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?
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?
Behold My 1337ness -Thursday, April 08, 2004 -11:12 pm-
Which OS are You?
create your own visited country map
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?
And Another -Monday, April 12, 2004 -3:31 am-
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?
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!
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
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...
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.
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.
Yes, Yes It Would -Thursday, April 29, 2004 -11:53 am-
Take the
What High School Stereotype Are You?
quiz.
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!
