were also a few collages of medium format black and white negatives. They were nice. Not great, not cool, just nice. And that was the best thing there. We finished with the whole site MUCH earlier than Squish and Scarlet, so we went to get sushi.

Later, we met Squish and Scarlet at Squish's house for booze and a movie. The booze was readily laid to hand, but there were provisions absent. We went to the grocery store. Scarlet was upset when Squish wetted her (Scarlet's) ass with her cold white jug. This led to two screaming college girls chasing each other through a desolate Kroger's lot in the middle of the night. Back home, we discovered the wonder that is Chocolate Thin Mint Yummmyness in Milk. Mmmmmmmm. The movie never got off the ground though. The four of us ended up talking for several house and making a rather good go of it. I was pleasantly surprised, as I wasn't sure of my standing with some members of the party and wasn't sure how it would go. All too soon everyone was tired and wanted to go home.

It was nice to have a night that mostly went well.

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Wordswordswordswordswords -Tuesday, June 08, 2004 -12:57 pm-

So Squish is taking a hell of a beating over on her blog, and even getting lambasted on other people's blogs. I look at the stupidity of what's going on over there and can only sigh in familiarity. Everyone is yelling at her for what the wanted her to have said, not what she actually did say. This is how almost every conversation I've ever had with most of these people has gone. Here, let me explain.

What Squish said:

I don't feel like going to the Harry Potter movie. Oh look, the Arts Festival is free!

What everyone wanted Squish to have said so they could make drama:

I'm not going to the Harry Potter movie because I, as an artist, am above such things, as opposed to you mere mortals. By going to see a mass-media film, you all are confirming that you are but mere plebeians and not worthy of my time. So have fun debasing your simple selves at the alter of consumerism. I, on the other hand, will be expressing my superiority by going to the Arts Festival, an event which you could not possibly appreciate. Thank you all for electing me Queen of the Universe.

So, as you can see, there's a large gap between the reality and the prevailing conversation. Poor Squish was just doing something else and everyone decided it was time for a blanket party. For God's sake, let her be! If you want to attack someone for being a philistine, attack me. I think the previous Harry movies sucked in a most boring manner. This movie may, may, get a chance when it ends up at the fiddycent. Depends on if I want to waste 2.5 hours of my life or not.

Oh, and since this seems to be a common misconception: I do not think you're a bad person for going to see a movie I don't like. <super serious tone>The real reason I think you're a bad person is that you don't hold exactly the same views, opinions, and values that I do.</super serious tone>

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Computational Thermodynamics -Thursday, June 17, 2004 -11:08 pm-

A week and 2 days ago, my AC went out. Again. For the third time this year, the fifth time overall. Management finally decided to give me a new condensor/compressor unit. I thought this would be a good thing. It really wasn't. It meant I spent a week and 2 days totally without AC. Now, think back over the last 9 days and remember the weather. Ick. I had to sleep on the couch some. When it gets humid, my heart rate and blood pressure rise dangerously, so I couldn't sleep on the top floor. This is also why I had to come home from Kentucky early. Sorry if I offened anyone, but I was starting to ahve trouble staying alive and it was making me cranky. I wanted to leave before I snapped at someone and pissed people off. I slept for most of the ride home and then for the next 14 hours. Anyway. As rough of a time as I was having, my server was also greatly stressed. The CPU was running HOT. Hotter than I've ever seen it, and I've run it without the heat sink on (don't ask). I had a thermal monitoring program running the whole time, with a script running to shutdown -h now the computer if it reached 55C.

The new AC arrived today, thank god. Once I had cooled off, I took a look at the historic graph of CPU temp that had accumulated. It cracked my ass up. The time scale in the first image is 7 days. You can see that when I tried to do a video import, I almost killed the computer. Then, you can see the day/night cycles as the temperature in the room rose and fell with the sun. Finally, you can see a crash in the temperature when the new AC arrives and starts working.
7 Day Temperature Graph

The second image only contains six hours. You can see a very clear downward trend when the AC starts to function and then a cyclical pattern as the house reaches its target temperature and begins to cycle the AC on and off. Finally, you can see the spike in temperature as I finally feel safe using the computer again.
6 Hour Temperature Graph

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Fritter and Waste -Wednesday, June 30, 2004 -2:32 am-

Well, I'm sitting in the ER, as I have been for the last two and a half hours, so I figure I may as well blog. This one is going to go back a ways, at least a week. The Saturday before last Michelle, Michele, and I met Mary at Momo. Michelle ended up driving Michele home so I had to drop of Mary on my own. As I was leaving her place I noticed that Mich's car didn't have much of any gas left in it. I stopped at the Marathon at Chittenden and Summit. As I was filling up, a major pimpmobile pulled up. Gold chrome hundred-spokes, purple velvet seats, little gold crown on the rear deck. The driver got out and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and put something on the ground. I was thinking it was a small dog or suchlike. The driver walks into the store with a leash in his hand. On the other end of the leash was an alligator. About 5 feet long. The man walked his alligator into the store, bought some snacks, and walked back to his car. He picked the alligator up, and the damned thing stuck its nose out the window as they drove away. Only on Chittenden does that make sense.

In further car news, I went to ComFest on Sunday. It was... moderately interesting. I ran into a bunch of people I knew. Parking was a bitch though. I drove for 30 minutes trying to find a legal place to park. I finally came across a side street, well north of the event area, where there were no signs at all. I went up and down the street twice to make sure it wasn't marked as no parking. I parked the car and started walking towards High St. About 100 yards away from where I parked I walked past a gravel lot that was attached to a vacant factory building. As I looked, a car pulled in and parked. I thought about moving my car to the lot, but decided that it probably belonged to someone and I should be nice and not park there. I walked the mile and a half to the venue and stayed there for about 5 hours. Eventually, I hiked it back to the car. As I was walking up the street to where I had parked, I noticed that there were far too few cars and far too many cops and tow trucks. I approached the first cop and asked why they towed my car from a street not marked as a no-parking zone. He replied that the street was only 22 feet wide. "Well, good for it," I said. Glaring a bit he continued on to tell me that Columbus motor vehicle code forbids parking on streets narrower than 23 feet. Riiiiiight... I was supposed to notice the missing foot, less than a 5% difference, from a visual inspection. That also presumes that I was even aware such a crazy law existed. It was a two lane road with no signs, why in the hell wouldn't I be allowed to park there? Thankfully, Mich had just dropped Amanda off on campus and could pick me up. The next day I went with Jeff to pick the car up. He had to go since his name was on the title and registration (we also found out that the BMV still thinks he lives in Westerville). He also had to provide the cash. It cost me $126 to get the car back. A $70 holding fee, a $46 dolly fee, and a $10 ticket. Great.

The Columbus Impound Lot is west of High Street just south of downtown. If you ever have to go there, wear good walking shoes. It was a ten minute walk from the guard tower gate to the row my car was in. The lot had once been gravel but time and toil had reduced it to an ultrafine powder that stirred up from the ground with the least breath of air, hanging lazily, before covering every surface in sight. It was apparent that some of the cars had been there for quite some time, since before the last heavy rains at the very least. These resident cars were sunk into the ground. Abandon your conception of tires squelching ruts into the mud, these wheels had melted there. The ground formed perfectly flat against the tire, following its every contour. The ground between was flat and level as glass. There'd be no driving that riced out Civic with the broken in windows away without a shovel. As a final insult, the white serial number placed on the driver's side window will likely outlast the car.

In other news, Half Persians are the spawn of the devil. They're also incredibly interesting. HP is a bitch to start and a bitch to join. They are, however, extremely fast to make. From a mathematical standpoint, they're insanely great. Take an integer greater than three. Take a second integer that's less than the first. From these two numbers, a half persian can be built. The first number determines the density of the chain and the second number determines the chain's aspect ratio perpendicular to the longitudinal axis. It's pretty damn cool.

OK, we're moving somewhere, bye.

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Science Fiction Double Feature -Tuesday, July 13, 2004 -5:29 am-

A couple of people pointed out that I forgot to mention why I was in the ER. I was waiting on Michelle. She'd been stung by a bee in the inside of the wrist and wasn't reacting well to it. 10 hours after the sting she was still swelling and getting redder. Michele mentioned that this is what Terry does when she's stung and it leads to cellulitis. I was a bit worried that she was swelling enough to cause the same dangers that compartment hemorrhages do. So we went to the ER. We waited 2.5 hours and then they took her into the Triage station. They talked to her, didn't even look at her arm, and sent her on her way with a prescription for massive doses of steroids. The next afternoon, more than 24 hours from the sting, the swelling was still increasing, her color in her arm was terrible, her finger tips were getting cold, and the back of her hand was cold. I called Mom, who called Dr. Melvin, who called Dr. Vaquero, and we were off to the races. After flying across town in the car and nearly jogging across campus to the med center, we got to the office of Dr. Vaquero. By office I mean a place with a desk and filing cabinets and such, not a office with a examination room. He looked at Michelle for a while in the hallway. He had another passing doctor look at her as well. He asked if we'd seen anyone about it. We told him we'd gone to the ER the night before but that the attention he'd just paid to her arm was far in excess of everything the ER had done. He and the other doctor looked at each other in a amazed and displeased manner and made some comment about only being in a hallway. He asked what ER we had visited. When he found out it was OSU, he got a bit stony faced and didn't say anything. In the end, he had her stay on the steroids, though at a much lower and tapering dose, added a script for antibiotics, and recommended that she keep taking advil and benedryl. About 5 days later the swelling and redness began to disappear.

I nearly had a trip to the ER myself last night. I think I've mentioned that I've started making chainmail. One aspect that really interests me is the tooling. This is partly because one of the people I'm teaching has little hand strength and coiling is difficult for her. Two nights ago I woke up knowing how to make a little jig that would slide over the mandrel and force the wire to coil tightly against the mandrel. The angle of the coil would force the jig resulting is a quick and perfect coil. The best part was that it would require very little human intervention, just a fingertip's worth of pressure to keep the jig from spinning around the mandrel. Last night I built the jig. The first test went wonderful with the drill in low gear. I should mention that I don't have some pansy-assed drill from the Harder Side of Sears. I've got a top of the line DeWalt contractors drill that will turn 6500 RPM in high gear and has enough torque to roll me across the floor in low gear. I started a new coil and switched the drill into high. Everything was going along swimmingly until the wire feeding into the jig fouled, caught my hand, and pulled it into the mandrel. My fingers were coiled tightly around the mandrel under several wraps of wire before I could get my finger off the trigger. I ended up having to go find the snips with a mandrel and drill attached to my right hand. After cutting myself free, I realized how lucky it is that I'm a safety freak. When I coil I wear heavy leather gauntlets and a full face shield. Looking at my gloves (heavily grooved from the wire) and at my seriously bruised fingers, I've little doubt that since the wire was running as it tightened over my fingers, that I would have lost the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand. The wire to be taken up now is coiled around something so it can't foul. I can consistently turn 40 feet of wire into a coil in between 6 and 7 seconds now, which is a hell of a lot faster than by hand. My next adventure is to modify Wiss M3 snips to work with coil sizes 1/8" and smaller, as well as modify the snips to prevent them from closing far enough to cause C shaped rings. I love having a project.

I joined my first RPG last night. Yes, yes, I know I said I didn't like gaming, but this one is perfect for me. I've joined IdleRPG on darkmyst.org. It's great. All games should be this easy to learn and play. I'm so good at it.

Due to a recent photoshoot, I've once again been living in Photoshop. The machine I do my graphics work on has 1.38GB of RAM in it. Tonight I was swapping like mad. That kind of impresses me since I'm on an OS with masterful memory management. I also need a second video card to support a 3rd and 4th monitor. Yes, a 3rd and 4th, I've already got two. Tonight I had work sprawled out across the two monitors on the workstation and the laptop (I've got a thing so one mouse and one kbd just float across the computers [no, not a KVM, it's all software and relies on the computers autodetecting each other]). I need more screen real estate badly. When I was done with the images and ready to export them for web use, I was disappointed, as usual, with the resultant jpgs. I finally realized that if I was having a problem, other's were too, so I googled it. Turns out that nobody respects color profile information and so the images were being crashed from AdobeRGB to sRGB (the evilest of all color spaces) by the display programs. Converting from AdobeRGB to sRGB before jpeg compressing the files solved much of this dilemma. This also means I should go back and re-export every bit of content I've done for the web. Ever. Oh. Joy. However, I also found a annoying trend. No two display programs interpret the jpeg standard exactly the same. This image shows what I am talking about (WARNING: This image is large, dialup beware!). This is the same file, displayed on the same machine in three different programs. Note the variance. Basically this means I've no chance of actually showing you all what I want you to see. Wheee.

After fixing the jpegs I had to create a gallery of them for the website. I've got a little program that largely automates this process for me. However, it wasn't working quite right. It kept making bits of the page disappear. After cussing at it for some time, and finally setting display: inline; for every class, id, and tag I noticed that my very first rule in the stylesheet read span { display: none; }. I've no idea what I was trying to test months ago with at, but by god that line met a fiery death. Blarg.

6am. I go bed now.

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Random Late Night Quiz -Thursday, July 15, 2004 -4:06 am-

Omae wa dochira anime no VILLAIN desu ka?
[koyasunomiko.com]

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There Really Ought to be a Title Here -Friday, July 30, 2004 -1:39 am-

Category X - The Changeling
Witty, amusing and a bit weird, you're welcomed into most social groups, even though you don't 'fit in' perfectly.

What Type of Social Entity are You?

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Ugh -Saturday, August 21, 2004 -7:08 am-

It's 6:45am and I'm packing up my stuff in a hotel room in Cleveland overlooking a mud pit. The next 10 hours of my life are to be wasted by listening to a damn financial guru. The 4th floor is not nearly high enough to jump from.

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Na Nah Na Na Nah! -Sunday, August 29, 2004 -12:03 am-

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Intersting Maps to Know and Tell -Sunday, August 29, 2004 -11:06 pm-

I'm going to save the analysis for later. For now, just go read.

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Alert! Alert! -Sunday, August 29, 2004 -11:27 pm-

I have been blog spammed! Many, many comments have been added with comercial advertisements in them. There's also a fair bit of surrealist poetry. I'll porbably post some of it if I remember. I think I've got it all cleaned up now. I'm worried, though, because they were all added to the writeback data files yesterday but the real data files ceased to be in the location the spam ended up several months ago. I am very confused.

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The Queen is Dead. Long Live the Queen. -Thursday, September 23, 2004 -12:17 pm-

Yesterday, at approximately 21:00 EST, my 1989 Toyota 4Runner passed out of my hands. Known to many of you as "The Flintstone-mobile", she provided 15 years of faithful service to my family, the last 6 years to me alone. She was my first car and first manual transmission for many, many other people. Her forgiving and predictable nature saved my ass more times than I want to think about. She will be missed.

Yesterday, at approximately 21:30 EST, a new member of the Williams family arrived. He/she/it is as yet unnamed, pending determination of gender. I am now the proud driver of a 2005 Subaru Impreza 2.5RS Sport Wagon in Midnight Blue Pearl. At the moment, she is a bone-stock, stripped down model with the exception of the optional Arm Rest Extension, the Mud Flaps, the Center Console Arm Rest Extension, and the Rear Bumper Cover (all of which I didn't pay for). For those of you wondering, it has 3 point (shoulder harness type) seat belts at all 5 positions. Riders welcome.

From the front quarter
From the rear quarter

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For Those of you Keeping Score -Friday, September 24, 2004 -2:12 pm-

I was just given a schedule change. It takes effect 20040926. You can see it on my calendar.

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RESUME - George W. Bush -Sunday, October 17, 2004 -12:54 pm-

LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

MILITARY: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

COLLEGE: I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE: I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With the help of my father and our right-wing friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market.

In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron. My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.

I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S.history.

I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S.. election).

I set the record for fewest number of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period.

After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.

I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in war time.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq, then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD (weapon of mass destruction).

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.

All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

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The Bastards Got Me Down -Thursday, November 11, 2004 -3:00 pm-

In the last month, I have been HEAVILY blogspammed. Due to this, I have turned off comments for my blog. For now, if you want to make a comment to a blog entry, email it to me and I will manually add it. The old comments that I could save are still viewable.

If anyone knows a good way to prevent blogspam with Blosxom, let me know

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Getting It Right -Wednesday, November 17, 2004 -7:08 pm-

I've realized that leaving OSU and, eventually, coming to work at McAlister has been a bad thing for me. When I was at OSU, I was, at least occasionally, exposed to works of beauty. By this I mean art, or something like it, that was truly beautiful. Photographs, paintings, whatever. Mainly photography because that's what I was doing. Leaving OSU, I saw only circuits at DeVry. Coming to McAlister, I am awash in photographic mediocrity. The photos of just random people don't matter to me at all, but looking at the work of people who make their living through photography is slowly killing the part of me that loves beauty. I didn't realize this until a wedding photographer by the name of Roland Millington came in to have us run some prints. I used to work for Roland, back in '99 and '00. I did his behind the scenes work, cataloging negatives, filling print orders, etc. Then, I was impressed with how much he charged people. Now, I'm impressed with his photography. Roland is the only one I've seen in quite a while who uses light. I mean really uses light. Uses it so that, even in the print, the light is still moving, wrapping around the subject, shining out of the frame. This is what I'm trying for when I shoot, what stops me in my tracks when I'm walking around. Honestly, Roland doesn't hit much more often that I did when I was shooting all the time, but at least he's trying. At least I was trying. Just looking at his prints of a cake, a couple, a bouquet make me hurt inside, makes me want to get the hell out of here and move on to something that matters. Too often in the store, one of the pros comes in and is talking about a new lens, camera body, workflow, or lab and I think about the work of theirs that I have seen. No equipment can save them.

It's the light, dumbass

Pretty Shiny Bits

Archives

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Meta

Closeness to God Index -Thursday, January 01, 2004 -12:00 pm-

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I have no idea what to say to this... -Sunday, January 04, 2004 -12:00 pm-

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Much Quizness Because of Bad People I Know -Friday, January 09, 2004 -12:00 pm-

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In A Fit of Productivity... -Saturday, January 10, 2004 -3:49 am-

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New, Awesome, Mind-Bending Music -Sunday, January 11, 2004 -2:56 am-

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Well, I have to have something to do at 4 am -Monday, January 12, 2004 -12:00 pm-

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Quizzes for 01/13/04 -Tuesday, January 13, 2004 -3:02 am-

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Unexpected Downtime -Tuesday, January 13, 2004 -7:42 pm-

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Sadness. -Friday, January 16, 2004 -3:28 am-

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3 Days Later -Friday, January 16, 2004 -4:47 pm-

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Freakin A -Friday, January 16, 2004 -10:53 pm-

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Rennie Craziness -Monday, January 19, 2004 -12:13 am-

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Burn It Down, Gentlemen. Burn It Down And Salt The Earth. -Tuesday, January 20, 2004 -5:19 pm-

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I Am Employed -Tuesday, January 20, 2004 -6:47 pm-

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I Am A l337 Haxor -Wednesday, January 21, 2004 -2:11 am-

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Hodge Podge and Then Some -Thursday, January 22, 2004 -3:17 am-

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Bygones -Friday, January 23, 2004 -4:39 am-

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And Now for Something Completely Different -Friday, January 23, 2004 -5:14 am-

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Tremors -Monday, January 26, 2004 -4:56 am-

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The Last Paragraph Will be the Least Boring to Most of You -Tuesday, January 27, 2004 -3:34 am-

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Pattern Recognition -Tuesday, January 27, 2004 -5:45 pm-

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Sometimes Life Is wonderful -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -12:06 am-

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I Need Y'Alls Help -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -7:10 pm-

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11th Avenue Tryptic -Thursday, January 29, 2004 -11:11 pm-

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-Friday, January 30, 2004 -3:02 am-

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The Omnipresent Book Meme -Saturday, January 31, 2004 -7:12 pm-

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Everything New is Old Again -Sunday, February 01, 2004 -4:52 am-

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Sorry I Didn't Make It To The Club... -Sunday, February 01, 2004 -5:37 am-

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That Which Has Passed Behind -Tuesday, February 03, 2004 -3:24 am-

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I'm Going To Be Moving... Again -Tuesday, February 03, 2004 -7:30 pm-

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I Love the 80's -Thursday, February 05, 2004 -8:16 pm-

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I Am An Impressive Geek -Saturday, February 07, 2004 -6:47 pm-

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There Is a White Flag Upon My Door -Sunday, February 08, 2004 -3:57 am-

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Hit Where I Stand At the Turning of the Years -Sunday, February 08, 2004 -4:52 am-

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Let the Wine of Friendship Never Run Dry -Thursday, February 12, 2004 -4:33 am-

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The Web is a Special Place -Thursday, February 12, 2004 -2:41 pm-

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I Had No Idea the Song was About a Drink! -Saturday, February 14, 2004 -11:58 pm-

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Unfathomable Antipathy -Saturday, February 14, 2004 -11:59 pm-

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