Pretty Shiny Bits

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

So I went over to BeliefNet and took their Belief-O-Matic Quiz. A lot of it makes sense, but I'm scared how high Christian Scientist appeared. Funni ly, the religion I was raised to be is awfully far down the list. Sorry, Mom. I'll try to do better in the next life. Oh, you can click on the name of the religion to find out more about it.

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (94%)
3. New Age (87%)
4. Liberal Quakers (80%)
5. Secular Humanism (76%)
6. Mahayana Buddhism (75%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (69%)
8. Reform Judaism (69%)
9. New Thought (63%)
10. Jainism (61%)
11. Hinduism (61%)
12. Taoism (60%)
13. Scientology (59%)
14. Theravada Buddhism (55%)
15. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (54%)
16. Bah‡'’ Faith (53%)
17. Nontheist (50%)
18. Orthodox Quaker (49%)
19. Sikhism (49%)
20. Orthodox Judaism (42%)
21. Islam (34%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (26%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (25%)
24. Seventh Day Adventist (21%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (16%)
26. Roman Catholic (16%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (10%)

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

You are SUMMER'S BOOBS.

What Quirk From THE OC Are You?
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Much Quizness Because of Bad People I Know    -Friday, January 09, 2004   -12:00 pm-

The Deity You need a job where you are in the spotlight, and people come to you for help. Some good examples would be a counselor, psychologist, nurse, doctor, or business representative. You need someone who will devote their life to you and worship you constantly. You are a hopeless romantic and crave attention. If they do not meet your standards, you would dismiss them very easily. You are VERY picky about who you date or want to date. Your ideal dream men would be Jack from Titanic, Legolas from Lord of the Rings, Will from Pirates of the Caribbean, and Romeo from Romeo and Juliet. Your ideal dream woman would be Amanda from Cant Hardly Wait, Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Roxy Hart from Chicago. You most likely are a Leo, Ares, or King. You probably are very insecure and lack self confidence, but hide it under a mask. You need to constantly be entertained which is why you hang out with people who make you laugh a lot. Being bored is hell for you. You are very clean and the world revolves around you. You like shows where people decide the outcome, like Punk'd, The Bachelor, and Survivor.

The Super Ultimate Personality Quiz
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You are Gandalf's schoolgirl outfit. You scare me.
I have to go away now.

Which completely non-existent Lord of the Rings object are you?
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In A Fit of Productivity...    -Saturday, January 10, 2004   -3:49 am-

So I've actually been working on things tonight. Mainly because my Christmas money has enabled me to get my pictures from Halloween and New Years Eve developed. I managed to scan about 15 frames and get them all ready for the web and then do the mark up. This is no small feat considering the files I'm bringing in off the scanner are 6000px X 6000px X 48bit. Or about 206MB each. It takes the scanner 9 minutes to spool the files to the disk and then I have to fuss with color, and spot the dust and wha tnot. Anyway, the pictures from the Halloween party over at the girls' house are here. The picutres from the big New Years Eve thing we had are here. Have fun and I reprint s are available.

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

I'm sure you all are going to be telling me that you've known about them for ages, but I just discovered a band called Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. As with a lot of the good music, I came across them on The West Wing. The Gimmes have this odd habit of covering old classics such as Uptown Girl, Country Roads, Science Fiction/Double Feature, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The mind-bending is that they're a punk band. You haven't lived until you've heard a John Denver song at 200 bpm. Added to that, the drive their music from an aggressive and complex bass line. Though often almost buried by the lead guitar, the bassist is extremely talented. Listen to the riffs on Science Fiction/Double Feature or Somewhere Over the Rainbow. This stuff is great.

Oh, and if you have any appreciation for musical theatre at all, check out their version of Music of the Night from Phantom.

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

I'm sitting here trying to have something to do so I guess I'll ramble at you all. I had my first experience of being on cam tonight. It was odd. I definitely need to not forget it's on and that people are watching. I hope I didn't scar Alanna. Sp eaking of which! If anyone has any extra PC100 memory, Alanna needs it so she can start video/voice conferencing with us. So donate if you've got em! On other fronts, there's an amazing amount of cross bloggedness amongst the rennies. I think there's nothing that they can't turn into an incestuous circle. Sometime the column on the left will link to all of them. I want a cam for my mac, mainly to talk with people whom I can't see in person. The problem is, I haven't found a simple list of all the c ams compatible with OS X. Google is too polluted with noise to be of much help. There's always the iSight, but it's bloody expensive. Great image though. Griffin just randomly stopped by tonight for a few hou rs. He said he was in the neighborhood. He was on his way from Boston to points Southeast of here. Hopefully he'll be back soon. I dunno, my head hurts, I'm going away now.

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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-

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

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. 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?

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

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Maerquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Sulskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
101. Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K Jerome
102. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
103. The Beach, Alex Garland
104. Dracula, Bram Stoker
105. Point Blanc, Anthony Horowitz
106. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
107. Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz
108. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
109. The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
110. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
111. Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
112. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged , Sue Townsend
113. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
114. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
115. The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
116. The Dare Game, Jacqueline Wilson
117. Bad Girls, Jacqueline Wilson
118. The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
119. Shogun, James Clavell
120. The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
121. Lola Rose, Jacqueline Wilson
122. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
123. The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
124. House Of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski
125. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
126. Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
127. Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
128. The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
129. Possession, A S Byatt
130. The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
131. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
132. Danny The Champion Of The World, Roald Dahl
133. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
134. George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
135. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
136. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
137. Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
138. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
139. Girls In Tears, Jacqueline Wilson
140. Sleepovers, Jacqueline Wilson
141. All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
142. Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
143. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
144. It, Stephen King
145. James And The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
146. The Green Mile, Stephen King
147. Papillon, Henri Charriere
148. Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
149. Master And Commander, Patrick O'Brian
150. Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
151. Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
152. Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
153. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
154. Atonement, Ian McEwan
155. Secrets, Jacqueline Wilson
156. The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
157. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
158. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
159. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
160. Cross Stitch, Diana Gabaldon
161. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
162. River God, Wilbur Smith
163. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
164. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
165. The World According To Garp, John Irving
166. Lorna Doone, R D Blackmore
167. Girls Out Late, Jacqueline Wilson
168. The Far Pavilions, M M Kaye
169. The Witches, Roald Dahl
170. Charlotte's Web, E B White
171. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
172. They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
173. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
174. The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
175. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
176. Dustbin Baby, Jacqueline Wilson
177. Fantastic Mr Fox, Roald Dahl
178. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
179. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
180. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
181. The Suitcase Kid, Jacqueline Wilson
182. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
183. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
184. Silas Marner, George Eliot
185. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
186. The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
187. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
188. Goosebumps, R L Stine
189. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
190. Sons And Lovers, D H Lawrence
191. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
192. Man And Boy, Tony Parsons
193. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
194. The War Of The Worlds, H G Wells
195. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
196. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
197. Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
198. The Once And Future King, T H White
199. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
200. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews

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