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

I found the screwdriver.

I didn't see any Simpsons tonight. Oh well. Though I can probably say that the new one was either BABF04 or BABF05. Not sure which.

Rereading yesterday, I must say that today was Rather Boring. (I Am Liking Capitalizing Things Today.)

I didn't get that thing done for bio. Oops. I knew I wouldn't remember.

Be One With Your Roaches. They are people too.

Anyway, I got up around 1400 today. That was nice. Yay for ten hours of sleep. Diddled around for most of the afternoon, getting nothing done. Watched TV. Laughed at the brit with a sword for a while (yes, I'm still laughing -- the BBC is so very good at the whole sarcasm thing). Went to the Boston Pops holiday concert at america west (arena...bleh...seats are too small). Luckily Annika was sitting with me, so that was entertaining. Got home around 2230. Found that although my VCR (oh Panasonic how I loathe your wretched creations...) recorded Simpsons just fine, it won't play it. Well, it will. But only four seconds at a time. Then it stops and you have to hit play again. Repeat ad nauseum. Well, not really. I gave up right after the first segment. I'll find another vcr to watch it on tomorrow. (At Least It Recorded It.)

So I'm still rather bored. Entertain me.

Hum.. Well, do you?

Nice day I suppose. Better than yesterday most definitly.

Woke up late(ish). First started working on pushing dosemu to do what I want. This involved me doing all sorts of things I don't like to do (ie, reading other projects' source). Luckily dosemu is fairly nicely cleaned and quite easy to trace through once you get a grip on the code size. I'd say for what it does, its the cleanest it can realistically be. I finally got it tracing port accesses (using the quite undocumented 'trace ports' config line -- figured that out by reading the yacc input). From there, I figured out why it was throwing out my statement about passing all ports through to the hardware. Aparently grand statements like 'ports range 0x100,0xfff' are not workable. In order to attain the rule, it must be a contiguous block of addresses that are not already reserved for something else. Of couse with a range like that, most everything cancels out the rule. Once I had it tracing, I could shorten it to just the needed addresses for tokenset.exe to operate (0xa20-0xa8f), which got tokenset.exe actually working and configuring the card. However, getting that to work killed my tracing ability. It only traces failed hardware accesses or port accesses to emulated hardware. Quickly hacked in logging to actual __volitile __asm calls and that was done.

Then spent several hours futily attempting to figure out what the hell it was doing, and ended up just recognizing that it was using the base+2/base+3 pair as an index register. From there, plugging in my own code, I could see that it has eight single-byte configuration registers (which mirror themselves over and over). I've got most of them mapped out. There's still a few iffy parts (like the upper nibble of the second byte (reg 0x01)). So there's a kinda-working linux equivelent to tokenset.exe available here. It took all day. It'd better not be completely wrong.

That was all thanks to dosemu. Thanks, dosemu. You work great. Mostly. Once I've read the source.

Once I noticed a few things about the way tokenset.exe is verbaged, I figured out that the tms380tr is not located at the programmed address, but at a calculated offset to that (see the tokenset.c code). This was a marvelous idea on Intel's part. They put the config registers right where the tms380tr config registers usually are (0xa20 is the Old IBM Standard Location for TR adapters, its also where the default Intel config space is). So when tms380tr drivers go to probe for a tms380 chip, all they do is end up fiddling with the eeprom config. Creative, indeed. But it will also take a bit of thought when I implement the final working support for these things in my tms380tr linux driver. Probing order is definitly going to be important (0xa30 before 0xa20, etc).

After you read that, you're probably wondering why it isn't supported yet. Well, thats because its ISA, and I have cronic problems with ISA DMA. kmalloc() keeps giving me above-16mb-barrier buffers for my priv data (where the SSB, et al, are). Thats no good. So the driver bails before it even gets to the BUD procedure. I've got to find a way to solve that. But in the meantime, this may be a good time to implement PseudoDMA support, which looks rather nifty anyway. That would also bring those Alpha's with the stupid DMA controllers into working order. Slow though. But working.

One final tms380tr note. Linus included all of my and Mike's changes into 2.3.29. Though it doesn't compile because they changed the PCI Vendor ID macro from SK to SYSKONNECT. Linus has the patch, should be in 2.3.30. [Oh, SysKonnect also released driver code for their very nice SK-9844...drool. Its in 2.2.14preX, for those who are actually blessed with 1000base.]

That was actually most of the day right there. Went to see Being John Malkovich with Brock and David (someone else too...hmm...don't remember...they were driving...in a car that is unhealthfully tiny). Interesting movie. Odd. But interesting. Has recursive possibilities that were not fully explorer. (And infact, there should have been infinite destruction when he entered himself. But sadly, no. Sigh.) After that, there was a short presense at David's dwelling, which took an extraordinarily long time to pick up undead. Undead did make it here, however, where it was indeed quite dead, just as not described. Gah. Troubleshooting. Motherboard is dead. But why. I still have no answer. I just know its the motherboard. Oh well.

Thats the end of that I suppose.

Hum. Exceptionally boring two days. Lots of food though. And in a moderalty cold place to be (Prescott).

Got up later than planned on Thurs. Wandered around waiting for parents to ready themselves. Left. Got there, ate lots, listened to them talk about the same things over and over and over again (blah!). I escaped and went off to read til 2300, when I decided I'd go to sleep Because Everyone Else Was. Slept in til a whole 0800 or so. More food. Reading. More food. Reading. Driving home. More food. Then checking mail and things. Played with NetMeeting for a while. Very stable and very featureful, considering its got Microsoft's name on it. It only lets two people actively contribute audio/video though. So I then went off looking for an H.323 reflector. No free ones to be found. How sad. Someone want to write one for me?

Amazon's Old Man commercials are just odd. Oh, I finally found three hours to sit down and watch Apocalypse Now (in ASF format, no less -- rather timely too, i'd just finished reading Lord of the Flies again). I must say that I have never seen such a disturbing movie in my life. Good though. Just very disturbing. Not sarcastic disturbing either. I mean it. It makes me even more frightened about having to read Hear of Darkness for compandlit.

Oh well. I've run out of things to talk about. Except the flaming monkeys. Hum. I haven't showered in a while either. I should probably do that.

Some random bystander asked about the wine gums I rave about every few months (when they magically appear in boxes from random places in europe). Someone please do share if you know where to get them in the states. Hmm...looks like you can get them here for $2.50 a bag. Though with a minimum order of $20, that's a bit much. Oh well. If you're really desperate I suppose... Buy me some orange Aero chocolate while you're there.... drool...

Anyway, back to the normal cruft. Normal band stuff, went to second hour for a bit, and came back to find people trying to kill themselves with tools (er, make music with them...christmas music in fact...hmmm...). Fell asleep in bio. Did nothing in compandlit. Except get to see my paper. A-. Yea. And it only took me two weeks...err...three hours to write. Hah. Oh well. Came home and went to sleep. Got chinese (Big Heng) for dinner. (mmm...chinese...food, of course...did you think i meant the human? no, i meant the food. definitly the food.) Spent most of the evening doing nothing. It got late way too quickly. Tried several times to get a software DVD decoder running in win98. I finally succeeded once, but then it promptly started crashing my sound card (es1371 bah) right as the scene I wanted to watch started (the Dawn of Man act of 2001, of course). That got entirely too frustrating, so here I am back in linux.

See, that page got me into an orange aero craving... damnit. I haven't had that stuff in three or four years... desperate...for...orange...chocolate...

David, you can add another method of contacting you. Uploading random messages contained in text files. The second one is rather important. Your machine is going to self-destruct too early this coming y2k if you don't ACT NOW!!!

Had to go to school today. Bah. Not terribly exciting now was it. No, not really. (Implicit self dialogue is fun, isn'it? Yes, I think so.) Anyway, in a not so concluding conclusion, nothing exciting happened today. Of course, you're all wondering 'What'd you do AFTER school?'. Thats a dumb question. Stop asking questions. Shut up. I already told you. Didn't I tell you to be quiet? I thought so, yet you're still talking. Stop that. Now.

I did try to get the tokenset program that comes with Intel's ISA (TMS380-based) token ring cards working under dosemu. The goal was to monitor how it was setting up the big interface chip. No go. Doesn't detect the card when running under dosemu, nor does dosemu seem to want to trace i/o accesses for me. Maybe later. Managed to reboot one extra time, for in my desperate attempts to kill dosemu, I accidently hit c-a-del. Oops. I guess thats why people have keycaps and their keycaps labelled with their keys' function. Not for me. I hate instructions. Yes. Yes I do.

Hrm. I wonder if the stress of being alive is starting to get to me. Hm. Maybe not. If it were, I probably wouldn't realize it. Unless its combined with total numbness. Then you could make up anything you wanted and it wouldn't have to really exist. You probably have no idea what I meant by that. Yes I do. Well then. I still don't think you do. Well I do. Stop contradicting me in public. No. I find it enjoyable. Well I don't. Stop that. Okay.

Mmmm...red meat...

Odd day. Not a very nice one. But livable. I didn't wake up this morning. Til around noon that is. Went to bed feeling rather disgusting, and I figured getting up would only more fully realize that. It was a moderatly good decision to sleep. I probably should've gone to the compandlit tea party today, just for mock value. But oh well.

I don't think anyone actually got the point of my hamster ball thing yesterday. I was full of crazy metaphors then. I am still most amused by The Fish Tank. Hehe. (Weee...random giddiness...)

Anyway, two majorly odd things happened tonight. One, I dragged out my scope, sister wanted to use it for no aparent reason. That was a hell of a lot of work. And it was 30degF outside. I probably should've been wearing shoes. But you know how I feel about shoes.

The other thing was me installing win98 on mediocris (on one of those half-dead 8gb drives from deepthought). I was actually fairly impressed. I only had to manually install five devices, reboot 21 times, and it only crashed once. Rather quick too. And now I can finally play ASFs at mostly full rate! So I watched spaceballs (what else?). And then just went back to linux, bought lots of random stocks for econ (hehe), and now I'm going to bed. So I can go to school tomorrow. Bleh.

Hum. So I guess I'll do that now.

Its not actually yesterday anymore. Its today now. I just put that there so I could remember which Simpsons were on while I still had the capacity to remember such things. I believe I'm comfortably incapacitated of that now.

Rather happily boring day. I slept til 1400. They should make those hamster balls big enough to put people in. I would certainly find it entertaining. To watch other people in. Of course not to be in. Well, maybe. But I have enough entrapment and isolationist issues already, without being stuck in a giant hamster ball. And no, thats not what I was dreaming about for my twelve hours of sleep. I don't particularly remember what that was all about. Most likely a good thing. I do remember dreaming that I could use my MPEG2 decoder boards in linux, though. And yes, many of my dreams involve linux. You can be quiet now.

Anyway, zaphod got a new motherboard (adding another PCI slot), and a new case (adding another eight inches or so of extra height). That took most of the usable day.

Just read that description of the Rainbow Run-About hamster ball. Its becoming increasingly intriguing. I've always wanted a safe and secure experience outside of my habitat, particularly while I'm outside of my room while its being cleaned (hypothetically, of course...it never actually gets 'cleaned').

Watched the teli most of the evening. Didn't bother with the Xfiles. Still need to find someone who recorded last week's. Spent the rest of the evening trying to find a disassembler that is free and will handle device drivers. I really want to try getting Sigma Designs Hollywood+ and Ventura decoder cardsworking in linux. I want hardware mpeg damnit.

Mmm...hamsters...

Yawn.

Got up around noon. Read books and cliffs notes for several hours on end. Went to the USMB concert at Gammage. Just got home an hour or so ago. That was the highlight of my day. But that says little...anything could have been the highlight of this day.

Of course, then I came home and found out that my grandmother had another stroke (nearly exactly a year after the first one). CAT shows no additional damage. But last time it took a few days to show anything anyway. Hum. Aum.

Frightening site of the day: AlienZoo. (Pay particular attention to the "Humanifesto" section, just full of quasipsychotic ramblings (in both prose and poetry!).) [No offense to any siblings of the owner(s) of that site. It was just too odd. I had to link to it.]

Oh, you probably missed the frightening site of yesterday. Which was fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu. The URL not frightening enough for you? Then go there and see the uhm...interesting graphic...

I have a headache. My throat is sore. I have a funky taste in my mouth. I'm hungry with no apetite. I have too many things to read and one too many essays to write. I feel like complaining. Do you really want me to write more? Thought not.

Hum. I said that already.

I get some rather ridiculous spam, but this one is one of the better (ahem) ones I've gotten in a while. Firstly, its creative. They personalized both the Subject line and put a cute PS line at the bottom asking a ridiculous question that would apply to most everyone who's changed addresses (as no one keeps the same address for more than a year because it gets too much spam after a while, ironically). Also, it offers all the great spelling peculiarities of all perfect spam: both accidental mispellings and purposeful mispellings. I just wanted to point all that out. You should always analyse your spam. Really. [Yeah, its a bit old. But I keep forgetting to talk about it and I want it out of my inbox.] This one also came in a special mailing list addition entitled "hey wassup KernEL".

VeggieTales: may they strike fear in your sense of handless surreality.

Well, so it hasn't been a particularly spectacular day. Not that any ever is of course. I just like to point out the particularly unspectacular ones, such as today. Or yesterday. But I pointed that out yesterday.

Woke up feeling both nausious and unable to breathe. Decided that was not such a good state to be going to school in. Feeling slightly better by bio, so I went to that. Not worth it. Most of the class was missing anyway. [Also missed the senior class pictures. I'm told they did them in a dumb way in any case, so it may have been more amusing just to miss them. Not like I care anyway.] Also went to econ. Sheesh. I think I'm getting stupider by the day. Which is obvious since I used the word stupider, particularly in the same paragraph as dumb.

Came home and slept til 2200. Watched simpsons. Complained a while. Still complaining. I think I'll just go back to bed. Gah. (I'm really beginning to like that word. I started using it yesterday, and its serving me well.)

That mjpeg board is just dead. The guy I got it from says it worked when it left. This is why you don't do private transactions. If you're going to do person-to-person dealing, go through ebay or something. At least you have legally binding contracts at ebay (despite the outrageous cost). I'm going to try to get UPS to pay for it. If it worked when it left and doesn't work now, then its got to be their fault, right? Perhaps I can convince them that they sent it through an overzealous xray machine that erased the eeproms or something...Oh well. [Yes, josh, I already said that today. But its so very rare that I find the opprotunity to use the word overzealous.] I've already won an auction for another buz on ebay. It says its still in a sealed box, so it should work. If not, at least I have someone to sue.

I need to get looking at those ISA token ring cards. I wish the Madge stuff would come.

Tara doesn't like people mocking whales. But she was most likely just bitter from people mocking her within two paragraphs of mocking whales.

Maybe I'll go watch the first twenty min of 2001. I still feel like watching that for some reason.

Hum. Did I mention my time management problem? I don't remember. I also have a memory problem.

Frustrating day I suppose. My general sense of disconnectivity to reality only greatens on days such as these. Not that it ever wanes. It only gets worse. Just some days, it doesn't get worse as much...

Anyway, read act two of Earnest in second hour (still hadn't done that yet...read the beginning and the end, just not the middle...big surprise, it happened just like I figured it did), recorded foster stuff, and came back to sit around in Adams' office as usual for the last half-hour. Drowsiness sets in around the second fifteen minutes of bio. I'm surprised that class has entertained me as much as it has. Its definitly held the record on that. But it appears to be losing it. Lets just get through the end of the semester and I'll be okay. But at least for this week, its made a superb naptime (and yes, I still know whats going on...thanks to the cliff notes...praise them! not that its difficult stuff...that class isnt anywhere near as hard as other people think it is...). [I'm feeling especially derogatory today.] Took a short test over Earnest in compandlit, and then sat around for an hour.

The new Madge drivers are out. In full source. With the dumbest license I have yet to see in my lifetime, and probably one of the most poorly written free-source license ever. You'll have to go download the package and take a look (and don't forget to laugh). In any case, at least they released the source. It seems to be the only documentation they're ever going to produce on the interface of the cards, so good. Not that its very good documentation...the code is rather ugly. Still, its source. They're starting to catch on. Maybe.

Spent the entire evening (up to a half-hour ago) trying to figure out why the buz doesnt work. Its not a linux problem. Its a board problem. One chip (the Zoran decoder) is showing up in /proc/pci. The problem is that its showing up with the wrong vendor ID. Wacky, I know. Also, the Advansys chip isnt showing up at all. And this happens at bootup as well (the BIOS list of cards lists the wrong numbers). So I say its a bad card. It will have to go back and I will get a refund. Damnit. Damnit damnit damnit.

Have I said damnit yet?

It doesn't look like brock is ever going to link to it. And I just found it, so I think I will. This is quite entertaining. [Brock: I was in there grepping around for where the Fish-And-Chips fortune was quoted. See, I thought you were david and that it was november, not december...and that it was in his log...and...oh well...you can stop laughing now...]

I suppose you could use psuedoephedrine to knock out a whale. Though I don't much see the point. Given the chance, I could think of hundreds of better ways to do that. But do you really want to give me that chance? Thought not. [I'll at least explain why I think that particular method is rather pointless. My thought comes from the method of injection. Just how are you going to get that stuff into the whale? That's what I thought. You'd already have to have a fairly calm, at least near-tranqualized animal before you could even get the stuff into it. Perhaps this is why david mentioned 'keeping it tranqualized'. Oh well. I still want to argue. Its a dumb way to do it. Now if it involved high propulsion darts and/or that green T-shirt that came today. That would be nifty.]

Furthermore. I agree with Dave; I'm leaving. Going to bed perhaps? Perhaps not. I'll let you know if I ever decide to actually make the decision. Which is rare. It usually happens for me. (Me being me, and not the body I reside in. As that me makes too many decisions for me already. In fact, I'm so bitter about it making all the decisions that I have stopped allowing myself to consider it me. Take that.)

Oh, if you beg him alot, he'll send you the shirt without actually being a 'devout Christian' (obviously, if I got one). But you do have to enjoy making use of "the F-word".

Oh so tired. I have a real problem with that lately. And time management. I have a real time management problem too.

Not a terribly interesting day. Turned in my comptency test form second hour. Went straight to the department chair, had her sign it, and give me everything I needed. The test is over Frankenstein, McBeth, Christmas Carol (Dickens, puke), and Lord of the Flies (yay!). Multiple choice over all of them, a pre-prepared research paper on one of them (a mere 900word max), and then a proctored essay on Christmas Carol. Terribly easy. Anyway, fell asleep in bio yet again. Bah. Must stop doing that. Must learn about protein synthesis. Stupid groupwork or something im not sure what it was in econ. I stayed out of that (I was tired and felt terrible by that time anyway).

For those of you with the Microsoft conspiracy theories, Microsoft announced todat that they're bailing out of the AOL-compatible instant messaging business. MSN Messenger will no longer be linked to AIM. And whats more is that the TiK/TOC website came back within hours of the announcement. Shrug. They even mention they're planning a TiK 1.0 release for Decembre.

Anyway, came home and slept for a while. The buz did come (with about a pound of customs paper work...the government is just too dumb...so dumb that I don't even feel like pointing it out anymore...). Slept as long as I could. Worked on bio study guide til 2030 or so. Installed buz and an ISA intel tms380 board in mediocris. Neither were successful. I've moved the Intel boards down from "possibly supported" to "plan to be supported / current support broken". They've got that weird chip on them that I don't know how to deal with. I'll have to look at the windows drivers I guess. As for the buz, linux isn't properly enabling its onboard PCI-to-PCI bridge, meaning that nothing on the far side of the bridge can be seen by the kernel (ie, the Zoran encoder, the video front end, or the SCSI controller). I'm waiting for a response on that one.

I'm hungry. I suppose thats a better than last night's strange urge to watch the opening act of 2001 (with the enlightening monkeys). Oh well.

I'm sure there was something else I was going to say here. Too bad you're not going to hear it.

It really pissed me off when WB showed the commercial for 7F16, and then showed 8F23. Grr. I missed the 1830 episode for some reason. I can't account for what I was doing then.

I'm complaining too much lately. And I've been watching far too much Simpsons (is there such a thing?). Is it sad that everything you hear you can immediatly relate to something referencing the Simpsons?

I figure if I watch Ben Stein twice a day, I can know as much useless information as its host does. And damnit the shortest color is not red.

Okay, back to today... Listened to foster rant about trivial things in second hour, and went and picked up the competency test forms. Slept some more today in bio. I dont know why I've been so tired lately. Probably because I lost my open can of penguins. Well, I'm fairly sure its in my band uniform garment bag. I destinctly remember putting them there a week ago so that I could have them to keep myself awake for state. But now they're mixed in with the skads of other miscellaneous things in the bottom of that bag. (Those things are really useful, until you have to clean them out.) Sigh. Anyway, compandlitlady wasn't there. Sub instead. I think the only entertaining part was the repeated warnings from the sub directed to two people in the back of the room who were touching, aparently unappriatly. Though I doubt. That wreaks of substitute teacher over reaction syndrom, a problem that has been especially prevelent this year. Oh well. Doesnt affect me any. Besides being able to laugh at it.

Looks like we've decided to ditch trying to get Multilink (channel-bonded) PPP ISDN going on the Courier modems and linux. Bay makes a nice small box that does it for the same price as the Courier modems alone, and no linux boxes at all. I would've recommended this earlier, had I known that someone made a router with integrated ISDN ports for less than 400$. Now I know. It does NAT and DHCP too. Real nice.

I should've been doing bio study guide. Oh well. Instead, I spent a good chunk of the later evening trying to get that 720mb star wars CDXA image to actually burn to a CD. Looks like I'm going to have to use linux for that. My dad's win95 box seems to have come down with something strange. It randomly powers off. Not just a reboot, but a complete power death. And at random times after bootup. It also wouldn't play the ASFs I wanted to watch. It would just play a lovely black screen and count the seconds real nice. Turns out it didnt have the right codecs installed. But did it bother to tell me that? Hell no. This is windows. And microsoft no less. (Even RealPlayer tells you when it doesnt have everything!) So I just grabbed a new copy of media player instead. It plays them now. Barely. At 4FrPS. [Welcome to my new acronym system for video: fps is too confusing, therefore I've created two new ones...FrPS for frames per second, and FiPS for fields per second...oh, most places FiPS=PrPS*2. But its an important difference.] Anyway, I thought maybe the video drivers were too old and maybe didnt fully support DirectDraw or something. Go over and download those. Start installing. Random shutdown problem occurs at about 60%. Reboot. Protection error. Safe mode. Standard VGA. Reboot. Redownload. Install. Reboot. Now get about 20FrPS. Shuts down again. I give up. I come back inside. [Yay for informal writing!]

[Oh, and don't confuse FiPS with FIPS. FIPS can mean other random things. Including a lovely ancient DOS repartitioner. Oh, the good old days...]

So anyway. My buz should be here tomorrow. I hope its not as disappointing as I know its going to be. But oh well. I still need to find out if there's some way to convert MJPEG into real MPEG. At least it will give me a SCSI controller.

I'm tired. And I think I'll ditch that NHS meeting tomorrow. I hate NHS. I get up a half-hour ealier every other wednesday so i can sit there and listen to people talk about nothing. Actually, I hardly ever know what they're atlking about anyway, because i'm too tired and I fall asleep becuase I had to get up a half-hour early. Did I mention that I have to get up a half-hour early? Bah. I feel disgusting. And I'm whining. I'm going to bed.

Hum. Booooring...

Talked about saturday in band. Rather low scores. Oh well. Did econ homework from two weeks ago in second hour. And ate some more of that tasty packing material (courtesy of Ben...there was Pez too, but I was more in the mood for the packing material). More protein synthesis. Yay! Slept through econ and took test while doing so. Still got an A. While sleeping. Oh, thats what, the dozenth time I've done that...? Came home for a little while, left again to go fiddle with ISDN for a while. Had to give up again. I don't know what I'm going to do. Came home again. Worked for an hour on my paper. Finished it. I always find it sad that I waste weeks putting things off when I could've done them in three hours total to begin with. Oh well.

[I was nearly ready to refuse to link to Pez after I saw their idiotically strict legal terms. Dumb. But I linked anyways. Its Pez. Oh, I also considered not linking because that clown is awfully damn frightening looking.]

Spent a few minutes reading through Madge source. That's an interesting process. That is by far the worst code I've ever seen. Incredibly unreadible. I don't think anyone is going to be very happy when they release that source. Its going to take a _LOT_ of work to get it to look like a linux driver (even more work than the SBlive driver did, and you can ask alan about that one).

The key thing is that I can probably fairly quickly add support for a couple Madge cards merely by supporting the EEPROM that they have. They attach a special i2c-controlled EEPROM to themselves to store the burned-in address (BIA) / MAC address. The cards work with the current tms380tr driver, however, the driver must be hacked to provide a phony MAC address to the OPEN command sent to the tms380c30. But that mean's I have to implement software i2c yet one more time. But first, I need to wait for my cards to come. Soon, I hope.

Olicom (now part of Madge) contacted me today. They're going to try and get cards and docs for me too. Did I mention this was fun?

I'm really tired. I've fallen asleep in every class today. If so many people hadn't been trying to kill me, I would have probably fallen asleep on the freeway this afternoon too. Too tired. Must sleep. I still don't know why Mandie told me to die repeatidly. Shrug.

I think I'm getting sick again too. Bah.

Yay. Be so proud of me. I finally figured out how to set my system clock against NIST. I repeat: Yay.

Southpark is dumb. (Except for the 'what is popular' episode...that was hilarious.) Oh, and I'm not sure about the third (new) Simpsons. I'm guessing at the episode production code. I didn't catch it on the credits and Fox hasn't released them in list form for season eleven yet.

Woke up around 1100 today. I think. Really didn't do anything all day. I didn't even try. Except for between 1600 and 1730, where I worked on my paper. Yes. That's what I said. Went over to Amanda's talk about some stuff around 1945, so I missed the Xfiles.

The Simpsons was rather amusing however. I think the most entertaining scnene was where Homer was carressing the 300 balloon and it out of nowhere jumped down his throat, and he coughed it up ("What was that about?"). Amusing. Actually, the whole 300 balloon symbol was alltogether amusing.

I was flipping through and saw bit about privitizing the public education system on CBS (handing it over to companies such as Edison Project/Schools).

Hm. Its 0800 at Madge-UK. I've got people bugging each other inside each division to help me. This is unbelievably fun.

Anyway, back to the school system. I personally find it a very interesting idea. Edison seems to have shown that they can do a better job at it. However, the question is wether they can _continue_ to do a better job. The government was pretty damn good at it when it started too. But I hate the government, so I suppose I'm required to like this idea. Read through the Edison site. Its a good idea. Really.

"I'm not actually a good dentist. I'm just the only one in the neighborhood." -- Bob.

Time to go to bed I suppose.

Hrmph. Capslock should be banished from all keyboards. Especially mine.

Long day. Up at 0700 (sheesh...hard to believe that was all in one day...)

I should do like brock and change the background color on a daily basis instead of actually writing anything. It would probably be more informative than my writing anyway.

Left for phoenix college where ABODA State [Marching Festival] was. Got very confused about where we were suppose to be. Finally warmed up. Marched a good show. And left.

Because my writing can be so disconnected, you know.

Came home for a while. Ate something. Felt tired. Felt a bit sick too. Oh well.

Which makes it rather difficult to follow at times.

Went back down there at 1430. Watched lots of bands. Watched the awards. No captions, and a mere Excellent. Oh poo.

Except for the trenchant few who can make it out.

Though it must be said that none of the first ten bands to perform got anything better than an excellent. The Superiors didn't start until the first afternoon session. All morning session got Excellents.

I've run out of disconnected comments to insert in alternating paragraphs.

Came home for a few more minutes. Went to peter piper slightly before 2000. Was forced to put on an obnoxiously colored hat. Then found out how amusing it is to watch random foodstuffs (particularly gelatenous ones) being thrown at people. And how unfortunate it can be to have such gelatinous foodstuffs thrown at you. In a very forceful manner. While splattering in multiple directions. Interesting evening indeed.

There's a distinctly small number of personal pronouns in this entry. And numerous sentence fragments.

Had to take a shower immediatly upon return home. The white whipped substance that someone (ahem) poured onto my backside was beginning to harden into a not-so-nice goo. Sugary though. Sticky and airy too. [Earlier, I had had large amounts of it on my face, while trying to eat it handless. That was interesting too. Gave me a good chance to start getting the lipstick off though.]

Perhaps I didn't run out afterall.

Haven't done anything since. Bleh. I've still got lots of crap to do too.

Hum. I think deepthought spontaneously gained an hour. Whats depressing is that its been doing it for months and I just now noticed.

Its been a while. Wednesday was not very eventful. Spent the morning wandering around Palo Verde [Nuclear Power Generating Station]. Well. Its parking lots and service roads anyway. Some sort of freakish parade thing. No idea. But they gave us danishes and frozen fruit juices. [PVNGS may or may not be y2k compliant. They're fairly reluctant to say for sure. Oh well. I for one welcome this change, and would like to say "Hail the new nuclear disaster." If anyone recognizes the slight Simpsons reference in that last sentence, I fear for your sanity. You should fear for you life in any case, as Arizona Public Service runs Microsoft servers. Fun fun.] Anyway, came home, tried to call the Madge guy. Left a message. Gave him my phone number with the wrong area code. Guessed at his email address. Went back to try and fiddle with ISDN some more. Got it all working up to the point where it was suppose to kick in the second B channel. Never did. Nor does it now. That is still a problem. No idea.

Straitjackets are expensive.

Slept in a while on Thursday. A couple random hours here and there were spent figuring out the Madge/Olicom situation. It started out well, but now I'm starting to get some problems getting info on older cards. I also got a prelim copy of the source for their upcoming driver. It still uses that stupid UDT. That's going to have to go. It obfusticates to no end. Anyway, I'm getting lots of cards from my US contact, along with a 100mb HSTR switch (the former on a permanant basis, the latter most likely on a loaner basis). Also, he's checking with his new Olicom parallel to see if I can get some of those TMS380 based cards too. Should be interesting to see what happens.

David - how am I suppose to bypass the NAU per-connection speed cap if you disable FTP? Hm? Hm?! You even added new movies to tempt me with! Ah! (Erm. Easily excitable right now.)

Today was somewhat depressing. I started working yesterday on the paper that was due today. Didn't finish. So I skipped compandlit. Did talk to admin about the competency test though. I can take it for the graduation requirements, but it won't cancel out any compandlit grades. Plan from here: take the test and try to get as high of grad as possible in compandlit, drop it next semester, and have a release time on a bi-daily basis. Its not an optimal plan, but its seemingly the best possible. I did go to bio this morning though. Which was of questionable intelligence. I ended up, quite surprisingly, taking the test from when that crazy sub was there. I loved the five minute warning I got too. Bah. I think I did okay. Walked home at lunch, went to DAC for a while (my sister wanted help looking for a PUSD job, can't imagine why), and came home and slept til 1645. Left for the game, did the parent night thing during pregame, later a mediocre halftime show (lets hope its better tomorrow), and eventually left. No more games for me. State is tomorrow. Scary.

I should get to bed I suppose. Too tired. Must write a paper on Sunday. Also Sunday, Mr Boglio is dropping off the scores for the music for the ensemble and brass choir thing I'm playing in at Christmas (I hate that word).

See ya.

Probably one of my worst days in a while. Bleh. But it had some interesting points. I guess.

Did a few run-throughs first hour. Not very good. Felt rather terrible after in second hour, and it was just getting worse...came home around 1000. I doubt I missed anything in bio. (Still no teacher.) Came back for compandlit. Which was rather entertaining (reading The Importance of Being Earnest). Had a sectional after school, which was not terribly useful I must say. But oh well. Came home just after 1500. Just enough time to check messages and go back for a "night" rehersal at 1600. Which was terrible. For many of the same reasons that the sectional was useless. But I won't enumerate. Did have an interesting time after the rehersal though. Lots of food and people (yes, two different things). It was sad. Last night rehersal, you know. Sigh.

Got home at 1900 or so...enough time to start getting nothing done. Besides getting the SW Episode 1 MPEGs transfered to zaphod so I can watch it right now with no jitter. The Thai subtitles aren't quite as annoying as I'd thought they would be. Its still good video (and great sound) relative to other movies I've downloaded. (And its MPEG. As opposed to that evil MS ASF format.)

Okay, time to talk about token ring. Mike Phillips emailed me the other day talking about the broken multicard support, and pointed out that the probes still use the old(ish) 2.1.x PCI routines. Today he sent me a patch which should fix the major problems. Its available against 2.3.26 at the tms380tr page.

Also, Sunday, someone emailed me asking me if I would talk to Madge (now includes Olicom as well) to see if I could convince them to open-source their token ring card drivers (which are based on the TMS380 chipset as well). So I went to their website and asked. One of the messages I mentioned checking earlier was on that phone-answering deviceamawhatsit. It was a Madge official (in Cali, despite the thick (and soothing) British accent), saying he would send me test cards and would get me into contact with Madge-UK, where all the token ring engineers are at. Which means they obviously liked my letter and agreed to release docs and let me write a driver. Yay. Credibility, here I come... Free cards too. I didn't have a chance to call him back today. I obviously will tomorrow. So, looks like its the beginning of the end for crappy Madge driver support on Linux. (They currently offer an aparently quite unstable binary-only driver at the moment...which is x86 only of course. Lots of people complain about this. I get to spearhead fixing it.)

So, yeah, that was a high point of my day. That, and watching Win95 BSoD repeatitly. Oh look, it did it again...

It's been quite a while since I've been this tired. It had to be at least a week ago. After getting up relatively early on Sunday, and not going to bed until 0430 on Monday, and then not getting any sleep at school, and then nothing this afternoon, I'm surprised I'm still able to type. An hour and a half of sleep in the past forty hours or so... I haven't really been very tired until an hour or so ago... shrug...

Listened to a couple of the judges' tapes in band, as well as sight-reading a few christmas songs. She says we'll be back out on the field tomorrow. Also have an "evening" (actually, afternoon) rehersal. Listened to the humanities class battle out morality. Ha. They're fun to laugh at, aren't they? The due date for the Awakening essay moved to friday. Yay.

I didn't get much of anything done this afternoon. Nothing that I'd planned to. Damn.

Aparently Tara was a bit frightened by yesterday's entry. Can't imagine why.

I'm tired. My body hurts. I'm going to bed.

Hum. Someone really needs to write that Awakening essay for me. It's due in 37 hours. Done yet? Thought not.

I did nothing today. Officially nothing. Hell, I didn't even take a shower. At least I don't remember doing that. Or anything. I don't remember what I did five minutes ago. Oh, its coming back to me. I moved a few feet to get the remote to shut the lights off. Which answers the question about why its dark in here. I also spent a while...ahem...pretending...to find info for the Awakening paper. Yes. That was productive. I'm serious. I should really write that thing.

Also watched Simpsons and things. The new one was one of the better in ahile. In fact, even though Season 11 is only two episodes long so far, its probably funnier than all of Season 10 combined. (I will always remember that scene in Treehouse X where Ned is thrashing Homer to death so politely...not that I don't remember every Simpsons scene anyway...) And the memorable scene this week is obviously (and I do mean obviously) where the tractor falls on Homer. You can't miss it. It happens at least a half-dozen times in the episode. But its hilarious every time. [Yay tomacco!] I loved the foreshadowing with the rabbid racoons for the murderous farm animals at the end (which is probably the second most memorable scene). So very amusing. Oh, and in 7G09, the scene that is one of my favorite Simpsons scenes ever: the flying rabbit scene. In my lifetime I have probably spent at least a few hours laughing at that scene alone. But perhaps I was just especially giddy this evening.

X-files was fairly good too.

I suppose I should go to bed now. I've surely got nothing better to do. Boggle at my procrastination...

I spent some time today going over ideas for a new economy. Our current economy is, of course, based on two things: 1) selling information and 2) selling time. Selling information meaning the retail market (selling books, CDs, etc), and selling time is the service market (you know). So, in my world, all information is free. So that kills the first one. All you're left with is selling time. It's particularly useful to point out that since all information is available to everyone, anyone can do anything they want to, given the _time_ to do it. And therefore its humanities own limitations that create the economy -- their finite lifespan and finite mental capacity. Not to mention that if you look at that from the other end of the deal, ironically, you'd be selling your own limitations! The only way to suceed would be to decrease one's limitations (increase mental capacity, etc). I love it. Are frightened yet? I was. By the sheer simplicity (even intuitiveness) of how all that worked out in my head. And whats more amazing is that I explained it in less than words than I expected. Well, at least I think I explained it. I doubt you can grasp my excitement over it from just the above...

Now I must really get to bed.

Relatively busy couple of days I suppose. I am probably just saying that because I wanted to sleep last night more than I did write about how I wanted to sleep, which tends to be what normally happens...tonight, for instance...

Friday was nothing out of the ordinary, except in that it was. I just can't talk about it (not that anything in particular is stopping me, its just that I don't want to talk about it), that is, talk about what it was that made it ever-so-slightly out of the ordinary. Mediocre rehersal in band, but lots of chocolate. Delayed going to second hour for a bit, until Tara came running in (I tried to run away from her, I swear!) yelling something about me having a meeting with the principal and Foster wanting to see me. So like anyone would do, I put off the meeting with the principal to talk to Foster. After I found that she had nothing interesting to say, I decided to try the principal. Nothing there either (wow, I'm lying all over the place today...). Went back to band and helped Josh, Ryan, and Adams attempt to address envelopes. It took nearly a half-hour to do twenty of them. How sad. It probably would have gone faster if there hadn't have been the laughing and such... Anyway, watched some disturbing video about Ebola in bio, with an equalling disturbing sub. Then another meeting with the principal, and then compandlit. Bah. That class will (somewhat literally) be the death of me. I bah again. Repeatitly.

In case anyone's (I'm looking at you, Adam) looking for my Z80 books, Josh has them. Or the post office. Not sure which. If the post office keeps them, I'll have to claim they were worth a lot in order to make myself some money. I like that idea. I think I'll just start pretending I sent things and then claiming insurance on them. The annoy me enough, I should get paid for putting up with them... Yes...

In any case, I got only an hour of a nap on Friday, so I had to suppliment with the rest of a box of Penguins. Pregame was fairly good. The game itself was overly boring. (There was one of these wondering around too. Pretty nice, but a bit dated. Uses that stupid floopy drive... 14x optical zoom is something most new ones don't come with standard.) Got home after 2230. I was quite tired (both from lack of sleep and from the caffeine).

Slept til noon Sat. Spent another hour in the shower (so nice...). Played with PPP and routing across a null modem for a while, nothing exciting. Had to be down at the school at five (Peoria Invitational this time -- at Peoria HS). Spent a rather long time before and after the performance taking random tours of the campus. I was not amused. Anyway, we marched one of our better shows ever. And we got an Excellent and two captions. No, wait, a Superior. Went back to the busses after listening to all those other bands and getting told to be quiet from some weird band-director-wannabe. And five minutes later, we were upgraded to a Superior with Distinction. Got back to school just after 2200.

I'm not sure who exactly is to blame (or that I am mocking) for all the indecision about the score. I'm guessing most of it was due to the announcer. Not only did he read our score wrong (I think) but he would just stop talking for long periods of time at odd times, for seemingly no reason. I'm not sure if he's narcoleptic or if he just get tired and needed a rest during those times. But it was annoying. Especially when he read scores wrong. If it was him. It could have been the judges' assistance forgetting how to add. Who knows.

[I had planned a bit more severe trail of mocking, however, I figured that's what you'd expect to read, so I decided not to. But then I decided you'd think I knew that you'd expect to read that and that I wouldn't do it, so I did it anyway. Just in a more minor way than I had started out to write. See, I can control my deprecating mocking. Really. I can.]

So yeah, it was a fairly good evening. Superior with Distinction is the highest score in the division, as well the highest score the school has gotten anywhere anytime in the past. It was just a district-level thing, though. Not THAT big of deal. But it is. In its own way. In that morale-boosting and ohgod-theres-less-than-a-week-before-state kind of way. (That brings it up: There's less than a week left in marching season. How Sad. Sad with a capital S.)

Hum. Fairly long entry tonight. But I have an excuse. It covers two days. So there.

I'll try to make this shorter than yesterday (it took me five hours to write all that, you know...).

I didn't get to sleep last night/this morning until roughly 0330. Not that I really needed it. However, contrary to what I would consider to be a good thing, Sleep Is Not Cumulative. And I was still rather tired, even after sleeping for that quite extented period yesterday. I got up this morning though. And stayed that way, at least until 0900 or so. Spent all bio discussing tuesday/wednesday. Blah. It was quite amusing nonetheless. Did stupid stock stuff in econ. Bleh. Since I've temporarily run out of meaningful permutations of Blah, I'll stop that (except for Bleu...thats a special one).

I was even less productive today than I was yesterday. Which I suppose is quite impossible, since I did nothing yesterday. Oh well. At this rate of personal increaing impossibility, I'll soon be be wasting infinite amounts of currency, like someone we know...

People are dumb. If I listen to Yakko's Nations of the World long enough, is it possible to actually stop finding it so terribly amusing? (Its a great example of a song with high-slope, near-linear acceleration as well...)

My next out-of-nowhere project is scheduled to be a nice clean m68000 (flat 68000) emulator/simulator. I want to know m68k better, particularly in relation to TI stuff (no, a linux/m68k-ti related project is not dead yet).

Hm. I just noticed that the title on this page looks quite large on windows machines. I've been using that exact same header for well over a year now, and I just noticed that. How sad. I'm open to title changes, btw. That one is getting old. Especially since I am the only person who has, does, and ever will find it amusing. But, it's lost its wacky edge factor (yes, it is frightening that I have terms for such things). Anyway, email me suggestions. Do it. Now. (If not, I may actually think about pulling you down into the surface of the earth for various 'satanic' reasons, just as Adams hinted at...)

See, as you can tell from yesterday's entry, today should've included going to one NHS meeting, one band class, and one compandlit session. In fact, it included none of those. But it included thirteen units of sleep. Ah. Sleep. A rather humorous event led up to this. I'll explain.

Picture it: 0530 on a Wed morning, I'd only been sleeping for about four hours. The alarm starts making loads of racket, I assume. I'm not real sure because I was sleeping through all this. So what follows is pure guesswork based on currently available evidence. I get up (at least I think so), still mostly asleep, shut off the alarm...and get this...go back to sleep. Isn't that unbelievable!?

Okay, so its not. In any case, 0645 rolled around, I should've been at school sleeping...er...listening to an NHS meeting. I was at home. In bed. And then 0720 whisped by, and I was yet again at home. In bed. Sleeping. This repeats again at 1230, when I should have been going to compandlit. Eventually, it turns exactly 1411, and I wake up, and notice that, well, I didn't do anything today except sleep. How about that.

So yeah, my mother also got a call from Chaney (the general harrasser-of-students-and-parents-alike officer). He wanted to know why no one went to bio today. So now they know. Also, he said that I "need to start going to class more often". Bah.

That sleep is about all I got done today. Oh, and Jens put together a patch that gets my old Toshiba DVD drive authenticating (yay!). The only problem being that the patch that fixes my player breaks Alan's new Toshiba. Hehe. So now I can theoretically play DVD movies. That is, if it weren't for the mpeg2/VOB player being written in C++, and me running Stampede, which is known for having a wretchidly broken C++ compiler environment (including broken libg++ and libstdc++). So yeah, it segfaults while printing the usage information (iostreams is broken, so the constructor of the cout object dies). Oh well. My current plan is to just completely reinstall mediocris using slackware 7.0. I like it (been using it on poinless and phlurm). And frankly, reinstalling an entire machine is easier and faster than upgrading/fixing g++.

Someone sent me a patch to tms380t to add support for the 3com 3c339 tokenlink. He says it works great with the driver. Forwarded patch to alan for inclusion in 2.3.26. I can't believe I'm the maintainer of a driver that supports over a half-dozen cards...

I'm out of ice to chew on. "Does your love of cheese show no bounds?" -- Random TV show

Oh well. I guess I'm done with all that. Time for bed again. Soon. Maybe. If only I had something better to do right now... just not aim stuff. Ye gods, I'm tired of hearing about AIM stuff. 'Add this! Why doesn't this work? What's with those random crashes? Why don't you scrap libfaim and completely rewrite it with a few more layers added in for fun?!'

I digress.

And I thought the NAU webcam was bad. Here's several useless ones. Particularly the Rubber Band Ball Cam (or the time lapse mpeg).

"It is great to watch Love Connection dubbed with Star Wars." -- Brock

I've spent a few minutes putting together the page thats linked to from the latest 2.3.x kernels. Figured that might be a good idea. I don't think I forgot anything.

"It would still be fun to randomly poke people with a four pronged fork." -- Mandie.

Spent the entire day avoiding doing real work. How is this different than all the rest of my days? Well, its not. But I just had no better way to describe today...

Finally worked on basic marching stuff in band. Spent second hour doing a motherboard swap on Foster's computer (486sx-25 up to 486dx2-66...much, much faster). That was probably the fastest motherboard swap I've ever done. Less than ten minutes. And most amazingly, nothing went wrong. I'm still in shock. Anyway, bio was hell. Had a sub that was out of her mind. Yelling and insulting people all the time; spent all 90 minutes of the class period doing such. We didn't get anything done. Ridiculous. She said she was coming back tomorrow. So guess what. I'm not going. We're suppose to have a test, but I'd rather make it up than have the headaches all day from listening to that lady (because I heavily doubt we'd ever get to the test with all her yelling and such). So yeah, I'm going to two classes tomorrow, band and compandlit. Unfortunatly, they're first and last hour. Bleh. Oh well. Then econ was the teacher lecturing about competition all period. We nearly got a reprive when he ran out the door, but sadly, he came running back in two seconds later. Aparently it was some twisted example of something. I don't know. I wasn't paying attention.

Didn't do much of anything all evening. I sent in an application for here, though I don't particularly plan on going there, unless they give it to me completely for free or something (another reason I won't go there is because they have less skill finding uses for webcams than I do -- why do I care about that roof!?). I was planning on going here, but now I think there's better facilities here (and its only about fifty miles away from the previous place anyway -- well, probably a bit more than that...but not much).

Oh well. I'm done for now.

Wilcuman la, mine leof, her Nouember! (Okay, I'll admit the month changed now. But I still won't admit that DST happened...)

As usual, you can grab the old volumes here. You should know that by now.

So anyway, back to today. Listened to the ASU tapes this morning. Nitpicky stuff. Many (most) of the comments wouldn't have been there (or at least in such extrema) if there hadn't been multi-deca-mph winds on the field at the time. They are real problems, but many things occured more often or more visibly because of the wind. Still more things have never happened in rehersal (the wind tends to knock out certain pitches more than others...leads to very annoying sound overall and makes it appear that there's quite uneven balance when there may not be). I will admit that there were lots of somewhat major problems that had nothing to do with the wind. And some more that had to do with there being entirely too many hashes on that field. Oh well. Had to go do stuff for Foster second hour. So no free time. Random things in bio. Mainly, no teacher for a while (babywatch).

Oh, second hour. I was walking along back from the english workroom over to the band room when good ol' principal stops me and asks me for a pass! The nerve of these administrators! Thinking they can track me like that... like heards of cows. Not to mention the fact that thats the first time in the four years I've been there that ANYONE has dared stopped me in the hall and asked if I had a pass. Bah. Bah I say!

I digress. More dumb discussion of The Awakening in compandlit. Blah. Biggish essay due next tuesday. Came home and hurridly packed up a new power supply for that DOA MAU, as well as packaging a new MAU, and getting the MO out for my buz. All so they could go out today. I haven't yelled at the post office in an at least twelve hours... How dare they raise Canadian postage to 48cents!

My nap today consisted of exactly twenty one and three quarter minutes of half-sleep. Not very pleasing. But anyway.

Jens sent me some more DVD patches to try. Failed. Even tried ide-scsi emulation. Still nothing. I think the best solution is just to throw this piece of junk in the garbage. First-gen DVD is fairly obsolete now. Perhaps ebay. Naw, no one would buy a DVD drive with no volume knob or any other front adornments. Well, they should be there, you see. Its just that for some reason it was sold to us without them. The holes are in the front bezel. Just nothing present to fill them. So to prevent dust buildup, it was decided to fill them with epoxy. So now its just lovely. I should take a picture of it sometime. Really rather...interesting. In any case, that was rather frustrating. I really want to be like every other linux user and be able to start trying to play DVDs in linux! Even Alan has played with it now! I'm getting left behind I tell you!

Hrmph. I really haven't been doing anything else tonight. I thought about doing somethings. But never got around to it. I use that excuse a lot. I like it. You can tell I'm sure. I think I have an NHS meeting to go to on Wed. Maybe they'll never notice that I never participate. Maybe sleeping through the meetings is enough... whats it matter anyway... such a waste of time...

Oh, a note for pointless+phlurm. The netmask on eth0:0 on pointless must be specifically set. It will default to class b. Which breaks the ability to get to anything else on NAU resnet. Brock and david thought DNS was really broken. But no. It in fact had nothing to do with DNS. It just so happened that their DNS servers were in or nearby resnet.

I've been writing a lot lately. Rather disturbing. Again, its all about cycles (except that statement...I say 'again' even though I'm fairly sure I've never said it here before...I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader to figure out what I'm talking about...and it doesn't have anything specifically to due with writing...much more important...). See ya. (Beoð ge gesunde!)

[And brock, please stop using my away messages...they're not quite as funny coming from you... Watch out! I might just have to start naming random meals again!]