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

Shhh! I won't tell anyone its a new month if you don't! I'm a bit too lazy to do the rotation right now...

You'll notice there's two days missing. Glad you noticed. Why without several keen readers point it out to me, I might not have noticed either! Well, it comes down to the last few days not being very nice to me. And I dont feel like writing about it. Enough stated. (This will probably the first time since The Beginning in Jun that I have purposely left out days. But oh well.)

Today on the other foot was not altogether better. In fact it was more disappointing than the two days prior combined. Okay, so that is a major exageration. But I'm bored.

Somehow got up around 0845. Talked to Amanda for a while. And then took a shower around 1600. Of course, stuff happened in between. But those were the two more exciting things.

I cleaned. I did have a purpose, however. I also had garbage bags. Now I dont. They stole some of my trash on the way out. Luckily, nothing important. My purpose was to find my notes from Foster's class last year. I needed some stuff to write my Crucible essay. But I never did find them. I just found my ugly floor instead. Its a lot whiter than I remembered it. Did I mention I still didnt find what I was looking for?

So I sat around thinking about that essay some more. Still nothing. Oh well. Then when I went to watch the Simpsons and X-Files, I noticed there were a bunch of overpaid loonies running around a big overpriced swatch of fake (not-so-green) grass. Eventually, that was over and Simpsons came. Not really worth the wait. And X never did come. They're just trying to get me excited for next week. Well it isnt working.

I persist in sitting here doing nothing even though my grades depend on the antithesis of that. Yet I sit. I dont know why. I really have no idea what I'm thinking about. Surely its something....

ARG! Oh well.

English once again brought strange events. For some reason, the teacher asked -me- to proof-read some stuff she was writing. I have no idea why. (Good thing, though... several his/her mixups along with a couple plural disagreements.) Odd indeed.

Calc didn't smell like lemons and/or oranges today.

Got my laptop all packed and ready to go. I think its worth the extra money to send it UPS Second Day Air. Comes to about $35 (including insurance for $1400). Not bad. Hopefully they will get the hint and return it to me via the same. If they do, then I will have it back by the end of next week. If they don't, then probably end of two weeks. Blah blah.

Talked to people for the early evening and spent the rest of the night til now doing calc homework. I wasn't planning on having to do homework but she says that if I can get it all in that she'll drop the lowest test score. I need that. Bad.

Oh, and a cleaned up my room minorly. This was in order to find my calc book and brock's ti92. Speaking of brock, he successfully made the trek to frigid Idaho. And even has inet access. How about that.

I suppose I should venture off to unconsciousness for yet another bit of prana-reviving fun....

Disappointing day indeed...

Worked on a terribly slow Mac Classic in english. Teacher somehow lost a bunch of grades from last semester. And aparently by state law she's not suppose to loose those. Luckily (for her), they were still on there. Hidden. In the trash can no less....

I spent most of the morning trying to avoid vomitting. Yes. I knew you wanted to know that. That's what I'm here for.

Came home to find five boxes from UPS on the doorstep. Two of them were mine. One was a 128mb SDRAM stick. Put that in mediocris (its the replacement for the bad one they sent the first time). Its now standing at 192mb. Nice...

The other was my laptop. In all its broken glory. Yes. Right out of the box, broken. The CD drive is tweaked to the point of excess friction. CD no spin! One more point for UPS Ground on the "Shippers Who Don't Understand the Word 'Frangile'" list. The other depressing point was the modem in came with. Its a bloody WinModem. I cant deal with that. It will have to go back. I've mailed the dealer to see what they can do for me without sending the whole laptop back. I really don't want to give UPS another chance to break that LCD panel in half.

Other than the above, not much went on. Talked to some people. Browsed a bit. Found this. Very funny. Let us hope I can never afford that many cameras, or the world shall be doomed to hear about my life every second of the day.... I do, however, like the idea of tracking the cat around. I shall have to ponder that one a bit....

I got an interesting mail in my inbox this morning. From the most unexpected place... Netscape, "Client Engineering" division. It included a nice idea of integrating a FAIM-based plugin into Mozilla. I'd have to agree with him...its a damn nice idea. I shall have to start on a such a beast sometime.

And as it appears to be a trend, Tara will kill me tomorrow.

Well, I think that be it. Methinks I need more sleep....though I know not why. Alas, from my words it appears I've been reading yet too much Hawthorn!

La de da...

Slept through band.... Read more Hawthorn in English. More Clear Understanding in calc. Wasted the rest of the day away... (It would appear from that last paragraph that lunch didn't happen. For all i know, it may not have.)

Spent a good part of the evening looking for 64mb 144pin EDO SODIMMs for a decent price. Several resellers had them for ~$90 (a good price), but there were problems attached to each. It would appear that the cheapest I could find that from a company that actually wants to sell something is $113. Uhg. Also ordered a Netgear FA410 PCMCIA ether card from IC-Direct (which is supported by Linux).

I was doing that because I realized I hadn't done it yet and that my laptop is coming tomorrow. Yes. Finally. Its in Phoenix as I write this. (I would go find interesting tourist attractions in Phoenix like I've done for the other places, but frankly, Phoenix is a terribly bad place. Don't come here.)

Talked to people while eating a sandwich. Then I went to bed (this is assuming that nothing occurs to hinder my life between now and the next sixty seconds -- no spontaneous combustion, please).

Ho hum....

Many a interesting conversation in band...yes...interesting...thats it. More Internet fun in englisc. APUSH boring as ever.... blah blah blah...

I think I finally got that Miraphone in tune. It took nearly an hour, but I think I did it. Gee... maybe someday it will be in playable condition. Actually, it probably is now. But I don't feel like dragging it back to school. I don't know if I want to play it for honor band or not. I really like having a fourth valve...and the rotaries are nice too...

Anyway. Took a very short nap. Then went out and watched Shakespear's Comedy of Errors. Not your average production however...it starred the Karamazov Brothers. Very funny. But a very diluted theme.

Then came back here and talked to random people for the rest of the evening. Exciting, eh? I thought so. Cat made a few guest appearences on the web cam in the late evening. n_ and David were amused.

Yet another average day in the life of mid... well, actually, it rained. So its not all that average....

Finally decided to wake up about 1400. Yuck.

Mostly nothing all afternoon. Talked to Tara for a while. She reminded me that I forgot to point something out. Saturday was solo/ensemble. Tara aparently got a...uhm... difficult judge (or in her terms "asshole"). She got a three on her solo and placed I believe 10th chair flute in regional band. Amanda faired much better... A superior (=one) for her solo, duet, and quartet, along with placing first chair clarinet in regional orchestra.

APUSH homework consumed an hour or two. I was also planning on doing calc homework. I swear I was. Two things seem to be missing in my room. One is brock's ti92. Still haven't found that. The other is my calc book. I just noticed that was missing. Hmmm...

I was in a somewhat odd mood in the evening. The people on AIM weren't helping. If you talked to me: I'm sorry; you'll know better next time. Watched simpsons and x and then i just gave up and logged off AIM. Well, actually, I logged off of Reality. That is, until shortly before 2200, when my mom came out and wondered why I was sitting on the living room floor in the dark. (I don't usually meditate in the living room. And in fact she's never seen me do it before at all.) I think she thinks I'm getting depressed again or something... Probably not good.

I eventually escaped her interrogation and came back to my room. And now I'm leaving Reality once again. This time, for sleep.

Not all that much as happened since ealier.

Did some more AOL work. Very limited. Still nothing working yet. Strange problems that are beyond my current level of expertise (and patience).

Worked on that blasted Mirophone tuba for many hours in the afternoon. I think I finally got the valves working as good as they're going to get without professional help. Rotaries are just so bloody difficult to work on. I also asked my dad about the tag thats on it. Aparently the district is moving to a new barcode system instead of the old "green tag" system. And this horn only has the barcode. Which means its brand new to the district. Which means most likely its a donation. I think a query of Baedke is in order. US$3000 tubas just don't land on your doorstep (well, actually, this one did land on my doorstep, but only because the handle broke as I was trying to get it inside).

Watched the normal Sat night telly in the late evening (am I the ONLY one who finds Mr. Bean truely amusing?). Hum.

Since UPS tracking doesn't work on weekends, today will be without an interesting city. Aparently no one found the square barcode thing as interesting as I did.

I'm actually still trying to figure out why in all Hades I got up at 0500. And I'm still up at 0100. Twenty hours awake. I haven't done that in years. (I usualy cop-out around 1500 and take a nap.) I'm really getting tired, however, so I don't think I'll be doing the 24hr thing....

And remember, if you catch a white rhino blowing in your ear, she's just trying to say "Good day"...

Well then. I guess I fell asleep.

Firstly, lets continue to track my laptop across the country. As of the time I should've written this, it just left the UPS Chicago Area Consolidated Hub (CACH) in Willow Springs, Illinois (you know how long it took me to figure out why there's not a Cach, IL, on the map?!). Since there's nothing particularly interesting in Willow Springs, I will point you to a nice but short explanation of the UPS barcode tracking system ("two dimensional symbology" system). This is more interesting than it might appear. I've always wondered if they actually use those bullseye-shaped speckle-graphs that are on the tracking labels. Now I know. They're MaxiCodes, developed by the MaxiCode subsidiary of UPS. It can fit over 100 characters of data into a single square inch and can be read and decoded at over 550 feet per minute! Yes. Now you know too. And you know what? It's an OPEN SYMBOLOGY! Even UPS knows the value of open design.

Now lets go back to yesterday. Went to the new comp lab during englisc. Magnificently odd sites such as the Salem Wax Museum and the terribly boring (but exciteful) NatGeo Salem Trial "walk through". Yes. It was hilarious at the time.

Lunch brought up even more odd (yet still amusing) topics including bastards, inbreeding, hermaphrodites, inbred hermaphrodites, and gay inbred hermaprodites (natrually the conversation stopped on the last two because of their impossibility and utter silliness).

The afternoon was hilighted by nothing happening.

One of the niftier things that happened in the evening was telnetting into a linux box (James' laptop) that was connected over AOL. Telnetting to an AOL IP just feels so dirty...

I don't believe anything else really exciting happened. Of course, for some reason, I fell asleep shortly after 2230. I'm still trying to figure that one out. And that made me get up this morning just after 0500. Eeek indeed! So I started doing some AOL coding (very little) and sent out a quick mail to the aol-protocol mailing list that included only slightly more stuff than the last one I sent. I then got code working that writes AOL frames. I just need to get reading done, then actually start a socket. Then of course, handle a few real-life frames. And log in to AOL... Then get the IP tunnel going and move the code over to the ethertap kernel interface. That's when the real fun begins.

Well its actually an hour past the time above. And too bad as well. I was really hoping that I could get this done so I could say I wrote it before an hour past the time above... In any case, I'm here now. I've actually been rereading the month of Decembre. I really don't know what caused the decline here. Probably the same thing that has caused the demise of my former life... When I remember what that was, I'll let you know.

I've gotten way too much sleep in the past too days. Yuck.

On the auk.cx front: Firstly, its paid for now. I paid my 20 pounds. Secondly, within the next few days, its lookup should be stabilizing. n managed to teach me a bit about DNS. And I also have him doing secondary for auk.cx now too (as opposed to the massivly broken granitecanyon). So as soon as nic.cx figures out how to update itself, everything should be stable. Let's hope.

And aparently James (Croall) got a bit bored this evening and felt a bit generous. He sent me an algo to generate the CRC on the AOL protocol. So now we're good to go with that. He also offered some suggestions on implementation, including use of the ethertap interface thats in the newer 2.1/2.2 kernels (as opposed to hacking ppp emulation). Some good stuff. And I agree with him: getting basic IP going should be nearly trivial. A Linux AOL client is closer than ever.

Spent the evening discussing the above two paragraphs with people who cared. Spent the other part of the evening not discussing the above two paragraphs with people who did not care. Oh, btw, my laptop is in Edison, New Jersey (home of the Edison Memorial Tower, which stands at the "exact spot" where the light bulb was "invented"). I hope it stops vacationing and eventually ends up here.

Oh, and I did go to school today. I think. No, maybe it was jail. No, you're right. It was indeed school. It was too windy for jail. And in further proof that it was school, no one tried to kill me. There's too many kind people at school, I guess....

Anyway. I guess I'll just wander over to the other side of the room for a while. Five hours or so. Maybe leap out the window....

We come wandering in once again... and yet you still ask: What is the point? And alas, we still have no answer...

I hate school...it makes these logs so boring. In any case, its inevitable.

I don't know why I bother. There's nothing to really write about. Nothing exciting ever /really/ happens. Just a bunch of stuff. That rarely makes useful sense...

Aparently I'm going on the band california trip after all. That should provide amusement for a couple days in the distant future. Started thinking about the whole Crucible essay thing in Englisc. Wall-staring in calc.

Came home and slept (though started that somewhat later than usual). Worked on Crucible stuff while talking Amanda. Then spent about an hour in meditation.

You know this would be a lot more exciting to write if something exciting actually happened in my life.

You may have noticed that I went to bed a bit early. If you did, you noticed better than I... I didn't notice til I woke up! I'm into sleeping a lot this week, it would seem. Just as well. I would probably just waste that time anyway.

Normal morning. Read Hothorn short stories in english. Oh so much fun, you know. Managed to get through some little skit thing in APUSH without making an ass of myself (just barely). Other than that, just wasted time.

Came home and gave a good look at the palm tree. It is indeed dead. I would have never have guessed that something could ACTUALLY KILL THOSE DAMN THINGS. But it is dead. And even more amusingly, its leaking. Its leaked water all over itself. And is quite soagy. Its really quite sickening. But its funny too. I think more pictures are in order!

Took a nice loong nap (I'm not sure why I was so tired). Then sat around and did nothing for a while. Then I was alerted to the fact that I was missing the SOTUA. Turned it on just in time to see the end. And the absolutly hilarious republican response. I'm not sure I've ever seen gardening used in a SOTUA response.

Then around 2300, I decided to do a little homework. And I do mean little. Not much done at all, actually. Because now I'm tired again. So I think I'll go to bed. How about that. Me...going to bed. Weird concept indeed!

I've got NO idea why I'm writing this so early. Probably because its too late to start something new. But more likely because I have nothing to do.

Hum. Wandered out of bed late in the morning (though disturbingly earlier than the two days prior). Worked on getting mediocris up to the usability of the old zeta. No where close. But I did play with WindowMaker and AfterStep quite a bit. I've been using AfterStep most of the day. Its nice enough. No fvwm, but its nice.

And in between that, I was working the webcam thing. I tried server-push. That only works with Netscape. I ended up using a specialized client-pull plus the apache mod_expires and using redir to redirect ihpled's port 8000 to mediocris' port 80. Somewhat hackish setup, but it does work.

Everyone continued to be amused by the whole webcam bit. And the guest appearance of Cat.

In fact, thats about all I did. Probably should have done some calculus. Or maybe decided on a thesis for my Crucible paper. Or maybe changed the world. Maybe tomorrow.

As I sit here munching on a large block of cold extra-spicy Velveeta cheese, I think "I should go to bed."

I happily got up late. Ate a few donuts. Wrote a log for the day prior. Talked to people as I waited for Stampede to finish downloading. Installed stampede. Fixed a lot of things. Stampede is even better than slackware: it doesn't even work the first time! I love having to fix things. Because I can fix them the way I want them fixed. Its nice. I'm still having trouble getting X to run on that. So most of the evening, I was booted into the old dist. So I could have things like bttv.

A webcam sounded like a neat thing to waste the evening implementing. So I did. (Don't hang around on there too long...it kind of uses up bandwidth needlessly.) I still need to get server-push working, as this whole thing with meta tags is sloppy and unreliable (ie, it works for everyone BUT me). Stacy got to watch the first live doughnut-eating/mtndew-drinking on the Internet (by me). She was amused. Then Amanda got to see my tongue and the drinking of a Citra. I think I may have found the one thing more annoyingly hilarious than this log used to be.

A short word on recent kernels: Stay away from 2.2.0pre7ac5 and ac6. They are bad news. ac7 seems to fix most of the problems. But bttv overlay still doesn't work. 2.2.0 is really soon now. Alan has made his last 2.0.0preXacX patch (7). Oh, and ihpled got some DNS tweaks. The return address on the MX for auk.cx should be happening correctly now. And dyndns updates should go out faster (ie, instantaneously -- TTL=0).

Oh, and at one point in the evening, I actually left my TV remote inside mediocris. It was an amusing, but terribly frustrating event. One of the few disadvantages of having such a large case, I suppose.

Well, since I went to bed terribly early, I didn't get a chance to write here. I shall do that now. Eleven hours later. After a ten hour nap. Yes, it was nice.

I spent most of the day in a dreadful mood. All of the day, in fact. Got up about 1400. Continued the ihpled cleanup. That just made me really really pissed off some more. Which didn't exactly help anyone who was trying to talk to me.

Let's not talk about anything up till 2100 or so. At which time I started getting more stampede. I like stampede. Its just like a modern Slack. Some of the things they did are a bit odd, but overall, its quite slackish. Except for the egcs/pgcc and glibc things. But those are nice additions.

Also, I'm having great troubles with my PPP connection. Its accumulating bad frames/overruns faster than it is good frames. And the connection is doing wierd things. And is not running up to speed. I'm fairly sure its not the modem, since I'm now using the old 33.6 modem and its still doing it. I think it may be a Primenet problem. They will probably be getting mail from me sometime soon.

After reenabling awwaiid's and orb's accounts, I went to bed with a 160mb download going. Its still going, in fact. About 20mb more to go.

Oh, and sorry for the boring logs lately. I just haven't been spending enough thought on it....

Ahg. Started off normal enough. Defintily a day of mixed emotion (especially in the past few hours).

Normal morning routine including occasional napping. Gave Foster confirmation that I was indeed not going to do AD. English started out peacefully enough, but shortly after a reading of MLK's I Have a Dream, the discussion turned ugly. And ended up a bloody mess of sexism/racism and all-around-bad-vibes. Bad news indeed. Did I mention I HATE discussions about the sexes? I think I've said that before...

I am having trouble remembering what happened yesterday. Such a long day I have no idea where it started and stopped... I think I went to calc.

Anyway, Brock dropped by after school to pick up 2x32mb EDO SIMMs I'm 'loaning' him. He says his box runs much better with 96mb. I have no doubt. I think I did a bunch of stuff after that. But the only thing I remember was sleeping.

Gave my final recommendation to David for his machine. Wandered back and forth from my room to the garage babbling about Deskjets a lot. Eventually got all that straightened out. I came in and settled down and started looking at stampede. I think this may be the Linux dist for me. And I think its the only moderne dist left that still uses BSD init (ala slackware). And, its glibc2. I've been attempting to download the base install all night, but I keep running into really stupid stalls and things at the exact same places. I'll get back to this in a bit. Then for some reason I go back out to the garage and my dad starts asking about USB and related things. Get into a conversation about that. Then all of sudden we hear laughing from outside and banging on the window. Startled, my dad starts yelling and the strangers outside run to their car in a mad rush and tear out of the driveway. It was funny. Really. It was.

So when Tara and Amanda came online, the obvious question was why didn't they stay a bit longer. A little while later, they did come back. And managed to do it without banging on any windows. They stayed for a bit and saw all the mysteries of this wacky house. Except Cat. Cat was hiding. And Cat couldn't be found. Shame shame, Cat. Cat wandered out right after they left. Oh well. I think they found my room to be a truely sickening experience. In any case, Tara got something out of it: a long phone cable. And they both made it out without killing themselves.

Eventually everyone goes to bed and I get bored. Started trying to get stampede a again. I figured I'd see how slow NFS over 56k was. Don't do that. Its bad. But I couldn't get it to unmount. And a whole bunch of other wierd things were going on too (like /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd being missing -- still haven't figured out where that went), so I decided I'd just reboot ihpled. I go out to the console and login as root. I don't usually login as root, so I never see the "last login" messages. This time I did. And guess what. It wasn't the console. In fact, the last time root was logged in was not even from this country. The obvious conclusion was that ihpled had been hacked. I knew I had big security holes from the start. I just didn't plan on anyone else knowing or caring. After the reboot and fsck, I started by disabling all user accounts. Then started poking around. I found a /usr/info/.term and a /.bash_history, both of which are signs of a root kit. And looking at that bash_history makes that obvious. I started to get really pissed at those stupid TI people who have ihpled accounts because they like to do stupid things like this, and they're not all that bright when it comes to things dealing ith Reality (federal law, for instance). After I started hunting through the user directories in search of anything, I found it all. It wasn't a TI person either. They will be getting a talking to, i can assure you. In fact, I don't think I'll reenable any accounts unless I have due reason to do so. I hate to be so anal, but I really don't like anyone having root, even if -they- don't think they're damaging anything, they are. They're damaging my ego.

I think I'm mostly calmed down from that. I sealed up the logins farily tightly and should avoid major conflict probably till morning (when everyone who used to have an account finds they no longer do). I should probably be getting to bed. Since its nearly 5am local time...

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.....

This would have been a horrible day if I hadn't have drank a half case of mtndew. But I did. So it was only moderatly terrible.

You know, I sit here and got through each class saying that we did nothing. Well I'm not going to do that. Just assume that if I don't mention it, nothing exciting went on. APUSH was exciting purely because nothing got done. Except for Lanée and I having way too much fun drawing stick people in the textbook. And after school brought an Academic Decathalon meeting. And she finally revealed the dates of the competition. This is important. Because it means I can't go. I will inform her of that today. Its the exact same two days as honor band. "Oh well!" I don't feel too bad because there are competant alternates (more competant than me!). But Tara will have to drop the team too. And thats two people gone out of a nine person team. "Oh well again!"

(eventually) Came home and slept. Thank goodness itself for that. However, I had to clear up a little issue with my laptop order first. Aparently the first order didn't make it quite right. I reorded it and all should be well now. Oh, and I'm going to get the RAM from somewhere else for a bunch cheaper and will be able to afford 96mb. Nice. Then sat around for a while. Read part of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (even got Amanda a nifty quote from that). Then sat around for a while. Then went to take Amy (sister) to Scottsdale where she leaves for RI to go to school next semester. That took too long. Came back and did nothing for a while longer.

Sheesh am I boring during the week. I swear the weekend will be more exciting (esp since its three days long!). Need to install something on mediocris and clean up the aukdyndns code so I can send a copy off to Josh (who is being kind enough to write the autoupdating client). I need to get him an account too....

Thats probably all. Oh well....

Well then. A long short day.

Sat in the cafeteria from 0715 to 1030. I don't recommend that. Took that stupid ASVAB. Note that on the question regarding what determines the color of light, do NOT take into account the natural curvature of space/time. Aparently they weren't thinking about such things when they made that question. Oh, and that badly drawn symbol in the last section is suppose to represent a rheostat, even though the drawing isn't technically accurate. Bad armed forces, bad.

Ended up going to calc anyway (I wasn't planning on it). Capuano wasn't there anyway. Oh well. Got a ride home with Brock with a three hour layover at David's house. Sat around there (and for a time, sat above there -- in the attic). Managed to get AOL to bypass its own DNS servers in favor of mine so that dyndns works instantaneously.

If anyone knows how to resize NTFS partitions, contact Brock.

Took a nice nap. That's always nice. Well, not always. But lets just say for the sake of life management theory that it is. Managed to spend most of the evening talking to Amanda, Tara, and a few other people.

After everyone went to bed, I started installing Debian on the new zeta (mediocris -- fits with the whole "mid" style). Managed to get dselect to core dump the first time I tried. The second try was a bit less eventful. I really hate things that don't just have an "All" option. And dselect is a bit more esoteric than it appears. Beware. I so far have seen nothing to make me want to use it. Aside from being libc5, Slack is -still- superior IMHO. And I think I will be putting slack on my laptop when the time comes (if for no more reason than that its smaller than debian). I did get X running on the Riva128 board, though. In less than an hour. That was impressive.

And that leaves me here. Watching cartoons and ready to go to sleep. Night all...

And remember, "You don't need pants for the victory dance..."

Once again. It comes to this.

Started off the day a bit late once again. Sleep is just not happening these days. I mean, I plan to sleep. I just get started doing other things and it never gets proper attention. Oh well.

Some truely odd coversations in the back of the band room (we rarely actually play, mind you) And aparently my english class is two days ahead all of the rest, so we're not going to do any work for two days (actually, three, since we don't have it today -- early release/ASVAB). That's nice to hear. I was getting afraid that productivity might be upon us. I was terribly drearful at lunch and didn't feel like doing much. APUSH was boring as well.

As I was really feeling terrible by the end of the day, I went straight to bed (actually, I talked to stacy for a minute or two). I don't think I ever ate anything. Hm. Come to think of it, I haven't eaten anything in nearly 48hours. I should look into that.

My dad finally got that Debian CD image downloaded. I burned that. The process was nice and simple. Took less than a half an hour. Made one for Jared too. The CDs even boot! I was impressed. Probably spend today's afternoon installing Debian on the new zeta. I think I'll pick another cloud name. Those seem to flow nicely. Unless someone gives me something better by the time I install.

After watching too much CSPAN2 and talking to Amanda for a while, I decided now that the check from SolomonSmithBarney decided to come, I'd order my laptop. Total came to $1614. A bunch higher than I'd planned, but I went with the big XGA panel and 64mb of RAM. Should be nice. Now it just has to get here. That's the tricky part.

Oh, and one of the sticks of RAM that we bought for someone else's machine that we're building was found to be bad this evening too. It will go back tomorrow. The prices are going up, but the good yield is going way down. God I hate non-customer driven, bottom-up capitalism.

I don't feel like doing much more. I hope I feel better soon.... I mean real better, not just better for five minutes at a time.

A so-so day, I suppose. Not overly productive, thats asured.

Got up and watched the second half of that rivetting Underdog episode that I watched before I went to bed. This was after I woke up nearly an hour early. This increased the problem caused by the fact that I didn't get to bed till after 0200. I was not excited about a mere three hours of sleep...

I was also not terribly excited about going to school, but I complied anyway. Thanks to a full can of mtndew, I was quite awake. Til 0840 or so. Then I was tired again. Watched more the crucible movie in english. Oh, and for some reason Rachael showed up and started talking to me. Aparently the owner of glug.com is her boyfriend. Oh, Actually learned things in calc.

I'll stick this here for chronology reasons... Aparently Brock and Jared (from PUSD) had an informative chat. And Jared is cooperating nicely. This is most definitly good.

Anyway, I came home and called up Axion. Got an RMA number for that bad stick of RAM. Boxed that up. Should have a replacement by early next week.

Nap time. Not long, though. Sat around most of the evening doing nothing. Browsed around amazon. Talked to people. Managed to get Amanda really pissed off somehow. Talked to Tara too. About useless things (she did get me to admit something, however).

I didn't get any calc homework done either. Oh well. I'm quite tired. I'm going to bed now.

Actually, after I wrote yesterdays entry, I didn't actually go to bed. In fact, I was up for two hours after. You see, I accidently turned on the Cartoon Network and laughed away for two hours. Then Super Friends was over and I went to bed.

No bugs to wake me up. Woken up by visitors instead. I mostly wandered around eating cheese. Also made up a price list for David. Very nicely configured system for less than $2500. This was followed by eating more cheese.

Then did calculus for a while. That ended quickly. It also brought up the point that the TI-92 has been sucked into the collective mass known as my room. I can't find it. Its got to be in here somewhere...

Anyway, I spent most of the rest of the day with my goals set on doing the dyndns stuff. I'm proud to say I got that nearly all done (ie, it works). The password checking is not working yet (well, it does on zeta's glibc2, just not on ihpled's libc5). And there needs to be more error checking (it would not be all that difficult to crash my bind right now, or at least severely corrupt a few files). It does work, though. Oh, and I need to write a bash or perl script to do updates automatically from the command line (so, eg, you can do it from ppp-up).

Of course, I got side-tracked a lot. And thats why it took five hours. Like Simpsons and the X-Files. And other miscellaneous things (like fixing my audio cable so I could watch said shows in a window next to XEmacs and netscape).

In any case, I think I shall be going to bed. Since there's nothing exciting on right now, I'll probably make it....

Hum...

Woken up about noon by the screaming of Saara. This was followed by me getting up and putting the frightful sight into somewhere less visible. The sight happened to be yet another 4cm cockroach that Cat chewed on a bit. I really wish she'd just leave them alone. They run away faster when they're not dead.

I decided I should get linux running on my dad's machine. This required me using the new machine to build a kernel. That was all going nice until it started throwing sig11's and cores at me. That was terrifying. After a bit of experimentation, I found the problem. Bad SDRAM. That DIMM will be getting sent back on Monday, rest assured. US$200 128MB DIMM bad. Damn it. So now I'm using a 64mb DIMM I swiped from my dad's machine. Its working nice. But I need 128mb. For a short time, I overclocked my K6-2 350 to 400mhz. Ran quite nicely (800bogos :). Later in the evening, it started throwing sig11's again and I put it back down.

In any case, my dad's box is running linux via nfsroot from mcore. Kind of slow. Its even running X. But since my major point is to be able to burn CDs from linux, I need the ide-scsi emulation stuff. Which causes kernel Oops' for some reason (on both 2.2.0pre1ac4 and pre6ac1). I don't know why. I finally got tired of messing with it and gave up.

I hate to sum up 12 hours in two paragraphs, but aparently thats all I got done. I still don't feel all that well and I've got a lot to do tomorrow. I am going now. I think....

"If you laugh, the world laughs with you. But if you fly, you fly alone." -- Rocky and Bullwinkle

"Funny thing about bears. After a few days of fighting, they seem to lose all their stamina."

And next time you want pizza delivered, don't bother with that stupid pesky telephone device. Just go to www.papajohns.com and order online (no, I am not kidding, this is no joke).

Just when you think you've started to understand society, they come out with online pizza ordering.

Gee am I glad that week is over. I was getting most bored of it.

Getting up in the morning is always such a wasteful thing. All you're going to do is just go to sleep again anyway. I did it anyway. Just as I do every morning. You only get one day in your life when you don't have have to get up in the morning. And I'm guessing I got another seventy or eighty years left before ramptant heart disease gives me that day. Drank a mtndew and got on with the day.

Discovered that the third valve of thet tuba I've been using was all out of tune with itself (I hadn't noticed until I actually forgot to use the fourth valve instead -- I keep forgetting its there). It will eventually turn out that there's a few more intonation problems with that horn than just that one tube. Anyway, English was spent...well... I don't remember what english was spent doing. And because of that, I can probably assume I was sleeping. I started to feel really terrible at lunch (a feeling which for the most part is still present). Just sat around and listened to Pavia babble about cotton gins and steamboats in APUSH. Janese actually fell asleep and started snoring. No one else was quite that brave... (All Hail King Cotton!) Skipped algebra in favor of band.

Played sousaphone for a while. Thats more fun than I remember. I can't believe its been an entire year since I last played one. Anyway, sat through yet another of those stupid assemblies. Disocvered I've completly forgotten how to improv the fight song. Thats bad. (It has been a tradition of the tuba section at Centennial for quite some time that actually playing the fight song as it is written is a mortal sin.) Anyhow...

Naptime following that. Wake up to find a house full of people again. Amy (my sister) and Ken (her boyfriend) along with my grandparents. I understand not why we can't at least have -one- weekend of peace around here!

Attempted to do a bit of tuba repair work. Failed. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I have no idea whats wrong with that first valve. I can't get the rotor assembly out to oil it which I think is the main problem. That valve is also missing one of the tension screws on a ball joint, but that would cause it to be too loose, not too tight as it is. The looseness of the fourth valve was fixed by tightening those screws a bit (they're plastic, which is strange). Then played for a little while. The upper registers are quite clear and robust, but the lower octaves leave something to be desired. I probably shouldn't have expected any more from a 3/4 Myraphone, but I can always dream. Found using a larger flare mouthpiece helps add resonanance and tone quality as well (which is the opposite effect of that on the yamahas). Still some funnies. Really needs tuning (ie, more than my ear can do).

Started moving stuff around in my room so I'd have room for my new computer. The two VCRs are now underneith the larger of the TVs. The extra TV went to the adjacent wall (to the last bit of shelf space left, and even that is on top of a stereo amp!). Then hauled in the new machine. Its unbelievably huge. And loud (fans). I decided it was worthy of more than sitting on the floor, so its got its own chunk of shelf space. (Which leaves me with an extra chunk of floor space.) Spent an hour or so doing all the things I'd been meaning to do with a graphical browser.

Generally decided I have waaay too much crap in this room. I should take pictures. Its really quite amusing. Well, its not amusing till the third or fourth time you've fallen on your arse from slipping on a rogue periodical or power cord. I need to get out the video camera anyway to take pictures of the inside of the new machine. Maybe tomorrow. If you want to know generally what it looks like from the outside, go here for the case manufacturer's promo shots. Yes, it really is 25+ inches tall!

Josh wants dink to be part of the dyndns at auk.cx community. Remember that, Adam (and stop talking to yourself on IRC too!).

Tara got pissed off at David. Dunno why. David has gotten pissed off at Micron. Though I'm not sure if he'll pay the shipping costs on the parts to build his own machine (which aparently PCProgress thinks should be around US$101,000). Oh well.... "...little help from my friends..." Aye, that has no context here. But Wonder Years did just start...

And remember, if you're pregnant, you mustn't handle Propecia tablets!

Firstly, if you're getting tired of typing in delphid.ml.org to get here, http://auk.cx/log/ now works as well. Christmas Island (AU) finally came through with the domain. I need to get dynamic updates setup for Brock and David (phlurm.auk.cx for Brock, I don't know what David wants). That sounds like a stand-by project for this weekend.

Anyway, back in time.... For once, I got up on time. Painful experience indeed. Band: nothing. English: nothing (well, most of the time was spent on completely irrelevent lecturing). Lunch: nothing notable there either. Just sat around in calc. Discussed the different ways to hold a pencil and still write sanely. Amusing. Worked on APUSH homework for a bit in algebra. Came home and took a nice long nap. Woke up to find that Tara now has an AOL account now. She came on and left while I was sleeping. She even tried to talk to my while I was sleeping. Aye, no response from me.

Most of the evening was spent doing homework of various sorts and helping Amanda with hers for a bit. Then I found auk.cx worked, so I had to tweak my DNS configs a bit (I did them from scratch two weeks ago and had no way to test them till now). Should all be working right now. Still need to do the dynamic stuff plus add a few other hosts. Looks like MX is even working (after yet another bit of sendmail twiddling).

Suprisingly, that was my day. Oh, and aparently Foster has once again reoganized the AD team and I'm back on it along with Tara, Josh, and a bunch of people who I don't remember (I know thats bad, since it was only two weeks ago!). Oh, and Windows has come up with a new way to be a pain in the arse.... It won't let me copy a 74minute audio CD onto a 74minute CDR blank! It plainly says "You cannot fit 74minutes onto this 74minute media". Arg!! Time to get out mp3enc...

I really think thats it. Nothing to look forward to tomorrow. Well, an assembly, but that's certainly not something to look forward to.

Well, aparently my alarm got really ticked off by me slightly ignoring it and this morning, it decided to not go off at all. Blasted alarms. [Rule of Thumb of Practical Computer Science: Never trust any device that does not run at least one UNIX varient.] I shall repremand it severely, be assured. It has wronged society.

There I was sitting in band. And Robert started complaining about his tuba. I look over. He's playing a four valve rotary. After questioning its origins, I just asked him to trade. I'm still not quite sure where it came from. And aparently I'm the only one who cares it exists. (Everyone else seems to be live by the misnomer "If it looks like shit, it is.".) And yes, it does look like shit, but it plays great (sans some minor (repairable) valve issues). Its got a very light feel to it and very easy to play. Nice range and decent tone. (The YBB-10x yamahas that I usually end up with have the habit of having a bulky (but imbarisingly wimpy) tone. Those horns are made for schools and are of school quality. Crap.) If I can get the valves working on this one, it will be quite fun to play.

English brought another test and more reading. And a visit to guidance. Schedule is changed. No more spanish. Don't remember much about lunch. Brock was talking about his diagrams of TIBASIC in what I presume are in preparation for HAL. Gave that speech in APUSH. Kind of boring. Then sat in algebra for a while after a brief chat with Ms Bienik. Oh, and it appears that the tuba section may be reduced to just two.

Came home. Waited for UPS for a few minutes. Not long. Four boxes. A whole mess of computer parts plus a standalone DVD player (my dad got a good deal on it, I guess). Spent a while unpacking. Setup the DVD player just to see what it looked like. Then on to assembling my new machine. Went together fairly cleanly. I only sliced my figer once on that bloody FCC-required RF sheilding! Was booting linux in little time (from old hard drives -- I'm waiting on the debian cd image to install anything new). 699.60 bogomips. Speeeeedy...

I'm a bit tired and I should get to bed.... and I still need to read a bunch of Crucible tonight too....

Oh my. Merely a day later and yet already I'm vastly tired of the whole thing. School is just not a lovable concept.

"Accidently" ignored the alarm for a bit in the morning. Wasn't terribly late. I wasn't terribly amused, either. I hate getting up, but I hate getting up late even more. More jolly amusement in band. More naptime in english. More bizare conversation at lunch. Brock joined us. Aparently instead of just not doing anything in class, he's moved on to just not taking classes at all. Somehow the issue of just where to put dead pets came up. Of course the natural answer is to bury them in your yard. Aparently Brock and myself are the only ones who agree there. Everyone else thinks its demonic or something. Strange people live in this city. Glad I don't live in the city (well, actually, all not living in the city limits gains you here is the ability to burn things -- an honor that indeed no one respects or makes use of -- and gladly so). Anyhow, calc was nothing. Just sat around and talked about how terrible the class has been, how many people failed, how no one learned anything, and how we talk too much. Spanish started off with a vist to guidance (though an unproductive one -- no humans around to whine at).

Here's what I'm thinking about. If guidance will let me, I'd like to swap spanish for a math class. Preferablly the fabled "college algebra" (which is what i'll be taking next year anyway after I fail calc). But any like class will do. If they won't let me do that, I will just drop spanish down to a TA for half-credit (the teacher does need a TA that hour, so it would work). We'll see later today, I suppose...

Normal routine followed. Oh, I think I forgot to mention yesterday that Denton got herself a whole lab full of new computers. Everyone should be proud of her conartistry.

Sat around most of the evening doing nothing till I decided I should probably do homework for a while. For APUSH, I had to write a speech from the perspective of John Quincy Adams. A word of caution about writing speeches: never write them from the perspective of dead people. Especially dead people who still can't make up their mind as to whether or not they're Federalist or Republican. Messy, messy...

I suppose that's about it. [Note that if I actually knew Spanish, I'd say something nifty right here. But since I forgot all that two years ago, I'm not going to. In fact, I can't even remember how to say something nifty in English anymore...]

And here we are. First day back at school. I haven't explicitly insulted any teachers yet. I haven't gotten kicked out of any classes yet. Only minor numbers of people have been scared. Unproductive day indeed.

Now if only I could get away from the #faim conversation for a bit, I could write here. Looks like its dying down.

Okay, so got up too damn early after a not-so-pleasant night of not sleeping (complicated). After getting yelled at for being in the shower too long (aparently 5minutes is now too long), I went and slept for a bit more and then went to school. Yes. School. Terrible thing to do, I know. Band was fun...rather, interesting. Yeah, this should be an interesting section I'm in. Yes. I think it will be interesting indeed. Second hour brought english. Mrs Culbertson is like Foster all over again, just slightly more odd (if thats possible). (No offense to either... Being Fosterish is a good thing. If you're a teacher. Probably not so much if, say, you're a donut inspector or toasted-blackberry-brick inspector. Those professions require sanity.) Third hour brought lunch. Ben has joined us in that lunch and aparently now, everyone fits at one table. Which is odd. Anyway, APUSH came and went. Spanish was next. Arg. Have I mentioned that I hate spanish? Oh, and I hate fluff teachers. I think all spanish teachers are fluff teachers. Doing extra assignments that have nothing to with the curriculum annoys me. Watch this class. It may just disappear from m schedule....

Came home and slept for a while. Got up. Slept standing up for a while. Read The Crucible for a while. Talked to people for a while. For some reason David and Brock came onto #faim and everyone actually had a conversation going. Not only were there five people in the channel, but everyone was talking too!

Aparently there's something called Jabber on slashdork that is suppose to be an integrated messeging client. Aparently they're looking into using libfaim (yes, my very own precious libfaim) for the AIM module. That probably means I should make libfaim work better. Oh, and the rumor mill has also churned out that gaim (the only non-AOL TOC client I know of and currently a "competitor" of gtkfaim) --may-- be moving away from TOC and towards libfaim as well. Exciting news, I suppose.

When I wrote in Amanda's guestbook thing a while back, I hadn't noticed that I ended up as the one and only entry number 42. Aparently the one who got #43 was quite "miffed", after all, she came 'prepared with a towel for the occasion'. Yes, I thought it was funny. Amanda didn't get it. She should really read that book...

I suppose that's about all. Oh, and Philips says that the databooks for those mysterious two chips are in the mail. And UPS says my new workstation will be here probably Wed. And I've grabbed just over 500mb of debian. Just a little bit more to go....

Here we go again...

In enjoyment of having yet another day of not having to do a damn thing, I slept till 14-1500. That was nice. But then I was bored. A condition that has yet to pass. My sister rented Man in the Iron Mask so I watched that until I could no longer stand the painfully bad acting and left. Watched Simpsons and X-Files as usual. After that, I spent some time reorganizing and conglomerating all my notes and papers from last semester to be put into notebooks in The Archive. Don't ask me why I do it. Its a reason thats simple and complicated and easier to just not bother understanding (even I forgot a few years ago). Probably because I can't stand to throw away trees as if they were useless. In any case, another overflowing 3in binder was added to the collection.

I am under the terribly unfortunate circumstance of having school in the morning. I am therefore going to bed early for a reason I know not (I've already slept for 13 hours today, I don't know why I think I need more). I'm sure I'll know at 0600 when I'm awoken from my peaceful slumber....

As Josh just reminded me, today (Monday) is Doomsday for all EU marketiers that haven't migrated to the euro currency. Today is the day that all EU financial markets must be trading in euros for thier fixed-exchange-rate with the Rest of the World. That means its the beginning of the end for many European currencies. All EU countries must be using -only- euro notes and coins by 1 Jan 2005, with many little baby-hops between then and now. In any case, most markets started converting to euros on Fri (1 Jan) and should have finished early Sun (3 Jan). I'm fairly sure that Morgan and SolomanSmithBarney both did. I'm sure most others did as well. If they didn't, as I said, its the day of death for them. It will be illegal to trade local currency. Just a note: I think the EU is a Good Thing. Its close enough of an agreement to allow control, but loose enough to allow individuality. It brings US-like order to the small "states" of Europe.

Boring (and short) day. Read a bit of the Jan99 SciAm and go to bed, I guess...

Ahg..its the third already....

Started off the day late again (1400 or so). My sisters and one of their boyfriends/pseudofiance's were over here, so I gladly stayed in bed. Family politics mixed with their mood swings are a trifle painful.

Sat around for a while. Found a present from Philips in the mailbox (the databook to the original SAA9051). Amanda came on. I pointed her to glug.com for a bit of amusement. (Don't worry, updated URLs for the Toaster Gallery and Furniture Porn are on their way to the site owner.)

Ate dinner. Had a bit of an "incident" with a bad Citra (vomitting was involved). Then Michelle called. Asked if I wanted to go to a movie with her, Ben, and Lanée. Decided that would be just as productive as sitting around here doing nothing. Saw The Faculty. Terribly amusing film. The alien is always the naked one. Bascially an intertwining of various sci-fi plots that have been conjured up in the past century. Twisted together in a somewhat odd way. Go see it. You'll know what I mean.

In any case, we all had a grand time and that was that....

Came home, talked to Amanda for a bit, then talked to Josh for a bit. Then talked to Orb for a bit (who was speaking in very erie metaphoric lanuage...). Something to do with a soul in a bathtub. Not real sure.... strange....

I'm getting tired. And I have a headache. I'm going to bed. Sit, spot. Sit, run, sit! Spot like simple sentences. Oh, and if you care why delhid is so bloody slow, I'm downloading Debian slink (2.1).

Oh, and its a fact of life: "Nobody cares."

It was just one of those days when you feel like you're sitting in the middle of a Faraday cage: everything around you is all excited, meanwhile you're just sitting there doing nothing... In fact, you could fairly easily explain away most of my life to be that way.

Somebody had the nifty-keen idea to wake me up at 0830 for "breakfast". If I wanted to break my fasting at 0830, I would have gotten myself up to do so! Needless to mention, I immediatly returned to sleep. And slept. For a really long time. Then I just sat there for several hours. Doing nothing. Pondering life itself (not like I ever _stop_ doing that anyway). It was eventually dinnertime and I was told to get up again. Arg. People are bloody annoying, I say. I complied. Then came back here. And laid here for a bit more.

Eventually it ended up to be 0300 again. Which explains the first sentance. I was still asleep or something, I suppose. Maybe 'morrow will bring something more enjoyable. Possibly. Probably not.

My room's Central Stack decided to start out the year with a good toppling in the afternoon. Should probably get that cleaned up before someone (ie, me) kills themselve leaping over the mess. I seem to have really collected a whole lot of junk in my room. A whole lot. There seems to be less than two square metres of visible floor tile remaining. Much rubbish indeed. Did, however, manage to collect the several-hundred aluminium cans into a garbage bag (err..bags). Yet those are still in the room. Just a bit more organized than before. And a bit less noisy to walk on. There's the genesis of trash bag as well. That will most likely multiply before all is done. I shouldn't say 'done'. That implies a finite time frame (David already got me started on infinite time frames earlier....though I don't remember what for. I'm fairly sure I missed the punchline, however. If there was one. I don't know for sure. Somehow I doubt he'll be asking me question like that again. Oh well.). I really wouldn't know much of anything. I've just been sitting here all day. Waiting for blood to return to hand. I should probably talk to a doctor about that. Before my arms just decide to fall off. Oh dear. I'm rambling once again. Probably because I haven't rambled to anyone else yet this day. Because all I've been doing is sitting here. Waiting for blood to return to my hand...

Blasted aliens. Stealing Elvira like that. Shame, shame...

Firstly, a pointer to volume seofon: dec 1998ad. It was a small month. Mostly meaningless too. A mere 76kb.

Next, oblivion. This log's very first new year. Not a big deal. This is the eighth volume. Just a few more months until the one year anniversary. Not like its a big deal. Its just a year, people. You don't see anyone out there rejoicing on April first, the first day of the month. Get real...or fake...whichever you like...

Wheee... Day started at 1330 or so. Its oh so much fun to have nothing to do. And that's indeed what I did for quite some time: nothing. Quite an enjoyable experience.

The next experience for the day was VBI. Specifically, closed captioning. Interesting. With some (minor) help from diz, I managed to get data flowing. Mostly gibberish. But data anyway. There were parts of words, just nothing readable. I'm not quite sure why. I was in the middle of upgrading zeta to 2.2.0pre1ac4 (from an ancient 2.1.111) to test it on that box when Amanda started bugging me.

Says I should go to Tara's party thing. I agreed. Then went to see if I had prior commitments no one informed me of (IOW, "going to find out what the hell is going on"). Turns out I did. Fill the next few hours with a forced viewing of Titanic. Ugh. Luckily, however, I'd already missed the first hour. Unluckily, there were over two more to go. -FINALLY- got done with that about 2145 and managed (as per Amanda's directions, suprisingly) to get to Tara's house (yes, the "pink" one). Many...uhm...interesting conversations. I'm not going to write much. Hm. Oh well. I have no idea what time I came home (yes, indeed, the state does let me drive...scary...).

Then I got home (I made it past all the drunkards who also appeared to want to drive on the roads). Then I rotated this log. It somehow ended up to be January. Have twelve months in a year is kind of screwy. Nearly as bad as having 24hrs in a day... or 60minutes in an hour... or 1milliard nanoseconds in a second...oh, wait...that makes sense. [Is the term milliard deprecated? I haven't seen it in print in ages. Maybe everyone uses billion instead these days.]

Since I've been drinking Citra for the past few days, I'm really quite sleepy. Gotta stop that. Unfortunatly, my plan of going to bed a bit earlier tonight has failed. It is fastly approaching 0300. Really fast. So fast that it is 0300 already. Gotta type faster next time....