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

I am the PINEAPPLE from HELL!!! They call me 'PEACHES'!!!

Yes, it does appear that I am indeed still alive. Aren't you glad? I'll be back to fill in the past few days in a bit...

After a dreadful evening the day prior, I formally decided I wasn't going to get out of bed. I ended up doing so anyway, however, when I was told I was going to the doctor. That's always a fun place to go. Appoitment was at 0930. I was there in time. Too bad the doctor wasn't. Oh well. Made it out of there by 1030. Decided that it really wasn't worth going to school for the last two blocks (I didn't feel like it anyway). Came home and attempted to sleep. But, that was kind of difficult.

I wrote the entry above (yes, I'm one of those nifty time travelers -- and I'm really groovy because there really aren't 31 days this month, yet no one noticed). Then wandered around trying not to run into anything. This pills they gave me weren't suppose to make me tired and/or spatially deficient, but it appears they do.

Ha...and Broq got a little insight into my insanity with a theory about timelines (on-the-fly creativity, of course). I didn't feel like doing much else. So I went to bed.... zzzzz.... sneeze....zzzzzz...ahhh!

Once again got to sleep in a bit. It was not exactly a pleasure though... [sneeze sneeze cough cough]

Took hours and hours to pack and load the van and truck. Too long, even. Eventually shoved out at around noon. Made it all the way to Showlow before we stopped. Eventually started up again and left to continue the vast journey. I slept part of this stint. However, I awoke immediatly before "The Hill" before Payson while we were driving through a largish cloud with a great pain in my head. This pain being larger than the normal pain in my head, as this was mostly centralized in my ears. You see, at this hill, you climb/fall about 3000ft in just a few miles of road. This is kind of painful when your ears are about to explode from internal illness-related pressure already. Made it to Payson without screaming too loudly (yes, we're on the straight path home this time -- the oh wonderful beeline highway -- you know, the one that's been under construction for nearly a decade...though there's now a "final phase" sign up... ironically). Had a late lunch at the Ponderosa Steak House there. Eventually left there too (good thing...I couldn't be writing this unless we had).

Turned onto Shea Blvd about 1700MST. Slowly crept over to the west side and made it to the Allenberg's (did I mention they went with us?). Stopped in to see their cat (the best cat ever, btw). Finally got out of there too. Made it home about 1800, only to spend another half-hour unloading and dragging a large protopaper product off the top of a certain van and into a certain metal canister and into a certain home.

This was a rather unfortunate evening for me, as I still felt quite dreadful. Amanda decided to come on and bug me during my misery. Then complained that I wasn't giving her XFiles commentary. Yes, well, at that point, I was busily replying to a mail that was basically offering me a job doing AOL AIM work (ie, money). Note that I still don't feel overly great at this point.

That's probably about all that happened that night that you'd want to hear about. I'm now two boxes of Kleenex less.

Got up at a decent time. Ate a somewhat largish breakfast. Eventually made it into the van about 1100MST. Did a quick drive up to Greer, AZ, USA.

Now this an interesting place. The winter-time population is about 160. It's also the location of a certain...uhmm...I suppose 'camp' is closest term. It's a Presbyterian thing. About a dozen little buildings scattered across a (large) hillside collectively entitled Montlure. It's the location of various summer camps. I went to one once...many, many years ago. For some reason my sister wanted to stop and see it again. It's slightly different in the winter time. For one, it's about 50degF colder. Wandered around there for a bit, and eventually left.

Good thing, too. Shortly after, it began to snow quite heavily. It would have been quite a mess to drive out of the whole-in-the-ground that Greer sits in while it was snowing. Luckily, we were on sr260, which I suppose is an acceptable road to be driving on in the snow (which turned to sleet and eventually into a really really cold and messy form of rain).

This was about 1330. And this day was the day picked to be the one where we go out and wander around the forest looking for a wood-based product to chop down. So we did. In the rain. In the snow. We eventually had to cut one outside of the USFS' designated "cutting areas" because frankly, all the trees within that area are crap (not to mention most being of the Juniper variety, which are quite an unattractive breed from the religous symbol standpoint).

Finally got chopped down and dragged onto the top of the van (it's quite a chore). Not to mention the fact that it was pooring rain (the really really cold and messy variety aforementioned). Then we drove back to the condo (which is in Lakeside, but we got the tree somewhere on the blank page between Linden and Pinedale, which happen to be somewhere west of Showlow, which happens to be a great deal west of Lakeside).

Sniffling and coughing starts here.

Sat around in the warmth and dryness of the condo for a bit (which included changing clothes -- I was kind of covered in good 'ol goopy pinon pine tree tar sap, which has got to be one of the strongest natural glues indiginous to the continental US).

Sara happened to finally get tired of not being able to eat anything without throwing it back up mere minutes later. Although this sort of thing isn't uncommon with pregnancy, this was quickly becoming a global health risk (meaning everyone else was getting tired of hearing about it too). My mother and her boyfriend (from Kansas) hauled her down to the Navapache hospital (in Show Low /Showlow). Aparently they plugged her into a couple interveneous bags and got her electrolytes and things brought back up (by this time, she was quite dehydrated after not even being able to digest water for over a day). Of course, when they came home all they could do was rave about the bisexual nurse they had. Ya, that's real relevent you know.

By this time, however, I was in bed, attempting to not drown in my own mucous (or at least be only half-conscious/asleep while doing so). Yes, I did not feel well.

That's the end of that one too.

Got up too damn early. I quickly showered and packed in less than 40minutes. Then stood around waiting for my sisters to do the same. Finally left the house about 0950MST. Stopped at the petrol station. Continued on to the Allenberg's dwelling. About three quarters of the journey, it is found that we've forgotten tie-down straps. Turned around. Re-entered our home. Grabbed the straps. Eventually out again by 1020. Made it to the original destination about 1045. Then, after much ado, we were all on our way to the merry land of Globe, AZ, USA (you can't know just how an exciting a spot this is until you've actually been there).

I'm sure some of our readers have noticed that going through Globe is a very odd way to get to Lakeside. And you're right. However, there were social implications that required us to stop in Globe first. That implication being that Amy wanted to stop and say hello to her soon-to-be fiance who happened to be at a 'gig' at the Apache Gold Casino just outside Globe. Yes, it's the big flashing building out in the middle of nowhere, right in the middle of the "Indian Reservation" there. [For those non-Arizona-politics-followers, a few years ago, it was decided that Arizona Native Americans aren't subject to the anti-gambling laws of the state legislature. Therefore, there's whole bunches of casinos all over the state, even though it's illegal for anyone else in the state to do so. Hypocritical? Yes, of course it is. What did you expect...SANITY from the GOVERNMENT? How dare you! No one knows quite how to handle the whole Native American situation. This just AZ's messed up way of doing it, half-assed at best. Of course, it's about three hundred years too late for a REAL solution...] So anyway, we did make it to the casino about 1300 (I'm guessing at the times here -- remember I'm writing this nearly a week after it happened). We ate some really horrid casino food (not recommended). Stopped in at the cabaret. Okay, so maybe not. I went to the only part of the building I could legally go to: the hallways. And they're a fun bunch of hallways too!

EVENTUALLY, we got the hell out of that place. I now know why they put it in the middle of nowhere: it attracts the scariest bunch of people you've ever seen (yes, including my sisters boyfriend :). I'm not quite sure what time we left, but we did.

And of course, the shortest route between the merry town of Globe and the wacky town of Lakeside is via a nice 50mile long twisty canyon road (through the Salt River Canyon). I'm sure the only thing worse than actually being on this road is _driving_ on this road. I don't recommend this road. Especially in the dark. Let us never mention this again...

Skidded into Pinetop about 1630. Checked in with the real-estate place, got a few keys to the condo and then ventured off to the other side of town (which is casually called Lakeside even though Lakeside doesn't formally exist anymore -- the cities of Pinetop and Lakeside unionized back in the 1960s so that they wouldn't have to have two govenors -- they're kind of expensive, don't you know).

For those who think Arizona is some sort of desert ocean, Pinetop-Lakeside sits at about 7800ft and is far from a baren desert. It's in fact quite a chilly place full of these large wood-based products known as "trees". In fact, the whole reason we were there was to remove one of these "trees", take it home, put it in a metal canister, hang frilly "ornaments" on its drying foliage, and somehow use it as a religous symbol. [How that all fits together is beyond me, but so are a lot of things.]

BUT, for the rest of the day, we just sat around complaining (it's what my family does best). Then for some reason we played a wiz-bang 'game' of Trivial Pursuit. Yes, well, let's just say I HATE THAT GAME.

That was the end of that one.

What ever you do, just don't make me even more mad...

I'd in fact prefer to not even write this, as I don't feel like and I don't really have the time. But I will...because if I don't do it now, it'll never get done...

As I said before, it was a holiday. And everyone agrees, a useless one. In any case, no school. That means SLEEP! And I got a lot of it. 11hrs in fact. After that, I ate a handful of oreos and started doing things. That was interrupted by someone telling me it was time to eat, and I can't help but comply with a comment like that. Much food and talking about nothing. Got the gobblets tuned to perfect octaves, followed by dimished minor, and eventually a proper major chord. Then came back and did nothing for a while. Then went and ate chocolate pie. Then came back and continued.

Spent a total of about 10 minutes working on my 'home page'. I kept coming back to it, and so it's pretty disconnected. Brock is complaining because it's too short or something. Somebody please yell at him loudly. Or at least figure out which one of us is personally borken (we'll get to that in a paragraph or two).

Aparently David got older today and no one told me until it was over. He has also picked this day, of all days, to start a log. (Yes, this marks the first day in history that he's actually USED his account on ihpled too.) His first entry is hilarious...funnier than either this one or Brock's has been in quite some time. Hopefully it won't get boresome within a month (like Brock's) or within six months (like this one). It is doomed to be as idiotically stupid and irrelevent as both of those, though. Nothing can escape the wrath...

Until I read David's log, I was in a very bad mood. I still am, a bit. The day hasn't been particularly annoying, it's just that nothing particularly good happened. Everything people say to me lately (past week or so) has annoyed me greatly. It's not their fault, I suppose. It's mine I'm sure. Just been in one of those points where everything stopped mattering, including things that do matter to me personally. I'm bored with my life. I'm bored with people. I'm bored. And I'm mad at myself for letting me get this bored. It's terrible. I probably haven't been this bad since I was "diagnosed" with "clinical depression" over five years ago. Yes, I'm manic at times...and it's been a while since I've swung this direction. That's still no excuse. I can't help but feel I'm in the state I am right now because of something I did to myself. And nothing can be proven otherwise. That 'personality' which I have made has put me here. I used to feel I could change myself. I _have_ changed myself. I no longer feel that I can do that. I'm helpless in myself.

As I said earlier, I should go to bed before my pessimism kills something.

Look at all them pelicans...

Not much of a day, really... Finished that lab in chem. Got to really torch stuff. Easy stuff. Second hour was spent attempting to study for the calc test. I finally got bored, grabbed a tuba, and played some music that was strewn about (first hour band was aparently kind of messy). Easy stuff. The subsitute that was in there got upset at me because I happened to be wandering around without shoes. I didn't see much problem to it. They guy was kind of wierd anyway (that would be wierd in a bad unfortunate way, not a good, funny way). In any case, it was eventually over and my dreadful conversation with him ended with it. Lunch came. Cats. Michelle's cats. Michelle is an interesting one to begin with, but aparently her cats are just the same. She has cats that walk on the ceiling. Yes. I'm scared. Hopefully no one teaches my cat that. She also invited me to go with their big group to go see the premiers of the new ST and SW movies when the time comes. Calc was terrible. I'm very sure I failed that test. I knew the material, I just couldn't do it. Oh well. Humanities went as I'd expected. Nothing. Meandered on home.

Was immediatly informed that I was going with the rest of the family to have pictures taken. Arg. That always takes too long, and, well, this was no exception. One of the worst events this time of year. Oh well...

I'm going to be redoing my "home page" in the next few weeks. One year is way, way, way too long to leave it the same. Nothing yet. It will hopefully be more productive than the last edition (and maybe even funnier).

Talked with various people. Thomas seems to be out of commision for a bit. Amanda was there bugging me all night (bugging each other, rather). Kari was having me talk to strangers. They didn't get the simplicity of lemon flow economics and the intricacies of rutabega supply and demand. Oh well. So much for strangers. Hmm... what did he say his name was... Bryan. That was it. Kari was having Sean/Mike's (you know, the multinamed one) sister talk to him too.

Got a mail from Jared. Hehe.... Aparently he set up a Linux box with Samba on it next to a WinNT box and David couldn't tell the difference (which is difficult to do from a windows machine). In any case, David refused to move over any systems to Linux because Jared would be the only one who new how to operate them. This is of course, as Jared said, job security.

Also watched the PBS/Cringley Nerds 2.01 special. Nothing more than I expected. Unlike most tech media reporters, Cringley actually knows what he's talking about and can actually explain it in a decent matter. Nice to know the world media hasn't fallen completely on it's ass. (That may be a 'copper ass' if you're Amanda.)

Did I mention today is this wacky American holiday called Thanksgiving? You know, one more holiday that is celebrated on a different day than it should be, in a different month than should be, and for different reasons than should be? It's celebrated by torching large harmless birds in some marvelous show of superiority over them and by stuffing them with various weeds that everyone knows they would never eat in nature. Also add to that various canned substances, mashed carbohydrates, soupy concoccions, and miscellaneous other things that no one would really eat unless they declared a national holiday to do so. Oh well...

[That would be late midevening on Tue for those who skip over my datecodes...]

Ya, a little early. Since I'm currently in the worst physical state of the day, I figured it would be a damn fine moment to record my mindset in the chronicles of time....

My stomach is either ready to dissolve itself or implode. I'm not sure which it's going to do. I loooove suprises. Maybe it'll be really groovy and do both at the same time! I think it's the beginnings of an ulcer or something....

Gotta love graphic detail, right? Especially since "Brock's log is more interesting" than this one. Well then. Just for that, Amanda, I'm going to not go into graphic detail! Not that I would've anyway. Who cares about my stomach committing suicide... hell, I don't even care... I'm betting mtndew, cranapple juice and string cheese digest just fine without a formal stomach...

Arrg. Lost the remote AGAIN. HELP! HELP! More 10-10-321 commercials!! No! Not COFFEE BEANS!!! AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.......

Ahem. Found the remote.

Now that I've wasted all this time on the irrelevent stuff, I'll continue on to the REALLY boring crap now... (you have been formally warned...)

Chem was spent doing a lab. Yes. Those are fun. It's not MY fault everyone was getting dizzy..... It was just a ZESTY morning I guess (whatever zesty really means, it doesn't mean that now). We get to continue that tomorrow. Yea. Second hour was spent doing the APUSH homework that I hadn't done yet. Lunch. Hm. It was there all right. Well, Amanda says it didn't "relaly" exist. Of course, the current implementation of reality is a very subjective one. You know, some like it, some protest it, and some throw blueberries at it. APUSH was a bit boring. Not much happened. I had to turn in one of my larger works of the 'bubble' drawings, though. Hopefully I'll get it back. Humanities was fairly worthless. Spent most of the time debating on what we'd do the rest of the period. As it turned out, the rest of the period was nothing by the time we decided we'd do nothing, which made it all the easier to do nothing. Oh, wait, Michael and I stood up in the front of the room making up answers to the test for the class to 'study'. And they think we knew what we were talking about.....

It's noteworthy, I suppose, that I'm now 'officially' on the CeHS AD team. Ya. Just what I need...something to do! Oh well. Michael was placed on it as well, but decided to drop down to being an alternate. Too bad. Oh well, at least we still have Rebecca to make our lives interesting... So if I'm not around someday in late Feb, you'll know where I am.

I stood around for a few minutes talking with Mrs Foster about life (we learned scary things about each other). Then ran over and quickly did that make up work I needed to get back my A in chem. Then caught Ben and stood around and talked for a bit. Then he asked if I wanted to sit in on the band uniform meeting thing. So I did.

Got home about 1630... Found my dad waiting for me to shut down my servers so he could futz with the faulting UPS. I did. So, ihpled and eagle both had about 10min dowtime today. [This is kind of sad for eagle, who had gathered 160 days, 22 hours, and 3 minutes of uptime. That's a new house record.] Seems the problem has been cured, at least temporarily. I really really really hate downtime.

Slept for a bit. Well, not really. Five minutes tops. Big dinner thing with 12 people over. I wonder why. Shortly after, I checked out, guzzled a half bottle of gaviscon and came here. {Adam would like to note here that Smithkline Beecham Consumer Brands Ltd. (maker of Gaviscon and other useful products such as Sudafed) does not have a web site.} My personal health has been bothering all day (firstly worsened by the stray toxins in chem and further increasing with day). Oh well. You're all caught up now. Arent' you excited?

Well, I'm not going to make any more commentary on that lame AOL-Netscape merger crap beyond just pointing out jwz's note about Mozilla. I wish I had US$4.2millard to buy up non-competitors with and then go make up stories....

"Just what I need... an existential elevator!" Oh, btw, here.

In any case, I think I'll depart early. I really haven't been getting enough sleep as of late.... And I'm beginning to die... oh...wait...I've been dying for over 16 years now... hm...

From Sara (Orb's Sara, not mine): "Aye, from Cornwall!". It seems I'm the only one who finds that histarically funny....

Ya, well, not everyone's life can be as plainly peachy as yours'. Or can it?

Before I go on to school, I'll have to mention what happened beforehand. About 2am local (the time I was just about to go to bed), a beeping started coming from the garage. Not just any beep, of course. This was morse code. It kept saying "C...C...C...C..." (or "-.-." or "beep-be-beep-be"). Anyway, it was coming from the garage UPS battery supply. A quick look into the reference manual says that Fault C is "High Battery". Ya. That helps. I told it to shutup (I mean that literally -- Best Power UPS' really do have a "SHUTUP" command -- along with an "UNSHUTUP" command -- I thought it was funny anyway). That stopped that bloody beeping, but the big red fault light stayed on. That's it. Then I went to bed.

Did that presentation thing for chem. Ya, that's over. (A reminder to all you wannabe chefs out there: make sure your Jell-O is at least mostly solid before actually feeding it someone. They will be glad you did.) I extremely dislike normal 'oral reports' after I've been in Foster's class for so long. Somehow the act of standing up there and blubbering about irrelevent bits of tedium just to make a time limit doesn't interest me. I find it completely ridiculous...not to mention pointless. The point should be to teach or something. Not just babble. I hate that. [Note that I usually babble anyway, but that's just, well, irrelevent.] In any case, that was over. Second hour, I swiped a tuba I found laying around the band room (one of those crappy yamaha ybb 3/4 jobs). [Of course, I always carry at least one tuba mouthpiece with me just in case a tuba randomly pops out of the ground that needs to be played...] Oh well... continuing on. Lunch was not exactly eventful. I had to explain to Amanda that for most of the waking day, I'm asleep. I'm sure she thinks I have some strain of multiple personality disorder, but who doesn't...

I fell alseep just about a dozen times in calc. Boring review for the test. He had a bit more final grades for us. I'm getting a 75.1%. Still a relativly high grade (relative to the rest of the class). Note that this is without any homework. Everyone above and below me did do their homework. And they still find the need to do it. Oh well. Humanities was spent staring at one of my personal nemesi: the walls. Should be nearly done with all the brain-related presentations. Finally. Yea. Tara gave me this mint that tasted really good (well, I dropped it on the floor first -- five sec rule, though). But, it had a terrible, terrible aftertaste. Something between a see urchin and a stingray. Oh wait. That was yesterday.

Wandered home. Terribly tired. Fell over. Stood up. Moved a metre or two. Fell over. Got the mail. Heh. Recieved another copy of that National Hispanic Institute letter from the school. Wait, it gets funnier. My mom finally decided to call them about it (I really didn't care -- she aparently did). Turns out that my PERMANENT RECORD says I am indeed Hispanic. Little did I know that since my first day of kindegarten, I've been leading people on about my racial preference. Okay, people. So maybe I am Hispanic. Okay, maybe not. But, it was fun while it lasted. The record should get chnaged tomorrow.

Did a bit more work on that UPS. Whatever was going on at 2am was not going on then. By it's own saying, the Batt Vout was 12.9v (the Batt VoutMax is 14.3 -- it must equal that to trigger the high bat alarm). A voltmeter confirmed. I have no way of clearing the fault condition, though. It's still red. No idea.

Spent several hours in the evening of what I suppose could be considered as 'family time'. Of course, it was spent making fun of the people in the movie Apollo 13. If you're sick like me, it's a really funny movie.

Sabanok should have all my release requirements met for gtkFAIM soon. Jolly good. Eventually, we can move on. I'm still waiting for James Croall to return from his little hiatus from society and pass along some of his code. I'm talking about the AOL client protocol code, of course. Not too far off in the distance is a happy Linux-native AOL client for all to use AOL services on top of every geek's favorite operating system, Linux. I need to find something more interesting to do than AOL protocols. Not that it's boring or anything, just that the user base it attracts is not really one I like to deal with. [Since n likes to use his implementation of the faimrc alias feature in NAIM, and includes my SN in the default buddy list, I had him change "faim guy" to "faim guy -- the rude one". I think that'll keep them away....] I need to work on mammatus. I really do. I need to have something functional. My goal is to have the basic features (cd/fm/streaming audio and TV-on-TV) done by the end of the year. That's probably pushing it. Since it took me how many months to just get here? ...

I'm betting there were tones of things I wanted to mention here but have now been forgotten by the passage of meaningless time. Of which, I seem to be either 9min fast or 2hrs behind, depending on which clock you look at. Its getting annoying too. Oh well. The cats live on. I'm still sitting upside-down watching my head turn red (rhyme and impossibility all in the same clause!). The problem, you ask? Well, the damn wall keeps moving!

Something I forgot to mention a while ago... I figured out the reason I've been talking about lobsters for the past two weeks. It's been a premonition about last Sun's Simpsons episode concerning pet lobsters. Yes. Simpsons is Life. Life is Simpsons. All Things are 42.

Funny Arizona Republic Quote of the Day: "The Sexual Revolution is over. Sex won."

Hm. Getting dusty in here. [Now if you can't see the metaphor in that, it's probably not worth you reading on!] I've been exceedingly obvious this day. I don't know why really, but I just haven't felt the need to put much effort into it (actually, it is more difficult for me to be plainly obvious than it is to be deeply metaphoric -- that being because I usually make up the metaphor after I say something seemingly randomly). Ahh... the life and times of an irrelevent human....

Woke up to find a nasty sounding carpet shampooing device banging at the door. I'm not sure if that's from reality or from a new kind of surrealism. In any case, it eventually hummed away into the distance and was replaced with large fans blowing the water out of the carpet (just try and catch me!). Eventually those left too. Goodness. I'm freezing. Time to shut a few fans off...

Wow is it quite in here. Oh my. I can really hear myself type now. Eek. {This the Master of Curly Brackets/Adam's Laptop Keyboard again... just to let you know, I don't sound that bad. It's his fault. Really.} Anyway... I'm still freezing... I can't imagine that it's much more than 5degC out there (which is also in here, since the window is quite widly open).

Got up late. Diddled around doing nothing for an extraordinarily long time. Finally sat down and did some transparencies to use for my chem presentation thing tomorrow. I figure I'm going to get a terrible grade for that project anyway, I might as well not put too much effort into the presentation...

Sara (my sister) and Mike arrived here after a multiday journey from the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as the middle of Kansas). They're here for Thanksgiving. Then they're leaving. Of course, Sara is coming back. And staying for a long time. I suppose I can just come right out and say it now that everyone should know. If you didn't catch the really really obvious hint back in Oct, Sara is pregnant (by Mike). Aparently they're both being pretty indecisive about the whole situation. It obviously wasn't meant to be (Sara's only 18, Mike not much older -- neither in the economic position to support a child or each other). Last time I knew, there was still question whether they would get married or not and even whether they would keep the baby (I never thought Sara would agree with adoption, but someone has talked to her). In any case, they're here.

Thought about doing stuff a lot. Never got much done. In my 'Sunday Afternoon Dileria of Boredome', I found I'd bought myself a Stingray. Not a real stingray, of course (_if_ there's one thing my parents would actually get upset about me bringing home, it's large saltwater lifeforms). I am referring to a Sun4/330. I looked at ebay and saw my email address and the number US$12 was listed next to a 4/330 motherboard. Neat, I said. I just hope it works okay in the half-baked VME chassis that my 4/110 is currently in. [I really really don't want to ship a 4/330 chassis -- I don't have enough spare change laying around to rent a U-Haul and have a road trip.]

Oh well. The night's xfiles episode was a bit too serious, so Amanda didn't get the commentary I'd promised. Instead, she got a few Coneheads quotes instead (yes, narfelling was involved). And she suprised me with a little too-much-like-me comment about my cat and lemons. And once more, she expressed her affirmation that this 'Diana' person does actually exist. Lanée was on too. That's what made me think of Krung Thep. [Brock: I must have at least a few private jokes, or it's just not funny. I'll try and keep them to a minimum -- though you know how good my word is on that...] Hohum...

Thomas gave me a temporary fix to one of my two main problems before I release a new 'midendian-branded' gtkFAIM. Still needs the read-only clause, though. I can't stand having something change my files without me running an editor... I also sent a message to the aim-clone and faim-announce lists saying that a release will be out soon. This is a feeble attempt to reduce the number of "when's the next release?" IMs I get on a daily basis. I think I'll release it as 0.10. I'm ready for symbolism. [I actually seriously pondered releasing it as .80 or .90 or something... it really is close to 1.0 quality. Of course, then I decided no one really thinks about version numbers that much besides me and left it at that.]

Either a genuity or an alternet backbone outage killed off Brock. Too bad. I suppose I can't end this without at least mentioning this (after so closelly I get tied to AOL these days)... Yes, the rumors are true... AOL is in talks to do a stock-swap buy-out of Netscape. Not necessarily bad per se, but I'm not sure what good it would really do. It seems to me if they really want to kill Microsoft, they should remain seperate entities. It's always easier to outrun a big larthargic beast when you're a pack of angry mice than when you too are a big larthargic beast (I really wrote that because I like typing 'lathargic beast'). Whatever. Financial markets never make sense. And hardly ever do they correlate directly to the technological goals of any party. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

The current topic of discussion on blackdown #linux is (human) breast milk. Or rather, the thermodynamics of human breast milk... kind of interesting, actually. But, I must get some sleep instead. Let's just hope the lathargic beast of a carpet shampooer isn't there to wake me up...

Oh, how noble argon be...if only it would fall from its stable elitist pirch to live a life as a transition for a bit of time...

There's that damn time thing again. I've spent the entire day 9min ahead of the rest of the world. At times, it's nice. Mostly, it's just annoying.

Got up about 1030. Noticed that I'd accidently left zeta on over night. Unfortunatly, though, it had lost the ability to read it's SCSI bus. The aic7xxx driver crapped out sometime overnight. I had to hard reboot. The fsck on the rebound spewed a couple parity and underrun errors. That's bad. But, I haven't had any problems since.

As I said before, I was told I was going to the PUSD IMT department's little party thing. Left about 1145. Sat around a lot. Saw a few people I've never seen before, along with many I have. Now know Mark and Sean by something other than names and rumors. Ladd (trainer), Linda (network ops), and Steve (telecom) weren't there for various reasons. I think they were the only ones. Everyone else seemed present. Talked Linux with Jared a bit. That was probably about it. Remind me to mail him sometime this weekend with address of Micro CPU mart (for US$99 Alpha Multia's). Left that mess about 1400.

Pondered bits of nothingness for a while. Looked at Thomas' latest gtkfaim snapshot. It at least compiles cleanly. But, it still erases my faimrc. It still parses faimrc incorrectly. I told him that I will not make a release until both the parsing is fixed and a read-only compile-time option is included (for us paranoid lifeforms).

Chinese for dinner (yea!). The cat got some too. She was all hyped up the whole night (nothing like a bunch of carbs to make your cat go wacky!). Speaking of cats, go see cepler's little kitty on his live pussycam. Cute kat.

Decided that there's a lot of the project-specific sites on delphid.ml.org that need to be updated (suprisingly, some major stuff has changed in the past few weeks). I started with the mammatus info. As it happened, that's all I got done (in fact, I didn't get anything much at all done). Added the node list. It looks like I can do everything I want with three nodes (two frontend nodes and one backend node -- the former being in my room and the latter being in the distant garage). That got me started doing mammatus-related things, which I ended up focusing on for most of the remaining evening. Managed to get mammatusTwo mostly set up hardware-wise and the same for mammatusThree. Two is running off one of those huge ALR motherboards. It's running quite nicely. The problem is that it took several hours to get it that way. Combination of more Mammatus-Related Oficially Stupid Problems and just digging for EISA config files for all the cards. Finally peiced together an EISA config disk with all the right files on it (barely fits on a 2mb floopy -- ~6kb to spare). BUT, the Dallas clock on the board has died (not suprising -- it's long past their life expectancy), so everytime I shut the power off, I have to rerun BIOS setup and then rerun the whole EISA config thing again. In any case, I quickly plugged in the old Fujitsu 1gb SCSI drive that was in the old echidna (still had a Red Hat 5.0 inst on it), and did some things. After finding that the installed BusLogic BT-742 (EISA SCSI card -- very nice) worked just fine with Adaptec AHA-1542 (ISA SCSI card -- kind of ugly, but works) drivers. After querying Alan, he said that the BT was originally meant as a clone to the 1542, but to use the BT driver to get full EISA bandwidth. But, shortly after, I found the partition table on that drive was messed. A failed repair led to a pretty unusable disk. I don't care. I didn't need that data anyway.

Well, I'm not sure what else went on, but I'm sure it was disappointing as well. Oh, something bizarre happened. Amanda came on and just started talking. She actually spoke first. [I just had to make a big deal out of it here, since I didn't when it actually happened.] Oh well. the world must be coming to an end. 9shift is going wacky again, btw0. oh well. see ya there yonder. no, not there1 there1 uhmm.... okay... maybe not. ya, there ya go... over there.. and remember... don't kill hormel.. they didn't invent it, they just make it1...

"Maybe I AM the devil, George!" -- Newhart.

Anyway, "Have a nice diurnal anomaly." (Restaurant at the End of the Universe).

Arg. Time. I hate it. It would be much more exciting if it every-once-in-a-while would just invert or something. Just for the suprise. Time is just so damn linear and monotonous. Let's put some spikes in it, people! I think a slightly shifted phase sine wave would do nicely. Everyone! Send in your equation of the optimal function for time! We CAN change the universe!

Chem was...uhmm...there. Only three weeks left in the class and she's finally getting around to reaction balancing. Second hour was boring. Chris Vail was for some reason there. I'm not sure why (he graduated several years ago, after all). Was given a stupid sheet of paper that says 'progress report... A-A-A-C-C' on it (well, there was more, but those are the only important parts -- the two Cs are calc and humanities, btw). Lunch. It wouldn't have been extraordinary if it weren't for a few things. Firstly, I was called up to the attendance office. When I got there, I was given a folded piece of paper that said my name on it, of course. The stranger part was the other words on the paper. I think it would probably be the easiest to understand if I just quote it... [keep in mind that I'm clearly caucasion with a clearly german name -- though why I, a Swede, would have a German name is a bit less clear, that's another story...]

Do you get it? Neither do I. But it's damn hilarious!

After the excitement of that died down, I got bored and started chewing on that progress report thing listed earlier. This isn't overly unusual. The problem occured when it decided to leap down my throat and into my stomach. I didn't think there was any paper that tasted worse than the laser-perf stuff, but this is it. Uck. Truely terrible. I've been tasting it all day. So, to add to my warning about laser-perf paper: Never eat line-printer paper that's got ink on it. You'll regret it. For a very long time....

APUSH was spent doing not much of anything (though I think by everyone's suprise, we actually got something done!). Humanities was spent...uhm... in discussion. [Foster had me make note of my new Latino identity to the class... who, of course, found it hilarious as well.]

The evening was spent doing really nothing, though at times I made feeble attempts at trying to look productive. Finally bugged Thomas for a non-corrupt copy of his latest gtkFAIM snapshot. It doesn't like me one bit. Not only did it not compile with GNOME supprot (aparently he wrote it to require the latest CVS GNOME), but when I started up a gtk-only version, it complained about my faimrc. I go to preferences and poke around. Hit close. Dumps core just after completely nullifying my faimrc (which luckily I'd made a backup of in case of that very failure). Oh well.

Spent a bit of time (mere seconds) pondering the direction mammatus should take. I've decided on a mammatusFour node that will have local storage. I think it's best if mammatus is a completely closed system (or at least have no strict reliance on the outside world -- for instance, now, it's booting off of ihpled, which is bad [wastes space on ihpled and shifts the load around strangly, not to mention security]). I need more fast EISA machines. I also need to go grab 2.1.129ac4 and see if those SMC TR cards are supported yet. If not, I'll either need to run the cluster at 4mb or run all FreeBSD throughout (which wouldn't be a terrible situation -- it's certainly a capable operating system which I may use on mammatusFour anyway just for the fun of it). [FreeBSD apparently already supports the token ring cards in question.]

Well, aparently I'm being told I must go with my parents to the school district's IMT (technology) department's little holiday party thing later today. It's at Hank's house. Ooo. A whole two blocks away (not only is Hank my dad's boss, but a neighbor too). Oh well. I suppose it's a good way to waste time. I'll try not to offend too many people.

I need to frame this Hispanic Institute letter. I'll hang it right next to my sweepstakes check for US$0.28 (yes, everything I've ever won in sweepstakes amounts to a single 28cent check -- which instead of cashing, I framed and put on the wall -- it's much funnier than having another quarter and change).

Oh well. The cat appears to have stopped hunting me down for the evening (remember that she's desperatly attempting to murder me so she can add all my room's digital clocks to her control dominion -- and letting that actually happen would certainly kill any grass-roots efforts to delinearize time!).

Well...uh.... It looks like I forgot how to add this afternoon... my UTC VCR is set to some time zone in the middle of the Atlantic...

Chem was boring. Played some stupid game. My team had one single solitary point at the end. For some reason, I got lucky that one time. I think it would have looked better to have lost with no points than to have lost with the one I got. Oh, something was mentioned about a test too. I guess I took it. Someone remind me I need to stay after school one of the first three days of next week (need to make up all the days I've slept in!). Second hour was spent reviewing Feynman lectures for both the chem minipaper and the quantum mech lecture for humanities (the former due later today, the latter I did last hour). Third hour was boresome. Lanée is feeling only slightly better aparently. Twinkies. Ick. Yes, Ghostbusters. Fourth hour (calc) was not really naptime (I wasn't tired), but it certainly wasn't gobs of entertainment either. Capuano (with child) came in to say hello (she's our real calc teacher).

Humanities went well. Didn't get around to more presentation/lecture things till fairly late in the hour. In fact, only two got done. The first took less than 10min. Since no one was volunteering to go next, it always ends up to be me that goes. It took just over 30min to explain quantum states to them. Although it was terminated by the end of class and not a confirmation of understanding as I would have liked, I think everyone understands it to a decent extent. I somehow doubt, though, that that is the last time I'm going to be up there explaining this. The whole thing severely scared Janese with the idea that life is based on randomness... I think everybody had a good time, though...suprisingly. I think after listenting to all the drudgery of the fact-lecturing people, it was good to get to talk about something that wasn't so concrete and finite...

I came home. I swear I did. Took a nap. That was interrupted, though. By quietness. It was too quiet. And after taking 10min or so to regain the ability to think in reality, I noticed that, well, there was no power. No wonder it was so quiet! There were no computers running! Terrible. What's more terrible is that it didn't come back on for nearly 40min. Luckily, though all the UPS batteries lasted long enough to keep the servers going. But, when the minutes continued to tick and I still had no power, I got scared and downed ihpled. And sure enough, 5min later, the power came back on. Oh well. So I reset the uptime counter again, who cares? Heh... Orb did happened to be logged in at the time. I'm sure he found it amusing. [Actually, I found it quite maddening -- it took today to figure out that nowhere on our network is there a monitor that's plugged into a battery! There I was with CPUs running but no way to check their status! Arg! And then it forced me to have to reset my VCR clock for the first time in over four and a half YEARS! And I was just starting to forget how, damn it!]

Well, I finally stopped wasting time and started working on that minipaper for chem (after all, it's due today). She gave us three weeks... I got it done in less than four hours. Oh well. It's crap, but who cares. I did get to take a peek at my dad's old electronics notes from 1965/66, though. Those were interesting. Anyway, it should all be done now. Except for the "product" that's due Mon (oh, I'm just overjoyed at the fact that I get to do another presentation! especially for that mind-numbing class!).

All that was intermixed with conversations with Alan and friends on blackdown. They called me "sick" for thinking token ring superior (actually, he said "sick sick sick" -- of course, then Orb called me "demented" and "wierd"). I was asking Alan about that wacky Novell-branded Intel-based EISA ethernet card sitting in a box around here somewhere (the one with the 10MHz 186 on it -- which, by the way, series-wise completes my collection of pre-pentium Intel x86's). He didn't know anything about it. It did point out, though, that 2.1.129ac1 (and ac2 which he release 15min after I talked to him) contained early versions of Jay's SMC token ring drivers. I'm not sure whether that includes those nice EISA one's I've got or not. Hopefully it does. That may allow me to do more with mammatus streaming than I'd thought (16mb busmaster TR w/ early token relase should be plenty of bandwidth for streaming even CD quality audio).

Oh, and I got an unexpected message from none other than James Croall. About what else than the AOL protocol! He's got a library going that can signin/off and do basic IP stuff. That means the CRC is documented, of course. I'll try and get a copy of it from him. With that done, it should all be fairly easy now. Just a lot of manual labor (decoding of the simpler packets). He said he's starting to work with mail. This is definitly really, really good (esp for FWAA, which has stagnated because of the CRC dilema). I'm glad to see he's willing to be nice and open about all this. Should be some great stuff coming out soon. [I suppose I should ask David if it's okay to start using his account for testing again...maybe he's not used up all 5 spaces yet...David, talk to me.]

Well, that's probably enough random bits of babble for now. You know that I say that and don't mean it. I never do. I always continue to type stuff after that. You should know better. In fact, what I say after that is usually even more irrelevent than what's said before! Okay, I'll let you go now.

Well then...

Oh, I forgot to mention it the other day. Cox replied to my nasty message about all the cable channels. They said they didn't intend to "deceive" their customers. Ha. Oh well. It was funny anyway. The message hinted at us getting fiber too... hmmm...

Chem was boring. Did some more of that wacky chemical mixing. Nothing like fresh ions in the morning. Second hour was spent reading the Constitution and doing a bit of APUSH homework that hadn't gotten done the day prior. Lunch. Uhm. Ya, it was there all right. I couldn't tell you much about it though. (ZAP! POW!) APUSH was, well, okay. Spent the entire time on these discussion questions. You'll be pleased to know that I respect freedom over order. Ya, like you didn't figure that one out already. I think Janese and I are the only true liberals in the class, which suprises me greatly. Humanities was also spent in discussion, but this time of the locally famed 'Bible Week'. No one could answer the simple question: "WHY?" I don't think that class quite understands the ramifications of 'Clown Week' either. In fact, I think they have a very skewed view on just what clowns are...

Spent part of the evening talking to TI-related people. I wonder why myself. Also the question of the evening was "Have you seen gaim yet?". No, I haven't. But I certainly know about it now. Had a short chat with it's author. He's using TOC instead of the full OSCAR protocol that FAIM uses. That's not necessarily bad. I wouldn't say its implicitly good either. Oh well. He's certainly got impressive qualifications, though. Sheesh...

There was a conversation blackdown #linux that I just had to be in. About using quickcams with meade telescopes. Thaddeus has a ETX. He's got pics of it combined with a color quickcam at primefocus. Pretty nifty. I may just have to find a cheap one to stick on the back of the 10in LX200 that's sitting on the other side of the room (everyone thought just owning one of those was quite impressive!). Nice scopes. Wish I got more use out of mine. Star party, anyone?

Found out David has the video card that the DTV1100 is suppose to be paired with (that's the card that Ahhz sent to me by mistake and let me keep). That's the card that I'm 'borrowing' the tuner off of to use in mammatus. I now have a justifiable reason for doing the TV-in-a-window-on-a-TV: to get all the channels when Cox finally switches over on the 16 Dec! I'll be the only one in the house that can actually tune in channel 74! Of course, it will look terrible (no one has gotten around to building that 80channel amplifier for the house distribution yet). But at least it will be better. [All the rest of the TVs in the house are too old to tune that high...including both of the TVs and both of the VCRs in my room.]

Anyway, I suppose that's it. I'm still trying to recover from that vigerous search through the false carpeting of my room to find the one book I was looking for (a set of Feynman lectures on computation -- contains some insights on electrochemistry that should be included in that minipaper I'm doing for chemistry). I did find it. Of course, now the false carpeting (of various tech manuals, 3in notebooks, cardboard boxes, and, the most devilish, the weekly periodicals) is now pilled up on one side of the room. Although this provides for a clean walking path in some areas, it makes it very difficult to go anywhere else (I'd like to see you bypass a 1.4metre high stack of the aforementioned items!). [Don't slip and die! Or break a toe! Or turn purple!] I found feynman, now I just need find some other things and then sit down and write for a while. Ya. That's sounds adventurous. For now, though.... I need to calm down and go to sleep.... [Still think my toe is a bit larger than it should be...]

Well this has been a hell of a day now hasn't it.

Chem was spent doing more cutting and pasting. Gotta love that. My cutting and pasting skills yet again proved superior. All this practice is much appreciated. I'm sure my life will force me to cut and paste everyday. Glad they're preparing me. After all, I wouldn't want it to seem as though paste really doesn't taste that good. Because it does. Anyway, second hour was spent sleeping. Yes, I know, I shouldn't've done that... Third was spent doing nothing, of course. Calc was...uhm...sleepy... (I got a lot of sleep recently.) These people seem to have a problem. They can't learn. Not by application and not by repitition. Arg. Humanities was spent taking a test. A short test. I will probably have to present all that stuff about quantum consciousness today. Finally. Oh well. Should be interesting.

Came home. Ate something. Rammed my toe into a 10ft ladder. Took a nap. Ate again. Banged that toe into a chair. Sat around (I'm guessing there -- I really don't remember). Probably yelled a bit. Oh, did I mention I rammed my toe into a ladder!?!? That toe is being held together with a few band-aids. I don't really think it's borken, but it's not really right either. The nail is kind of, well, two nails now. Oh, did I mention it hurts?!?

Evening was spent discussing a few things. Firstly, Sab has done some great work on gtkFAIM. I'm seriously thinking about just skipping the 0.0b version number completly and recristening one of this snaps as a pre-0.0c snap, followed by a 0.0c release. Aparently he and Thomas have been doing quite a bit of work (including bug smashing). Nice stuff -- glad to see someone still cares about the lonely gtkFAIM! Also, Orb talked about Life for a bit. Or rather, the opposite sex of Life. Brock basically just had to say that he still thinks the DOJ should leave Microsoft alone. I of course can't agree with that. He continued with that 'survival of the fittest' mumbo. Glad to see Amanda in a bit of a better mood as well.

Also, that brought up a few thoughts. Last week, I found out that my uncle is some sort of millionare. I knew his company had won an non-disclosure-agreement breach lawsuit a while back (he got his picture in the Denver Times, anyway), but I didn't know he'd actually end up with any of the money. The settlement was for roughly US$12million (that's the rumor anyway -- no one in the family has the guts to actually ask him how rich he is -- but, he just bought two houses and three cars...I'm guessing there's more there than he led on). Aparently it had something to do with Polaris (I think) violating an non-disclosure agreement with Ecklin (the then-employer of my uncle -- you may know this company as the parent of NAPA Auto Parts). This was over some new feul-injector design (they were in the habit of designing engines for "snowmobiles"). My dad was asked to testify in the court battle a few months back, but he didn't see much point in that, as he didn't know anything about the business end (he also worked for that company during the time of the contract). I guess he probably could have gotten some of this money then too... Oh well. It's nice to know a millionare though.

Not much else going on the world. The Tripp/Lewinski rubbish was released. Oh,ya, I'm excited. Bunch of whinny little...well, nevermind. Let's never speak of this again. Or cardboard. Or, for that matter, lobsters. Is my toe suppose to be that big?

Oh leap'n gezzerfroids! I must resume awake operation in less than FIVE HOURS!!!!

Cyanide acetate. Hmmm.. Lets not talk about chemistry (well, it was actually boresome anyway -- Mrs Gumm decided not to show up). Second hour was rightfully trivial as well. As was third. Well, it did involve a somewhat odd conversation with that girl who's always talking about Bullwinkle. You know. The one you can't really understand.... uhm... that speaks in riddle and of personal events that play no role in anyone else's lives but her own... I swear mtndew does NOT resemble gingerale. Anyway. APUSH was blah. Wasted the entire period talking about mostly irrelevent things (well, she did give us a quiz right after telling us all the answers). Humanities was spent drawing more geometric and false contour sketching. Of course, everyone else was carrying on conversation about various things.

Primenet decided to freak out in the afternoon. Well, most of the last half of the day, actually. ihpled (the computer, not the imaginary friend) started doing strange things too. So, after 119 days, 6 hours, and 48 minutes of being on, it was restarted. Truely sad moment indeed. I also set up the delphid-news mailing list and added every user of the system on it. Then sent a nice message explaining the outage. I don't like downtime. It bothers me.

I was attempting to explain to Brock how nice it would be for me to talk to an instance of myself that was not myself. I can't imagine that I'm alone on this one. It would be pleasant for there to exist a person who you could talk to that knew enough about you to understand what you were talking about without explanation and yet still be different enough than you to make it worthwhile to talk to them. Well, anyway. Eventually, he popped back up and we started talking about socialism and...uhm...I always forget the name of that thing. What ever it is, it involves massive amounts of egotism and drives people merely out of self interest. He seems to believe it. I've come to the belief that that idea and my ideas of socialism are not as different as they would outright appear. Anyway...

I really felt like mentioning blue-bearded sporks on that APUSH quiz today. Instead, I just rambled a bit about crazed maniacs. Hope Pavia finds it amusing. Maybe next time. She'll be prepared for it by then. I try not to drive teachers insane right away. It's been enough months. She'll be ready soon... if only she knew the terror that waits within....

Good thing I got out of that wierd writing style of yesterday. {It's worth noting here that Adam just about got away with spelling 'yesterday' with a 'q'. I caught him in time, though. You should feel lucky. Qs are a sign of the beginning of the end. Kind of like Z, but with less kick.}

Well, I'd better depart. I've been known to talk about rabbit-like creatures, banannas, zambinis, rutabegas, rogue water bottles, and the royal shade of green (which is what this entire log is really about).... I doubt you want to hear about them.... {And for here, it's worth noting that Adam has created a useless sentence for your viewing pleasure. 'Where is it' you ask? Well, you just read it.} 'Happy trails to you....' {Yes, Adam knows that guy's dead. But that's no reason not to mention him in the same paragraph as zambinis.}

And here we go yet again. This time, though, we shall do it right. Well, maybe not. Rightness is just one way of looking at conformancy. Who's to say that we should descriminate on just what we think is 'right' and call everything else 'wrong'? Who's to say that there IS another end. Maybe the entire world is just a different level of wrongness. (Or I suppose if you're one of those whiny optimists: different level of rightness.) Who's to say that there is a scale at all!? Has anyone ever given a thought to the idea that maybe nothing should be judged? That 'stuff happened' is better than 'it was a exciting day'? I should very well stop there, for if if I venture further, I'm sure that the ever overloaded topic of the demise of capitilism will prevail. Heaven forbit someone attack the way millions of people spend every waking day...being greedy... In any case, I made no money today. I'm not going to say whether that's good or bad, and that is merely because you've already made that decision in your mind already by the time you got to this word. No not that word, this one... Damn it. I wanted to talk about white elephants before you started making judgements!! Oh well. Maybe tomorrow. So continue reading with your opinion polluted mind and lets hope you don't make an interpretation wrongly...

The Scrubbing Bubbles attacked me in the shower. I swear if they do that one more time I'm just going to have to send a nasty mail to Dow. After all, not even Dow Chemical has the right to randomly attack people during their most vulnerable time. The shower. Oooo... scary place be that! I eventually ridded the walls and drain of their shear brutality and continued my day. They were probably just upset that I woke them up in what they seem to have become accustomed to being the middle of the day (roughly noon time local). If there's one thing that should be avoided, it's waking up grumpy Scrubbing Bubbles. It literally takes minutes to cleanse the air of them.

In case you hadn't guessed by this point, nothing much happened that day to speak of. It was fairly useless. Achieved nothing. Did nothing. Merely sataround sustaining only the bodily services needed to survive and not much more than that. Finished off the last of the cold pizza supply. (This probably explains part of my mood at the moment).

I made a somewhat feeble attempt at getting lirc running for mammatus so that it would at least something useful. No luck there either. I'm beginning to get the idea I should just continue coding my own IR control package and forget about it. It's annoying me greatly to keep having to deal with stupid problems. I figure if I code it, I can only blame myself, which is far simpler than convincing someone else that they're wrong.

Sat around staring at blackdown IRC a lot. Suprisingly nothing occured worth mentioning. Alan sent 2.0.36 off to Linus for final approval. He also put out 2.1.128ac2. It seems like only yesterday that everyone was screaming about the fb/abscon implementation on i386. Now they're screaming because SMP isn't working just right. Again. I fear 8bits won't be enough to store the minor-minor kernel version numbers for 2.1 much longer (less than 128 releases left before that contention sets in). Although, Linus says Dec for 2.2. Uhm...ya... He only said that last Dec too...

"Head's up! There's a barn headed straight at you!" I'm beginning to loathe television once more. I think I just need to stick with CNN and CNBC again. All this other crap just drives you insane with bad acting and purely idiotic plots (not that I could do much better...but I don't get paid for it either). Hohum. And I've seemingly run out of tidbits of irrelevence to speak of. Seems to me that I've nearly written this entry in some other lanuage. Why I haven't said "YOWZER!" or "GEAKENFROID!" at all yet. Oh wait. Well there ya go.

Off to another freakish day at school here in just mere hours. Well, it's Monday, so probably nothing eventful shall really occur. If it does, be assured that I'll dumb it down to a slow dribble by the time it gets encoded into the arcane wording of this log. After all, I wouldn't want any of it's readers to get too excited (we all know what that can do! and I don't have any more classes I can get kicked out of!).

I still say I'm speaking in too much English. I must find some imaginable way to rid myself of that terror. After all, if everyone went around speaking English, others would indeed have very little reason to call us Americans!

It's 0634 and all's well... Well, not really. But what would be the usefullness of an archaic idiom that actually made a bit of sense!? I shall henceforth depart into the utter blackness known as sleep. Hopefully, by the time I start typing next, I'll be awake; but somehow I fear that is a triffle improbable. It's always more fun to write this in the middle of a trippy dream anyway... [It's always nice to freak people out as well. Unfortunatly I do more of the former than I do of the latter. I'd really prefer to do both at the same time. Which probability wise should be realitively simple. That is, if relitivity actually made a difference in these matters anyway.]

I can only hope that someday, someone will finally take notice that the supposedly 'off-the-wall' objects and concepts that I write about are actually alegoric to reality. I can also only hope that someone will someday figure out just why I keep mentioning parity conservation....

I'm spent.

Got up bright and early at 0800 only to sit around for quite a tad of time waiting for nothing to happen. Left for Phoenix College at about 1000 (location of ABODA state marching festival, of course). Got there in time to only have missed the first couple bands. Centennial was great (as usual). Stayed till noon or so. Came home and did various things, including taking a pleasant nap. Headed back about 1500. Watched the last of the bands. Everyone was eagerly awaiting the awards. That finally started a few minutes late (~1755). Fun fun. Centennial got a superior with a drum major caption. Neat. (AFAIK, this is the first time any Centennial band has gotten a superior or even a caption.) GO GREENWAY!! Anyway, the awards finished up and everyone stood around looking overly happy with the assorted hugs and things. Great night for everyone involved (and even for those like myself who like to just sit with the band and think they are...).

Yea! Finally found out who this Diana person is that everyone keeps talking about! Thanks for telling me, Amanda. If it hadn't been for that, I'd have continued assuming she was a crazed maniac from Montgomery Wards who ate blue binders for breakfast....

Came home. Had a discussion about about freakiness and specific relativity with Amy [a sister] (who happened to be standing on her head at the time giving her hightened awareness of such things as localized matter inversion). Also read Hitchiker's for a bit. That of course forced me to take a while off to stop laghing. Talked Etcha-sketches and 'meteor showers' with Brock. And, of course, ate pizza (I seem to have depleted my supply of string cheese...-pout-...).

Oh well. this shift key has been having troubles this evening 9you know, i always thought the gods of shift would come after me...i just assumed it would be while i was sleeping...0 oh well....

I always think of zany things I could put here write after I write a stupider one. So now I figure if I don't write one at all I won't have to worry about it. Wow...

I slept in first and second hours. I figured sleeping was better than standing anyday (or anyclass, as the case may be). Ya, so I grabbed a mtndew and ran to school just in time to sit around in calc doing nothing. Eventually left that place early to go take the AD test. That was at 1220 local. I eventually left school at 1520 approx. There were seven parts. I "finished" (meaning mostly guessed) the first five parts. The six part was probably the one I could've gotten the highest score on if I'd actually finished it. I stopped at question 10 or so (of 50) and went on to draw pretty designs in the rest of the bubbles for that and the seventh test. I left in disgust. (Nearly ran out of time even then.) Oh well. It was a really stupifying experience anyway. Just what I needed after a bunch of wacky dreams about tornados and tomatoes...

Hm. Flipper. Anyway... I don't remember what just happened after that. Parcel came today. Not computer parts as it is usually, though. This time it was copies of Hofstadter's Mind's I and Adams' Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide [to the Universe]. Anyway... Then pizza came and I had to eat that. Instead of all that tasty paper. Guess that means I'll have to read them instead.

The rest of the evening was spent watching MASH and drinking cranapple juice. ...mmm... Oh, and eating string cheese. I think Josh should focus efforts on computer controlled picture frames instead of computer controlled coffee makers. I don't know about you, but a good dose of magic smoke would be better than all that stupid coffee... (I am aware that magic smoke has nothing to do with picture frames. The point remains. Though out of context. Need I speak more irrelevance?)

Oh well. I need more cranapple juice. Or mtndew. Something. State (marching) today. Probably be out most of the day. All other times, I should be doing homework. If you see me on AIM or IRC, yell at me. I should be concentrating. On doing nothing. On doing APUSH and chem homework. Arg. Yellow MP3s. Or was that blue.... Hmm...yellow and blue...thats strange...those would be Lanée's special colors....

Of cardboard boxes and aluminium based antiacids... (what does that mean? well, they do the same thing when consumed: make you feel worse and have a bad taste in your mouth.) Paper works too. Stay away from that cheaper "laser-perf" crap, though. As I was telling Amanda the other evening, it can make you feel a tad terrible. Of course, at the time, maybe it was just 8th grade that did that to me... I should eat more of it as a bit of an experiment.... mmm... ahck...

Hm. Well, here we are. Me half-awake once again. This has been...uhmm..and interesting day. Tiring.

If you saw me on AIM/AOL all day long...sorry... I kind of kept forgetting to shut it off (or even mark myself away). I'm sure somebody got pissed off at me...but what the hell...

The class currently known as chemistry was not exciting. In fact, boring. I nearly fell asleep. Second hour was average. I spent it deciding what I wanted to do with next year. (I will be having NO normal classes next year except band: AP comp and lit, AP bio, AP phys, AP calc 3-4, and honors free enterprise/government. It shall be interesting. It looks like I've ended up with an extra semester, though...so I may get an early release second semester.) Anyway... Lunch wasn't eventful. Well, except for the bits of triviality spewing from Amanda. Ya, I reallly needed to know about large mammal sexual peripherals and behaviors.

APUSH was spent aiding Lanée write a letter to Ben. That was interesting. Also managed to waste a bit of time. During that time, guidance took it upon itself to 'finalize preregistration' for next year. So it's all 'in the system' now (you know its reassuring to know old IBM S/36 and AS/400 boxen are still powering our screwed up schedules). Humanities was spent 1) falling asleep, 2) doodling on the newspaper people, 3) listening to info about brain stuff, 4) waking up, and 4) learning how to count. AD test later today. Yes. Its finally friday.

After school, I had to go take a test in chem that i missed several weeks ago. I then managed to blazingly run home to arrive at 1520 or so. Enough time to eat a bit and check mail and was off to somewhere else slightly before 1700. Off to Heather's boyfriends house (don't ask why). The topic of dicussion: various bits of calculus. Eeurhg. FOUR HOURS of that. Finally got home about 2120. Just late enough to make me decide that there was no way I was getting that chemistry stuff done for tomorrow. So I had dinner and checked mail some more. Amanda was on. Yes. She was. David was on long enough to say goodbye (he should be in cally by the time anyone useful reads this). I'm not sure whether B3k was going or not. Oh well. B3k was on long enough to say nothing (this is why I must assume he's going too).

I'm tired. I'll just have to think of some excuse to give for not having all that chem work done. Oh well. That's part of the fun. It's minuscule point-wise anyway. Why am I trying to rationalize this. This is stupid. Why do I have to think of reasons to explain my decisions? Sheesh. I hate being human (sometimes -- other times, it makes a good excuse).

AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! PARABOLIC HAIR!

So here we are again. And I thought I'd be closer to Beta Centauri by now.

No school today. It's interesting. Holidays in the middle of the week! Imagine that! Spent literally half of the day sleeping. Finally got up about 1245 local. But that was after having a good ten hours of sleep, endevoring into fourth stage REM several times. (Its scary enough that I analyze my sleep patterns after I get up, but even more so that I do it while I'm sleeping!) Got up with the clear intention of doing homework. I first, though, had to see what was going on in the world. Not much really, but I didn't feel like doing homework yet.

Added some code to NAIM related to the away features. Mailed those off to n. They were included and he released a new snapshot.

Discussion with Orb about just what learning and knowledge is and how and to what extent you gain them. Eventually Sara (his sister) broke in with her ultimate amounts of wisdom and rattled off various theories. She eventually agreed with me. To quote Sara, Orb was being a "stoopid poo-poo head".

Then I got started on some mammatus related things. The Temic tuner is now talking happily to the Bt848 via the i2c bus. However, the video and audio outputs of the tuner need to be buffered and level reduced in order to be usable. The "CVBS" video output of the tuner is 2v peak-to-peak (normal composite is 1v ptp). The audio is the same (though it's reduction is not as crucial). I got linux booted up again (this required putting a new switch on an AT power supply to fit in the Dell) and loaded up the tuner module. The i2c bus scanned fine (detected two devices on the bus). The tuner module detected one of them as a "Temic NTSC" tuner. The other device I have no idea what it is. I assume it's either the Bt848 bus master address or the ITT video decoder that's on the tuner card (which I have no idea how to deal with). Lets just hopes its working as well as it seems to be (will have to wait for the video buffer to do that). Oh, the important thing about attatching the DVC1000 to the tuner card. Firstly, the two i2c leads on the Bt848/DVC1000 are actually fed out two of the pins on the "ExTuner/SVideo" connector on the board. That was good. Secondly, SDA/SCL (the i2c pins again) on the DTV1100 (the tuner card) are fed out two of the pins on the LPB header. That was good as well. Made the connection nearly solderless.

All that above was more difficult than it sounds as it took a lot of referencing and research. Anyway, in a feeble attempt to get rid of the frame-fading effect I keep getting on the mammatus bt848 overlay, I tried using a number nine/s3 card instead. Overlay won't work at all with that card. But, grabdisplay did...just really slowly (drops a lot of frames). So I put the Trident card in, and the grabdisplay of it was a slightly faster, but not usable. So, still nothing is working adequately. I need to get the audio node and IR remote control going so I can at least have something to show for 3 months of work on this project.... Eeek! Frank Lloyd Wright sitting on a GOLDEN GATED FENCE in BICHROME!!!

That leads us here again. Wherever here is. (You can read B3k's assesment of the subject.) Oh well. As I foreshadowed, I never did get to the homework. Now I'm down to one day to do half of the 'project' for chemistry. I don't remember what else I was suppose to do. Oh well.

ROBERT TOWNSEND on ROUTE SIXTY-SIX??? What has the National Highway Naming Commission been DOING all these YEARS??! EATING FRIED CHEESE STICKS??

And from day one, I KNEW I wanted to be a MICROPHONE!

Yes, that's right. And the blue notebook contains white-lined paper.

Chem was uneventful. Nitrate, nitrate, NITRATE!!! or was it NITRITE!? Anywho, they're both COVALENT!!! Second hour was short. Band had pictures this morning, so half of them were still in there. Talked to them I guess. Then did other things for a while, til Amanda came to annoy me. Then we went to the assembly dodad. Then lunch. Hohum. Then calc. Doze time. Then humanities. Fun time. Group review day... heh. That's always fun. The running opinion is that under Rebecca's oppresed love for Booth, there exists an oppressed lesbianism. I'm going to leave that one alone. Anyway, David and Brock were for some reason in there for a bit too. Only the former seemed to acknowledge that I was actually there. Brock passed on without notice. I'm still wondering just why they were there to begin with. Oh well.

It's amazing that 14-7=7 hours of my life can be summed up in such a paragraph as above. But whatcha gonna do...

Nobody got the margaret thatcher joke at lunch. I was depressed. Amanda just asked about the lobsters. Hello? That was LAST WEEK'S JOKE!

Came home and found my mother had scavenged the supposed special ed records discussed yesterday (saved them from the BONFIRE!). They were from that "speach therapy" thing. In second grade. 1989 (that's 1984+5). You'll be happy to know that although my oral musculature is "adequate for speech production", I still was "unable to approprietly approxiamte the /r/ pheneme." But, Adam did "demonstrate adequate voice quality, rhythm and rate for his age and sex." Glad to know that. Thats always important in the second grade. I can't even count the number of kids that used to get made fun of about that... "You SISSY! You don't have PROPER VOCAL RHYTHM! NAH-NAH!" Anyway, my "articulation disorder" led me to be to take classes from a "speech pathologist" for 40min a week for several months. One of the COMPLAINTS listed on the "Speech/Language Handicapped" form was: "Very shy, worried about drawing attention to himself; would rather sit back and watch." Uhm. Okay. (Note that that statement was not punctuationally proper on the form itself but was corrected for typing clarity.) In any case, we all had a good laugh, and RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (must practice...that /r/'s a tough one!)

Not much happened in the evening. Orb finally got me to babble out AIM (he's been aparently trying for a few days now). He also somehow convinced me to get up and try out that supposed employee version of AIM. Not terribly exciting. That OSCAR console thing is pretty worthless. Mostly just local client stuff. YOu can do some neato stuff with the GUI, but that's about it.

Discussions with Brock led to the creation of a new 'language': neatanese. Any neat permuted spelling of any word in any language can be classified as neatanese. (As B3k said, it's kind of like midendianness.) Like REZIGRENE or KCLOATM, for instance. Anyway, life meanders on...

Well, I could include a joke here about CAFFEINE FREE PEPSI or CAUCASIAN FM RADIOS (or maybe even something about the duality of PARITY CONSERVATION), but I think I already have... After all... this is no place for ROGUE BLUE-BEARDED SPORKS!!!

De plane, boss! De plane!!!

Chem was boring. Test. Blah. Second hour was unusual, yet uneventful. The choir next door was having sectionals and sent the sopranos over to the band room. Listened to them. Very good. Lunch was boresome. APUSH was spent listening to guidance people babble about senior-year class requirements. But mostly just talked with Lanée. Humanities was normal. Michael sat on the floor the entire time because he had no chair, of course. The point is that he was sitting there to make someone notice that he did not have a chair. The problem is that nobody noticed. Literally. Nobody asked about it. Strange. Anyway... I nearly convinced him to get out the rubber bands again, but he said his fingers hadn't healed from the last time. (I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but that entire incident last time left his finger with a large hole at the top.... It was funny...)

Came home to find a card from the district saying that they were going to be destroying all their special education records for people who hadn't been in special ed for more than five years. A call revealed that it was not concerning any of the gifted crap I did in elementary school. The only thing that I must assume they're talking about then is a...uhmm...what did they call it... it was a 'speach therapy' class of some sort back in first grade. They claimed I couldn't say the phonem "wr" properly. So they wasted six months of my life teaching me how. Ya. They've been messing with me ever since first grade. Anyway, that was longer than five years ago. The ironic part was that the postcard that said that they were destroying records had been destroyed by the post office...

Before dinner my grandfather called to inform us that my grandmother had had a stroke. She'll be in the hospital overnight. There doesn't appear to be any physical paralysis or anything, but a reduced memory is quite apparent. It would appear her body is finally catching up to her (this is a woman who's in her seventies yet acts no older than fifty). So if I sometime disappear for apparently no reason at all, I've probably gone with my family up to see her.

The inet fell apart most of the evening. Every once and a while I was able to stay connected to blackdown to have useful conversation. Mostly not, though, as everyone was dropping in and out. Primenet happened to pick this evening to flip out too. UH OH!! THERE'S A MONKEY WARDS IN THE CLOSET!!!

Oh, nearly forgot, congratulations to the Centennial volleyball team, who are now number ONE in the state. Coached by none other than the voiceless Pavia (who every once and a while doubles as an APUSH teacher).

Oh, and stick somewhere in the day something about Amanda being mean. Well, you can stick that in several places. It's not MY fault CAT FUR is so EXCITED!!! Especially through direct shock to the arachnoidal cranial padding....

....and don't forget: PARITY IS NOT CONSERVED!!!! (except in everything but electron flow)

And I now appoint you AMBASSODOR to the SAO TOME and PRINCIPE ISLANDS!

A truely disappointing day, from what I remember.

Woke up. Ya, I do that a lot. OF COURSE! That's IT! Oh, wait. Nevermind. (You never know... I could have finally figured out Einsteinian Unified Field Theory for all you know...) Sat around on AIM and IRC doing nothing for quite some time.

Finally got bored and added another irc instance. This one for blackdown. I figured if anything could liven up my day, it would be the ramblings of Linux hackers on a Sunday. It minorly worked. This actually continued until the very end, but stuff happened parallel too.

Decided I should probably do the APUSH homework I had. Decided not to do humanities homework. That was exciting. How liberating. And to all you dead fish out there, remember: the crow that flew the coop arrives at dawn.

Also booted up zeta to make sure it still worked. Haven't had it on in over a week, after all... I think United Way is a gay rights supporter.

After that it was mostly nothing. There was a short conversation with people on blackdown relating to 101 Things to Do with Old Sun3s. That continued and ended. The next eventful conversation involved Alan (Cox) making dirty (yet funny) jokes about DECnet and X. That was followed by an extremely long conversation about funny names to make with the offshore-registrar TLDs (donn.ie, po.st, pen.is, you know). Oh, there was a short bit on American history as well.

That led into a showing of Star Trek Two at 1800, interrupted by the Simpsons at 1900, and that by, of course!, the XFiles season premier! (at 1000). Amanda got the gist of the entire episode through my keen commentary. Orb got to see it an hour before me. I was amused that it took place mostly in Phoenix (a city I'm told is mere miles away from me). It was funny. It was ponderous. It was good. Not great, but good. Just think... a JOINT COOPERATION between CNN and TRENT LOTT!

Now all I need is a SURFACE MOUNT electric drill and an EXTENDED SHOE HORN! Oh well. In any case, the Headline News SuperTicker is stuck. Big time stuck. My keyboard has a mind of it's own. Adam has gone insane. Him and I have gotten too mad at each other. Now he just stands around and groans about broken keyboards and glorified neutrinos. Just think... someday, some pion is going to come and whap him in the head and he won't even notice. Stupid, stupid Adam. Oh well. At least the Man in the Moon won't come get him anytime soon. Now all you need is a TRINITRON VEGA! I don't think we're in the twenty-first century anymore, Toto...

Nothing like STREET-LUGE at THREE AM!

That's it for now... Who do you think I am? MIGUEL DE ICAZA????

Take that, BOB DOLE!

Ya, two entries in one day-night cyclicle... I'm getting adventurous these days... [If you haven't read yet today, go below and read the first one first...hmm...how logical that sounded...I didn't think I was capable of such blatant sense-making after dark...]

Okay, Orb. Now here's the story. If you read the entry below like you said you did, you'd know why I wasn't answering messages. I clearly stated that I would be off doing other things all day. And I interrupted your story because food was more important. Not really. But it's a good excuse anyway. I had to go to the game in any case and would have to interrupt you then. Happy now? Sheesh... temper, temper... (distemper? :)

To leave off where I started...err... start where I left off... I was leaving for the AD thing. That was interesting. Seven people showed up. Plus Mrs Foster, of course. One of the school's art teachers (and his wife) showed up to talk. We talked moderne art for over three hours. Well, that, along with side-discussions (you can't see Rebecca and not make a joke or two) and eating. Out of the nine of us, we went through two bags of doritos, one bag of cheetos, a bag of red apples, a bunch of banannas, and forty-two popsicle-sticks (the popcicles were nowhere to be found). Okay, so all except the last was true. By the time we left, we were down to four people. [That guy's wife said something strange... she said i had a "beautiful [speaking] voice"... hmm...] Anyway, made it out of there slightly later than planned, just after 1600. After returning home, I basically put my stuff down and went back out again.

This time to something a bit less stressful.... The peoria (marching) invitational. (I know I ended up there because not only do I have a piece of paper explicitly telling me but also a large PURPLE CLOVER on the back of my hand...it's of one of those rare three-leafed kinds, so it's superbly identifiable...) This filled the evening with many good reasons for gesticulation (most of which involved your basic hand clapping and arm waving). Centennial did wonderfully, of course. They left with every single caption they gave out in addition to an 'excellent' rating. (I don't think they should be depressed about that low rating though...esp since every band in that division got the same rating -- except for one 'good'. And besides, they did pick up every caption award.) Congrats to everyone -- esp to the drumline and the drum majors! Enjoyable evening. Got back a bit later than planned on this one too... about 2030... (That Ironwood parking lot is a marvel of idiotic spatial mobilization engineering...)

I've spent then till now in some strange state involving self-reflectivity and your basic wall-stare. Oh, and a mtndew helped too.

I should probably do some homework... but I think I'll contine staring instead. It's much more productive. Of course, there's nothing like reading Plato on the ceiling...

Thomas is currently streaming conspiracy theories about getting together the currently active FAIM developers... Hmmm.. That's a scary thought... We'll just make a nice cute efnet IRC channel until AIM2 chat is working... Need bot now. Never thought I'd say that. Everyone come yell at me over in #faim...

Anything to avoid talking about fury worms again...

Ya, so, once upon a hill there stood a guy pulling a scary look at a fury worm.... And the worm was in the middle of saying, "Kind sir, pray tell me just what a rutabega looks like? I seem to have forgotten since the last time you arrived..."

And that leaves us back at the bottom of the hill, not quite where we left off, but partially exciting none-the-less. You see, we reenter the author's mind once again...but first, let's figure out what happened...

Okay, so I kind of dozed out early yesterday and didn't have a chance to write this when the day actually happened as I usually do. There's nothing like a bit of MUSTARD...

Chem was spent doing more cutting and pasting. With the invertable kiddy scissors, of course. I think an essay on those scissors could easily lead into a thesis on reversible physics, but, oh well. This injuncted with the normal wacky conversation with Michael led to an enjoyable morning.... There's nothing like painting your eraser PURPLE with 3M GLUE to liven up the place...

Second hour was spent learning how to play trombone. Yes, now I too can play the trombone. Ya, well, there ya go. Lunch was excited by the addition of a third table to hold the huge crowd that apparently gathers there. Of course, it could still have been limited to two if the chairs were actually filled effeciently, but you know PEOPLE... Clac was doze time. Humanities was normal. I think Mrs Foster is the only teacher I've had who just says "There's a test up there...take it when you feel like it." So I took it. Simplicity. Took mere minutes. I would have finished faster if I hadn't decided to write entire essays for the essay questions instead of the paragraphs recommended... But it's difficult to stop me from talking about UNCOUNSCIOUS MAGENTA CAVEMEN, SHORT-ARMED MONKEYS, and FREUD...

We had a visitor about 1515...Jarred (from PUSD, although this was absouletly unrelated to profession). He had come to pick up some non-computing related things from my father. That was followed by various `geeky' bits of conversation and some strange jokes. (Yes, the meaning of life is presumed to exist somewhere inside the box ontop of the garage's refrigerator -- you know, the box that hasn't been opened in TWELVE YEARS.)

Aparently somebody called Cox. We should be getting 78 channels back somewhere in early December. A message from a PLUGer confirms this. He said that parts of the Peoria service area were scheduled for 4 Nov, and the rest for Dec. That story fits. The problems in our particular area involve a problem that is going to be very costly for Cox to fix. They must come out and climb up each one of our telephone poles to 1) remove the premium channel filters (we don't have cable boxes out here) and 2) replace the low bandwidth (~60channel) amplifiers with high bandwidth ones (to accomidate at least 78 channels, probably all 125). Let's just hope the SHEEP don't scare them off the POLES...

Anyway, after that, it was Fazoli's take-out Italian (that's with a short 'i', btw). Mmm... MEATBALL sandwich... Then the 'football' game. Not terribly eventful. A lot of TOE FLAPPING...

That was followed by the long adventure home (two blocks) and various bits of triviality. Installed EPIC4pre2 on ihpled for an unknown reason. Now I have the reassuring IRC scrolling off in the scary lands of tty8...a long way away from the tty6 I am currently typing on...

About 0000 this morning, I mysteriously disappeared. About 0900 local, I found myself. I'm quite scared about that too. NINE hours of socially-acceptable unconsciousness. I should be running for days on that...

Anyway, I finally woke up to find the laptop still on, NAIM and IRC still running, yet more gtkFAIM patches in my inbox, and a large indentation in my side where the laptop spent the night. I'm terrified. I've had nightmares where one day I'd wake up and find I'd sleep-typed gibberish on IRC or AIM all night. Never dream. It's bad for your conscious self.

That leaves us here (yes, again). The rest of the day is kind of set up already. I have a AD study-o-thon (better phrased as "school on a saturday") at 1300. I'll leave that either when it's done or at 1530, which ever comes first. From there, I will venture back off, this time to the peoria marching invitational thing over at Ironwood (HS). That will probably last till 1930 or so. Then I'll be back. To continue more ramblings. Aren't you scared... [Sorry this isn't as humorous as it's been of late, it's not deep in the trenches of night like usual...I just don't get that excited right after I wake up...]

Don't look at me! I'm not the savage that created PEPSI ONE!

[You can just feel the hilarity of this entry, can't you? It's just glowing with it...]

Chem was, well, interesting. Ionic and covalent bonding! ya! Can't get enough of that! Take that Louis Dot! I'm gonna draw CIRCLES instead! Second hour was spent with the choir of that period. Nice hour and a half doing nothing. Lunch uhm... something about Bullwinkle, Ranch dressing, spies, and the decimal number 25... oh, and urination again. Just some bizare conversation in general... APUSH was a trifle boring.

Humanities was interesting... I was sitting there with a newspaper in front of me and a stack of rubber bands on the side. So, in my bordome, I though: "There must be something neat-o that happens when you put these two together...". And there is. You see, if you stretch out the rubber bands, you can use them ala 'silly-putty'. Besides allowing me to morph the people in the newpaper into a paranormal entities, it also made the rubber band fragments look like little striped snakes... And the newspaper ink makes them sticky... After freaking out the back half of the class for no aparent reason, they finally asked just why I was laughing so much. Michael finally decided to get involved and by the end of the class, we both had a nice set of squirmy striped snaky bands... Of course, the strange looks never stopped being aimed at us... But it was all fun and glorious anyway. Oh, and the official test given by the presenter today reveals that I'm am in fact, a right-brained human being (on a 3 to 7 split). That's all well and good, but WHERE ARE THE CHERRIES!?! Now I have a reason to be insane. Do you?

I suppose I should do some homework. It is do tomorrow, don't you know...

A good portion of the evening was spent upside down. After I stopped being able to feel my feet (and more importantly, it was getting difficult to type), I righted myself and continued. I can't say enough good things about proper blood flow. You know, there's nothing like a CORRONARY!

Talked to Orb a bit. He mysteriously disappaeared (well, probably not that mysteriously), so I started spewing my ramblings by way of Amanda (still am, actually). Ahh...nothing like EMACS in the WINTER TIME... (that's from the perspective of a ceiling fan, by the way...)

It gets worse by the day... soon, all humanity will be nothing but a pile of good laughs and annoying tie-died kickers... That is, except for the inventor of the US$250 hammer and token ring... they'll still be around. The latter because of ingenuity and the former because he bought everyone else's soul (except for that of the inventor of token ring) and tie-died kickers...

(I always wanted to end with something about tie-died somethings. That will have to wait, though... as a greater revolution has arisen...)

For it has come to my attention that society is having trouble. Too bad. I really wanted to go outside tomorrow and yell "AIN'T SOCIETY GREAT!?!", but I can't. Not because of me, but because of you. That's right you. Society is its own fault. Well, yellow eggplants and purple lemons had a bit to do with it too...

And to all a good day! (Or at the very least, a lobsterian one...)

GeBleck!

The excitement of the early morning had no relevence to life. It in fact had to do with Cox cable service. They decided to give us an entire block 78 television cable channels. It was exciting. These are the things I get excited about at 0600 in the morning.

The day pretty much went downhill from there... Chem was spent doing part of the course assesment. Aparently she thinks it best to give us the final exam piece by piece after each unit. Interesting style I suppose. Second period ws, well, boring. Concert auditions on 11 Dec I think (can't really remember...). Third period was absent today (early release). Calc was unfortunatly not. Humanities was interesting as usual. Foster wasn't there today. Discussions included sanity, McDonald's, coffee, US$3mil, what's wrong with society (aka, the Dazed Ramblings of Lee), and PASTA(!). Oh, and don't forget the WRATH OF THE MOTLEY MISTER PERKINS! It was all over and done with by 1145. Another half-hour was spent doodling around doing nothing till Kari decided she wanted Brock to drive.

At this point, we stil have 78 channels.

A quicky bit of nothing and I was off to the library to do research for APUSH with the rest of my group. Should now have a submittable thesis, though not much more. Really need to work on that some more.

Got out of that place finally about 1730. The rest of the afternoon is a blur of sorts. About 1900, the cable goes out. About 1902, we get two channels back. I do APUSH homework here. About 2100, cable comes back. But my worst fears were true...only 39 channels came back. So I hurridly ran over to Cox's web site and rushed them an angry response. I really wanted the sci-fi channel too... sheesh. They just like to mess with you. First they rearrange channels to drive you insane then when they get you there, they push you over the edge by overloading you with all the channels at once! Then they take them all back except for the stupid ones! Arg.

I made an incredible realization late in the evening... I really am starting to talk like fortune. (The scariest comment: "And then Sally Strothers says 'Hell with ending world hunger...I just want some PIZZA!'" I took a moment of silence to collect my insanity after that one. Of course, I followed that with a staring contest with my cat. I want to know how she ends up winning all the time. I always end up falling asleep or something in the middle... That, or she starts singing The Revenge of Mary's Little Lamb and I break out in uncontrollable laughter... And then she swipes my arm with her sharp claws and I end up with a big red line lasting for days... Ask me, I'll show you... The moral: never laugh at a cat. They're probably smarter than you are.)

Oh, and don't shoot squirrels. In fact, no small woodland creatures were harmed (or armed) in the production of this sentence. That however does not apply to this sentence. Of course, that last sentence doesn't imply that it violates the former sentence, just that you shouldn't assume that it didn't. When in doubt, assume neutrality...except in cases involving errant NatSemi tech manuals... in that case, run for your life...especially if it's the Ethernet databook...they're heavily armed and have been known to kill without premise... In fact, ignore every word past "squirrels" (which is perilously spelt just as wrongly as 'perilously' is).

Of blissful thought and a hearty dose of anticaffiene...

Felt terrible in the morning, slept in till 1030 or so. Went for APUSH and humanities. APUSH was boring. Humanities was hilarious but indescribable. Bascially, the theme was "make Rebecca cry" or at least "make her face turn bright red as often as possible". I think we all succeded on both counts.

So, it looks like (yet another) beginning of the end for the Unger conflict. The URL of this log as well as a list of important dates has infiltrated the school district Cholla Annex and should allow for a final shakedown of the remaining bits of the scandal. Also, if you are a district employee and have read all the comments, please feel free to send me comments (to afritz@delphid.ml.org or afritz@iname.com). Anonymously, if you wish.

Watched the CNN election coverage for most of the afternoon and evening. Although I was sadened to find that the retired dairy farmer didn't make govenor, its still amusing to find Ventura (the former professional "wrestler") is in the lead in Minnesota (and does have CNN behind him now). That's more worthy to note than that. If he does win, it will be the first time in MN history that an independent (in this case, Reform) party member will hold a state-wide office. This is a good thing. I've always thought two was not enough. And maybe even Ventura will take the Reform ticket on the 2000 presidential run.... No aparent change in local elections. McCain's here to stay (for a third senate term). Jane Hull will remain our govenor (not suprising...although Hull doesn't do much, she's obvisouly better than getting some weenie like Paul Johnson in there).

I was in a pretty good mood, that is, until Orb started with socialism/communism argument. Arg. If I felt like listening to what a dictionary says, just what would be the point in living? Oh well. His quote of the day: "You're trippy today."

This is ridiculous. I should've written this several hours ago. Now I'm all out. I swear it would be more amusing if I had. Oh well. Can't do it all right. In fact, I'm lucky if I get half right... oh well.

And I thought CNN never made jokes about aliens...

Today, I can officially state that humanity has gone insane. Now come on people.... The entire Unger incident can't be cathartic that this many people care! In any case, it seems I'm forcd to bring it up YET AGAIN....

Aparently the rumor is getting passed around that we over here are a bunch of theives or something. To set the record straight: delphid.ml.org is NOT, i repeat is NOT, a PUSD district machine! I built it with my own two hands! It is in no way stolen or taken from PUSD! No connection whatsoever to that district! Clear enough? Sheesh I hope so. And to whoever started that rumor (you know certainly who you are), please stop making up stories. I'm getting tired of it. Everyone's getting tired of your little bits of fiction. No one cares how creative you are. I'm only disputing your ability to teach, not your creativity. We all know you can make up stuff. We don't need proof. Especially when it puts connotations on people's names (like mine and my father's). Now go away. I'm not in your class. You don't have jurisdiction anymore. You control your life, I'll control mine. Let's keep it that way. Bubble check!

I really wish if Cox was going to make such a fuss over rearranging our television channels that they'd keep it in one configuration for at least 24hrs. They seem to be rearranging them every few minutes for no apparent reason. If nothing else, Cox itself provides for hours of amusement....that's before you turn on the TV...

Anyway, let's get this day summarized so I can editorialize some more....

Chem was uneventful. Test today. Second period was spent doing not much of anything useful. I wandered around the big band room with Feynman's Six Not-So-Easy Pieces in hand. I wandered around in circles for over an hour. Baedke just gave me a strange look and pondered on. [I find it more helpful to read while doing physical things like walking...it helps, believe me. It's related to hypnotism I suppose.] Lunch was filled with bizare conversation, not the least of which concerned urination off the posterior and pector of boats. Go figure. Calc was sleepful.

There was a short chat at the beginning of humanities concerning how much [Mike] "Booth" sounded like some demonic chant. A quick glance at the Republic revealed a photograph of people in costumes that could easily have been chanting "booth! booth! booth!". This conversation was ended with demostrations of pigmy dancing and the aforementioned chanting. The rest of the period, however was filled with conversations about consciousness and mind vs body and all that repetitive undecisive stuff. Aparently she wants to have a test on Fri. Somehow I doubt it will cover pigmy dancing.

In any case, yesterday happened. It is now today. Let's hope nothing ruins that (I would just hate to have the ultimate apocolipse of sorts occur while I was sleeping!).

I sit here watching ALW's Cats on PBS and can't help but think about it. Unfortunatly too many bizare and otherwise irrelevent questions come to mind to ponder here. So, I will continue my normal ramblings.

And it's the day of decision...don't forget to vote for the professional wrestlers and the dairy farmers! (If no wacky people happen to running in your region, vote Libertarian instead! [If none of them are running, there's always the LOBSTERS!])

This day really makes me wonder what the rest my life will be like. Just one of those things.

KBAQ woke me up this morning with one of the best works ever...Dvorak's New World.... The day went downhill from there.

Most of the day spent doing mostly nothing. The Burger King people never sang to me when I went in there.... I think television advertisements should portray reality. Ya, when pigs finally stop flying... They're everywhere! Get them off! That's better.

Attempted to working mammatus. Though, that really didn't last long. I was changing out the 25mhz chip for an AMD sx2-66 when I turned it on and it went POOF. I mean literally. It's frankly the first time I've really blown something up in quite some time. (I'm not talking just audible here either... there were plenty of fireworks too.) The problem was clearly in the power supply. Taking a quick look under the lid of the supply revealed a chopper transistor that was complety blown to bits. Literally. Dozens of little pieces. Barely anything left on the stalk. Just bits of plastic, ceramic, and silicon all over the inside. Nice. Needless to say, that ended today's mammatus work. Maybe some other day. (This is yet another stupid problem to add the Mammatus-Related Repository of Idiotic Events.)

Spent the day doing not much of anything (so 'not much of anything' that I've had to repeat that statement three times now just to make this entry sound exciting!).

Did occupy some time in the afternoon reading Plato's redition of Socrates' Apology aloud to myself. I frankly do not believe that any of that epoch's works are understandable without reading them aloud. The word usage makes little sense unless you actually read it, not the normal skimming that's done. Most of the literature of the period are writings based on conversations, not explicit creativity. It's like reading a screenplay and trying to understand a movie. It just doesn't work. In any case, it gave me a good reason to talk to myself.

I have decided that two things cause intolerable sleep patterns: 1) caffeine, 2) artificial light. I've talked about the former, now lets go with the latter. I figure that if you sleep right while you sleep, you don't have to sleep much, meaning drugs such as caffeine are futile. Anyway, artificial light is just so impure. I think it does something to you that just isn't right. So, I've avoided it all day. And contrary to the fact that I've been sitting in the dark for several hours, I'm not tired at all. Coincidence? I think not.

Okay, so I figure I've got nothing better to do, so I watched FOX's showing of The Lost World. Oh boy. I guess considering the alternative was nothing, I suppose it was worth it, but for anything else, definitly no. I did not think that a movie existed that could survive with an introductory exposition less than five minutes in length, yet there it was. I also didn't think a movie could exist with absolutely no single climatic event, yet there it was. Absolutly nothing. Just one thing happened after another. No up or down, just a steady stream of unimportant events. I was in fact suprised when three hours after it started, they were showing credits already. Oh, and I really hate it when they insist that bad things can only happen when it's raining. This was a problem with Jurassic Park as well. I really think that the writer got lazy or the budget ran out too early and they just had to use the pure existance of mud itself to add to the effect of the plot! Not just visual effect, but mud affecting the plot! If there was no mud, these movies would be even more ridiculously boring (hell, they might even make sense!). Oh, and I thought Bernard Shaw's little bit was a pleasant addition the last scene. I wonder how he got CNN to let him do that... Anyway...

I will try my hardest not to turn this into yet another discussion of the fall of moderne society (though I think the cliff is only mere centimetres away). "We're trying to save the universe from collapsing on itself and all you can do is criticize!"

Yes, that's all well and good. Till them errant walls come back and haunt you. Or the television starts talking to you. Or those flying pigs come back. Lets face it, people: this world's a scary place! But don't fret all day long, for there's work to be done! Eventually, if we all work together, we can tear down all the walls of the world so no one will bruise again! [Oh, and the pigs are nothing to worry about... just run whenever you see them.... and they're usually guarding the white elephants, so beware of them too.... they come right after the short-armed monkeys...]

And remember....IT'S ALL ABOUT THE LOBSTERS!

Yep, that's right, I rotated. volume five: oct 1998ad is there. Have fun (watch out, it's big -- 184kb).

Well, without caffeine, I didn't sleep much yesterday. Sound wierd? Not really. You see, caffeine doesn't actually keep you awake once you've drank it for 5 years day after day after day. In fact, it reverses itself. It makes you more tired. [If you think about this, it makes sense. Really. With caffeine you don't sleep well so you must sleep more. Eventually you just become as insane as I've become and you're all happy about it whether you sleep or not. In fact, you notice there's many more important things about sleeping to notice than caffiene....Like having psychadelic dreams... while awake....]

After staring at the walls for several hours trying to figure out just what I was going to do with all my newfound awakeness, I decided to turn on the ol' laptop and talk to somebody. Instead, I read mail. But, you know. Eventually Brock came on and some babbling went on. For some reason at the same time, I was pondering the existance of the world and decided to think about something else.

So, for when she comes to read this bright and early at roughly 0630 every single morn, here's a link to Brock's log so that she, Unger, won't have to use her own. Have fun. [And remember, I host my own pages. I have the rights of an administrator. I have the rights to the viewing habits of my users on this server. Of which you are aparently one.]

Back to business. Finally took the plunge and upgraded GNOME to 0.30 on zeta. Actually, it was quite simple. RPM works better on non-RedHat machines than I'd thought. Using the upgrade option, it did everything all nice and clean. And GNOME even got smaller from .20 to .30! Anyway, I then recompiled gtkFAIM with GNOME support. Looks nice. (Now that I know for myself that it works.) Nice work, Thomas!

As usual, I don't really remember the afternoon much. I'm sure I had some amazing thoughts, but still. Later in the afternoon, I finally got to watch television on my TV! Finally mammatusPrime is streaming video...well...through itself. So it's not impressive, but at least it works. Kind of. The tv image is fine in a smaller window, but at full 640x480 each frame kind of fades into the next one, leaving artifacts behind. Alan says: "Video card or PCI bus I suspect". (He can be so verbose.) My original suspect was the fact that it's running on a 486sx-25, but he didn't agree, obviously. I still think I'll push the clock up to 40mhz or maybe 66mhz just to see if maybe I can get the PCI clock to go up. And I'm out of machines if that doesn't work. This entire project has been one stupid problem after another. Incredible.

Still need to get the audio node running. Then connect the two somehow. The stream interconnect will probably be token ring, with the audio stream running on EsounD or similar. That should be more fun, as I actually know what I'm doing when it comes to networks....

Some app (err...show) on TV was telling me what my problem is recently. It's called random noun syndrome. It's normally associated with Alzheimer's disease. But aparently it can be triggered by various drugs as well. Its where you start talking about random nouns for absolutely no reason. Just pick a noun. Any noun. Then talk about it. You know, mostly like what this log is.

So, for today, I will abstain from mentioning white and pink elephants (and maybe that infamous "clear water") in my deleria. "Nothing like a penguin in the sink!" (some tv ad)

As I said, some people seem to think yesterday was a holiday. I still don't really think so. The only "trick or treater's" that came here consisted of Amanda (no Amanda, that's not you) who came to say hello (with them, it takes a good hour to say "he" and another good 1.5hrs to say "llo").

Before Schickele Mix last night (which was one of the more hilarious episodes in a while), KBAQ[89.5fm] informed me of a better reason to make yesterday a holiday. The 31st day of Octobre is also the day Martin Luther decided to finally publish his grievences with the The Holy Catholic Church, starting the Protestant Revolution. Now wasn't that nice of him? Disregarding the relgious implications, this was a world changing event in the true spirit of the Renessance. Without those 95 pieces of paper the world could still be under the tyranny of overpaid monarchies and rogue aluminium cans!

As it's nearing sunrise, I should probably be going off to do something else. Don't kill anything while I'm gone. Especially white elephants. Oops.