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

[So this technically should be the start of another volume...try to ignore that...and I'll save my complaints about DST til some other day...Happy Samhain too...]

Oh the Gods, thats a lot of Simpsons for a single evening. Seasons four, eleven, ten, and one all represented. Wee...

Anyway, delightfully quiet day. Got up around 1030 and found myself with nothing to do. Yay. (Well, I use 'Nothing to do' rather loosely; as in, 'Nothing to do that needs to be done within twelve hours'.) At least I think so. If there is, I'm not going to do it anyway. Ha.

First checked on the MAU power supplies I stress tested overnight. The first MAU I sold and shipped out last week turned up DOA. With the symptoms of a dead power supply. It went all the way to Hawaii, so it may have something to do with extended periods of deadly shaking and throwing about (I think things would be safer if USPS would just sling-shot them over the water than actually go to the trouble of putting things on planes...). Oh well. Hopefully the next few I ship tomorrow will be better. The guy in Hawaii agreed to just a power supply swap (they're self contained, easy to change). That will definitly save on shipping (those MAUs cost $10.35 to mail!).

Started transfering large files across TMS380 token ring cards. From system hangs a few weeks ago (that I didn't have time to look into at the time), I thought the driver had a bug. If it does, I can't find it now. I transfered 800mb across it with no problems. It might have been NFS troubles before (I was transfering Austin Powers 2 MPEGs from dt nfs mounted on mediocris, ftping from mediocris to zaphod...long path...it was probably an NFS deadlock somewhere). Which is possible, because this time it worked maybe because I was using a different kernel. I also took this morning to upgrade mediocris to 2.3.24. I got a pleasant surprise while reading through the 2.3.22 patch...my Big TMS380TR Patch finally got in. Yay! Mark that number: 2.3.22. Its the first time my name got added to MAINTAINERS. Anyway, yeah, and so now thats one less patch that I have to add when I upgrade kernels. In fact, at thispoint, its the last. No more -mid versions for a while! I can finally use stock kernels again. Oh, and bttv-0.6.4h is out. And he picked up my closed-captioning changes. So now I don't even have to patch bttv anymore! All I have to do is add in my TEA6320 driver, which I started tiddying up to send to him as well. If that goes in, my life only gets easier. And if someone would just listen to josh and take his bttv-0.6.4X-to-kernel integration patches, I wouldn't even have to have a seperate bttv... Oh, reality amazes me sometimes... [Where is josh anyway? Surprise trip to that dumb big state again?]

The tms380tr driver still has a major problem: it only works as a module. I need to work on that. I found that out when I upgraded dt to 2.3.24 as well. I'll get to that.

Another thing I added to the mediocris kernel is the net filter code, so I could play with that on something other than dt. Once I got the token ring accessing the outside world (through nested masquerading -- that was neat 10.0.0.10->{10.0.0.1->198.60.150.3}->{198.60.150.14->24.221.15.172}->{24.221.15.171->outsideworld}). Anyway, after I got that working, I decided I didn't have any excuses left for upgrading dt. So I did. Its now up to 2.3.24 as well. I had compiled in tms380tr, but it never ran the detection on bootup, and subsequently got removed as __initdata. So I was able to load the module and get it working without rebooting again. Very nice. I think I should probably keep it a module anyway. Until I know it doesn't need any fixes. So now I'm up to using netfilter. Its basically a useless redesign of ipchains, both are gratuitously complicated. But oh well.

During one of the mediocris downtimes (there's been several now), I put in the DVD player from zaphod (TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1002). With all the recent stuff about DVD, I figured I should try it for myself. Ha. Figures, I'd have one of the only drives around (first-gen toshiba ide) that still have problems. But interestingly, I'm only one of two people that has one, so I get to test lots of patches (which is why mediocris has had lots of reboots today -- I should really just modularize the cdrom driver, but instead, I've been rebooting). There's another patch in my INBOX that I didnt get a chance to test today.

Okay, what else... Did some weird stuff with brock's box (phlurm) and pointless (I'm not real sure who's that is...pointless just exists...pointlessly...). Brock wanted incoming connections to come through pointless' masqing (ipchains) to phlurm on token ring. He had an extra ethernet IP (phlurm's old one). I set up an alias on pointless' eth0 (eth0:0) with phlurm's old IP, and added ipmasqadm forwarding rules incoming from that IP to be rerouted to the real phlurm (on token ring, behind the masq). Well, I thought it was original. Kind of a very-selective level three tunnel... I was satisfied, as was he aparently. I can now successfully link to both (phlurm, pointless). Oh, and the new micropolis logo is just splendid ("Created with The GIMP").

When I was growing tired of obfusticating their network, it was time for Simpsons and that's about all that happened the rest of the evening. Maybe a few other things, but nothing of importance I suppose.

For some reason there's a small goat outside the window. It's getting loud. Maybe if I turn off all my lights it will go away.... hmm... not working...

[If you read all that, understood it, and are still coherent, you're doing better than I am...] But I have to go to school tomorrow...oh too soon...

Abnormally active couple of days. And yes, I am still in the country. Unforunatly.

Friday had its interesting points. Had to march in the morning with the new uniform jackets on. Erg. Heat. Sweat. I spent the first part of second hour doing that bio stuff. Turned out to be even shorter than I expected. The other part was spent helping make dumb topten lists for the band newsletter thing and laughing at elena molesting a life-size visage of Ricky Martin. More ridiculous cell counting in bio. Sat around doing nothing (on purpose) in econ. The excuse: "too many people were gone". Ha. Ran by the band room and picked up my uniform and went home. Where I attempted for the entirety of five minutes to take a nap, failed, and went off and read mail and other things until 1630. Then off to a lovely (away) game. Marched a superb pregame (except for the anthem...aparently I have the only copy of that left in my section...). Very boring evening. Fell asleep on random, repeated occasions (including the busride to and from). Got home at 2230. Too late. Went to bed immediatly. [Well, not immediatly. I did turn the car off first.]

And now for today (or rather yesterday, as it seems I've ended up writing a bit late tonight/thismorning as well...). Got up at 0600, just like a normal morning. Left for school around 0730. Loaded the busses once again, and left sometime after that...for ASU Band Day. Slowly ate Penguins to keep me alive all day (and that worked too, until they started to wear off around 1230, and by 1330, I was definitly asleep). Marched the show at 1000 (or thereabouts...that's just when it was scheduled for...). Picture after that. That photographer really needs to find a better bench for the back row. That one was okay if you were one of the last few people to get on it, but if you're the first (such as myself), it was rather scary (it was not heavy enough to sturdy itself...and needed people to help it). Luckily, there was a wall nearby (but unfortunatly, that means everyone was holding on to me...). Very scary, as I said. Anyway, oh, I got my hat back then too (it was blown toward the guest stands in the second beat of measure three of the first song...oh, that was scary too: wind -- too much of it; nearly killed me on multiple occasions). Back to the busses to pack up and then back to the stands, where we sat until some time when they decided to tell us how (they think) we did (some say this was around 1245...but I am not inclined to believe that...). [Grr...still have bites itching from those stupid ants in the bandroom...perhaps I should do something about them...like stop sitting in them...I'll think about that.] Anyway, we got an excellent, much to (at least) my dislike. I'm thinking they did some bell curve thing, because there were entirely too many goods and not enough superiors (ie, they were in equal numbers...not a good sign). But there were lots of excellents. And (somewhat unfortunatly) ours was one. Oh well. There's still State. Went to back to the busses, opened the windows (yeek...err, wreak!), and went home. During which, I fell asleep (see earlier). Woke up (amazingly), on the bus at the school. Wandered inside, put my stuff down, and came home. Where I slept again. For a long time. Well, not really. I was woken up at 1730. Bah. But I'm about to continue here soon. Spent most of the evening wasting time, as I really didn't feel like doing anything. The gnome 'fifteen' applet is lots of time-wasting fun (as well as a "productivity buster", as the guaranty ensures).

And then I threw Cat across the room.

NAU people will be happy to know that incoming port 25 (SMTP) is blocked on all resnet IP addresses. Which is odd. If they were going to go to such trouble as blocking ports, why didn't they do it for all of them? (ftp, www, smb, all open) Shrug. I found this out after I'd installed screen on pointless and decided I needed a pine window open but then realized I couldn't get mail on pointless. The logical thing for me to do was an MX record in the DNS to let me do that. That went okay...except for all the mail bounced with 'No route to host'. Oh well.

Oh, and Slackware 7.0 came out today. Glibc 2.1.2 all the way. And they have ISO CD images. Yay. Finally, a new slack!

My state of drowsiness is becoming rather delusional. I think its time to go to bed before its time for BREAKFAST!!! Oh, wait, it ALREADY IS!!!

I had to go back to school today. Pity me. Pity me now.

I just noticed that I never updated the header on this page. It still says Sep. Since I can't remember the translation for October right now, and becuase there's only three days left in it anyway, I'm not going to updated it. I just wanted to point out that it was wrong. It's really rather irrelevent and youu probably never noticed. Which is why I pointed it out. You should know these things. Despite the fact that there's no hope of them being corrected. I shall just cough on you a bit instead.

Yes. That was a good coughing.

Mediocre day again (haven't had one of those since at least last week). Found out that I missed absolutly nothing yesterday. Except perhaps in econ. No one seems to really want to tell me what occured in econ. Oh well. Not like it matters. Certainly didn't miss anything today. I mean, while I was dozing. Particularly during compandlit (I remember Tara starting her presentation, but that's about where my memory stops...next thing I knew, Michelle was banging papers on my head trying to wake me up...grr...).

That wasn't the only nap I was rudely awoken from. But the other's are no more or less mentionable than that one. Spent the evening setting up ipmasq on pointless (and consequently, setting up phlurm to use it -- brock's diagram in his log from a few days ago is now accurate, btw). Also setup samba and started apache (don't know why it didnt get started...).

Also went down to the school for a bit to fit a band uniform. The back parking lot is surprisingly smooth. However, restroom floors are just disgusting.

Suppose I should go to bed now. Oh, I have bio stuff to do. Oh well. That's what I have second hour for...

Another sick day. Bleh.

Not really much to say. Did spend two hours in the afternoon wrestling with ISDN. Or rather, the dysfunction of USWest. Damn them. Oh well, I'm not the one paying for my time...

Hohum.

Ever seen a Real Micropolis? (not that one that David's been extolling lately...)

Oh well. I'm done.

Sigh. Sure wish I didn't get dizzy everytime I get out of bed. Or perhaps its just a sign I should stay in bed...hmmm...

There was no way I was going to band this morning. I decided to go to bio so I wouldn't miss the new stuff. Turns out they started the new stuff yesterday and took the test today. So I took the test. On three minutes notice. Bah. And compandlit turned out to be a good waste as well. Besides being rather, uhm, short, it was also with a sub and we had nothing to do BUT leave. Which would explain why it was rather short. Came home and tried to sleep. Couldn't. Too hot (enough to ignight sheep into talking fireballs and make them say rude things at you while you're busily trying to type your password in fear, as brock can attest to). Decided to try the night rehersal. That lasted about an hour. At which point, I was on the verge of collapse and decided to come home.

Where I ended up on irc.openprojects.net. I had originally gone in there to talk in #livid, but ended up in #jabber and eventually talked to jeremie for a while. Who finally fixed his PCMCIA apparently. Shrug. Temas is still aparently happily working on the AIM transport for jabber, though seemingly nothing works quite yet. Shall be interesting to see. Maybe they can write a better than I can. Well, lets hope they can. if they can't, thats rather sad.

Oh well. I'll just sit here and continue to cough up strange things in an attempt to amuse myself. Well, what else am I suppose to do when I'm sick?

Perhaps its just me, but today was entirely too hot. It could just be me (aparently I'm "generally odd"). Shrug.

I didn't go to school today. Because I was fairly dead when I think I woke up. I'm unsure if I ever actually woke up or not. But I made a decision nonetheless. Good decision.

Slept on and off all day, feeling generally dreadful. Still do pretty much. Read another fifty pages of Great Expectations. I agree with david. I am starting to fear for my life as well. Perhaps I should just find the movie.

In my decision as to which is better: the Iomega Buz or the Miro/Pinnacle DC10+, I have decided there is not enough information to make a decision. And since the resale value is quite high on both, I'm just going to grab both (found the DC10+ for just a bit over half-retail), and resell the one I don't want. Indication is that the DC10 may be slightly better, but the Buz does have that UW scsi controller. We'll see. I certainly have the cash for it these days (oddly enough).

I see that slashdork has yet to pick up a very interesting story about DVD on Linux. In fact, the source to all the decryption routines required to do it. Go get it before its denounced as illegal!

I must go to school tomorrow I suppose. Bleh. I still need my compensation days...

Since the final Simpsons of the day is not one of my favorites, I think I'll just go to bed now.

Sniffle. Terrible weekend.

Woke up Saturday with one hell of a headache and a soar throat. And that didn't exactly go away after I stumbled out of bed sometime after noon. Sat around moaning and complaining all day. Decided to take some of that Entex they gave me last time. Despite all its...interesting...side effects, it does work quite well as a decongestant. Loratadine helped too. (I could have prevented the whole problem by taking that all week...but my chronically bad memory keeps me from doing such things as taking medicine regularly...) Went to bed when I decided it was not healthy for me to be awake with a temperature over 102degF.

Slept til noon or so again. Feeling a fair bit better (and a temp under 100). Though still had zero energy to do anything. So I once again sat around moaning and complaining (not necessarily in that order). Also read the first fifty pages of Great Expectations. Bleh. I don't know how I'm ever going to get through that thing (only 563 pages left! -- cursed compandlit...). Oh well.

"stack overflow in regexp matcher". Emacs always has great error messages to brighten up my day. Gag. Guess I'll just have to use vi until I start a new file.

Hm. Nevermind. Seems to be magically working again.

Lots of Simpsons on sundays. Amazing. That xfiles with the neat ending shot of the monolith in the african desert was on too. I'm easily amused at times.

So I guess I'll just go to bed now. I hate it when I'm only sick over the weekend. I think I should be able to take two days off school as compensation for my missed weekend. But all my luck, I'll still be really sick by morning anyway...

Moderatly entertaining day I suppose. Though I started out feeling rather dreadful, and have, in fact, ended up in about the same way. Oh joy.

Kept feeling dizzy in band (too much effort being expended!). Slept second hour. On the floor. With the ants. (I should really tell someone about all those ants in the band room...but they don't seem to be harming anything. And the feeling of them crawling all over me can be rather amusing. I've yet to be bitten.) Finished up the photosynthesis lab in bio. (I forgot to mention yesterday that we were tasting that new pure-starch packing material. Its quite entertaining to eat until it fully dissolves on your tongue (and is rather tasteless up to that point). But then it just starts getting thick and, well, tastes bad. Its a stimulating experience in any case.) And then compandlit. Oh, the joys of compandlit. After I got tired of listening to (erm, dozing during) everyone elses poetry presentations, I did mine. Took entirely too long. And Sara was being terribly distracting. Not like anyone was listening to me anyway. Even the teacher start zoning halfway through. But oh well. I got an A+. Which is definitly what I need in that class to get my grade up (from a C...).

Came home and slept for probably the entirety of ten minutes. Bah. Then game. Lost the game bigtime. But I found it amusing that the score at half-time was 21 to 42. The show was good, however. The music was still a bit dead, but the marching was clean. Cleaner than Goldwater last week. But it still needs work as far as volume and dynamic changes.

Oh well. I'm feeling terrible at the moment (cursed allergies!). I'm going to bed before I cough to death...which is possible...its been known to happen...

Weee... Okay, a weee is not in order. But I must maintain some sort of excitment for my redundent life now musn't I?

David left my TV on the Roseanne show. It's frightening.

Finally "finished" cleanup of the first song in band. Yay. Second hour was spent trying to get my graduation crap in order (I remembered it was due two hours before it was due, and required money...which I of course didn't have -- ie, this required a short trip home). Lab in bio (photosynthesis). Then econ. Teacher wasn't there. Yay again. Still had to do the test though. Hohum.

Mail check number four when I got home, then promptly to sleep. Earlier than usual actually. I've been getting delayed for some reasona or another (yesterday it was because I was tense from compandlit...dunno why). Woken up too early. Grr.

Watched Simpsons number one. Then started on Project Agni (a part of Secret Project #168). And a while reading RFC1459 a bit more thoroughly. Then brock and david showed up. (Figured they would...not that it matters...) No, there is nothing I can do for an EEPROM chip with a chunk blown out of it. Many discussions ensued about random things that I don't even plan to remember. Makes you wonder what went on during that four hours they were here. Shrug.

I'm growing tired.

mediocris (not micropolis! -- David just had to go off and name his box with something that sounds entirely too much like my machine!) is now amazingly fast. Upgrade it? you ask? No, in fact, all I did was flip a few BIOS options. Which is rather sad, since I could have been running it this fast for several weaks now. Today I find out that Gigabyte BIOS' have buggy Write Allocation for K6-2s. It should be left enabled in BIOS, and enabled in linux. Linux will do it right. And fast. All sorts of stuff is fast now. Included mpg123, which was taking up 80% CPU before, and now takes up less than 10%. Very nice.

That's what I spent this evening doing. Rather frustrating indeed. Also found out that my tms380tr driver breaks real easily. For instance, transfering a 480mb file across it will make your box reboot. Fun fun. I'm not in the mood for bug finding.

Back to the morning. More cleanup in band. Stayed in band again to do some bio. Ended up helping Adams, Ryan, Josh, and Elena write one of those stupid chain surveys just to mock the rest of them that have been passing around band people. Amusing. Quizzish thing in bio. Easy. Screwed up on a lab too. Oops. Got to pet spinach leaves, however. Had to make up a timed writing in compandlit. I had no idea what I was writing about. Just random words going onto paper. Oh well. Started presentations too. I'm dreading doing mine...going to take forever... Ah, but its Tennyson!

Oh well. I got nearly nothing done today. Hrmph.

Nothing terribly exciting today. Actually, there was. Lots and lots of sleep. Sleep is good.

Started cleanup stuff in band. Not sure what took so long to do three sets. Oh well. Stayed in band and finished up my bio, watched part of Swing Kids, and spent a short time trying to help Ryan explain Heisenberg Uncertainty to Adams ("Cat? What cat? That cat doesn't exist..."). Oh, I took a nap on the floor in there too. Off to bio... nothing to speak of in there. Exam on Friday. And the uncomfortability of the desks in econ kept me awake in there yet again. I have no idea what they were talking about, nor do I care. Damned econ.

Came home and slept. Til 2130. Yes, it was enjoyable indeed. Why would Tara ask _ME_ what she missed in humanities? As if I go to that class or something...

So who did what where now?. That's got to be the most incomprehensible few paragraphs I've ever read. Well, from David anyway. I've seen far worse. Some of that compandlit stuff comes to mind... Perhaps I have missed something. Or perhaps I'm not fully awake or somesuch... "Whoa I'm lost."

imood.com is oustandingly amusing. "Right now the Internet is feeling...tired."

Pretty good day, I guess.

Woke up rather tired, as usual. Listen to the judge's notes and the video from Sat. Then sat there for a while. Then some more. Into second hour. Then there was that stupid meeting for seniors about gratuitous graduation products (at gratuitously high prices at that). Then wondered back to band. Where wonderous wall sculptures (including hammers and play-doh!) and life-size Gap people (a couple of which were mildly frightning -- where did those things come from? I'm betting they were Sara's doing...evil Sara...).

Eventually wandered to second hour with lanee, michael, and mel (the only three people who didn't ask me why I wasn't wearing shoes -- except mel...but all she did was yell at me to put on shoes...hmm...she's usually rather direct). Then to bio. Then to lunch. Didn't stay there long. I came home. Because the thought of going to compandlit was disturbing me.

Since I did all this wandering with no unnatural foot protection, I feel a review of the travelled surfaces is in order. The best floor is the band floor. Nice, relatively thick carpet, and exceptionally cleanly. Auditorium floor was a bit worse, but still good. Cement from the 800 to 400 buildings was adequate. Bit sticky in places, plus the usual film of black powder. Though surprisingly clear of loose debris. Bio floor is just rather dusty, though nothing particularly disgusting. And that brings me to the cafeteria floor. That was indeed particularly disgusting. Stray food bits scattered all over the place. Takes a bit of concentration to avoid blatent dirtying of the feet in there. Even the walk home was better. The only distressing part of that journey was the part of the 79th between Acoma and Banff. The rest was okay, except for the rising surface temperature of the road. Oh well. Try it sometime. Just avoid the cafeteria. Gives you yet another reason to just stay in band all day...

Had a consulting job after school, setting up linux (rh6.0) boxes to connect a couple LANs together via ISDN. Got it all working except for the ISDN part, which is waiting on the proper modems. AsyncPPP works great across a null modem cable, however. Splendid. And more money. Money is good.

Got home around 1830. Been trying to avoid falling asleep since then. I think I should stop that now. Tata.

No new Simpons today. Damn Baseball. But it was sunday, so there were three reruns. Two of them were sequential. And a third from first season.

One-stop shop for all your worthless token ring needs. Well, not really. But close enough. Oh, and buy this. In fact, buy lots of them. I have lots of them. They're taking up too much space. (And no, none of the visible parts of my garage are for sale. Just the blue thing.)

Yesterday was rather tiring and somewhat maddening (well, not in itself, but combined with other things, it became maddening). Got up around 0800. Wandered around for several hours. Went to school around noonish. Went to the Goldwater Marching Invitation. Nice solid performance. Much better than I was anticipating. Many many (frustratingly many!) hours later, the awards stuff came along. Centennial got an Excellent overall, and an aux and a drumline caption. Back to the school around 1800. Came home and took a nice shower. Except for the fact that my toe was hurting rather badly, not to mention bleeding heavily (damn shoes -- where's that paint!?). Anyway, I didn't really get anything else done yesterday. Not real sure what I did. I do remember, however, that exactly zero earthqakes occured. I was disappointed. They seem like a grand source of amusement.

Got up early again today (0800 or so). Did compandlit poem (Tennyson's Ulysses...interesting). Then goofed off for a bit. Then started bio. Got done with the majority of it. I'll do the rest in second hour on tuesday (mere minutes before its due...its sad that I actually plan on procrastinating).

What's additionally sad is that I can't pet Cat because static is so bad today and everytime you touch her it shocks one of us. So its a Cat avoidance day. But she just won't get out of my room. Go away!

Three words: "Linus Is Batman".

"...when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to be a grotesque pandemonium, and humanity, worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation..." -- Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Today should've been a better day than it was. However, it squandered its chances at greatness...

Two quick run-throughs in band. I am not confident in tomorrow. But who is. I will be surprised at an excellent. Attempted to keep everyone in second hour from killing themselves over falsely low grades. People concern themselves entirely too much with numbers. [No one cares if they understand the information or not, they're just concerned about whether their teacher thinks they understand the information...oh, the wonders of modern education!] Took that laughable final in bio. (Its not just laughable...I will laugh at it...Ha!)

Came home and pondered the magnitude of the work I have been left with to do within the next few days. I don't like it.

Saw those lovely comments brock and david left for me on irc.auk.cx::#auk. I'm not sure if they were just really bored or slightly drunk.

Then noticed that naim died and wouldn't log back in. Checked with a few other people (via TiK). No other libfaim client was working either. Slept til 1600. Found that Everybuddy (the only libfaim client I didnt check) did work. One of the authors sent me a patch that touched aim_conn_newconn() while adding proxy support. Aparently I was doing something drastically wrong in there that AIM was not caring about until today. Included that fix and released a naim-0.9.5-recon3-mid3. Then n released a naim-0.9.5-recon4 (which is recon3-mid2 plus a few other things -- including a faimrc option for shutting off background colors and allowing secs_int values to be set to zero). I guess this means i'm going to have to release another libfaim snapshot here soon. Arg. I've gotten such split trees (I work on the libfaim inside my naim tree to fix bugs (immediate testing) but add features with my seperate libfaim tree). Its very difficult to make snapshots now, since it means I have to merge the trees. I hate merging trees. Takes entirely too much time.

Unfortunatly, I shouldn't have been spending time on that. I should've been doing the rest of this rubbish needing my attention. Spent the entire evening making vain attempts to read The Awakening for compandlit. I did read a fair amount of it, but certainly not enough. Mainly because I kept getting distracted by the likes of the above and brock/david's random questions about setting up a token ring. Luckily, however, it appears the latter is all straightened out for now. They've got their ring going with all three nodes, and even did a slackware-current install across the ring (phlurm to pointless). That includes one windows machine (undead) too. The only thing I'm at all mildly concerned about is the heavy latency penalty their ring has. Often double what it should be (2ms+).

I suppose thats about it for now. As I said, today just wasted itself.

Oh, I added index.htm to the IndexDocument line of the apache config. That should be on the default list. Anyway, that page should load automatically alright now. WinAIM smilie faces are evil.

Hrm. That was unexpected. So I've been laying here, flat on my back staring at the ceiling. And after about thirty minutes of that, the walls start moving. I stand up. They're still moving. I ask myself if reality is falling apart. I ask david a question. He gives the most logical, but most uninformative answer. Ah. Reality must still be in order then.

So then the walls stop moving. Insanity? Or earthqake? (Which is plausible...I'm less than 200mi away from a fault line...)

Perhaps I should just go to bed.

Its 4am. I'm not in bed. And the only question I can come up with is "Why is my cursor so blue?" Actually, I do have another question. I goes something like "Who was that running past my window at 4am?" Behold, I have answers for neither of them.

After a short discussion with my sister and a brief look at all the news sites, I can verify that I'm not insane (yet). It was an earthqake afterall. CNN is calling it "moderatly strong". Since when is anything about a 7.0 quake "moderate"? If we can feel it several hundred miles away (it was in Joshua Tree CA from what I'm told -- from sources more informative than CNN, thats for sure), I just don't believe the word "moderate".

Oh so tired.

Mediocre rehersal this morning. Then just kind of didnt make it to second hour til an hour late (erm, oops). Teacher finally came back in bio. Woohoo P680! Compandlit teacher decided we didn't need to do anything. I was oustandingly (yay jgo) pleased by this. Naptime then more naptime, then jazz concert, then (soon) more naptime. Though a few of those naptimes should have been converted into "Adam should've been doing his homework here, but instead he decided to sleep...".

I'm really dragging these past few days...sleeping alot, but its not enough....

Understatement of the day: Arizona Banks Charge High Fees is the headline.

Bah. I'll just go to bed now. Maybe I'll do all that work tomorrow. Maybe not....

Not much school this day. Short band rehersal. Weird grade problems second hour (there is a hole in space somewhere on the surface of Fosters hard drive, making it loose random grades and even more randomly give people F's...oh the joy...especially two days before the term end...). Yet another day of uselessness in bio. (Which is better: shoes or a few choicely applied layers of latex paint?) Econ was dumb. That's it. Just dumb. Short sectionals after school.

Came home and called speedchoice. Ordered two more IP addresses. They'll be out to install the new "multiuser" modem on Saturday morning (hopefully before I have to leave for the Goldwater invitational (which I think is noon...). I'll be using (whats left of the lightning field damanged) Asante switch for the public side of the network, and still run the majority of the lan through dt, except for two machines. One for secondary DNS and one for Secret Project #168. (Now add this to the other three or four dozen things I have to get done this weekend, and we'll see what actually ends up happening...)

Personal bookmark: RFC 1459.

And yes, I suppose you do have to be relatively special to get me to relinquish space on deepthought. And unfortunatly, too many people avoid writing HTML by hand. What they don't understand is that you can save time by writing it by hand because you don't add useless cruft that frontpage (et al) add. There's lots of oustandingly dumb windows users out there...

How many dimensions are in your reality?

Hohum.

Rather unfortunate rehersal this morning. But the lack of effort required in second and third hour were quite refreshing. (Melvin Kelvin is now a cartoon character, who just happens to be a leading plant energy researcher...ahh...bio was pointless...teacher was out...and the sub was someone I knew from a long time ago.) Compandlit was just boring. Unfortunatly, no insects to entertain me.

Came home and tried to nap. However, I'd had to eat so many penguins to stay awake all day, that I was not tired on time. It eventually wore off. Went to band at 1800ish. Rehersal till 2130. Very long, but didn't really seem it. And it was worth it. Very good evening. But, now I'm tired.

Auk may be getting more external IPs. We'll see within the next few days. That will be a Good Thing.

And now I can go to bed.

Three days. Not much.

Saturday and Sunday were fairly drab. Spent some more time trying to get a decent amount of video recorded at full frame rate. No go. I've determined the problem is a lack of storage bandwidth. And I only see one way to fix that. Reduce the bandwidth required (ie, hardware compression). I can't 'afford' that right now. Luckily, I don't require digital video right now.

Spent nearly all of today setting up a new server for Secret Project #168 (hail the octothorpe!). Its a rather secure server. So secure that its only got two ports open to the world (four ports from my vantage). Take a guess at which two they are. Ha. I laugh in your general direction.

Also set up an IRC server on...irc.auk.cx. Amazing. Its fun to talk to yourself. Logon and try it. Port 6667.

Added another user to the auk family. There's been a surprising number of people asking me for accounts lately. Though I've been denying most of them. I think it has something to do with AOL breaking their own users' web space. Ha. I need to get a faster upstream. I should just move to IL and leech off josh's SDSL...

Oh well. Out of info for now. Not a terribly nice week to look forward to, despite what it outwardly appears to be. Yes, its only four days long, and yes its got two half days in it. The problem is that one of those half-days is a finals day. And one of those days (ie, tuesday) has a three hour rehersal on it. And the day following this week has a festival. Hrm. ....

Hm. Aparently something fell on the zoom button of the camera I use for the webcam, so it spent the whole day zoomed in about 20x on a small blue post-it note on the opposite side of the room. Which contained a phonenumber. Ooops.

Missed yesterday. That's because I slept through yesterday. Came home after school and just slept til 0600 friday (except for a few minutes around 0230 when I talked to brock about turning david's scanner into a reflecting electron microscope...). Which is how its still possible that I'm still awake now. After today. A very tiring day.

Only class I went to today was bio. Spent the rest of the day either in the band room, on the field, or in the middle of the street trying to march in a straight line. I hate homecoming friday. Rehersal from 0700 to 0900, then that dumb parade til 1000. Bio after that, then lunch, and then an assembly til the end of the day. Went out for chinese after school, and then slept for an hour so. Back to school at 1715. Marched pregame and then sat in the stands all night. Lost the game. Hah. I don't remember when I got home. Quick took a shower and started trying to figure out what's been happening the past two days. Aparently nothing has been happening, so it was a good time to bring brock and david into the scene. Which unsurprisingly enough, they did come. David had a hard drive with the power connector broken off. Resoldered that and copied the data onto a CD. Also gave them a whole load of token ring stuff. Should be amusing.

I'm growing tired now. Three day weekend...yay...

Not been reading enough kernel source lately? Try looking at the pictures...

And remember to not forget that time_t in decimal turns 940000000 sometime next friday. What's important about that? Its the last tick of the ten-millionth-place digit before the year 2000...

Oh, the worthlessness... Oh, I said that already.

Good rehersal in band. Played with the new gradebook app they give the teachers during second hour. Very neat. Reviewed stuff in bio. Econ was just wasteful. We did nothing except argue.

Bonanza was the first TV series to be broadcast in color. Marvel in the triviality of that statement.

Had a sectional after school. We were all too tired to be productive, but tried for 40min nonetheless. Came home and slept. Got up and ate something. Then when back to bed. And I'm still really tired. I hate school.

Allergies returning... need to start taking histamine blocker again I guess... [Notice that claritin is using Apache and PHP3...in case you're interested. Its not Linux, however. Solaris.]

Watching Cringley's HDTV special on PBS. Not terribly interesting. Oh well. Should probably be looking over bio stuff...

Hrmph.

Wandered through band and second hour... tried to sleep through bio. Failed. Took a quiz instead. Found out I only got a 90% on that last test. I hope the trend of decreasing grades doesn't continue (got a 95 on the last one). But seeing as how I didn't really study for that one and was quite sick for the week leading up to it, 90 is probably fairly good anyway. Oh well. Another test on thursday. Respiration. Woohoo. As you can guess the day was going fairly well...until compandlit. Compandlit I was not happy about. Only got a 5 (= C) on the last timed writing (which considering the fact that I had no idea what I was talking about, was pretty good). After finding that out, I spent the rest of the period torturing the small insects that dared taunt me during my bad mood. Particularly a rather deformed red ant, which I kept confined to an 8.5x11in piece of paper. This actually kept me quite mentally stimulated, as that ant moved surprisingly fast and my pencil's eraser is rather ineffective for use in containing red ants. Eventually I was released (as was the ant) and I came home (the ant didn't -- he's still there -- the last thing I need in my room is more wildlife).

I stole my sister's Rio Salado catalog. I'm thinking maybe I'll quick take eng101/102 over the internet just as insurance, for if/when compandlit decides its not going to work for me. Eng101/102 are really quite easy, and I get both high school and college credit for them. I think its like a total of seven essays between the two. Easy stuff. Oh, and I don't have to have them done in 40minutes...

Tomorrow's an odd Wed. Meaning yet another NHS meaning. Oh, the worthlessness...

Ricki Lake is disturbing. As are women named 'Dagmar'.

Spent the day inventing new ways of sleeping with my eyes open. Sometimes. Did nothing all morning...right through afternoon (econ)...and home to sleep in bed. Got up and spent the majority of the evening doing the bio homework I should've been doing for the past week.

Updated my resume ever so slightly. Basically just changed the addresses. I really need to fix all that stuff properly someday. But since I'm not really looking for a job at the moment, it's rather irrelevent.

Someone on linux-kernel decided for some reason to run character statistics on the 2.2.10 kernel source. You'll be happy to know that a whopping 13.68% of the kernel source is composed purely of spaces. Not to mention the 5.33% of e's and 4.13% of t's.

David's new 500mhz PIII needs a name. Suggestions? (Besides "onlywindowsusersneedthatmanycycles".)

And I thought yesterday was unproductive. Got up at exactly 0701 in order to rid myself of the terrible annoyance caused by the CD that fell to the floor around 0300. After I picked up the CD, I went back to bed. Returned to awakeness four or five hours later.

Spent most of the day doing nothing. Did fill that extra ISA slot in mediocris with a video blaster. And it works in linux. Which means that new non-contiguous RAM stuff in 2.3.x kernels actually works. No overlay though. I'm quite sure its caused by a non-functional feature connector on my Riva. In any case, I hacked together a small app and now the webcam should be back functional again.

Really good Simpsons tonight. Especially the hangers and tin foil. Spent the rest of the evening watching TNT's Animal Farm. Worthless movie. There's only two concepts to derive from it. One, birds are dumb. They're perfectly equipped to be self-sustaining. Yet, they stay on a farm. Where their byproducts are taken from them and eaten by humans. And two, goats move very slowly.

Oh, and I have yet to figure out why trading with animals is immoral. The only thing more sad than a dumb movie is a 'Making of...' of a dumb movie (which will air on Wed).

Oh well. I didn't get anything done today. Not even homework. Which means I have lots of bio to do tomorrow...

I don't feel like rotating. Maybe I'll just have another multimonth volume.

Yesterday wasn't terribly eventful. Foster finally came back. She was out for a few days. Had that laser RK done; up to 20/40 vision now. I need to get that done sometime. They won't let me yet, though. Should probably go have it done in Canada anyway. Anyway, dumb presentation-like things in compandlit. I don't do things will when I have no idea what I'm doing.

Came home and slept awhile, in the leisure of not having a game. Tried to probe for my ISA tms380 token ring card. No go. I will officially declare it dead. In any case, while I was sleeping (literally -- my first dream about token ring), I figured out how to get rid of using bus-master DMA on ISA. The TMS380 has a special mode (psuedo-DMA) that completely emulates DMA at quite a low level. I think it will be quite easy to implement, with very little impact on the rest of the driver. It will be really slow, but it wont bring anything else down with it. Good solution for a terrible problem. Anyway, I'm going to try to leech an ISA tms380 card off someone to implement it and test it.

I then made the rather dumb mistake of starting to migrate to the 25gb drive in dt a bit too late at night. I had to do the copy a couple of times to get it right. After very little planning, I decided the best way to make it copy right would be to put a third-party in the middle to do the copy. That third-party turned out to be mediocris (if you'll remember back to oh-too-long-ago, I originally generated the deepthought RAID and bootstrapped Deepthought Linux using mediocris, so all the raidtools and /etc/mdtab were already setup). It all worked fairly well, except for some dumb things that I prefer not to direclty admit to (step away from the keyboard...). All in all, the server was down for (barely) less than four hours. Also still at 2.3.10 (with no TR) because after several attempts, I still couldn't get the new ipfilter stuff working (they just had to replace masquerading with "something better"...again!). Oh well. It all worked out in the end. The RAID is still in mediocris. Not sure what to do with it. Probably just do useless things with it til it dies for good (which its not far off from).

Anyway, got up around 0900 saturday. Didn't do much most of the day. For ultimate luxury at 10Mb/sec, I ran a cat5 out to the living room (where the comfy chairs, big tv, and nice sound system are). Been sitting out here, except for the time that I was in the garage.

A teacher asked me to do some video dubbing for her. Lots of short (30sec) clips from two VHS onto one VHS. I figured, why not try digital. After finding no adequate linux solution, I stuck my extra Diamond DVC1000 bt848 board into my dad's box (win95). Best drivers I could find for it were the Hauppage WinTV ones. Lots of strange errors, and the Hauppage apps themselves didn't work. But the capturing in Adobe Premier worked just fine. Played with that a lot. Noticed it was impossible to get full-size NTSC frames (640x480) out of it at all. And half-size (320x240) would run at 30fps, but drop frames while the disks sync. So, I eventually just gave up. It was a lot of fun though. And Adobe Premier is very cool. Just wish I had enough hardware to actually use it. So spent an hour doing the dubbing manually with two VCRs. I hate VCRs. Really.

Also spent an hour or so fixing and then completely killing linux on brocks machine. Linux is great. Lets you break it from 200 miles away. Lot less liability that way. Kicked brock into install slackware-current (glibc2.1-based) anyway. That was good. And to think, he thought I disabled his system ON PURPOSE...

Really haven't done anything at all today. I probably should've. But I go that video stuff done. And since half the things on my TODO list from a few days ago in this log concerned ISA TMS380, I can't be blamed for not getting those done. Probably work on PPC TMS380 today. Probably should do homework eventually too.

I'm getting a bit tired. Probably go to bed here soon. It's surprises me how much I can mess up the entire house in just twenty-four hours...

Wow. What timing. Only one minute off from yesterday...

Not a terribly useful day. Long repetitive morning in band. Another sub in humanities. Though for some reason bunch of them started a religious discusion, which is usually considered a Bad Thing in a humanities class since there's usually more opinions than there are people. As could be expected, a brawl nearly occured. In any case, today's sub wasn't doing any strange chanting. More crazy stuff in bio (I really need to start doing homework for that class...). Econ was dumb. I'm still getting an A. That's all that matters. Came home and slept. Tried to get X running on the pmac. No go. Strange problems. Also trying to get a kernel to compile on it. ADB seems to be the only thing keeping a 2.3.18ac10 kernel from compiling. Aparently PPC's main tree is in vger (which I call vger only for historical sake, its now on openprojects). Started pulling that. Try to compile tomorrow.

Probably the only amusing part of the day was around 0230 this morning when brock decided to log into mediocris and start playing loud Star Wars mp3s on my speakers, in my room, where i was trying to sleep. That didn't last too long. I suppose this is what i get for having 666 permissions on /dev/dsp...

That's about it for today. The rest of my family is going to flagstaff for NAU's homecoming on sat/sun. I'm staying here to have a nice and quiet weekend alone (its terribly distracting to have all those people running around all the time).

Overall, the last week as been uneventful, but some interesting stuff did happen.

I didn't start feeling better til, oh, yesterday. Came home early on thursday with some unpleasant problems, which continued (and worsened) into friday, saturday, and part of sunday. Still didn't feel decently well until tuesday (which is rather ironic, since it contained a band rehersal, which I always come home feeling dreadful from anyway). I did miss the game on friday, though.

Besides exhausting liquids from all the wrong directions, I did do some productive things. Firstly, lots of progress on the TMS380 token ring front. With some help from the author of the original sktr driver, I was able to release a patch for Alan's 2.2.13pre. He kindly included that patch, which means that 2.2.13final will have working tms380 token ring for the syskonnect cards, plus the Compaq (I didn't get the Thomas-Conrad's device ID in time to include in the patch). Since then, I've been working on getting a good generic version of the driver going for 2.3. I've renamed it to tms380tr and included a lovely card list which lets it autodetect PCI cards at least. I've yet to test any ISA cards. I did get one report of using it with an ISA card, but that was on Alpha, which has a screwy DMA controller which doesn't allow bus-master DMA from all addresses, not to mention emmitting system-side addresses instead of ISA-side addresses!

Recieved a new IBM 25gb drive on Monday. I've had no hardware problems with it. The promise EIDE card's BIOS maxes out at 8gb. Luckily Linux doesn't listen to it. I've requested a new BIOS chip from Promise; they've yet to respond. I hope to get that installed into deepthought sometime before next week.

Saturday and (especially) Sunday were spent doing lots of libfaim and naim work. I released three or four different versions of naim that day, along with a libfaim snapshot. Fixes all known major problems to date. The problem with MacAIM 3.0 and some WinAIM 3.0 clients was that AOL removed one of the Holy Zeros from the message block header of the ICBM frame. I reduced the search to three, but its still a bad way of doing it. I really wish AOL would stop messing with minor things. If they're going to change something, they should all-out break the damn thing, not just tweak little things to make it break unreliably and often silently. Of course, they have my code, and they know exactly what will break libfaim...

Back to token ring for a moment... I got several Thomas-Conrad PCI token ring cards, which are nearly identical to the Compaq one. After adding a line to my autodetect card list, they worked fantastically. (A minor note: after releasing my patch to 2.2.13pre, some pointed out what I had been ignoring: lots of 'No free TPL' messages. My fix was to increase TPL_NUM from 3 to 9. I'm not real sure where that value gets used, but if I read the comments correctly, there should be no harm in increasing it. It got rid of the messages for me. In the patch I sent to Alan tonight for 2.3.18ac10, I only put that printk in if the debuglevel is greater than zero.) Putting one card in a win95 box and another in mediocris (using my 2.3 driver), I was able to get some incredible transfer rates. It seemed to peak at 1896.77 Kbyte/sec (16Mb/sec ring, I think 8000b MTU). So you don't have to get out your calculator, that's 92.6% ring effeciency. I don't think I need to bother looking at more driver optimizations. Thats definitly fast enough. (Comparitively, my 100mb/sec _switched_ ethernet can only do abou 2100Kbyte/sec -- its worth noting however that the latency on TR is nearly 1ms, while on the ether, its about 0.4ms.)

I've also got a PowerMac in my possesion (originally for the purpose of fixing libfaim with MacAIM3, but now for much more sinister, erm interesting, operations). It is having Linux/ppc R5 installed on it right now. It's a 5400/something. Its on the slow end of pmacs, but its decently new, and its even more decently fast. MacOS 8.6 is actually kind of fun to use! Anyway, it does have a PCI slot in it, so I'm going to take the opprotunity to get tms380tr working on big-endian archs. Which I would bet you it won't do it all right now (its got static byte swaps in the code -- the TMS380PCIA PCI interface actually does everything big-endian anyway).

My list of things to do in near-future looks something like this...

• Getting the new drive into deepthought
• Finish up linux install on pmac
• Get a 2.3.16+ kernel running on the pmac
• Get the tms380tr driver working on pmac
• Write a user-space prober for this ISA tms380 card of mine
• Get the driver working with it (if the card is indeed good)
• Play with getting the driver to play nicely in non-bus-master mode

That's enough in that list. As for today itself, it was fairly simple. Nice band rehersal (yes, nice, strangely enough -- the last few have been better than usual for some reason). Listen to the substitute chant strange incantations to himself in humanities. Finished up glycolysis and the Kreb cycle in bio...start electron transfer chain tomorrow (woohoo!). I've never learned so much useless information in my life. Its fun. I think the foil is going to have start coming with me to school again. I'm lacking good entertainment. Compandlit teacher was gone too, I don't think we did anything in there. Came home and slept for an hour or so. Ate and then started upgrading my main developement tree to 2.3.18ac10 (weee). This is while simultaneously downloading and trying to figure out how to use pdisk on the mac (I didn't think anyone could make fdisk any worse, but, there pdisk is -- use 'c' to create partitions, not 'n', oh, and you don't create partitions, you just steal space out of the 'extra' partition -- bah!). Anyway, after upgrading my tree and getting my TR driver working and everything else, I generated a patch for Alan. It turned out huge because diff didn't want to listen to me. After that, I've just been sitting here running back and forth between the garage (checking on the ppc install) and my room. Bringing mediocris up to 2.3.18ac10 allowed me to start ripping CDs again (that was broke in 2.3.16 -- "Wrong media type" crap), so I've been doing that.

I just wrote lots of stuff, but I bet josh is the only one thats going to be able to understand more than half of it...

Okay, so I'm now typing this from the console of a powermac running linux-ppc. Its pretty neat. I like this keyboard too. Nice response. I'm not so sure how X runs with only one button; should be interesting. But for now, I'm going to bed.

Bah. I feel dreadful. But I remembered to write nonetheless.

Moderate day for the first half. Started bio lab. Managed to get one of those dialysis bags thrown at me (gee thanks Sara). Actually finished that part on time. Amazing. Compandlit was far less interesting than Friday. But entertaining. In that sarcastic way.

Came home and fixed token ring, with minor assistance from the author. Then fell asleep. Woke up with one hell of a headache and even worse post-nasal. A bit later I got up. Big mistake. Things get heavier when standing. Especially things in your head. I laid back down. And then got up again. Took decongestant. After that is a bit hazy. Deals with ceilings and random things moving. (And no sara, I am not full of crap. I didn't just ditch band because I felt like it. Its because the four feet between my bed and chair was about all the farther i could go without falling over.)

After the decongestants decided to do something besides make me nauseous and crazy, I booted up 2.2.13pre10 and got token ring working under it. Mailed patch to Alan. Rebooted into 2.3.16. Fixed up tms380tr to work nicely there. Completely overhauled detection and multicard support. I think its nicer. We'll see what Alan thinks. But that will take a few days. It still needs to have the 2.1.107 tr_type_trans() removed from it and work with the new one. BUt other than that, it seems to be working. I want to test multicard support as well as do more stability tests before I sent patches out.

Damn NHS meeting tomorrow. Aparently I have to go to those this year. Grr.

I bet you saw that last entry and thought 'Oh look! I can once again be amused by Adam's lovely worthless rantings about microcosmical topics that I don't give a damn about but he seems to!' Look indeed. We shall have none of that. Go away. I only discuss serious business here, you know.

You'll notice its been a bit since I wrote last. You're really starting to catch on. Now I'm not going to complain about how I'm too busy to write here. I'm not. (But I do have better things to be doing.) And I'm not going to complain about how I have nothing to write about (never stopped me before). But I am going to complain about the post office. I'll hold off on that for a few seconds, however.

The last week(s?) have been mildly entertaining. So wonderfully mild I'm not even going to tell you about them. And you may except that. But I wouldn't. See, I'm not going to tell you because I have no idea what has occured. I'm guessing it involves me doing lots of stupid things while drinking mtndew and penguins. But thats just an educated guess based on what I'm doing as I write this. And basing the idea that I've been doing that for weeks on the fact that I've been doing it for at least the past two minutes. I can only assume past there, for thats the farthest back I can remember.

I'll cover the past few days. We'll see if I can get them in order.

Friday (I think thats what they called it) was a lovely day. Not only did I have my normal drugs, but I had a spectacularly hillicinegenic decongestant. (And you ask why I can't remember anything! I can't even differentiate realities!) Stumbled around in band trying to remember where I was suppose to be going after being gone for two days (at that point I was still upset that I was required to stand upright). Did nothing in humanities but laugh at my own dwindling GPA. I have no idea what we did in bio. But do I ever? Compandlit was laughable as well. Discussion on Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston). Its really a good book (it was even better three days after the discussion when I actually finished reading it). I made two blatently obvious comments in the discussion. But that's about all everyone else did too. (And contrary to what it sounded like, I did know what I was talking about...mostly.) Mine were more obvious then most. But obviousness is based on common sense, which I lack in terms of the rest of the world, but seem to have gathered my own collection of uncommon sense, which I ironically call common sense.

Friday I also watched The Matrix which I had at that point never watched before. Tara was right. It is a good movie. (How I watched it before release? 1.3gb of MPEG, of course. Ahh...fast connections...)

I believe I did a lot of token ring stuff on Sat. I had gotten copies of the microcode and everything else needed to write a TMS380 driver. Finally started fiddling with everything. the SysKonnect driver is basically everything I would have written if it weren't already written. Very nicely done too. However, the driver hasn't been functional since 2.1.107. Spent the weekend trying to fix it. Got receive working (I think) about 2300 on Sunday night. Transmit is still broken. I managed to generate a bit of l-k and l-tr traffic about it. Of note is that Jay is gone. No one knows where. But he was the former maintainer of the sk driver as well as linux/tr and linux/sna in general. That means linux-sna is dead. Oh well. I seem to have gotten three people working on getting it fixed. I plan on renaming it from sktr to tms380tr and making myself the maintainer of 'Generic TMS380 token ring support'.

Anyway, the other thing that happened Sunday was the movement of the SpeedChoice modem into my room, as well as moving the main switch into here. So now everything of value should be out of the garage. Yay.

Today was far less interesting than Friday. Nothing really interesting at all, actually. I went to school. I took a nap. I did nothing. And I'm about to take a longer nap.

I think I've avoided it long enough. The post office. Aparently they've decided I no longer need paper/parcel mail. No idea why, but that seems to be their stance. We've gotten no mail for two days now. And today, they left a cryptic message written nearly illegibly on a post-it note, accidently attatched to a second blank post-it note, attached to a blue half-sheet of paper. The part of the writting I coudl read said something like "Fritzler 8 VH OP". Just what are they trying to tell me?

Anyway, so now I'm pissed off at them. But I get pissed off at most everything/everyone at least once every few days, so I'm guessing this will pass as usual.

Oh well. We'll see if I can remember to write here tomorrow. Ha.

Aha! You found me. I decided I'd pop back into public existance for a bit. Just to see what I was missing; probably not much. But I'll try anyway. Now that most of the cruft has blown over in a reasonable manner (not a perfect manner...but reasonable). I'm going to try to start enforcing my new rule about avoiding pissing people off that I have to deal with personally. No big loss, though, since far more than 99% of the world's population are still up for exposure to my cynicism without restriction. And you thought you were safe...

August (the month I accidently skipped and then came up with a fantastic excuse for the skippage four weeks later...such a fantastic idea that I'm sure you have already figured it out) was actually a fairly interesting month. And at times I regret not writing during it. It included some fairly major stuff.

Firstly, band camp. A bizzarely interesting week-long experience that everyone should be sentenced to. Many hours of marching in weather that is entirely unsuitable for doing such things. Its amusing to see yourself actually doing something as stupid as marching in direct sunlight at 110degF. Oh, did I mention the humidity? Or maybe the mosquitos? Oh yes, can't forget those...

The week following that was spent on a lovely little trip to colorado/wyoming/southdakoda. It was most all family stuff. The only major non-family thing was that ridiculous trip to South Dakoda, which was mostly spent doging bikers (we happened to be there the same week as the Sturgis convention). And just note to everyone who has yet to see those stupid faces carved into that mound of rock: they're rather disappointing. And its definitly not worth the trip. It looks far more interesting on the postcards than it ever could in person. Anyway.

The week following that one was completely the opposite of lovely; more of a dreadful ere. It was the first week of school. Class lineup from now til December looks something like this: band, humanities (see last year's logs for why I took this entertaining class again), AP bio (still not sure why I'm taking this, but I'm learning lots of useless information nonetheless), honors econ (aka, nap time), and AP comp and lit (aka, nap time, take two -- the idea here is to convince the teacher that you're mute -- it worked for me for three weeks!).

That week also led me to a decision that probably was not completely unexpected, but a bit surprising anyway. I took an indefinite leave from my position. So, no income for a while. And no funny DSP hardware to play with. But there's no way I have enough time to be useful in that position. I'll come back to it eventually (if it still exists when then).

Since then, I've mostly been doing either school stuff, band stuff, or sleep stuff. Lots of crazy homework. (Including rather disturbing reading for comp and lit.)

I suppose I could include bits of the Speedchoice story. It got installed on its scheduled date (I think I wrote about that). It died three days later. They fixed it a month later. That's not to say they didn't try before that. In fact, they tried entirely too many times. I believe I've seen eight or nine service techs out here. Everyone except the last guy was clueless. As I said, except the last guy. I really wish I could remember his name, because he does deserve mention. He wasn't even an RF tech. But he figured out in relatively little time (relative is important...I once had the techs here for six hours in one day), that the antenna was too small and that the modem was overdriving the antenna. That not only explains the excess heat coming off the modem, but also why the modems eventually just started dying (I've been through three or four of those too). So I'm up to a wide 25in antenna now. It has worked consistently ever since that guy left. Amazing. (Though its still not as fast as josh's new 1Mb SDSL...he just had to outdo me... :)

So everything has actually been going rather well around here. Surprisingly well. Too well...

(You are aware of course that writing here was just an excuse to avoid reading comp and lit stuff... Oh, and the foil seems to be an interesting monolith to be mesmerized by these days. Yes, it came out of my window. And indeed it is over six inches on its longest diameter.)