Did you know stuff happened today while you weren't watching?

Sunday wasn't terribly interesting. Ken announced that his father offered him a job 'too good to pass up' in Conneticut. So, he's moving back there in Aug. Amy won't be moving back there til after their wedding in the summer of 2000.

Also figured out that the ethertap thing wasn't working because it also requires the netlink_dev module to be loaded. That really should be documented somewhere. So, I am to the point where I can ping an AOL IP logged in on linux, but surprisingly no packets are getting out of the AOL interface, but incoming works. Not sure why pings work then. Maybe AOL is futzing with something somewhere. In any case, I need to look into why nothing gets sent.

Got up round noon today. All I've really done today is watch Star Trek (original series) on the Sci-Fi channel. They're having thier big favorite episodes thing. Just finished the tenth hour, which means the number one popular episode. (It was, of course, The Trouble with Tribbles.) I didn't agree with some of the choices, but they're all good ones. I guess they're repeating the top four again. Its suppose to last until 0300 EST.

Somehow I doubt I'll do anything else tonight. That's why I decided to write so early. Oh well. I'm killing AIM (midendian) for a while. I need a vacation. Persons who really need to contact me know how to do that already. Any persons not knowing how should probably not really be finding themselves really needing to contact me, really.

Just watched the tribbles episode again (yes, its now midnight). I'm still laughing. Anyway. I've slept five hours of the past 24. Yet I've watched 14 straight hours of star trek. I think its time to even those numbers out a bit.

A mostly do-nothing day indeed...

Was woken up just after 0700 (with just under three hours sleep) to eat 'breakfast'. I did eat. But I did it with a mean look on my face. Then I went back to bed. But I figured since I was up, I'd watch Bob Ross reruns on PBS (The Joy of Paining, of course -- a show which has undertones far beyond painting). Then I went to sleep.

Got up around 1400. Took a shower. Ate some Fruit Loops. Tasty. Got into an argument with Tara. Took another nap.

Left for dinner about 1845. Went to Ruby Tuesdays at the Paradise Valley mall. Met Ken's (my sister Amy's fiance's) parents there (they flew in from Connecticut yesterday for Ken's birthday today). Rather long (and expensive) dinner. Got home around 2230.

Watched Bob and Margret. Browsed around x10.com to see what home automation was doing this week. Started looking at AOL code shortly thereafter.

I didn't remember James' AOL code compiling at all, but it does. And it looks even functional. I have gotten it to login and list my mail messages (using my test screen name 'TasteThe42'). I left off trying to get the ethertap interface working. That's probably one of the more complicated things. But quite surprisingly, the code isn't the problem; the kernel is. I can't get open("/dev/tap0", O_RDWR) to return anything other than 'operation not permitted'. I guess I'll have to check that. Weird. Not even the sample code works. But it does look like the AOL part is functional. It gets the AOL IP info packet that contains an IP number and DNS servers (and then segfaults when trying to read/write to a negative file descriptor). I'll have a look tomorrow. But it looks like we may have basic AOL going sooner than I'd expected. Especially if James will let me distribute his code with no hassles.

That's about all I've done. This cranapple joice tastes a little funky... I think I shook it too much... and added a bit too much water... oh well. I'm starting to like it...

Today can be divided somewhat cleanly into six parts...

Firstly, from about 0330 to 1130, there was sleep. Ahhh...sleep. It was jolly nice sleep too, except for the part where it ended. That was rather unfortunate. You see, I had to get up. I really did. Or I would have shunned. Because I just had to go to lunch with my parents and sister today. (That's what they told me anyway -- IMHO, it was up for easy conjecture, but it turned out to be rather tasty, so I'm glad I went.)

The second part was where I was taking a shower and wandering around the house waiting to leave.

The third part was actually going to lunch. I've already said that that was a good choice. Went to Big Heng. I've mentioned before how delightful that restaurant is. Mmmm...lemon and emperor chicken...tasty. The only annoying thing about this part of the day was that the power in the restraunt kept going out. We got food (they use gas to cook) but no drinks (fountains require electricity, surprisingly enough). And no air conditioning, and no overhead fans. And it was 104degF. Yick.

Part feower was remarkably similar to part two, with the replacement of the shower in favor of a nap.

Part five was remarkably dissimilar to any of the other parts. Went to Tara's (T) "Star Wars Party" (which aparently had very little to do with Star Wars in the end). This started around 1600. I took Michelle home and and then came home myself somewhere between 2300 and 0000. We did indeed 'watch' the trilogy while there (contrary to popular disruption). Lots of stuff happened. Big sandwich. Brief Simpsons appearance. Three cans of Pepsi and one Mtndew. Good evening.

Sara (S) queried about the Regnu incident. I didn't tell her. For if I did, I would have to kill her. Someday when I'm feeling particularly mean and hilarious, I should write an essay on 'post-aftermath Regnu remenicing'. That stands to be good paper...bwahahaha...

The rest of the evening after I came home amalgomates into part siex. And that basically entails booting my laptop into win95 and playing with icecast on mediocris. I'm ripping my CDs at 192kb to maintain as much quality as possible, but I would like to be able to stream the audio across my IBM wireless adapters which run about the excrutiating equivelent of a 56k modem (it actually calculates to a 38.4kbaud, but whatever -- statistics show up to 56k). icecast does have ways (through 'listen') to remix/reencode streams into lower bitrates. I think I will try it when I get a moment. Not tonight. Other than that, I have listened to Beethoven's 9th about three times now (that constitues the last three hours, i suppose). [Out of all the skipping problems I've had so far streaming across the wireless cell, only a few have been related to wireless. The others are caused by windows stupidness. I'm running on that slow of connection, yet what causes winamp to skip frames? No, not the connection, but merely scrolling in a netscape window! Sheesh.]

You know, I haven't read any Douglas Adams literature in weeks, yet, in places, I'm using some of his classic idioms and sentence/stanza structures. Not by any means detrimental, but unexpected and a bit odd (like a few other events of the evening that have missed mention in this entry).

I don't think I'll ever understand why people hate Charlie Rose's show so much. I think the more amusing thing is that I got a reaction from a few people when I mention watching Rose, but no one really cared that I watched C-SPAN{,2}. C-SPAN, I would think, is far more objectionable to the average TV viewer than any PBS show. Oh well. I did find a lovely article on slashdot (cough cough) by JonKatz (cough hack) that talks about the real 'virtual reality' that is often experienced by hackers, a sensation caused by 'hyperfocusing' and just basically doing things without social guidance, only hacking instinct. There is some surprisingly interesting stuff in there, coming from a non-programmer. Maybe JonKatz isn't as stupid as he looks.

Oh well. Further evidence that I'll just never understand 'normal' people. In any case, I think I'll depart now. Nothing left to do (well, nothing left to do that I could actually get done before dawn, which is rather close, btw).

I've grown bored again...

Got up somewhere shortly after noon. Read mail. Watched misc TV. Thought about how lazy I am getting already.

I'm trying to rip at least a sizable number of my audio CDs (into mp3's). This has proved somewhat troublesome indeed. pileus (laptop, ess1688 audio) won't play any mp3's using winamp under Win95. However, mpg123 will play them, but only version 0.59k -- .59n doesn't work. Also, my dad's win95 box does play them under winamp. I can't get mediocris to do much of anything past encoding (using bladeenc, seems to be fastest). All the decoders I've tried either don't compile or just don't work on mediocris (using ALSA -- OSS doesn't work with GUS's). This got me into huge mess. I ended up reverting to the 19May1999 CVS snapshot of ALSA. Today's is broken. All sorts of problems. (There needs to be some way to do a MOD_DEC_USE_COUNT without rebooting.)

Watching X-Files on FX now. I turned on my regular TV. I never noticed what a sickly green tinge it has. This is the 'Mutato' episode (one of the few episodes that is filmed completly in grayscale -- it really shows the tint problem badly). Oh well.

I got my schedule fixed for next year (he did call back after all). I had to drop AP Physics in favor or non-AP physics. Surprisingly, that was the only problem. Let's hope it stays that way.

I've really gotten nothing done today. Ripping CDs takes forever.

Oh well...its about 0300 now. Haven't really done particularly anything. Mostly sat around reading Open Sources. There's some good stuff in there ("In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.").

Anyway, I was watching Charlie Rose today, who was interviewing Clayton Christiensen (author of The Innovator's Dilemma). He had some very elegant analyses of the way technology and business intertwine and decide what succeeds and what doesn't. I would find the book somehwere, but I don't think there's anything in it that he didn't mention in the interview. Yesterday, he was interviewing Scott McNealy (head of Sun Micro). McNealy has to be one of the funniest CEO's around, and combined with the normal comedy of Charlie Rose, it was hilarious. Oh well. I think that's the only entertaining thing on TV in the past few days.

There's a piece of leftover pizza sitting next to me. It looks sorta good. But I know if I eat it, I'll take one bite and remember how dreadfully disgusting it is and not finish it.

Well, the last person just left my buddy list a few seconds ago. I've run out of things to do. So I guess the sum of those indicates that I am bored enough to go to bed.

The last 50 or so hours are basically just one big blur...with mild accumulations of evidence pointing to a sleep/eat cycle. Really rather confusing. That, combined with a bad headache and a bit of a stomach ache, its been a rather confusing set of hours indeed...oh well.

CSpan.org is broken again. Did anyone else catch their special on W. H. Harrison a few weeks back? I want a recording of 'Tippicanoe and Tyler Too'; CSpan seems to have one. Of course, no one understands /why/ I want such a thing. We'll just let them wonder now won't we...

Got up 'round noon. Watched wretched TV for a bit. Went down to the school to see if I could talk to a counselor. No good. In with a parent. Left note. Probably will end up down there again anyway. Came home and did nothing for a while longer. Went down to the optomotrist's office. Never saw an optomotrist while I was there. Left without going broke (yay!). Came home again. Did nothing yet again. Fell asleep around 1900. Being asleep sounds like a good reason to have forgotten to go to the movies with T, E, and someone-unworthy-of-a-variable. I can't very well remember things if I'm asleep. I've tried. Most of the times I do remember things while sleeping, it turns out to be either a coincidence or wrong. Usually the latter. People oft find my running out of bed and half-badly-ordered drunken-style speech incomprehensible. Then they remember that yes, this is me they're thinking about, and that's the way I usually am anyway. Rarely has anything I've gotten out of bed to tell someone been relevent at that time to that person anyway. I usually wake up rather later than I remember it, thus making my remembering it useless if the snippet of barely-fact was time-critical. I find the worst cases of this to occur when that time-critical snippet is "Wake up at xx00" (where x <= noon). I can never seem to get that one right. I usually remember it several hours late (say, x+3) and then don't bother waking myself up til x+5 or 6. The moral of my babbling is: never listen to me right after you wake me up at x+1 yelling about how late I am.

At this point, not even I can remember what the hell I was talking about before that. I'll go back and look. Oh, that's right. I woke up around 2200, wondering where I'd been for the past 3 hours. I then remembered I was asleep, smiled, felt generally pleased, and in duely short time, fell asleep again. I finally ran out of energy to sleep, so I got up again. I've managed to occupy myself for an especially long time by doing nothing. (Well, except for that one point where I was in a particularly bad mood and decided to watch Life of Brian again just to make me laugh. Yes, that was a good idea.) It's now something like 0500 and I still have no reason to be either awake or asleep. So I guess I'll just pick one.

The fact that I am currently standing in my backyard comparing the position of the Earth and Sol ("watching the sunrise") makes it only more confusing which option to choose. Should I go to bed because I have nothing better to do and its really late? Or should I stay up because the solar day is just starting? Decisisons, decisions...

Yes, yes, another day gone by...and me, with nothing to do but write about it...

I do believe I got up 'round 1400 (maybe slightly earlier... +/- 0.5hrs). Sat around for a short bit laughing at CNBC (I'm not sure what else there is to do while watching 120pt DJIA drops; its just hilarious). Decided to go to McDonald's. For some reason after waiting in that stupid stupid "drive-thru" (more appropriatly called "drive-around-but-not-quite-half-way-plus-a-reallly-sharp-turn-that-will-probably-put-your-head-in-the-middle-of-a-cement-post") line, I went to T's. Ate. Then left. Came back home. Diddled about for a bit. Stared at D's (David's) door for a bit. It eventually opened (somewhat luckily -- I was very much running out of things to find wrong with the doorway). D gave me my 89, a mangled Starcraft CD, and a few other trivial items, all of which I can't remember their location of already (it took mere minutes to loose them again, whatever they were). Rubbed that CD for several hours. Couldn't for the life of my cat find a can of car wax. Ended up just using some other lovely chemicals instead. Took longer, but it did eventually work. I hope whatever CD drive mangled that disc is now in a dumpster somewhere. In any case, it did get descratched and readable. Proceeded to burn a copy for S. Then went to T's, S's, and eventually followed by W's (Stacy's). This was approximatly 2200.

First we went to Greenway and 75th Ave. To sit on the yellow line in the middle of the road, of course. Then a minivan decided they needed to drive on that road. The next logical place to go was Fry's. Wandered around there a bit. Then left; arrived at T's. S sat and played starcraft on pileus until I took them both with me, but left S at some random house. D came for a while too, in order to aid S in the playage of starcraft.

I got back shortly after 0100, at which time I found myself with nothing to do. I'm talking to S again. I keep calling her S merely because she finds it annoying. And thats funny. In any case, I have indeed run out of things to talk about for now.

Oh yes, I've neglected it long enough: Stacy's Log (I mean, W's log).

[Insert usual strange generalization of days missed here.]

Sunday was oddly productive code-wise. Managed to get up at a mid-morning time, followed by doing much coding indeed. After a couple 42-minute hours, I figured out the changes that the linux tuner driver needed to work with the Alps tuner on my AVEC bt video board. [I first tried all the 8 options available, took the one that worked best (it uses the same i2c bit-banging as the Temic tuners do). After that, all I needed to figure out were the other five numbers (two VHF_L/VHF_H/UHF change-over thresholds (which I ended up mostly guessing on) and the three i2c registers that did the band selection (these happened to be low enough that trial+error was easily possible).).] After that, I (rather quickly -- ~21min) hacked up a TEA6320 driver the (audio fader/mux chip on the AVEC). Around 1600, I decided I could stand without a shower no longer and went ahead and took one. Went out to dinner with my grandparents (at Black Eyed Pea -- humorous name indeed!). Had a lovely time mocking the waiter (rather, waiters...we had two -- one was a trainee). Came home. Cursed at FOX for leaving a Sunday without Simpsons. Then quickly threw TV control into my menu system (support which looks surprisingly like the radio support I threw in a day or so earlier). I haven't turned on my Real TV since. This is so much clearer, far better color and sound, and I can get all the channels (all the way from 2 to 78 -- sans the unsignalables and the scrambleds). More than enough better features to make up for the 4in size difference (15in monitor -- maybe I can convince my dad to switch monitors with me...19in...mmm...). Went to sleep watching my new TV and feeling the amount of control I have over it (there's nothing better than the feeling of actually making use of your own code).

Today. Well, I woke up sometime between 1330 and 1400. Got up around 1445. Found a UPS'd package on my doorstep (litterally...the UPS man must come inside these days). In it was Monty Python's Life of Brian. After a bit of preparation, I went out to the garage and watched it (I don't have DVD decoding capabilities in my room...yet... and the other room was busy, though I did move out there once they had left to go somewhere else). I rather enjoyed that movie. Not really much of a story (past the sligh parodical and satirical connections). But it was one Monty Python comedy scene after another. Straight comedy-wise, its better than Meaning of Life.

After dinner, Tara asked if I wanted to come over (this was in fact rather good timing as I had just thought about how I didn't feel like doing anything). Watched the three of them (Tara/Mel/Sara) [let us refer to them as T, M, and S] babble rather loudly about someone who was "being stupid". [Though, I think when you get the three of them babbling that loudly and lucidly, it can be assumed that it is always concerning someone 'being stupid'.] Anyway, one of them left (now just T and M). Then M left. T and A (me) watched ST: Insurrection (moderatly enjoyable movie, basically a really long ST:TNG episode -- completely stateless in the context of the big-screen saga). Elena came in the middle of that (let us set her equal to E). This was followed by T and E going off to fetch incredibly white ice cream from a place we shall refer to simply as 'Sonic' (in terms of E, the "Sonic Force Field" attracted them). 'A' sat in T's house, terrorized her cats, burned down her house and neighborhood, and managed to rebuild them and erase the Minds Of The Cats just in time for T and E's arrival. They returned home. Finished Insurrection. Sat there for a while. S came back. She said about one sentence, and that made E leave again (to go to M_i's house, where S just returned from). T, S, and A sat around for quite some time later discussing absolutly nothing, including insanity. T and S decide to start SW:NH shortly before A must depart. A departs. A writes log.

Re T's log: I stole nothing. It was coincidence. Really. As for insanity, I (A) seem to have the highest score on that stupid test out of everyone so far (S is somewhere near 80% -- just more than a point below mine; I think its the 'drink gasoline' that made that difference (aparently S has never done that)). Oh well. Her loss.

Anyway, enough variable fun for one entry. I've run out of things to talk about (as if I hadn't run out of things to talk about before I started -- that is the purpose of the above, you know).

S asked, so I figured I'd find it again. The reference to Jeff is in the Octobre 1998ad edition (at the very end of the 1e entry). Come to think of it, I really don't think that is the way you spell his last name. Considering I had it written in front of me when I typed it, that's realitly bad. Oh well. Ta ta.

Peachy day.

Got up around 1100. Ate lunch. Took a shower. Ate breakfast. Took a nap. Worked on menu stuff for a while. Read various pieces of mail for quite some time. Found the most interesting class schedule at Cornell College (IA). Read it about it. Its neat. Anyway...

After having a lovely conversation about cow-fly relations and general politics with the cow across the street, I got in Saras vehicle and we went to go see Star Wars. Overall, its a good movie, worthy of seeing more than once. But it does have its problems; the largest problem being that the first hour drags unbelievably badly. But, it is a good movie. Sara, Jason, and I went back to Tara's dwelling. Ate mushroom-infested pizza. I drank a Pepsi. Watched Gattica (blah!). Jason left. Mel came. I drank another Pepsi. Watched (most of) SNL. Got back in Sara's three-doored plus imaginary fourth door car and came home.

Drank mtndew. Wrote an utterly positionally- and functionally-centered log. Went to bed. Or at least that's the plan.

Okay, take The Test. It's response to me: "You are 81.8181818181818% insane." A bit low, I do believe....

It's now 0130 and I should be getting to bed (though its not like I have anything to get up for). I have spent the last few minutes/hour hacking a working set of subfunctions into my menu system to the point where i can control basic radio features from the other side of my room. Its really not clean. Quite undynamic. Terribly unrobust. But I want to go to bed. And I can switch between KBAQ and KJZZ/NPR with a single button push.

It's quite a bit later now. I updated the address and fixed a few spelling mistakes on my "home page". (Yes, the webcam is working again, despite bttvgrab's repeated attempts to befoul me.)

I guess I'll cover first, and hope I can finish before Gilligan's Island is over (I just hate to write without something to amuse myself simultaneously). Thu was the last day of school. Somewhat of a waste of one at that. Despite what we were scheduled to do, all we did in english was sit around and eat donuts/doughnuts. Four dozen of them, in fact. And after slight wandering around, we ended up in the band room, where my laptop got used for playing games by various people and where I was wandering around further doing nothing (sans two concerted efforts to find Foster, both of which failed -- anyone know her email address?). Came home and did mostly nothing all day long. I'm sure I did something. However, I don't really remember. Oh well.

Had to play at graduation. Supposed to be there by 1945. Of course, we didnt' start til 0900 (an hour late). Some somewhat major incidents involving people forgetting certain things didn't make it the most well prepared of evenings, but it ended up pretty much okay. Surprisingly, there was no wind. I was beginning to think it really wasn't graduation. Then it was just about over. And the wind started. And then it was graduation. This is the first year in all I can remember where there wasn't 30+mph winds throughout the ceremony. It was over around 2230. Came home. Fixed my WinGate wireless proxy. Went to bed around 0030.

Slept in till 1130 or so this morning. Very nice to have nothing to do.

Added the 2940uw SCSI card back into mediocris, this time with just a Nakamichi 4disc CD changer and a Pioneer 6disc changer attached. So now mediocris is an 11disc CD changer, an FM radio, a TV, and a computer all in one. Hah. Its all very nice. As long as you load the modules in this order: radio, bttv, then gus/alsa. Any other way segfaults modprobe or gives resource conflicts. Oh, and I upgraded mediocris' modutils and net-tools to the latest CVS versions. Just for fun. Updated e2fsutils as well (to 1.14) in order to try and fix the 'illegal block' problems I've been having. I think I got it all fixed. I still need to find a way of plugging in the Pioneer audio -- its an external drive, and I'm out of stereo inputs. On the Nakamichi, I was able to just use a different cable and plug it into one of the other three CD inputs on the card. I'll figure something out.

Had a lovely conversation with Tara and Sara about bipolorism and how I think that way. They just cannot understand how I can have different thought patterns at different times. They seem to only be able to compare this to multiple personalities disorder and other things. I find it quite useful to seperate my hacker side and my conversive side. I can't explain things like this. Because aparently no one can relate it to themselves well enough to understand it. I shall have to discuss this with Brock. I think he knows what I'm talking about. But maybe not.

Spent most of the evening at Barns & Noble. Nothing exciting.

Then fixed my webcam real quick. I ditched bttvgrab. It wasn't doing me any good, and it certainly wasn't working. Kept getting stuck in a select() seomwhere. I've resorted to just calling 'streamer -t 1' every 15sec.

I also did some things with my menu system. Finally got it working using only the remote as the control. I like it. Very smooth. Also messed around with some recursive identifiers and things. Not very useful, but fun to implment. Now all I need is to actually make it do something besides open and close windows and menus.

Gilligan is over. I'm going to bed now, I guess.

Shortly after I stopped writing, with a mere 10 minutes left of battery, I started playing gnometris. And with Sara's moral support, I was able to lose horribly just in time for to run out of power. I then sulked all the way home. Well, not really.

Came home and read mail, and then more mail. Still no word on where that tea6300 module is. Anyway, mediocris froze on me again. Had to do a fsck. It turned up 'illegal blocks'. I then ran fsck -c to find them again. It didn't find them. Yes, I think that's lovely too. Bad blocks that just disappear whenever you're actually looking for them. In the middle of that latter stage, I took my 89 down to school, where brock was waiting for it. His purpose of being at school was to take a physics AP test, and he forgot a calc. Remind me to get that back from him.

Oh, and I threw in my $9 FM radio card when I had the lid off (well, actually, its still off). I was getting paranoid, as I'd heard that those cards are crap. Well, mine isn't. It sounds better than any standard radio I've got. And I must say that gRadio's gtk interface is much easier to operate than any radio I've got around here as well. So now I can automate the process of hitting the snooze button by using a cron job. Yes. Lovely indeed.

I then took a nap. Yes. That's right. Oh. I forgot to mention that /right/ after I got home, I put more foil on my windows. It was too bright in here. And this is relevent, of course, because that brightness would have affected my nap. Tin foil is terrible to manage. I'm thinking maybe something less prone to ripping would be better... maybe several delicatly laid layers of mylar?

I find this amusing... everytime I save this over NFS, the radio gets fuzzy. I think its time to rearrange the cards a bit.

Anyway, I quick added a stupid feature to faimbot (which still doesn't really do what I want it to do yet)... the "fortune" command. And that is exactly what it runs (to david and brock: it runs fortune on mediocris and /not/ on deepthought, so you won't get any of those hilarious but incredibly disgusting and perverted deepthought fortunes). And these are not actually 'fortunes', by definition. Only by context and history are they called fortunes. They've been called fortunes for going on two decades now, I'm not going to change their name now.... Sara just had to point this out to me. And then we created a lovely paradox and then I got all tingly with excitement.

Tara's log now links to this one. So now I suppose there's even more people reading this. Hah.

Last day of school tomorrow/today. Mere hours left. Saddening, but joyful.

A bit early indeed. I am actually sitting in the hour formerly known as APUSH. Everyone else in here is taking their final (of which I am exempt from -- I took the AP test, basically buying my way out of Pavia's wretchedly long finals). They all look so happy. Oh well. Let's go to yesterday...

I never did get to write a log last night. I should've, but I actually forgot...by the time the evening was over, I was growing terribly frustrated of various things, especially typing.

It was actually quite an amusing day yesterday. We played through (most of) next year's marching music. That was interesting. Especially on a sousaphone with only two valves working. [I really don't understand why they use brass valve casings in otherwise synthetic horns. Granted, valve casings don't usually get dented all that much, but it does happen. Brass is too soft. It sounds nice, but on a plastic horn, 'sounding nice' is not really that big of deal, since it already sounds dreadfully hollow. I'll stop ranting now.] Finished watching Death of a Salesman in english. Then she announced that our final will be acting it out. Ha. And I ended up with the part of Willy because I "already wonder and around mumbling and babbling things about nothing" (Lanee and Stacy) -- "Where are the rest of your pants?". Yesterday was our last day of calculus. Stacy and I got to rip Capuano's room apart. [Whoever 'designed' staple removers was either really stupid spatially or really smart financially. Common sense says that that staple is never going to be far enough away from the wall to clamp those teeth under it.] So we lived with breaking finger nails instead -- which she had more of, of course, so I gave her that job. Then we got to pack up all her cabinets (its worth nothing that she has been in this same room for many years and had grown quite a worthy pile of cruft -- for some reason, they're kicking her out). And then Stacy's Quote of Yesterday came out: "You're more weird than people think you are." I went to jazz band after that. And watched Dead Poet's Society (I'm not real sure why, of course, but wasn't going to pass up a chance to watch one of my most favorite movies merely because I didn't know why it was being shown).

I of course came home and slept after that. Then got up and did some things. I first tried to figure out where that TEA6320 driver I saw floating around went (the chip that is on my video capture board -- audio fader/tone control). Many people kept referring to a tea6300 module that would be 'trivial' to modify to work with the 6320 (I would agree). The problem is that I can't exactly find the 6300 module. Oh well. I then started working on getting ALSA going. After a few tweaks to adapt to the new 2.3.1+ waitqueue mutex structure, I got it to detect (and do the PnP configuration on) the Interwave/STB card. I still couldn't get any output from it, however. After getting very frustrated, I unloaded that module and got it work on my GUS MAX. Much better. Everything seemes to work, including OSS emulation. I could not get recording to work, but I'm not sure where that is having a problem. I really love the way ALSA loads and configures everything with absolutly no complains. Fantastic. I must definitly agree with Alan that is far more modern and by far superior to any form of OSS. I had just started watching the end of Family Guy that I'd taped on Sunday through the GUS/Bt848 when the Riva froze my machine when I tried switching resolutions. [Oh, and I fixed the wierd color problems by forcing the X server into a 555 color weighting, as suggested by someone on the video4linux list.]

I'm looking at all my doodling in my APUSH Free Response booklet (the green one). The two essays for part three that I did were "How were the lives of the Plains Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century affected by technological developments and government actions?" (part b) and "In what ways did economic conditions and developments in the arts and entertainment help create the reputation of the 1920s as the Roaring Twenties?" (part c). The other options I had were "How did TWO of the following contribute to the reemergence of a two party system in the period 1820 to 1840? : Major political personalities, State's Rights, Economic issues" (part B) and "Assess the success of the United States policy of containment in Asia between 1945 and 1975" (part c). The DBQ question was "To what extent had the colonists developed a sense of identity and unity as Americans by the eve of the Revolution?" (part A). Not terribly difficult questions. Oh well.

I've only got fifteen minutes of battery life yet and I can't find an outlet. I'll have to finish fast. I shouldn't have played those games of metatris and gnome-stones in calculus yesterday... or I should have at least remembered to recharge overnight. 100 minutes is a deceptively long time.

We finished the play-through of the marching music this morning. And Baedke got to hear more of my complaining about the crappy sousaphones. I think I convinced her finally send one of them in for repair. It was the last day of band this year, btw. It was kind of nostalgic. Ben and I played together for the last time today just like we did the first time we played together...side by side, and the only ones on our instruments (well, actually, the first year he played tenor sax and not bari like today, but that is quite irrelevent considering the band we were in at the time). [Ben will soon be a crazy Californian in a week or two. Sad to see him go indeed. We've been friends since right after he moved here from Rochester NY in fourth grade. Long, long ago...]

Then I just came here. The arrangement of the desks is stuningly square, as opposed to the usual triplet of angled rectangles. Not real sure why. But its the last day of this class as well. Pavia was getting nostalgic the other day too... this is the last class she will have that teaches American History from the point of view of the 20th Century. Insteresting thought.

Anyway, I had better get going before my batteries die and/or this thing starts its ten-minutes-left beeping. Its terribly loud.

If anyone knows how to shut the DEC Multia/UDB's onboard video off, let me know. I just can't remember how I managed that.

Anyway... a nothing-out-of-the-ordinary day. Completed the last trivial final of the year. I am done; nothing left to do except sit around and mock all the people who still have finals to take. Also finally paid for my AP tests (US$130..ugh) and turned in all my books (sans the calculas book which is still around here somewhere -- I always have to loose the MOST EXPENSIVE book, don't I?).

Compiled the modules that go with the 2.3.2 kernel thats on mediocris (its time to upgrade to 2.3.3ac1 already). I still can't get any sound to work. Keep getting those "DMA timed out" errors and no output. Oh well. I think its time to go get a fresh ALSA and ditch OSS for good. I was able to get overlay working on the Bt848 again, though...something I haven't been able to convince into working in several months. The only problem is that the color comes out with some (many) holes in it (as shown in samples here and here).

Tara took this evening to start a log. It didn't really take as much convincing as she said it did.

I need to tighten the foil on the windows...its starting to gain enough slack to let too much light in. I really have no reason to go to school tomorrow. But I will. Just because I should. Hah...

Hmmm...those cookies were dry.... But I really don't feel like getting up to get a mtndew...

It's been a varied few days indeed.

Nearly the entirety of Thursday was spent at school (over thirteen hours). Normal school, and from the end of that til 2000 for APUSH. The rest of the day was spent sleeping.

Friday was the stress-relief day: the APUSH exam. Yes, that's right: four and a half hours sitting in a small room taking an overglorified AP exam. [I felt good about the multiple choice part: I only had to skip three questions (out of 80 total), and only guessed on two -- who in the hell is "Rosie the Riveter" anyway?!. All three of my essays were quite short and overall lacking in supporting detail. Oh well.] I thought about going back to class. I did go to calculas for the entirety of two minutes (long enough to give Chrissy my 89 and say hi to Stacy and Capuano). I then went to say hi to Denton. After wandering around for several minutes, I found Brock (rather, he found me) and he said she wasn't there anyway. David then found me, and the three of us walked to my home, where there unsurprisingly nothing happening and nothing to do. They left. I stayed and didn't go back to school (not much of a loss). I went to bed. I'm sure I did something that evening, but I can't really remember. Probably read a lot of mail.

Got up about 0930 on Saturday. I decided I was tired of the Sun looking at me all the time (yes, it can see through rock). After a bit of ravenging throught he kitchen, I found some tin foil, which is now plastered on my windows. My original theory was that if I reflect the heat back out, it would eventually stay cooler in here. Of course, all that crumbled when I realized that all I was doing was increasing the greenhouse effect that was already occuring. Oh well. It's still nifty to be in complete darkness all day long. Of course, it would be nicer if it was a bit cooler. It really does disturb your body clock, btw.

This weekend on the whole has been rather productive. I finally got bored enough to get X working on my AGP Riva128 (its been in my box since Jan, yet I have not gotten anything to work sans my Number Nine Imagine 128s2r2 til now). I'm not real sure what the problem was before. It took a bit of tweaking this time, mostly because of XF86Setup's oddities, but it works. It does do some weird visual effects on Netscape though (in 16bpp) -- the buttons aren't really 3D... they click down, but there is not "up" position... its as if the Riva can't draw some shades of gr{e,a}y. I also upgraded mediocris to kernel 2.3.2. And put in the AVEC Bt848 board, and STB sound card. I figure if I have them in a working machine, maybe I'll get them working faster. So far, it hasn't helped. But who knows...

I also found a warez copy of WinGate 3.09 that is unlimited expirery, unlimited user. So now I have my wireless proxy working again. I've missed that. Still wish I had linux drivers for that thing...

Most of Saturday evening was spent at Tara's dwelling, where Sara, Mel, and, oddly enough, Tara, were present. If you someday can't think of a way to madden Tara, telnet to your home machine via her AOL account and IM to AOL from the same machine. Oooo.... Oh, and the only part of Practical Magic that is even mildly amusing is where the frog burps up the ring. It's funny. Believe me.

Came home at midnight (for some reason, my mother has gotten it into her head that I am supposed to obey the City of Peoria's curfew laws, even though I am not citizen of the City...oh well). Sat around for a few hours after that. Eventually ended up in bed.

I don't really know when I got up today. Probably around 1100 or thereabouts. I don't really remember what I did today either. The only major things I can think of are watching Simpons/XFiles from last week, the ones from this week, and working on my mammatus UI stuff.

Last week's X-Files was surprisingly good. The whole layering of realities thing could have been more original, but there was still much clever content there. Good use of decoys to throw the viewer off til at least halfway through. And this week's.... well, this week's was even better. The drama was somewhat badly done, but the theme was very interesting indeed. The last scene of this one, with Scully and the pan-out of the large ancient mass in Africa was the more impacting scene in quite a number of episodes. I haven't yet had time to watch the end of this week's Family Guy, but the first half was okay (I quick hit record on my top VCR as I went outside to help move my sister back in). This week's Simpsons was hilarious, full of satire and great comedy. Anyway. Enough of my reviews.

This evening marked a very useful point for mammatus; it now has the working beginnings of a pop-up user interface (as opposed o the beginnings of a working user inferface). My goal in look and feel is something similar to what most modern TVs, VCRs, and even many monitors have. I am not yet to that point in look, but I am very close in feel. I am calling it the OneDay Menu System (merely because it went from nothing to working in one day). Gratitous screenshot here (the menu(s) are on the far right, GNOME (CVS) panel at bottom, running CVS Englightenment with Absolute E theme, of course). It's got a lot of visual problems, but the functionality is mostly all there. It can automatically do unlimited depths of submenus and everything. It just needs to be plugged into my serial infrared code and then we can maybe have a working prototype of a usuable mammatus!

[Eeek...that Flashing Winds thing from Honor Band is on KBAQ...scary...] I am downloading the IBM ViaVoice for Linux speech recognition SDK (all 40mb of it). Thinking of a few more features for mammatus. Anyone know of a good free speech synthesis package out there? Star Trek, here we come....

I am not sure there's much else I can mention. Its been running between 30 and 33degC (88-94degF) in my room all day, and all night. I'm really getting bored of this. Stupid to live in a place so damned hot.

I need to go put my AP exam wrappers somewhere. I am saving them. Dunno why. But its the only part they let me take out of the room. Figured I should do something with them. And I had so much fun folding them after I finished the test... I got to make so much noise while everyone else was hurridly trying to finish their own tests. I mock them. Yes, thats it. Oh well...

Hohum... The collector's mtndew cans got stuck with a picture of Jar Jar... pepsi got Anakin. Bah...

Off to bed, I suppose....Easy less-than-a-week of school left to wake up to. Yay. Last week.

I don't remember what day it was when I wrote last. I'm thinking Monday. Not real sure. This has been a really odd month. It's halfway over and yet I have not rotated to a seperate May page yet. I am seriously considering continuing this and just symlinking /log/may.html to /log/arpil.html when its done. Hum.

By Tuesday (yesterday, I do believe), I was quite exhausted; so much so that I came home and slept. Slept some more. And if you consider each instance of the word 'sleep' to be forty-two minutes, it should occur a total of roughly eighteen times throughout this explanation of how much I slept. So in other words, all I did from Tuesday to Wednesday was go to an APUSH study session and sleep (an unbounded reference, btw). I then got up usual time on Wednesday (today, I again believe).

Short day at school, only til 1145 (? -- I don't really remember). Nothing eventful. Came home and tried to sleep (again, unbounded). Was quite unsucessful, especially considering that it was literally a 105degF in my room. I eventually gave up on that effort and went to APUSH. Stayed until 1700. Came home and got ready. Went to the Band Banquet. Which is wholely uninteresting to anyone not in band (unless you're one of those people who seems to be interested yet has no current connection with band, ie Stacy). Brock was there for some reason too.

A short message to Josh (I nearly spelt your name backwards on accident), since I don't remember whether its apci or acpi and I'm sure ddns on auk is completly broken: I am in fact not taking the AP Calc test. My 89 is not going to waste however. Its just going out for rental for the first person who asks to use it. And in fact, its still unreserved for AP test times. The calc final exam times are reserved, however.

Tomorrow is all about APUSH. AP test is on Friday. We still have to learn a lot of things, plus review everything else. I think she is expecting us to get home about 2100 (from right after school at 1430). Yes. Should be amusing indeed.

And luckily that test is in the morning. And then I have a bit of Calculas to burn away stress with. And then I go home. Friday. Ahh....

And I find the fact that David has added an index to a five-entry, six month old log just somewhat hilarious.

I think I am going to bed now. It is finally a livable temperature in here and it may not stay that way for long; I must take advantage of that as soon as I can. I must also remember that sleep is not additive/cumulative as it logically should be. So no matter what I think, I can't just sleep for 20years or so and then live the rest of my life awake. Hum. Oh well... The more likely reason that I am going to bed is that my foot is getting quite sticky from repeatitly smashing a Citra can with it... [I think it would be terribly humorous for someone to actaully drink a "Delaware Punch" in Mexico, a place very far away from Delaware.]

What always surprises me is the extreme apathy that genuine Kleenex boxes have towards properly and consistently handing over their contents one tissue at a time. Out of all the Kleenex-like products I've ever used, it seems that the authentic Kimberly-Clark Kleenex boxes have the worst record for issuing one sheet after another with no sticks or rips. Oh well. I suppose Kleenex has become yet another case of developing namesake and then trashing the actual product. (Xerox comes to mind as the other major case of this -- they've managed to get many, many people to think of "xerox" as a verb. Just once I'd enjoy hearing someone not say "I'm going to go xerox", and saying "I'm going to go xerographically replicate!" instead. Yes. That would be amusing indeed.

I have been taking a hiatus from log-writing, and computer-work in general the past few days. Its mostly been about studying for AP tests and finals, and just making the realization that this is the last full week of school. Stress levels have been running a bit high. I have had (and still do have) APUSH study sessions til 1800 everyday after school. Luckily that will all be over quite soon. The APUSH test is on Friday morning.

I suppose I should explain the APCS situation. I payed for a test. However, the test never got ordered. I paid for the AB test (the more difficult one). David and Brock also paid for the AB test. They got tests ordered for them. This was because they turned in their cutsie little 'contracts' that said they were committed to taking it. Of course, they see the teacher everyday. I don't. I never got a 'contract' to sign, let alone turn back in. So I don't have a test. However, one of the persons who paid for an A test (the really easy one) has decided not to take it. I am going to take that test, even though it will do me absolutly no good. I just feel like wasting 65$ more. Hell, the school has already made a $10 profit off of me! (And as I found out today, its really a $20 profit since they didn't really order me an APUSH test either!) The APCS test is tomorrow (Tue), 1230. Three hour test. Blah. And after that I don't get to go home. I have to then go to three more hours of APUSH studying...

Ah shit... have you ever sneezed so hard that your nose starts bleeding? This can't be good...

Anyway, those two tests are about the only thing left to do this year. Last Thurs was probably the worse day there was: school, then APUSH til 1800, then I had to play in a concert, then I came home to write an English essay as a final (American hero crap), then I had more APUSH homework to do. I got to bed about 0400.

I'm not sure that I have to come to school at all next week. All my finals should get themselves done this week. I have already vowed to do no more English work, no matter how stupid or trivial. My stupid algebra class will be done on friday. APUSH will be done on friday. The only thing left is band. Which is unfortunatly first hour. I still say they should move that. Should be put in a better position for ditching the rest of the hours.

So, I haven't been talking on AIM much at all. I check the messages people leave for me, laugh, and then go study some more (I was going to say 'study and sleep', but then I realized I haven't really slept much either). Don't expect to see me much online til next week. Or maybe this weekend. But I'll probably be sleeping then.

Stacy and I were brainstorming once again in Calculas today (yes, be afraid). The end result seems to be that people are supposed to be signing their names on the cow (leather) part of my bookbag. (The spot is not easily missed -- It is marked in large plain letters with the word "HERE".) Ones too fearful of the Mystery of the Cow can just sign my yearbook instead. But it must include an essay on why you refused to sign The Cow.

I have really been feeling dredfully bad the past few days, and in fact still do. Allergies are to be the cause, no doubt.

Tuesday was not particularly worth mentioning, but I will briefly do so. Stayed after school for a short APUSH meeting. Slept all afternoon. Went to a concert back at school again. Spent 2100 to 0140 doing APUSH work/study. Not gloriously fun, no.

Wednesday. Started final exam/essay in english. It needs a characterization of the supposed 'American hero'. Blah. After all that APUSH work yesterday, we managed to do nothing in class. Bah. Stayed after school talking to Denton for a while. She has no idea when the APCS test is either. I hope someone knows. Came home and slept again, though a bit longer this time. I regained consciousness just in time to watch the Simpsons at 2200 (it was the boresome 'Dancing Homer moves to Capital City' one).

Sheesh...by the time I get around to filling in Disneyland, my memory of it will be down to nothing... Well, not really...

I'll go back and fill in a bit now. Filled in Thursday and Sunday, and part of Friday I'll try to get to the rest later.

Today was marginally existant. No one felt like doing anything at school, and thefore nothing got done. I just came home and slept a bunch more. And then managed to be unable to concentrate on anything all evening. I have had a very difficult time concentrating on writing the below. Oh well.

The only interesting bit of irrelevent trivia is that Lanée may be marching sousaphone next year. She really wants to play something new. Oh, and yes, I probably am back to marching next year. And I wish whoever keeps telling people that I hate Baedke would stop doing that; its getting annoying, especially since I think they're telling Baedke that, and she's believing it. That's bad. Yeah, that's really bad.

Oh, and aparently we have to stop generating rumors about Regnu now. She really was sick. Quite badly, in fact. Oh, and to all those students who she gave this log's location too: yes, I really am a psychomaniacal dingbat out to damage, harm, and generally demolish society and humanity as a whole Well, that's the sentence you were looking for...wasn't it? I'm sure its at least the one Regnu told you to look for...

Yes, so, well, I am home. And indeed I did have a lovely time in SoCal. I will write later. As well as rotate this. But I am still tired, as I have not really slept in several days. So I'm going to go work on helping that situation now.

Pulled out of Disneyland about 2300 on Saturday, after sitting on the bus doing nothing for a half-hour, and after waiting for a tram to get us all the way over there for the half-hour before that. I managed to stay awake for the entirety of ten minutes. Slept til we got to that dinosaur petrol station again. At which time, the driver told us to get off the bus again. This wouldn't have been quite as maddening if all three busses had had to evacuate. But this time, only our bus had to; the other two got to stay inside and sleep. And it was about 0130 by this time. Not a very nice time to be wandering around there. Oh well. Left again. Stopped again at Blythe. But luckily didn't have to get out. Yay. Continued sleeping. Aparently we stayed there for a half-hour or so, little be known, or little to be cared, by me. I regained consciousness around 107th avenue. And was awake enough to read street signs by Glendale Ave (don't even ask about the paradox that ensues when you read the last sentences). Dawn was about this time; that probably had something to do with it. Arrived at school slightly ahead of schedule: about 0530 (scheduled for 0600). Unloaded rather quickly for being so early. I stood around waiting for a ride for a while. I even called home several times. No answer. I just got mad and walked home, to find my parents sitting there waiting for it to turn 0600. Why they didn't answer the phone is something they didn't have an answer to. Blah. Talked to them for a bit and then went to sleep. Slept for about eleven hours (til 1730).

Did nothing most of the evening. Watched Simpsons, et al. David and Brock stopped by my window. Aparently Brock's truck is being actively non-functional. He is therefore living at David's for the time being. My guess is that while they were standing by my window, their feet not only got a taste of the irrigation water, but they also hauled some of my ants away with them. Good for them. Now they won't be tempted to make the few-foot journey up my wall and into my window to munch on me in the night....

Loaded up the busses at 0915 or closeby. Made the trek up to Pasadena (its actually a short drive, and it wouldn't be a time consuming one except for the normal amount of heavy traffic). And got lost, again. Aparently the drivers couldn't find 'downtown'. They made it eventually. Wandered around 'downtown' Pasadena on foot for several hours, including a small time consuming food. Loaded the busses again, and moved slightly to the right, into the vicinity of Pasadena City College. We played there for some reason. Basically just sat there for two hours. Then quickly left. Drove back to Buena Park, but not to the hotel; this time to Medieval Times. (That's a restarant-type place, btw.)

[I'm not done with this yet.]

School was of mixed attitudes...but mostly just wanting to leave. Had English first (for two hours), which included taking an exam on Fahrenheit. Bleh. Oh well. Came home after school, finished packing, and left again at 1515 or so. Stood staring at the busses for several minutes and then was told that the doors were open and that that meant that it was enterable. Go figure. First stretch of ride was uneventful. Stopped at Blythe (just across the CA border on I10) for dinner around 1700. Its ironic that we always stop at Blythe to eat; it has got to be the worst place to search for eatable food: it is what appears to be a slum town that only has fast-food restaraunts. And out of the half-dozen of those that it does have, they are the worst instances of them around. Sickening indeed. I personally ended up at Carls Jr, waiting in line for a half-hour surrounded in the front by a certain teacher who isn't all that exciting to talk to (last name starts with an H, btw), and in the rear by Tara's parents (I don't remember what they were talking about). Also stopped at that Texaco near the large fake-like dinosaurs somewhere before LA (I'm not real sure what the name of that place is... I do believe it starts with a 'C'). Aparently the busses have to be completely evacuated while being refueled (no doubt there's an insurance company behind that policy). And of course, it was about 50degF with 30mph winds; eventually they let us back on the busses. Made it closer and closer to the hotel, so the drivers just insisted on getting lost. But, they made up for it by getting lost on a road with a curious name: 'Orangethorpe Ave'. Well, I thought it was funny. Even somewhat ironic. (Name a road after orange orchards that were probably never existant anywhere near there....okay, so maybe it was funnier after being on the bus for seven hours...)

Eventually made it to the lovely Travelodge (Buena Park). It was not a particularly beautiful place, however it was good enough, I suppose. Our room (David and two other persons happened to be in the same room) was a bit amusing. Firstly, it had a rather large hole in the wall covered in a barely affixed glass (aka, a window) that opened into a lovely alley-like pathway, complete with large but cute stray cats. Also, at first glance, the room had no bathroom at all. After being there for a half-hour or so, the location of the bathroom was discovered: behind the door. Oh, and don't walk in the hallways with just socks: for some reason, it likes to try and eat the said socks. A sicky experience. It was a smoking room too, so it smelt just peachy. The sink in the room, though it did expulse water, did not do so in an orderly manner. Very uneven flow. Luckily we didn't need it. Anyway, spent the last few hours of that day poking fun at the mentally disturbed inbred's on TV (out of all the mess, they did have a 22in Philips-Magnavox TV, complete with hotel-custom remote that was suprisingly not glued to anything). And then sleeping. Or at least what appeared to be sleep. It didn't really feel like sleep. And it certainly wasn't as refreshing as sleep. But it was aparently sleep.

Big TV. But no clocks whatsoever. I woke up for no reason. The sun was up. I figured it was probably not too early. I layed there for a while. Heard David's watch beep. Figured it was beeping for 0800. Got in the shower, causing everyone else to get in the shower. After I got out, I found that his watch was in fact not beeping for 0800, but for 0700. Oh well. We got to breakfast early that day anyway (except for David, who was still in bed at 0900). The hotel's complementary breakfast was that of a normal breakfast of that sort: dry doughnuts, warm milk, and cold coffee.

I'll stop there and finish in the entry for that day. Eventually.

I find it amusing that today marks the day when deepthought-time and adam's-room-time converged for a slight second. Both showed 0324 at approximatly the same juncture. As I said, I was amused.

Bit early tonight. Yes. I'm leaving tomorrow. And I still haven't done any of those pre-leavage activities (not that they take more than 15minutes or so, but I find it laughable to mock how other people make such a big deal out of doing them). Yes, tomorrow I am going to California. Not by myself. Far from it. It's a band/choir thing. The rumor is that we'll be back at a dreadful time on Sunday. Yummy.

Anyway, today was a Good Day. Better than the Moderate yesterday. Went to school around 0900, as I had planned (imagine that). Really did nothing sans sit around and talk all day, but it was useful enough. Capuano asked about Regnu. Hehe. I just find that somewhat gelastic. Aparently the list in the teacher's room says that Regnu is 'ill', even though she is definitly not ill and well-known to be on some sort of 'administrative leave' for this week. Which is amusing in itself. No one really knows why. Just a lot of rumors. A lot indeed. I think I will catch Mr Matheson at a lunch one of these days and query his knowledge a bit. Anyway, that's about all that happened at school.

Slept the afternoon away. And now really doing nothing. Oh well. May (or may not) go to bed early. (Statistics show that when I say that, I usually end up going to bed later than usual.) Must go to English for two hours tomorrow. Ick. First thing even. Ick, ick. We still haven't finished watching the end of that bleckful film rendition of Fahrenheit 451. (I suppose its not a wacky of a movie as Incubus or something.)

As a worthless sidenote, IMDb has got to be one of the best resources around, for anything. Incredible amounts of movie information (as you would have seen if you've followed movie links in my log before). As good for movies as lyrics.ch used to be for music. (Of course, they got busted on copyright issues.) And for everything else, h2g2 seems to be getting there.

Oh well.

Moderate day, but on the good side of moderate. They extended first hour to two hours for today and tomorrow (rather, yesterday and today). Didn't do anything. I studied for English a bit, but that was really useless because it somehow ended up that we didn't take the tests we were suppose to take today anyway (that teacher can be quite gullable at times, okay, most of the time). More long lectures in APUSH. I still don't think we're going to get anywhere close. The AP test is in two weeks. Fun. I set the curve on the last test, though. I'm sure that has caused some overoptimism in my mind. Probably more likely just less pessimism. But I'm sure you understand how those fulfil each other anyway. And this entry is not yesterday's, so I'm not going to explain every obvious detail. Ditched last hour and went to jazz and sat in Baedke's office. Came home and immediatly went to bed. Because I got up early. To go to ASU. Tonight was Dr Strange's last concert (mmm...retirement...). That's a big thing. Aparently a lot of other people thought so too. Filled up Gammage. Very nice, but very long. Lasted til nearly 2200. Plus the fortyminute drive home.

I'm not going to school til nine or so in the morning, so I'm not too big on doing much right now. I'll probably sleep anyway.

Bah, I've said Bah too many times today. And that brings up the question: would you notice if one day you woke up and your eyes had flipped themselves over? (Note that waking up has absolutly nothing to do with this since chances are you'd never notice. Or it would probably take a while anyway, which still makes waking up once irrelevent in the grander part of waking up everyday of the duration of your non-noticing period.) I know I would notice eventually. (My right eye has this crazy little blood vessel thats are curly, squigly, and generally adorable just underneith my lower eyelid. I would eventually notice that it was missing. Which would ultimatly mean either of two things: 1) blood has stopped flowing and/or has hardened in my eyeball (I would notice this before I would notice that because this would also imply that I can no longer see); or 2) That my eyeball(s) has flipped itself upsidedown. Not that any of the last paragraph has anything to do with what happened to me in the past two or several or oppositly infinate days....

Contrary to the dreary mood I've been in for the past week up til an hour or so ago, I'm in a surpringsly interesting mindset now. It was probably the crangrapeapplejuice. Though that that would put me in this mood is oddly strange since I have drunken too much of that crap over the past year, and it has never done that before. No conclusions should be made about crangrapeapplejuice at this time.

I guess I haven't written here about days here in quite sometime (sans my days writting about writting here, which only lead to massive confusion of anything besides the sentence that follows). I am not here write now with a focus to write much of anything (even though some deep focus brought me to writing here anyway). In short, my focus is currently lacking focus. Let's make some random focus, and in taking into account the true impossibility of randomness, I will base the randomness (and therefore the focus) on some of the thoughts going through my head in the past few days. Most likely, I'll get bored after the first bit of false randomness comes and stop and maybe even make this evening's fourth attempt at going to bed. But you didn't get this far if you liked coherency (the non-concrete noun, not the operating system).

Over the years I have managed to gain an inderscernable requirement for a sense of usefullness. I'm not quite sure how to explain what my mind thinks 'useful' means, but I can best just say that its a sensation you get after doing something useful. And this need for usefulness is what keeps me going when I'm feeling particularly unuseful (or antiuseful, which is either a good feeling or bad feeling depending on who its directed at -- being antiuseful around a certain teacher that awwaiid and i were just talking about always provided me with hours of antiuseful entertainment at the expense of human stupidity). And theres only one thing that has managed in the past to drive me into depression, and that is the loss of the need for usefulness. You can probably tell at this point that that is the current case. In case you didn't already notice that. I'm not sure why it's happened. And doing things like this (and working on libfaim, mammatus, and other non-school,non-human related things keeps me out of it). It just happens. Aparently it happens every six years or so. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Some people go through their entire lives without feeling useful. I'm not real sure how that is relevent or why I should generally give a damn about that, but people keep telling me it somehow matters. I have grown up differently than "most people". It's quite difficult to tell where the experience of other people is relevent and where I'm going on relativly new human experiences, if I ever have. (Considering the current instrastellar population of several billion humans and many zillion insects, past and present, I have now assumed that there's absolutly nothing I can really do thats truely different than something someone else did years ago, or a few minutes ago (one thing about counting insects is that time shows little varience -- death vs birth evens out over a general span of a millenium -- of course, few people measure human experience in terms of millenia for two very good reasons 1) there's very few full millenia of humanity to compare to itself and 2) too many insects lived and died in that milleium to bring any relevence to the time scale.) [This all depends on how long you define a millenium to be of course. And that unit of scale seems to have changed. Many times.] Humans are not original thinkers. They seem original, of course. Because they find novel ways of aggregating past knowledge into a "new" idea. I see no point in human history of the past four thousand years that humans came up with something that could even be construed as somewhat new. Now the first few thousand years of homo sapiendom were probably quite original times. However, no one has quite compromised space/time to the point where one could actually learn what those wacky malformed apes were thinking about (that is, if they existed at all).

I guess I'll have to check my other log and see if I was thinking about anything else. Hmm...some of my interesting art...abstract to say the least... Oh, I was talking about my handwriting. "Seems apathy has become a way of life when it comes to me as of late." ; "I have not disregarded school this much in years." (23apr1999,0000) Oh well. I can't really read much else. I have to be in a writing mood to read my writing...but it looks pretty disheartening.

pileus' nic needs a new dongle. A rather, a nic that doesnt need a dongle. I've managed to rip the hell out of mine in the few months I've had it. It doesn't work all that well anymore. Must buy a new one hear soon.

I am back to the point where I have no idea what time it is. Its amusing at times. But mostly just confusing. Rather, confusing when I actually need to know the time, for some odd reason. Otherwise, its sometimes amusing, depending on what time it is. Mtnew cans are rattling in the false wind of my fans. I do believe that the win-lose ratio on these fans is quite bad; they produce more heat than they seem to alleviate. (Which brings up the true pointlessness of fans in general. It's a marketing scheme. "We'll sell you the fan half of the air conditioner now, knowing you'll be unsatisfied and come back for the other half. You know, the half that costs so much to operate. Oh, then when you say you can't afford the other half, we'll tell you to buy an imitiation other half. Initation other halves consist of a paper towel soaked with water hanging in front of the half you already have. Of course, you could accomplish this using a paper towel soaked with water and the half you already have, but we'd rather you pay us several hundred dollars for it, complete with an undersized power supply, a paper towel thats too thin, and a tank for the water thats way too small -- unless you get the upgraded imitation other half, which draws water directly from your house's water supply and will be guarenteed to use the wrong sized pipe and fittings. We even have two names for these imitation other halves, both equally deragatory to paper towels: "evaporative cooler" and "swamp cooler". Either way, it will make your wallpaper fall off and your wall paint to gum up, not to mention make your home a sweet home for not just your family but a sweet home for all the city's wayward insects as well -- and letting those insects propagate in your swap-cooled home will have the added benefit of decreasing the originality of the human race as a whole and create as many run-on sentences as is needed to execute your junior-high English teacher, not to mention all the plurality disagreements!")

I shall make my fifth attempt at bed-going at this time.

Okay. I'm going to take time out of the usual routine to respond to Orb's reply to the entry from a few days ago. Please read that now. You can skip the part about e, I won't mind. Thats probably the last thing I learned in calculus (and probably one of the only things I've learned past limits and derivatives).

First, Orb's log is at www.rtweb.net/theorb somewhere. Don't remember the last part. Now just don't put it in Yahoo!. Time to split my Xemacs window and interpret...

Some key/interesting statements:

• "I'm afraid of letting people know what I think...but I think I shouldn't be..."
• "Boldness isn't important; it's acting bold that counts."
• "...people stupid enough to not like me once they know me I don\'t care enough to mind."

Before I said I was 'naturally fearful of confrontation, especially in the physical form'. Now if you're not me, that sounds like I'm afraid someone is going to 'beat me up'. That is definitly NOT what I'm talking about. I've been in physical fights before, and that is definitly not what I care about (back in second and third grade, I found it amusing to curse at the stupid people, who "defended" themselves physically, and all it gained me was a non-informative/enlightening trip to an authoritarian's office). What I am talking about is physcial contact, not confrontation. I should have said "verbal confrontation in the physical form". Meaning that me talking to someone is far different than me writing to someone. I'm not completly sure what's so different about them in my mind, but there's definitly a difference. One major one I think is delay factor. I like to sit and think about things, to formulate a complete response. That's fine if its email or AIM or IRC (less so on IRC). But in human-vs-human direct conversation, there's a certain way that people do things when talking, and one of them is not taking very long to respond. I have a real problem with that. Add in my inability to interpret the English lanuage in real-time, and I don't make a very good conversationalist. (Yes, its my struggle with English that brings me to study it further -- I can't read very well either.) So, back to the confrontation part. Yes, I am fearful not of mental confrontation or physical confrontation, but of the part in between: the handling of humans.

I do not have a fear of mental confrontation in itself (many can attest to this; Orb isn't the only one I've had long "I\'m Right, you\'re Wrong" conversations with -- esp about stupid things like indentation and whether its okay to leave off the second ')' when its preceded with a ":)"). But, I only seem to manage to have those conversations when I'm behind the shield of non-physicality. I cannot remember a single decent conversation with anyone face-to-face. I just can't do it.

"...com[ing] out of [my] shell" is what the past six months have all been about. As for 'quirky mid-ness', I don't know. And for understanding myself, I can easily say I don't. And I of course can't say what I don't understand about myself because I don't understand it yet. ("42." "What's the question?") I do very much like his 'I write so people understand me better so I can understand myself better' idea.

And one of the gargantuan themes that I myself foolishly did not notice: a fear a change. The largest reason that I don't say anything real is that I'm afraid of what it will change. I don't always know who reads what or how they read it (the latter is especially important considering how non-literal I can often write things). Things are basically decent in my life the way they are. Change usually brings worse. I am definitly not one to take risks like that. Especially risks dealing with interrupting my already fragile relationship with humanity. Like saying something about someone else who I actually might have to talk to someday (notice the gratuitous use of "some-" prefixes -- I don't like risks.) People (and the rest of the humanities) aren't like anything else I've studied in the past. There's no way for me to be completely secure in my knowledge of it. (Perhaps Orb's stance on fear of mental confrontation in a hacker being a silly concept is what's at play here: I am not comfortable with my amount of knowledge and am therefore trying to learn. I cannot learn.)

It is sad indeed. Orb has a more realistic interpretation of hacker ethic ("...wanting the net understanding of the world by the people in it to increase."). [I don't think I can generate a "_really_ interesting" reaction to Orb's log -- methinks the only way he's going to get that is for one of the person's he talked about extensivly is to talk to him about it.]

You are correct on several points at the end of that paragraph. My personal log is nowhere near as satisfying to write as the public one. It is clear that I am far more introverted that yourself. And that it is terribly sad that I'm afraid that people will learn every single thing about me. And I'd prefer it if none of the last three sentences were true. But I'm afraid that they are.

I will try to 'just talk'. Of course, I have tried before. And I probably still won't get it right, especially when it comes to talking about people See above for an explanation why.

Another point about my perspective on this log: I've been here the whole time, you probably haven't. And of course I forget that. In order to understand every minute detail of the above and past writings, you must read everything back the past eight months. Ambiguity enters otherwise. And part of that is that new readers may not know that I always desire comments on anything I write. And henceforth, I put a comment immediatly prior to my address at the very bottom here to let them know that ("In the spirit of Orb.").

I also always encourage anyone to start writing their own logs/journals/diaries. If you've never done it before, its very satisfying (as Orb said, "I never really believed in that until I did it.").

I will probably come back and write some more later (including day summaries). The smartest slashdork comment I've ever seen: "Its stupid comments like 'get a life', that makes some people think 'why don't I take yours instead'."

Wheeee.....

School was positively dreadful. Probably the lowest lull was playing the incredibly stupid game of 5x5 tic-tac-toe with Stacy. Don't do that. It's terribly frustrating. And insanitizing. Too many choices! CHOICES!!!

Got home and drove out to CPU Micromart. Had a nice chat with the front secretary. But that was it. The person I was going to see had an out of state emergency to attend to. Oh well. It's really not a bad drive all the way over there. If you can get past all the maniacs on Greenway Parkway, it goes nicely (or if you ARE one of the maniacs -- then theres no change at all). Takes about 40 minutes in relatively heavy traffic. Not bad. I wouldn't mind making the drive daily, especially if gas prices would go down.

Got home about 1630. Tried to sleep for a while. Got distracted many a time. Did sleep a bit. In fact, till 2030. I'm still tired, however. I didn't sleep all that well last night. Been working on typing in APUSH notes so I can use them on the test tomorrow (don't ask). I personally think we should have just skipped this test all together, considering how behind we are and how few days we have left of that class to cover 80 years of history. Oh well. I was managing to talk to people, eat ice cream, and type at the same time. I have begun to think of my short attention span as not just that, but more of a way to avoid repitive stress disorders.

Conspiracy rises again in Regnu's hole in the wall. Aparently she's got her ass stuck in a tomato furnace again. Rumor is that at least two more people have been 'removed' from the class. That, and she was being more rude than usual today. (I wouldn't know personally... I avoid coming within ten metres of her.) Those, and aparently today she has caught a log-reading itch. All the way back to Octobre she went. And there's been 232 hits on deepthought alone from the district proxy's IP. You tell me that's coincidence? I laugh. I don't just laugh. I laugh repeatidly.

Oh well, I have run out of things to stay up for.

Bah. I am sweating. Oh the gods, do I hate this place. What _ever_ possesed humans to move to such a wretched stretch of arid land as what is now, for some stupid reason, known as Southern Arizona?! Too damn hot. Nothing here. Have to bring in water on purpose. Cursed humans. Especially old ones. Nineteenth century American humans had to be one demented and idiotic group...

My ceiling fan is quite ready to shake itself off the location of its namesake. It may just decide to go with that ability here right soon. Let's hope I'm not here when it makes that decision. I'm afraid it won't be able to write logs anywhere near as badly as I do. In conclusion, it is my guess that ceiling fans make bad replacements for people named Adam Fritzler.

I'm currently reading the final segment of Orbs journalish thing. Quite interesting. Much more interesting and deep than my dribble.

For a breif moment early in his writing, he brings up this very log; mentioning how it never talks much about anything besides computer stuff anymore.

And in reaction, I must say this: I am not as bold as he is. Never was, probably never will be. I am naturally fearful of confrontation, especially in physical form. In fact, the entire Regnu incident showed me in complete fear of what I was going to do next. And that is where I decided to end it. I stopped mentioning real names (unless I knew they wouldn't mind). I stopped mentioning anything of substinance. I stopped mentioning my reactions to most things. For reasons I care not to discuss (if I know them myself), I fear what people think of what I think. I speak very rarely about it, always have. When I first started this log, it was just me listening. There was no fear in talking to myself (well, less fear anyway :)). But then more people read it. And the power of it started to enter my mind. I got scared. And this log is now what it is: useless, superficial dribble. Only enough to remind myself what happened, not enough to lead anyone on to what I am really thinking.

I now keep two logs: this one, and one for myself (you may see me writing sometimes at school, or for no aparent reason, carrying around a notebook). It's not that I am particularly against others reading my log. It often proves as a way to amuse people, something I find rewarding. However, it has become more of a performance art than a sounding board for thoughts and ideas. I write for others, instead of writing for me. It has become useless to me.

One of the largest problems _is_ that I can't mention real people the way I think about them. I fear doing that. It leads to a lot of trouble. It needs descretion. And in general, there is only one person who has offended me enough to actually commit character assignation (we all know who that was). Everyone else I have managed to deal with their inadiquancies myself. In my head. But unable to write about it. This is a public place. I am liable to destroy other people more than I help myself. I do not want to do that. I have never in my life felt the need to really hurt someone (point out their inefficiencies,yes, but not hurting them :)).

Perhaps part of that is the one-way nature of this log. I write. People read. They cannot easily write back. Many months ago, I thought about putting the daily entries into slashdot.org-style news format, with a comments section for every day. So it would become a two-way endevour. I gave up on that thought at the time, but it may have been a good idea. And just a reminder, if you do have something to say, please mail me at the address at the bottom of the page. I will not mention that you made a remark unless you wish to be.

So, I go on. On to more nothingness. Only rare people end up seeing the face of my demensia. They are the unlucky. And the ones to be feared.

Some people were really getting on my nerves in band. I was about to scream at one of them. A particularly tall female one. I got over that. Made it into english, just in time to sit and do nothing for the entire time. Well, actually, we were talking about the Littleton shootings. And suicide. And Hitler's homosexuality. I dunno. I was mostly in a blur (and writing in journal mentioned above, managing to concentrate as little as possible on reality). Moved on to lunch. Helped Lanee with the APUSH homework she missed (she took the past two days off as well, just with a far far better reason than I had). Spent half of APUSH discussing the shootings again; the other half spent on lectures (ahh...I love Pavia's lectures, so informative).

Came home. Checked mail. Only found two personal messages that needed attending too. The first was somewhat important, but I didn't think too much of it at the time. I was more interested in Orb's. It was much more interesting than a message that states a phone number.

And that phone number was to the linux store. I was asked to call, in response to what I sent them the other day. I guess that was yesterday. Oh yes, thats right. Because he got the message twenty minutes after I sent it, but he didnt formulate his two sentance reply for another 24 hours. Oh well. I called. Though I hate phones. I really do. (Actually, I had to _find_ my phone, then plug it in, just to make this phone call today. It hasn't been plugged in for weeks.) I am taking the 25mile trek over to scottsdale tomorrow after school to meet with them. Let's hope I can find the place.

I suppose I then napped for a while. Then got up. And started thinking too much. And wrote this. Bah.

Well today was kind of amusing now wasn't it. I didn't go to school. Yet another of those decisions made while laying in bed. People just don't learn to get me up before asking stupid questions (ie, "Are you going to school?" [I of course say 'hell no!' when asked that question a minute after getting rudely awoken by some bleeping box that claims to know when I want to get up. And after I tell someone that I'm not going to school, I have this tendency to believe it myself, and therefore never end up anywhere near going to school.]). I calmly stayed in that bed until ten or so. That's when I sat up and asked myself if I felt like going to the last half of school. I layed back down to think about it. About 1500, I sat back up and wondered why I can never make decisions in a reasonable amount of time. I then read mail to think about it. I soon forgot the question and wondered why I wasn't tired like I usually am at that time. Of course, then I remembered. I'd slept through the past many hours.

While reading through last weeks' NTK, I found this incredible article (On Egg Sandwiches and Neutrinos) that proves that Douglas Adams is indeed one of the best scientific writers around. (That link spawned from a thread on douglasadams.com concerning the quote in Mostly Harmless about egg sandwiches.) [Also note that I just had to reply and point out that the decreasing surface area of the sandwich while being eaten was not taken into account.]

Now that you know all about eg-bb interactions, we can continue. I say that as if I just got hit on the head with something. I don't think I did.

I finally got gtk to drop down a menu for me. I then decided to not use gtk for my project, reason being that it would take too much effort (and josh kindly pointed out that I have already spent more effort trying to do that one thing than should have been needed to make the above decision, so don't bother mailing me just to point that out again). I shall have to find something else to code a TV-like pop-up menu system in.

Oh, I'll just to just after I woke up again. While I was reading the mailing list for PLUG (Phx linux Users Group), I came across a message from Rusty which was a forward from John Wise, saying that there were positions open over there at the linux store. I am ashamed of the state of my 'resume', but I sent it anyway.

I studied for the APUSH exam a bit too. I am very surprised at the amount of information I can remember. That test is on the morning of the 15 May, I believe. The CS test is a few days earlier, at the 11 May. Approaching all too soon, I must say...

Seems Orb has started himself a log. [I'm not going to list it because I really doubt he wants it activly distributed -- and we all know what active dristribution of an independant thinker's log can end up in!] Some good stuff in there.

I believe I will go to bed now. I have APUSH tomorrow, so I'm going to school. That's all I go to school for anymore. Everything else is just so damn worthless. All I seem to learn at 'school' is how idiotic 'school' is. And every minute I'm there, I learn that I shouldn't be there. It is a literal waste of time. Especially the last week or two. Just nothing happening. Very frustrating. That I am required to sit there and do nothing. You know, if it weren't required, I probably would not feel so bad about going.

Gee, this bidaily thing is starting to catch on... I thought about writing yesterday...but just didnt seem worth it.

Sunday. Well, hum. Probably the more major thing was the complicated removal of the large trash bag(s) from my room. I figure the easiest method of removal of large, heavy objects from somewhere with limited access would be to take out the window and throw it through. And so I did (after opening the window, removing the screens, and appropriatly placing a trash can, of course). I then stepped in a very large pile of ants. That was bad. I was mad. I had a hose. They had no defense. Their village is not quite as concetrated now. In fact, it looks more like a dried heap of mud. That was fun. But I decided while I had the hose running, I'd wash the numerous pounds of dead spiders, spider webs, and just plain dirt, from the outside of my window. All that is now in the ant pile. Yay. Yes, that fifteen minutes was the most exciting part of Sunday. Except for of course, watching Simpson's and Family Guy. Oh my is that an entertaining show. And that X-Files (about Moulder's neighbor) is by far one of the best in quite a while.

And today. Well today was nearly as useless as Friday. The main difference being that I went to school on this day. Not that that really made much of a difference. English was quite boring, since all we did was read. And I had nothing to read, since I already finished the book. Took yet another AP practice test in APUSH. Blah, that was it.

Came home and slept. Felt terrible. Felt even worse after getting up. Eventually got a bit better.

I finally figured out the gtk_signal_emit_*() functions. And got one working. So far, I've only been able to send GDK_KEY_PRESS events. I need GDK_BUTTON_PRESS events (to simulate clicking on a menu). We'll see. I at least know how to do it now.

Sat and talked on AOL for a while. I have about 4500 minutes to use up in a week. I don't think I'm going to make it.

I guess I'll go to bed now.

Wheee...this is fun... I'll explain towards the end...

So on Fri, I really didn't go to school... Good thing. It would have been a waste of time. (I actually went to English, where all I found out was that me going to English was a waste of time. So I just went home after that.) I went to lunch with my sister (to SouperSalad -- we went there merely because of the creative name), and then went down to the aeroport to pick up her child's father, who is staying for the weekend. Got home somehwere after 1500. Ran up to Barns and Noble to pick up an APUSH study guide (and for some reason, a copy of 1984). Went to Tara's for an hour or so. Came home. Went to bed, eventually.

Got up normal time this morning. Felt the need to finish 451. So I did. There's some good themes there...but the plot is terribly predictable. You know exactly what is going to happen 30 pages before it happens and a vague idea 50 pages prior. Just not very rivetting. Oh well.

Downloaded Slackware 4.0beta. Also updated my CVS trees. I just love the new pre-0.16 Enlightenment. Its just so entirely different than any other wm. That's what I was wheee'ing about above. So much fun to use.... you can't even predict where new windows will fly out from! Anyway, I also finally got GNOME to a degree where I might actually find it useful. I think this is the first time its ever done everything just the way I like it. The main point is that the panel now cooperates with E's at-the-edge automatic virtual desktop switching/panning. It never did that before, and led to a great annoyance trying to go down to the desktop below. And I never use any worthless product unless it doesn't take effort to use it uselessly. So yes, GNOME is now worthy of being worthless... ie, you can use it or not, depending on what you feel like and it won't get in the way in either case. Very nice.

I'm really liking this new desk. I put in a TV today. So now four tubes starring at me. I even turned my chair around and grabbed the camera. See my Desk o' Console and a picture of mediocris (which sits just off to the left of the earlier picture -- the box sitting on top is my wireless proxy...which ust be placed so oddly so that it can project easier out the doorway/wall yet still have enough cord length to be plugged in). Oh well....

On the topic of my wireless proxy, WinGate, the proxy software im using, ran out of license days today. I just set the clock back to March. It didn't seem to mind, and started proxying normally shortly afterward.

Spent the early evening trying to figure out how to make gtk let me send mouse/keyboard events without using a mouse. I'm trying to implement a modern-TV-style pop-up menu, but using gtk instead of that ugly font/menu that most TVs use (still nothing better than those new 64in 'plasma' big-screens from Philips -- the remote is merely a touch-based LCD panel, meaning it can be in any layout needed, reconfigured one the fly -- it looks a lot like a Palm Pilot :). Thomas made some good suggestions, but I ended up just asking the gtk-list. The first response talks about gtk_widget_event(). I'll mess with it more tomorrow.

Suppose thats enough for now... probably forgot something...

I am alive. Barely. Actually, I'm feeling quite good.

On Wed, I took Tara's advice and just stayed home. That was a good choice indeed.

Today started out a bit miserable, but quickly bettered. Got my Gatsby paper back, for one. For the three hours that I spent researching and writing that, I got 197/200 (note that on the last paper, which I spent nearly eight hours on, I got a mere 195/200 -- and a note saying that that was the first paper she'd ever gotten that concerned that thesis...imagine that...an original thesis...taken right out of the back of the Cliff's Notes...). [Also note that on that idiotic carreer project I got 200/200...and that took me longer to do than the Gatsby paper...] Oh well. Also started Fahrenheit 451. Spent all of lunch quickly finishing (can we say "cooperative learning"? :) the APUSH assignment that I had forgotten about.

Came home and had my usual sleep time. Then got up and started the more dreaded work than homework... cleaning. Yes, I can see more of my floor than ever thought possible. (I knew the floor was there... I really didn't need to prove it... but some other people in fact did not believe it was under there... of course, they were human. Cursed humans.) This was in order to lessen the problem of space contention while moving that big new old desk into position. Of course, I ended up with a major problem anyway. But that was easily solved by quick disassembly of the old desk (err...it wasn't really suppose to be that quick... but it kind of...uhm...fell apart when I most expected it... you could call it 'halfway prediction' if you like... or just common sense. I more like the former.)

Mind you that the new desk is just over five feet long. And thirty inches deep. Lots 'o space. Three monitors all lined up in a row, all staring bluntly at me. (And as it happened, while I was moving everything about in my usual move-it-halfway-then-think-about-if-it-will-fit way, every single clock in my room got unplugged in some way. And so now in addition to the monitors literal glare, I have four menacing 12:00 observing myself as well. This should be interesting. Which will drive me insane first: the ones near the monitor or the ones I see when I'm falling asleep?)

I'm not quite sure when I got done with all that (seems time is something of an irrelevency when its midnight for hours at a time). It's late, though. And I haven't done anything else but that. Amazing how I actually accomplished something I set out to do. I feel dirty now. Though that's most likely just the dozen or so pounds of dust that currently cover myself. Either way, I don't care...

...me go bye now...

[Please excuse the use of the compleletly pointless blink tag above... but I just couldn't resist. Its the first time I've /ever/ used one of those blasted things... And hopefully the last.]

Gurge... One dreadful day follows another...

Slept in til 0800. There was no way I was getting up any earlier than that. Walked to school a bit early. Talked to my english teacher about nothing for a while. Sat in class feeling miserable. Sat at lunch feeling miserable. Sat through the rest of the day feeling about the same. Stayed after for a bit to talk to Denton about the Comp Sci AP test. Yes, the AP tests are approaching all too soon. Came home and slept til 1900. Blah.

Found out another of my long-time friends is also moving after this year (to NM). Oh well.

Oh well indeed.

Didn't feel much like writing yesterday. Blah...

Slept in late on Sun. Started on /dev/ti renovations. Got distracted. Went to Tara's. Spent the rest of the evening there.

Today was fairly dreadful. Nauseous and generally sick most of the day. Ugh. Came home and went and picked up a desk that someone was giving away. It will be nice to have more surface area. I'm just afraid getting it into my room is going to involve the removal of a window or two....

Spent most of the evening clearing off my room's floor. Yes, it has one. And surprisngly, its not composed wholly of paper products.

I'm not going to continue on and make it look like im in a mood to care. I'm not. That's it.

I seem to be quite awake for it being close to 0300... probably all the mtndew... or maybe the fact that I slept til 1400...

Yes, so I got up quite late. But it was nice. Did a bit of libfaim work most of what was left of the afternoon. Listened to n try and convince me that I should go autoconf/automake/libtool. He assured me that using a dynamic lib is a good idea. But I still don't want to do auto*. Anyway, the whole reason we were talking about that is because of my change in last night's snapshot to use gethostbyname2() instead of its predecessor gethostbyname(). Aparently libc5 doesnt' have a gethostbyname2(). Arg. Can't we bit rid of that antique yet!? So I don't know what I'm going to do about that.

Josh got me started on /dev/ti (aka the code that comes with fargo that turns your parallel or serial link for TI-[8-9,x] calcs into a character device). Arg. That's one big pile of shitty code. Its got to be the worst writing per square line I've ever seen (worse than my own!). It was written for 2.0 kernels. It of course doesn't compile on 2.1/2.2. I got it compiling. I got it loading by changing the {get,put}_fs_byte() calls (which were archaic even by 2.0 standards) into 2.2-compliant copy_{from,to}_user() calls. But it still doesn't work. I'm not real sure where its problem is. Of course, half the time I was working on it, I was unknowingly trying to read from the wrong parallel port (0x3cb instead of 0x378). Not like fixing that helped it at all. I still have no idea why it won't read. It needs some work, to say the least. I think Josh was about to start writing something real quick in userspace to try and get at least something to happen. Oh well....

Stopped that about 2200 and went over to Tara's. Watched that other movie that she keeps telling me to see... Dune (the two hour version). [About the four hour version: it was a TV release and was supposely slightly worse than the two hour theatrical version. That, and it's not available on tape anywhere (it was actually the original 'laserdisc deluxe' version and was therefore available on laserdisc or, later, on TV -- its rumored that a (somewhat illegal) copy of it can be bought somewhere). And the supposed six-hour version is still not even sure whether it exists or not, let alone get a copy of it. Yes, five minutes with an altavista search can bring lots of interesting information.] Anyway...

I'm now going to bed, hopefully. Unless I find something more interesting to do. Which is possible...

Not a very nice day really, but I suppose it had to happen... Decidedly anti-human.

Turned in that Gatsby paper. Done with. Over. Gone. And that is about it on the refreshing and enjoyable front. Everything else is just a bunch of lousy crap that happened because no one felt like keeping it from happening (change "no one" to "me" for a more trutheful outlook).

Slept for a while (after I found the sheets which somehow leaped off my bed and flew into another room). Then ggot up and fixed some libfaim things. No pending fixes now. Should be good to go to a 1.0 soon. (Well, not soon. bBut closer than it was a week ago.) The off-by-one-in-malloc typo that n pointed out let me figure out why i could never free() the data that comes back from the varargs callbacks. So it should leak less now. Also seem to have found that the idle time caps is somehwere around 17500 minutes. That's just another bit of useless AIM trivia. Released another snapshot too. I need to start on chat. If I dont, I'm not going to have anything left to do.

deepthought is going crazy, beware. Don't trust the RAID. I lost several files tonight (luckily nothing important) because of "illegal blocks". I ran badblocks, but stopped it after nearly an houru of not finding anything. I backed the RAM back down to my original 24mb (from the 80mb that's physcially in there). I had some troubles with that ram when i first put it in, and I want to be as safe as possible. I also need to figure out how to shut UDMA off on those drives. I just have no idea where the problem ocurred.

As with most of my anti-human days, I got a lot done. As well as getting a lot of sleep. Very nice. As long as I dont kill anyone, I'll be okay...

This may sound odd, but I am writing this before I go to bed earlier than expected. You see, I was expecting to not go to bed at all. But things started moving faster than I anticipated, and here I am.

For a reason I'm not sure of, today has been particularly lucid. Usually I can't remember the details of something that happened an hour ago...but today is different. Odd....

I got up somewhat late this morning. Thought about skipping first hour. Decided I needed to go. Got there. Decided I should have stayed home. Sat around and did nothing the whole time. Oh well. Stacy and I did our presentation thing in english. Not really very exciting. Those presentations are going to take forever. I think we've gone through about a quarter of the class in two days. Today was mostly spent watching a video that was not intended to be watched fully, but only clips. We watched the whole thing. All 30 mintues of it. That took up a bunch of time. Oh well. Doesn't really matter.

I came home after school and slept. Well, I went to Arby's first. I had a craving for Arby's. I have no idea why. Anyway, I slept. Had the oddest dream about trinary numbering. That has got to be one of the stranger things I've dreamed about. The only problem is that I don't particularly remember what it was about. Just that it involved trinary. Oh well. I slept for a very long time. This was of course to avoid writing that Gatsby paper that is due Fri. In fact, I got up to eat dinner and went promptly back to bed again (remember what I said about letting me make decisions right after I wake up). Slept til 2100 or something I think.

Stalled a while longer. Proofread Stacy's paper. Did some more research for mine. Found very little. Decided to just start writing and see where it went. Quite far, actually. In fact, all the way to the end. I had a final draft by midnight. I then did all the steps that you're suppose to do before your final draft (like a rough draft, for instance). All put together by one. Its done...finally done. No more papers this year...yay! Read mail and more mail til now. Now I am writing this.

Or was, anyway...

Here we are again... I thought I'd be closer to edge of the universe by now... [Well, you know, most modern cosomologists are on the side that there is no edge to the universe... that is in fact either infinite or some sort of solid polygonoid. Oh well...]

You know I forgot to mention that Daylight Savings was a few days back. And I therefore missed yet another opprotunity to start yelling about how stupid the whole idea is (and was). I'll let you go without that this time. But next time, you're going to hear about it... [Of course you have like seven months to prepare for that...but most likely one of us will forget anyway...oh well...]

So anyway, if we could please return to today... I got up and decided I didn't want to be up. And for some reason I qualified that as a valid excuse. This is reason number one why I should not make decisions right after I wake up. Especially decisions about going back to sleep. I'm especially biased in that situation on those types of questions. And not only did I sleep through first hour, but I somewhat accidently slept through English as well. Uhm...Oops? Oh well, I dont think I missed anything too exciting.

Nothing fantastic at school that I shall even bother mentioning.

Been either working on my Gatsby paper, or getting distracted from writing my gatsby paper, all evening. I'm really not as far as I want to be. For some reason, I just can't get into it (which is a prime requirement for actually getting something done -- I am only minorly productive when it comes to writing about things I don't see motive in writing about). Oh well. It really needs to get done by Fri morning, however. I suppose I could ditch class on Fri and have the weekend. But then I'd have to worry about it all weekend. I'd rather just do really badly and have it done by Fri than do a competent job and turn it on on Monday. Weekends are just too short to be worrying about suceeding.

I need to go to bed now. I am going to start getting stressed here soon if this keeps up...

Well now.... I guess I should start getting back into my old routine of actually writing here on decently often basis....

Fri wasn't particualrly interesting. I did remember several things that I wanted to write about, but I forgot them by now. One of them was that Fire has been released, with a copy of libfaim (remember that its the libfaim based AIM client for MacOS X Server). I also released a (chat-less and passwd-less) snapshot of libfaim pre-0.90 that same evening (tar is here).

Saturday, I was woken up somewhat early in order to "move couches". And move couches we did. We now have a new couch. A very nice comfy one. Which is in fact where I spent all of Saturday. The reclining portion is very nice for being very unproductive in.

Sunday I was not even here. While most of you people were down here in Peoria, I was up in Prescott...where it was not just raining...but snowing. Quite wildly. It is very odd to see 10cm+ of snow on the ground at Cordes Jctn in April. Odd indeed. Anyway, we had a big meal with my grandparents and came home. Back just in time for Simpsons, Futurama (I really wish it was going to say on Sun nights -- thats the only night I remember to watch TV!), and X.

Monday monday monday. Ick. Mondays are sickening. (Somewhat literally on this day.) Anyway, not very exciting. I got a TI-89, though. But thats nothing exciting. Its aparently the trendy thing to have right now. How about that. I'm trendy! Up til nearly 0300 starting -and- finishing the career project for english (its noteworthy that I was given just under a month to do this).

And aparently today is my birthday. Nothing new there. Its the seventeenth one I've had, after all. (I think I'll stop there before this appears to look even more like a Gatsby reference.)

All morning (till 1030) was spent taking that cursed 'Stanford 9' test. I hate that thing. Such a waste of time. "Calculas" was amusing, though frustrating. Oh well... I did get most of the blue ink off (came from those ASVAB "star markers").

Actually did not come home and sleep today. Researched some Gatsby ideas (I have to start -and- finish a paper on that book by Friday). Then went to Tara's house with Brock and watched Monty Pyhon and the Holy Grail (of which I had not seen -- it is available on DVD, surprsingly enough, for a mere $18.99). Just got home a little while ago.

I need to print out my career project. Looks like I'm not going to have to do the presentation by myself -- Stacy has decided to let me talk with her. I really need to get going on that Gatsby paper.... grr... But after that, I should have nothing major in english til the end of the year. (At which time I start Eng 101 and 102 at GCC, which means two papers to write this summer...but that's one less graduation requirement.)

I think that's it. I can count the number of hours of sleep I've gotten in the past two days on one standard, non-deformed human hand... thats bad...must sleep...

Okay, there's a rotate. Manda picked the color this month. Because I was feeling quite indecisive. And yes, this is month eleven. Only two more to go until the officially, completely useless anniversary!

I was very tired when I got up this morning. Not abnormally tired, just more tired that I've been the other days this week, which have been abnormal. Oh well. I spent English in the "electronic classroom" explaining to the teacher why I won't be turning in observation notes. (I actually also read linux-kernel while I was in there. If you log on as Patron63, open up MSWord and run the "telnet" macro -- those district guys forgot about one of Fortress's little-noticed features when they decided to not use it on NT.) APUSH was nice and interesting. We actually were quite productive.

I slept til 2000 or slightly before. Wandered around AOL for a little while. Got off. Tara told me to get back on. I listened to their little band groupie chat room thing for a while. Then left again.

This got me to thinking about things. I don't see it resonable to convince all AOL users to run AIM2 on top of AOL. But I do see it reasonable for AOL to release an AOL 4.1 or 5.0 that uses the AIM service exclusivly for IM and chat. That would be nice. Nice and unified. I would start a project to work on a bridge between the two, but if I draw on past experience, every time I start a project like that, AOL implements it in their next release. So maybe if I do it and don't tell anyone... (And I really do not like having to live without /me's. Those are really more useful than one who'd never used them might think. They provide context and background.)

Got to rotating this log. Decided that I'd also take the time to start an index of sorts so that you don't have to go through ten pages just to get to June. You can skip right to a specific month (either by volume number/name, month name, or color (in hex)). I left a space for an introduction too, in case I ever feel like writing one. Then of course I had to have something that linked to the index, so I reorganized this month's footer. Let me know if it breaks in your browser. Lynx doesn't render it too badly. Netscape is not blindingly ugly. IE and AOL may have a different opinion, however. We shall see if I keep it.

I nearly forgot to include a link to last month...volume tiene: mar 1999ad. (However, you could've just hit the Index link down below and gotten there eventually...I just do this because its tradition.)