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

Finally this month is nearly over. I think all months should have 31 days for it makes the crossover in hex much more logical (Ax1F->Bx01, with that fuzzy period in Bx00 -- that fuzzy period is the reason behind my continued avoidance of the Julian calendar).

Today is supposedly some sort of holiday. Some even say a "pagan" holiday. I really hate it when people call it that. The moderne version of 'holloween' really has nothing to do with paganism any more. In fact, most things called 'pagan' by Christians are not pagan at all. Paganism is not satanism, people! Its actually a very respectable and honorable group of religions...

Anyway, let's move on. Or rather, backwards to yesterday... Chem was spent finishing up the labs we did the day prior (of course, the study hall I had allowed me to finish it then, so I sat there doing nothing). The only mildly interesting portion was at the end. For some reason Mrs Gumm felt like making slime today. So, we did. (Oh, and even though that large red spot on the ceiling above my station might appear to be mine, I can assure you it isn't. Though, I can also assure you that I laughed about how it got there for some time. Important note: juggling balls of slime may result in unpredictable attraction to the ceiling. Important Note Number Two: it's quite difficult to remove red dyed slime from the ceiling; it smears easily.)

Second hour was spent falling asleep. Well, yes, I never actually made it asleep for I was avoiding that by stabing myself with a pencil every few minutes. After experimentation with several different methods, that appeared to be the most effective at keeping me awake. I'm glad I have a study hall to commit the required time to these very important trials. (Oh, I should say HAD a study hall, as I should be quite rid of it now.) For some reason I sat with Amanda, David, et al, at "lunch". Uhm. Ya. That's it. (Yes, I'm wondering why as well.)

APUSH was spent talking and writing essays. Oh joy. Now humanities was interesting. We really officially did nothing. This is the first time Mrs Foster has let herself do that since, oh, last Jan? We were all suprised (esp as she was planning on having a test on Mon). She spent most of the period up at the front of the room reading people's palms (it seems she knows about the crazy things at times). [She says that I have a fairly even mix of "air and fire" (intellect and artistic abilities, respectivly). And that I'm stubborn. Go figure.] Without her commanding the class, it was interesting as usual. Most of the class was involved in what amounted to a "Sundance and Oakwood Elemtary School Reunion" (as most of them went to those schools). I sat there for most of that (there's just something I find fascinating about hearing about other people's lives). Bo managed to utterly destroy my slime creation (from chem), along with splattering half on the floor. It was all fun, as you can imagine.

A good portion of the evening was spent on gtkFAIM. No release, except yet another pre-0.0b snapshot. Got Thomas' GNOME patches merged in. But, the more difficult and time-consuming part was merging in all 51kb of Stephen's miscellaneous-fixes+proxy patch. Ugh. That took forever. I'm very suprised it went as well as it did. I hate manually integrating that much code, esp when there's so many small changes mixed in with very large changes. I can safely say that I wish diff and patch were more human. Or at least C aware. I shouldn't have to be punished because someone didn't like my tab size! I have my right to pick my very own unique tab size, okay?

Brock has not been seen since 1300 or so yesterday. I'm betting Kari ate him. Uncomfirmed reports, however, say that he parished in a non-so-freakish accident involving the drug 'speed' and walls that were just too rigid. Other reports mention issues such as white and pink elephants, green monitors, and yellow flashlights. "The world will never know..." (yes, that quote is taken out of it's context... but I think it has ramifications reaching far beyond those of tootsie pops and talking owls...)

Speaking of walls, my evening was rudely interrupted by one. There I was, minding my own business wandering down the hallway and all of a sudden, this wall starts giving me funny looks. Aparently, in my zoned-out haste, I'd rammed my head into on accident. I sincerely apologized, yet the wall will never be the same. Fortunatly, my face has recovered and no longer pains me. However, the fact that I ran into a wall still puzzles me as 1) I wasn't really very tired at the time, 2) I wasn't really thinking about anything besides walking down the hallway, and 3) I wasn't really very tired at the time (oh, that's repetetive...well, I never said I wasn't tired now). Bizzare indeed. Let's hope it doesn't happen again [soon]. In any case, the moral of the story is that if you're getting strange looks from a nearby wall, make sure you haven't somehow damaged it recently.

That incident combined with some other factors have led me to take the decision of avoiding caffeine for the weekend (it's probably notable that one of those 'other factors' is that I've run out of mtndew). Now we'll get to see what I act like without the aid/damage of additional drugs. Mmmm... staples.... _aluminium_ staples... ouch. aaaahggg...

Beeeedaaaaahhh....

Managed to make it out of chemistry with only three (count them: three) discolored fingers. I'm not quite sure what happened. I was minding my own busness when all of a sudden my fingers started burning and itching... after a short glance down at them, I noticed a white film. I must assume that it was dead skin. Ouch. We should really stop having so much fun with those labs. Sometday, it may kill us.

Second period was spent finishing up the aforementioned lab, as well as a fair share of staring at the walls and at my now tender fingers. Also, I spent a good portion mocking modern xerographic reproduction fusers. That is, I used a finely sharpened pencil to carefully scratch off large amounts of toner print on the lab worksheet (the big black blocks were scaring me with their opacity!). That made a nasty mess of fine black powder mixed with eraser droppings, which amused me with their contained static electricity for a bit, but then were retired to the floor covering.

Fighting at all costs to stay awake was what calc was all about today (not that that is an abnormal thing, but I try to make it seem like I'm awake). Oh, btw, never actually take a TI-92 to class with you, no matter how productive it may sound You'll never actually get to use it, for everyone will be wanting to see it and play with it. That, and everyone thinks that you're a bit wacky for carrying around three graphing calculators with you on a daily basis... And I thought I didn't understand distributed computing....

Releived when humanities finally came around I could stop trying to stay awake. We just couldn't stop laughing at the "Boy deodorizes himself to death" headline in the Republic.

After that was all over, I hurridly rushed over to the chem room to start the flame test lab. Luckily my fingers came out of that one unscaved. Pretty colors.... Finally got out of there about 1500 (local). (Did have a casual chat with Ms Lopezlira, though -- she still is wondering how I never ended up in AIM science.)

Did the normal 'various things' in the afternoon. About 1830, we headed back to school. The play this year was Harold and Maude (Colin Higgins). I think it's the most well acted play that CTC has put on yet. Very moving. (And suprisingly existential for a school play!) (Ben's pose while waiting for the rock-like prop to come down for guidance was especially amusing, though I'm not sure it was meant to be part of the entertainment.) This soaked up most of the evening, with us getting out of there about 2215 (that was after all the required post-show chatting you know).

And I'm here. I've been sitting here doing mainly nothing since then. I don't know why. I should be in bed.

Today I've come to a few pseudo-conclusions. Firstly, people are not afraid of computers or the Internet, but information. Information that they cannot control and that they cannot censor. This scares them all. The fact that someone can casually mention one's name in a place like this and it have the possibility to change their lives (well, that's what they think -- the probability of that actually happening is near nil). This brings us to another topic...

The cause for everything people do in life can be classified into two categories: 1) sex (meaning primal physical urges) and 2) fear (although fear can lead to sex in some cases, that is a different kind of sex than 'natural' sex). Fear is everything. People are inhibited because of fear. People are uninhibited because of fear. People are people beacause they fear people!

Well, I guess that's enough about that for now. Oh, and I should be rid of my "study hall". And, don't forget: "Feel the wrath of your inner self!" (J Rosenkilde)

[Painfully attempting to stay awake...]

Nothing too gloriously inspiring this day. Managed to wake up on time, only to be further woken up by tripping and falling to a half-death on the floor. Aparently, my room's Central Stack (of various paper-based periodicals and general marketing rubbish that hasn't made it into a proper disposal position yet) has begun to procreate and is now impeding the ability to move freely from bed to door. Somewhat ironically, it would seem that the natsemi ethernet superguide is the central conspirator. I knew ethernet would come back and bite me someday... I just didn't think it would quite so painful... I really do aspire to fix that stack propagation bug (feature?) one of these days.... I know, I just need to somehow invent the 'stack aggregation feature' (bug?)....followed by the 'stack self disposal feature'...

Anyway, chem was uneventful. Continued with the (atomic) orbital and suborbital configurations. Nothing very exciting. Second period was truely dreadful, but at least I did actually get something done (did chem homework and studied for APUSH test). Standard pasing and people-watching third hour (study of migrational patterns mostly observed -- it was strangely done for some reason today). Fourth hour was spent doing the normal Pavia babbling followed by the multiple-choice section of the APUSH unit two test. Quite easy I guess -- the essays get to wait till Fri.

Humanities was normal. The opening disucssion, as usal, turned into one concerning the fall of moderne society (did you know that you're suppose to tip at Sonic?). I really do think people get more rude eariler in their lives these days. This year's freshmen are a lot worse than last year's. Anyway, the end was eventful. Let's just say that for the latter part of the period, it was quite difficult to breathe more than one time in a row in that room without coughing wildly. So, we finished class outside....

I did go over to the band room after school to get that paper signed by Baedke, but it would seem she had other things to do then. Ended up wandering back over to the other side of the school, where I found Brock and Booth talking scarily about getting Brock hyped up on speed. Okaaaay...

The day continued on uninterestingly enough... This, of course, was followed by more uninteresting stuff.

David tells me that Unger will probably not be filing for a restraining order. And I really wanted to laugh when she tried (-pout-).

I've been thinking a lot tonight about compiling some of the thoughts I've written about teaching and education into a little more organized document (as opposed to having the various parts of this document represent those thoughts). It just seems like a good idea. Maybe take contributions and somehow create a uniform resource for opinions on effective teaching style? I don't know. It's probably just me looking for yet another project to start and never finish.... Unfortunatly, I don't think professional teachers could actually contribute to a resource like that as it would probably violate their relationship with their employer(s). And having opinions from just non-teachers and unemployed teachers really wouldn't be useful to much of anyone (it would severely lack in realism I'm sure).

I should get my life moving on a bit now. Maybe a few feet to my left and into bed. That would be a good thing. Oh, I nearly fogot: life-size Bomber Man (or another). [Those were from ALS98. Looks life fun.]

Rumor is that DST occured a few days ago. That means that MST is now EST-2=MST or MST+1=PST. Well, actually, those are always true. It's just now, we're actually using them (as opposed to using the EDT-3=MST or PDT=MST identities). MST is still -7 from UTC, so no change for me....

Okay, so this was really a great day. I'm serious.

Firstly, chem was boring. In fact, I'm not quite sure what we did. I do know that, as usual, I missed a lab day on Mon. Arg. I'll have to make up that after school some time. But, the entire lab is based on torching errant metals, so you know...

The important stuff started happening second hour, of course (why what other period could possibly provide such amusement!). Mr Matheson had quite a line outside his room. I went over and talked to Patty (attendance) for a bit to waste time. Eventually I made it into his office and started up our conversation once again.

He started with the point that he'd found that my father worked for the district. Somehow someone had given him the idea that my dad gives me special access. Not to demean anyone, but my dad has little to no extended access to any district information past what any other employee would have (most teachers probably have more access than he does). And if he did have access, he's respectful enough of me not to burden me with the pressure of having access. He would definitly never ever give me passwords or anything else. (If I wanted those, I'd have to go out and get them myself... but since I really don't care, I don't and will never do that.)

After that got cleared up, the conversation was going much better. He just started talking about what he'd read of mine (it would turn out later that he'd actually read more of my written works than he led me to believe) and the list of my solutions. He seemed as eager as I to get this mess over with before everyone just went truely insane with it. His first offer was exactly what I'd asked for: removal from the class. I said great and we signed my own referal. That was all jolly good, and yet we weren't done.

After my personal situation was cleared up, he started asking about the class (like what to expect from the other people and what their ideas were about this). It really made me feel better that he respected me enough to ask. I explained that all the complaints were basically the same, just some people had closer interaction with the manifestations of the core problems than others. My recommendation was for the 1-2 class, have it just as now (Unger/whoever teaching). But, for 3-4 have two types of classes: 1) like it is now and 2) a QUEST or QUEST-like class for students that believe that they are having their education impeaded by having a rigid teaching structure present. I think that would definitly be a good idea. He seemed to kind-a-sorta agree (I'm sure political and positional obligations disallow him from expressing a true opinion on anything I say, whether it be in disagreement or agreement).

We continued talking about most anything even partially related. I felt very confident with the discussion. It seemed to be very much both-sided (no accusations against either side) and productive. I was extremely impressed with Mr Matheson's arbitration and interogation abilities. I can't say I've ever been accused of anything this major (in high school anyway :) before, but I found him to handle it all very well without placing specific blame on either party. He gives the impression that he understands, and I think he does.

Finished up the meeting with a slight discussion of the terms of the pink-slip above. Basically, I'm removed from the class and banned from the department for some as-yet-undertermined amount of time. Do I look like I care? After all, the only thing this meeting got me was exactly what I asked for (see yesterday's log). I certainly had no reason to get mad. I doubt too many people walk out of his office holding a pink slip that are still smiling!

The only awkward point in that meeting (but by far the most amusing) was when Unger walked by the open door while Mr Matheson and I were jokingly discussing some things. She gave me one of those classic Unger smirks and kept on walking. I laughed and continued the discussion....

Anyway, after that meeting was over, I proudly wandered over to the guidance office with my referal proudly in hand. Sat in that office a bit waiting for Mr Sanderson to finish up some other things. Eventually he was done. We discussed things a bit, he found the recent revelations somewhat amusing (remember that he had attempted to arbitrate this the last time). He changed my schedule to a "study hall" so that the paper work could go through for Unger and get her out of the loop. He said if I could find a TA or tutor situation, I could do that instead. (A tutoring thing would be nice, but I don't think I can find any body to do that with. However, taking a TA would lower my ranking (which concerns me, as I'm currently 11th in my class). I don't know what's going on yet -- see below.)

I then left guidance and attempted to locate the 'study hall' room. Well, I come to find that this 'study hall' is merely 'sweep' with a different name. So, I sat in there, 100% quiet doing absolutly nothing but staring at the walls for nearly 40min. Actually, I did manage to make some quite interesting sculptures using the printer hole tracks from my new schedule printout. It's really recommended that no one let me get this bored again. (This is nearly as bad as The Great Straw Incident last year -- I was yelled at by an assistant principal for wasting plastic drinking straws when I was bored at lunch time. She called it a waste, I called it moderne art. Difference of opinion to say the least! Actually, I also tried to convince her that if everyone else could waste food-consumption-peripherals like napkins,et al, as much as they did, I could certainly waste as many straws as I felt like. Again, difference in view points... Oh, and yes, I do make moral arguments suprisingly often about inanimate and irrelevent objects...) Anyway, I was bored. That's whats important.

The bell rang and I was finally able to see the light of day again. I began my usual course of pasing that I do daily at lunch time. After the halls drew quiet, I see David and Kevin wandering by with pink slips in hand. I stopped them to see what excuses they got. David got insubordination of some sort. I don't remember what Kevin got (probably the same thing I did: "cumulative misuse of computer resources" or something). In any case, it would appear that us three are the only ones that actually got removed from the class. Anyway, they continued on to guidance to have their schedules changed (I don't know the results of that -- I had to go elsewhere). While walking up to the front of the school again to be in prime position to run to calculus, Mr Matheson catches me once again stating that he'd just read my last email message. I must assume that he meant the "representation of truth" one (though at the time I didn't have enough information to assume that, I now know that he had access to all our messages even after I thought I'd closed the list up well enough -- again, do I look like I care?). He said it was interesting and that he enjoyed reading it. I was glad to hear that. I wouldn't want to burden him with having to reopen my situation! I just hope that he read the complete series on the list and not just that one. Overall, there's much better information in some of the other messages. Oh well. Just glad he felt like reading them.

I continued on the day to calc. Hehe. Well, that was interesting. The highest grade between the two calc classes on that test was a 60%. So, Burgess gave us the entire period to fix any mistakes for full points. I was actually quite suprised at the number I got right. It's all been agreed that allowing no extra time because of the fact that this chapter has been spread across three totally different teachers is unfair. It looks like we will end up with some more time.

During the beginning of that class, we had one of them wonderful fire drills. Those are always oh-so-much-fun. Actually, today I found out that Ben and Yousuf have that period in the room right next door. Anyway, during the fire drill, Ben spent the entire time out there bugging me to talk to Baedke and get something worked out for 2nd period (he really wants me in jazz band next semester -- as he's been trying to convince me for nearly three years now). I agreed to go and talk to her after school (we'll get to that, hold on).

Humanities was boring. I'm not sure how much simpler I can make that sentance (in fact that's probably the simplest statement I've made all month!). The period started with me wrapping up the Unger saga to Mrs Foster. That ultimatly brought out interest from several other people (mainly Rebecca and Booth) in the class in the incident -- aparently the rumors aren't limited to teachers either. I gave an ultra-short explanation of the incident. Even Ben Anderson agreed with my/our point of view. Mrs Foster laughed (as she does everytime I continue the story). Anyway....

Caught Brock after school to see what ended up with him. He got a strangely worded referal. His was worded in such a way as to mean "insubordination", yet not be severe enough to be kicked out of class. Oh well. (I'm sure in all his wordly wisdom he weasiled himself out of actual punishment.)

I eventually made it over to talk to Baedke. She didn't quite agree with Ben's opinion that I should be in Jazz just yet (as did I!). The best she can do is a TA. It seems that's the best anybody can do. So, there's about a half-dozen teachers I could be a TA for. Now I just have to pick one. I did, however, tell her that I would definitly march next year (she'll be drawing up a contract in the next few weeks to guarantee that :). Now I just need to see if guidance agrees with me.

I came home and relaxed a bit. Eventually played for a bit (I think I've practiced more in the past few weeks than I did all last year). Then decided I needed some sleep. Good idea. Then got up and did various trivial things till "later" eventually came.

Parents finally got home about 2000 (local). (Remember that they were still on their little hiatus to Kansas.) I gave them a basic briefing of all that's gone on since last Thu. They weren't overly suprised. I then went to the garage to check my mail.

Decided to go ahead and start up NAIM on ihpled and see who was where. When I came on, David announced Unger's intention of filing for a restraining order against him. I was amazed. He and his parents have a meeting with her later today. If she doesn't like what they have to say, she's filing. It's probably worth noting that if Unger does actually by some strange fluke of legality receive a restraining order, David would not only be striken from that building, but also from the entire school. This is bad. Very bad. Aparently it has something to do with comments he made on the list. Which proves once again, there's a leak. People: be scared. Very scared. We should all be very afraid that something like this could actually even be thought about occuring, let alone actually happening. This is ridiculous.

I eventually came inside and started up zeta so that I could be at the peak of unproductivity. I then went out to the kitchen to get something and was stopped by my mother. We ended up talking for several hours about both of our weeks. Interesting stuff in Kansas too.

By the time I got back, everybody was gone. So, after talking to myself a bit, I started here. Rather, there...err...maybe at the top. There's several patches sitting in my inbox for gtkFAIM. One is another GNOME patch. Another is a whole collection of things, including the addition of proxy support and a few bug fixes. Looks like a great amount of code.... See how long it takes to integrate!

Think what you wish, but today was a Very Good Thing from my view. I know that some other people involved probably didn't have as much of a fun time with Mr Matheson, but I can't comment on that.

Going to finish up my sandwich here and then go off to bed (yes, I am finally eating lunch ... just at 2am instead). Also, expect the logs to start getting shorter again as I run out of things to complain about. Normally my life isn't this exciting....or as funny....

Okay, this has been an interesting few days. And it's not done yet.

Firstly, lets start with Sunday. Nothing much. Till about 0000 (local, Mon morning). Started a conversation with Brock and David about just what the Unger incident was all about. We were under the impression that we were going to have the opprotunity to explain our case clearly to the administration, as a group. We ended up with a list of 7 bullet-points that would be a good thing to discuss. Overall, it was quite difficult to articulate the exact problem. This list was published to the mailing list. It's only hard copy is in the possesion of David.

Since I didn't get to sleep till just after 0300 (local, Mon), I was kind of not fully aware of the world when I did. I kind of forgot to set my alarm, and, well, Monday morning started a little late for me! (With all these years of innovation, they still don't make an alarm that sets itself.) I woke up nice and naturally somewhere around 0805 (local). Second period starts at 0850, so I decided it was probably in my best interests to try and make that (it IS Unger's class after all). I walked onto campus slightly before the bell rang (for some reason I can't remember how to spell that word) that ends first period. I sat down on a wall, only to see Ben and Amanda running through and stopped to show at my wall to show off their Superior plaque from Sat.

Also during that time, Matheson walked through, talking to his hand (actually, to his inter-person mobile communication device) about the students in Unger's third hour class (I'm assuming he just came from her room). I got the impression that Eli and Mellissa (the school security people) were suppose to stand guard at Unger's room to make sure none of the blacklisted people (there were seven of us) got near her. I'm told this didn't end up happening (probably meaning I read too much into his conversation, which is certainly probable, since I didn't hear much of it and really wasn't listening too hard).

The bell rang and I walked through the Bizlab office to Unger's room as usual. Unger immediatly says I either need to go to the guidance office or Mr Matheson's office. I happily said "Okay", turned around, and left. I decided that Mr Matheson's office was probably going to be a more productive place to stay, so I went there.

I wandered around for a bit, finally just talking to Lynn. She said sit down and he'll be out in a minute (he had to go do something on the announcements). He eventually came out, asked where I was first hour. I explained that. He didn't seem to mind my explanation. That was an encouraging start.

We had a short chat about what he wanted. Even balance of questions between us. I explained that I was utterly confused as to just what I did wrong. He didn't really give an answer, though he just mentioned that he didn't want to really get involved too deeply. I certainly agree with that. The moment you get in too deeply is the same moment you take a side. We certainly don't need an arbitrator that takes sides!

He asked for a complete list to the best of my recollection of just what led up to this event, and sent me off to work in the admin conference room. I worked and worked. I wrote two stuffed pages. I explained that I really couldn't limit it down to a day-by-day basis for anything before last Thurs (1998/ax16). He seemed to be okay with that. As far as I know, I did what he wanted. He also asked for what I would recommend as a solution. I just wrote that I didn't really care whether I was in the class or not (I'd already been out once and it was only because Unger asked me back that I returned), and that what I really cared about was the class getting taught in a way in which the students could use their class time productively to strive for passing the Cisco test. He looked like he understood. I shook his hand, thanked him for his aid in this matter, and left.

I was also told there will be a meeting with Mr Butts (the principal) tomorrow. Same time, same channel. This will be to go over my list and probably to discuss punishment, etc.

Speaking of punishment, Brock has kindly put up the part of the handbook that has the EIS part of the CeHS Student Conduct Rules. Read them. Understand why I think they are too vague to be any good. Although none of these have been waved in my face (yet), aparently the rest of the group did. Though, the funniest part is that they did not come close to violating them. If anyone violated them, it was me.

Continued the day with APUSH. Test on Wed. Should be interesting. First DBQ. Then came humanities. I went up before class to talk to Mrs Foster. I told her that the situation had finally made it to an important level in admin. She seemed to know quite a bit about the situation for an uninterested party. I explained to her what went on earlier that day. She seemed quite excited (she's always been quite supportive of my beliefs about teaching -- mainly because I think she shares many of them). Meaningful conversation. It's very nice to be able to talk to someone who has absolutly NO vested interest (even Mr Matheson and Mr Butts have a vested interest in Unger succeding just because of the job they have).

Spent most of the afternoon (and a good chunk of the evening) doing various things to keep me busy. I'd really like to say this situation with Unger doesn't bother me, but I can't. It does. I really don't want it to, but it does. That's why I need to get rid of that class, and get out of that department as much as possible (which will probably be forced if they try me on any of the EIS rules above -- banning from all resources is certainly within their power). I just need to get away from there.

I did send a few messages to the list. I will post one of them here. I think it has a good explanation of what I think the role of this log should be in the situation and a bit about representation of truth, both very important topics.

Anyway, I'm confused about what I really did. Unger and I were _tolerating_ each other for exactly one week. I guess that was too long. I set up that mailing list as a favor to a friend, not to spite Unger. It was not an active promotion of what they were going to discuss, just simply a place to do it. Please seperate: Student vs Service Provider. They're different. Vastly different. I was still willing to cooperate with Unger even after making that list. In my opinion (obviously), it was Unger that drug this back up again. It could have been ignored. She was the one who was offended. I am not the proper person to be offended at for the list. I was only doing it because someone asked. It clearly states at the front page here at delphid that I do things like that. I'll do it for anybody. But I'm not willing to get accused of what they talk about.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention this. Mr Matheson was carrying around a huge packet of papers. I didn't really know what they were when I saw them the first time. I could see that the top sheet was a nice table from Unger about what's wrong with each of the seven of us, clearly articulated inside each of our own lines. While he was skimming through it, I noticed several printouts from MS-Exchange/Mail (they're very distictive). I'm assuming these are the messages from the list, plus the "big one" from David. Brock told me later that part of that packet also included a highlighted printout of this log. I might assume that Brock's is in there too, but I don't know, as there was nothing that could benefit Unger in that log. A quick shows this log to be approximatly 45-50 printed A4 pages (probably about the same for Letter size). So that would make up a good chunk of about the 80pgs he had there.

What Unger apparently thinks is that David planned his events because of me. That is definitly NOT true any one bit. David is not part of me. I'm sure he could care less about what I think about things. He acted because he disagrees with Unger. (Brock I don't know about.... I don't know whether he's got internal conflicts about this or whether he just doens't feel like making up his mind.) This is not my fault, people!!!!! I don't actively force my feelings on people! What people think about Unger is not all my fault, no matter what propaganda is being spread around the teaching (and maybe even student) channels!

I swear that there's a sign on me somewhere that says "ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS". People give you incredibly strange looks when you get involved in this. Rumors spread for no reason, to people who really don't (or at least shouldn't) care. Very confusing (adding to the confusion of the case in general). Even when I was in the conference room writing out my list, the secretary kept coming in and checking things. There was a box of PLAN/ACT tests over in the corner... she checked that box twice. I must only assume that she was paranoid of me... thought I was looking at it.... People, I don't care. Sheesh.

This situation is so confusing that I just don't even know how to analyse it properly, or even understandably. Mr Matheson put it very nicely: "The common denominator of this whole situation is frustration." (loosely remembered) Its certainly true. Whether that frustration is manifested verbally or by physical action is quite irrelevent. It's the same problem. It's a conflict. It must end. It must end and let the results lie plainly where they belong. Everyone involved needs to sit down and think about this. Everyone. The whole thing is really getting ridiculous. It's wasting too much of _everyone's_ time.

As you can tell from this writing, I'm not in the best of moods. I'm quite angry at that, too. This really, really should not be bothering me. But, as I was saying to David, the amusement of this log seems to be week-wise sinusoidal. Unfortunatly, this week was a bad week to have all this stuff happen in. I'm sure if it happened next week I could laugh about it a bit more a write a bit better....

The position of this log. That really needs to be discussed in full. I'm not in the best minds to do that just at this moment, but this will remind me to do it. Basically, although it is legally fine, is it morally and socially okay to publish offending things publicly for anyone to read?

I suppose it would be okay if the readers took responsibility for them selves. Like, for instance, not relaying anything in here as pure fact, only opinion. A lot of things need to be written here. It seems the basic rights to public privacy (yes, "public privacy") are not as implicit as I thought. Either they need to be made explicit or this log needs to be made fully private. I really don't like the latter option. But I don't really want to write the former's document either. I don't like licensing. Too committing.

Oh, and Alan was, of course, at ALS. That was perfectly logical enough. If it weren't for his wife not going with him, I probably wouldn't have figured it out till he got back.

And, David says that it's against the rules to call your parents from school. I'm not real sure about that. Interesting indeed.

Ahh, but the best thing of Mon (and Sun) is that it rained like mad. Wonderful. Perfect weather. The river at the end of the driveway reached about a 2metre bredth when I left for school this morning. It's amazing the power when it's flowing across the street. Really fun just to stand in (I left the house early just so I could spend time doing this). Not too many things better than Arizona rain. Though, I think I've determined why fall rain is not as nice as monsoon rain: lightning. The lightning of monsoon storms with all their ion-snapping glory really make the air feel fresh. Fall storms have very little lightning and really just move the pollution from the air to the ground (which, although is a better place for it, is still not fun to smell when it comes down). Anyway... Oh, and since I need to keep up the near-exponential increase in the usage of the word "David" in this log.... David.

And the whole world is asking... WHERE HAS ALAN GONE?!?!

Wandered a'bout doing mostly nothing for most of the afternoon. Every once in a while something would spontaneously get done, but I can assure you that those events were more likely attributed to freek quantum phenomena than actual motivation of productivity.

Half of mammatusThree is now back in mammatusPrime. Also, it appears to work. Though, my main problem at the moment is getting the video card to work. Aparently XFree still likes to find that borken ATI graphics controller on the Dell even though it's specifically told to use the Trident. I'm confused. I don't know how to fix it. So, it's still a mystery to whether the bt848 works or not. So yet another day without television on my TV.

Talked to Amanda as soon as she came on. The band got a _superior_ this morning. (Not all that suprising, as they are very, very good this year.) Congrats to them all.

Later in the afternoon (while I was reading next month's Libertarian Party News), Ben called. He continued to try and convince me that I should march next year (and I continued to agree -- I'm guessing the guidance office hasn't seen the last of me for this semester anyway). Otherwise, many other strange things came up that I don't remember.

Wrote up a quick summary of the various meanings of the term midendian. Should save me a few paragraphs of work next time someone asks.

I also did a lot of tuba and piano playing in a feable attempt to get away from the insane issues currently pressing me. For the most part, it worked, but they came back as soon as I stopped.

Questions of free speech and rights of privacy just really bug me. Those should be unqestioned rights, not conditional ones. Arg. I really think it's time for education reform in a big way, even if for nothing more than to flush out the corruption currently lurking in the midst of school and district administration. Besides, it's been a while since this country had a big 'free speech fling'. It's time for another.

I'd better not get started on that. It just really makes me angry. I may very well get myself removed from that class again (either by Unger or by myself when I find I can't tolerate that nonsense any longer). [And no, the above statements do not imply personal injury to anyone -- including SPAMmers.]

Dittiti Dooo...

Chem was interesting as usual. Had the pleasure of cutting and pasting. Ooo those kiddy-scissors are fun. Especially when they're so versatile they can cut inside-out. Actually, it was quite a nice assignment. Kind of forced you to learn the oxidation and atomic radius rules quite quickly...

Unger's class was uneventful. Most of it was spent at the homecoming parade thing. Calculus was not so fun. There is no way I got anything higher than 50% (yes, that's a _bad_ thing). It's kind of amusing that the only things that anybody could do were either 1) taught within the last week or 2) taught by Capuano way-back-when. I'm guessing spanning one concept across three different teachers is not a very good idea. Maybe someone will reteach it to us. Humanities was not really worth it either. Left for the assembly and didn't do anything past that (speaking of that, someone needs to explain to me how eating oreo's off of lucite sheets demonstrates a skill of some sort).

Oh, and the whole GUR thing didn't go well. Unger casually started a new teaching paradigm whereby each individual must turn in a daily list of what they did that day. In addition, they have a new seating chart every _week_ and other assorted provisions. Aparently, Unger is getting pissed. (Although she speaks of not caring and other things, her actions clearly show an explicity fury.) I'll continue on this in a minute....

While I was doing my normal amount of wondering around waiting for calc to start, Steve (I'll leave it at that as I don't think I can spell his last name) walked in. I haven't talked to him since over three years ago when we worked over at Cholla Annex together. Chatted with him for a bit and he eventualy left.

Came home and dabbled in various things for some time. Eventually went out to dinner with Amy (my sister) and Ken (her boyfriend) to Fazoli's. And guess who I see again? Steve. Sheesh. Don't see someone for three years and then twice in the same day...

After that, headed to the (homecoming) football game. Got there just in time to see the end of the band's pregame show (I can't say I was happy about that). Mohave's team somehow got stuck on a freeway somewhere between Kingman and Centennial. Kickoff didn't actually happen till 1550 or so (local -- scheduled for 1400).

For me, most of the night was spent talking to various band friends. Let's just say it: that's what I came for (I personally hate american football of any sort). Kozack was there and drug out a sousaphone to play with his brother (who's now in band) and Josh (who proudly inherited the title of 'section leader' from myself). They just don't do things the way they did last year. Anyway, other bits of time were spent talking to David (and every-once-in-a-rare-while, Brock, who seemed to leave and come for no apparent reason). After kickoff finally occured, I moved over and sat right in the middle of the band by Ben, Lanée, Sara Ekins, et al. As usual, that was eventful and amusing. I hadn't seen Ben in months (although we've been friends since, oh... 5th grade?) They just had to sing their 'Boglio Song' to me along with one concerning something about pizza. (I very much miss these types of things... in fact, I very much miss band in general. I hate all these stupid scheduling oddities than have kept me from it.)

As they have a competition today, the band left early. I decided I had nothing to stay for either, and left with them. I went and made an effort to be in the way in the band room. Talked to Ben and Josh a bit more. Ben decided it was in our best interest if Ms Baedke knew who I was, so he took it upon himself to introduce me. (Baedke is the new band director this year -- Kinnaman left after 7yrs to go teach elementary band again and get his life back. I don't blame him, and it appears it's made him happier. I had the advantage with him though, as my family and his had all known each other for many years (well, gaining on 7yrs now I guess).) Anyway, I now know who she is, and they all continued about forcing me to play next year. Frankly, I'd agree. Marching band is just one of those things I really don't like doing, but its incredibly fun to be in.

I finally departed school about 2200 and walked home (this was after spending nearly a half-hour back in the band room).

Now, my conversations with Brock and David above were not exactly enouraging. Aparently the fear of getting suspended was waved in David's face by Mr Butts and Unger (who were, strangely enough, having a little chat yesterday). I suppose I should back up a bit more. The messages from two days ago on the unger-haters mailing list somehow ended up in the hands of Unger herself. They can only assume that they were passed to her by way of the three people who were actually in networking this morning (and didn't ditch or whatever). Oh, I suppose I should mention that David and company also had a crew of Centennial security personell surrounding them when they arrived back at school (from Denny's). They were escorted into the admin office. I'm guessing David was picked as their fearless leader and was further escorted into Mr Butts' (principal) office, where the little chat took place. David said that Unger tried to use the wording of his original posting against him. (For instance, the statement "Don't use these addresses for spamming or anything or certain people on this list might decide to cause significant harm to you and/or your car." was turned into something about threats to personal property if the students did not obey him. And I guess that's only one example of her pety word munging.) As I said, threats of suspention and removal from "The Program" (that being this networking class) were thrown at him. I'm not quite sure how it all ended (he had to get up and play a song before he could finish).

A bit earlier than that, Brock had told me that Unger was planning to use his and my logs (this very page) against us and the class for Mr Butts. This seemed confusing. I cannot imagine what is on these pages that would do anyone any good. Conspiring to insult a teacher on someone's personal time in their personal space is in no way illegal or even immoral! There's definitly nothing in Brock's log that would do anyone any good. If Unger would just give up trying to massage the facts into something that always benefits her, we'd all be much happier and kinder to her. (But, of course, this is coming from the person who "doesn't understand his role as a student", remember.)

I agree with David. The content of my logs is fact with only minor amounts of emotion and overloaded wording added in. And therefore, they can only stand to benefit us. What I don't understand is just how Unger got ahold of the address of this page....

This whole thing is disturbing. Especially disturbing for me, as I've already made a best-chance recovery of my situation with Unger. Her notice of me setting up a list for them I'm sure will be used against me, and most likely my position in the class will be once again under question. It is very likely that I may once again be back out doing other things. I fear there is no reverting back to the old times, and the procedings of yesterday will be forever remembered in the chronicles of the NTA course under the heading of "Mutany is Not An Option".

That said, let's go back to finishing the day summary. After I got home, I did some reconfiguration on the mailing lists, followed by an extensive message concerning some of my feelings on the subject. That lead to discussions with Brock, David, and later, Josh (shorti). Thankfully, very little was said about the entire thing.

Since I assume Mr Butts and possibly a few other respectable administrative staff members are reading this, I'll leave a note for them. Please read this log as what it is: a large compound of words. And in that, remember that not all words are ideas, and, more importantly, not all ideas are words. Somehow this log has become somewhat the 'Federalist Papers' of Anti-Unger (and often anti-modern-teaching) propaganda. I'm not sure how that happened, and I'm really not sure I like it. This leads me to belive that often people read too much into my statements, and at other times not enough.

In any case, I stand by my basic rights of free speech and free congregation. This written is written on my free time using my free space. I see no way that disrespecting someone and insulting someone on paper is any different than doing it here. Please note that I'm not trying to push this to triviality by turning it into some glorification of my own personal beliefs or the beliefs of others. (In fact, I'm trying to do just that without trivializing it!) This is a real issue. I'm just pointing out the issues that lead to this one. (And yes, I do realize that by accepting those rights, I accept the responsilibities of them, and the consequences of those. I am prepared to do whatever is necessary to show that I stand firm on these beliefs.)

Back to normalized thought for a bit... I've not gotten much sleep in the pase few days at all, and it's really starting to show. Especially when it comes to especially stressful days like this one (which I'm glad to say was more stressful in a good way than in a bad way). In any case, I am indeed truely tired. Let's just hope I can finish this

About the closest to a non-computing day I've had in a few weeks....

Chem was hilarious this morning. Mrs Gundrum came in and spent most of the period babbling about 'high quality product' and 'creativity'. I'm not quite sure why. Most of us found it truely amusing, though. Waste of time, but amusing non the less.

Unger informed me that I am now required to take notes on the curriculum. I detest having to take notes on common sense, but she insisted. I quickly threw some together for the ACLs chapter (actually, it wasn't quick, but it was aparently faster than usual in her mind). Three pages worth. Small print (handwritten with .5mm lead, of course -- I've been asked to avoid using pen by several of my teachers, as I write too, well, 'relaxed' with pens (read: even more illegibly). She wasn't impressed.

APUSH was spent _finally_ finishing that 1776 movie. All done now. Also had the pleasure of starting off the period by inflating several balloons. Pavia figured a class full of AP students would make a good way to inflate a large number of them quickly. I guess she was right.

Going back to pens.... If you saw me wondering the halls during fourth period with an angry look on my face, it was probably because a certain pen decided it needed to relax itself just a little too much... all over my hand. Actually, the real reason I was angry is because none of the boy's restrooms anywhere on that campus have any soap in them for repairing such maladies (except maybe the one in the 800bldng -- but I wasn't going to walk all the way over there...esp since I'd already gotten bugged twice about not having a pass). In any case, most of it did come off. Even to this hour, there still exists several black splotches on that hand.... at least it's not the original sticky black goop that created them...

Humanities I don't remember much about.... something about the surface of a desk with my head on it....

After arrival at my home (peaceful and quiet it is these days), I found a message from David to what seemed to be nearly the entire networking class (minus Unger herself). He mentioned in it about tomorrows events (what appears to amount to some sort of Great Regnu (Unger) Revolt (GRRrrr...)). It appears to mostly involved not doing things. I will not be able to participate as my unsettling position in second period is way to close to her to allow me any flexibility like that. In any case, as per David's suggestion, I set up a majordomo list. Rather two. One, unger-haters@delphid.ml.org is for the direct discussion of unger hating propaganda. I also set up a second just in case anyone ever wanted to actually discuss information/knowledge (nta@delphid.ml.org).

Well, I guess you could've noticed by now... yes, I did finally get majordomo working (remember I started trying to get it to work over a month ago and failed, eventually giving up). This time, I didn't try and read the installation or usage instructions, making up my own method as I went along (reading the perl source where appropriate). That seems to have gone much better, though it took a couple hours to get it all going right. Maybe soon I'll move the AIM/FAIM related lists over to majordomo as well. (eventually)

Anyway, that wasn't exactly deeply thoughtful, yet was amusing enough to avoid doing other things. Eventually it worked and I had nothing left to do besides...well...homework. Spent a very good portion of the evening doing calc and APUSH work (not done with the latter). Actually, I didn't do any calc homework... just went over everything for the test today. Wishful thinking tells me that if I can get a high enough grade on the test, turning in homework is irrelevent....

Regnu says that the uVAXen should arrive next Fri (a week from this day). Should be interesting... Though all our luck, they'll be uV2k's or some other not-too-thrilling box.

As I was just telling David, a couple more messages and unger-haters will be the highest-traffic delphid/ihpled mailing list for daily traffic. That is, it will have more than 5msgs in a single day.

I think /. has officially entered into the 'beginning of the end' period. Anarchy rules at the moment, which although okay for some sites, is not doing the slashdot-style much good. It's reducing it's ability to provide information and it's definitly killing it's readibility and usefulness of comments. /. comments have successfully lossed all purpose that they once had. It's been overrun by "first comment" idiots and other falicies of society. Time for a reboot, if you ask me....

It's a good thing to see the Palestinian-Israli peace talks flowing again. This is probably one of the last times to talk peace and still have those two leaders alive. And I thought they'd never be in the same room with each other since the Rabin assasignation....

Also spent some time later in the dark-day futzing with the 68k assembler that comes with Fargo. That has got to be by far _the_ worst assembler I've ever seen. It's authors seem to have come up with their very own assembly languaage that is only partly based on 68k. Arg. Someone who's on the A92/A89 list(s?) want to ask for information on the .92p binary formats??

Arg... CDAII... Arg.. UK key escrow... arg... people.

Had the pleasure of coloring in squares on a periodic table in chem...woohoo... can't imagine much more of waste of time.... There's got to be a decent way to teach periodic trends without involving supposedly non-toxic wacky colored inks and unsharpened colored pencils...

Somehow or another everything I did in networking yesterday was erased, so I had to quickly start over. Probably the most heavily concentrated work I've ever done to date in that class. Did the entire thing (2pgs of 10pt text) and still had over a half-hour to spare. Not that it was difficult. But I was kind of pissed off that it was gone. Damn 95/NT.

Calc test on Fri. Should probably at least do some of the homework... and/or maybe at least look at some of what's on the test. I'm really finding that class pointless for anything besides taking tests. The homework does no good. You either understand it or you don't...practice doesn't seem to help anybody very much in this context. There's got to be some reason homework is only worth less than 10% of your grade...

While going in to say hello to Mrs Denton, she mentioned that the company that Cris (Mencer) went to work for now has openings again. Could be interesting. (Oh, Brock, you should talk to Denton about this.) Programming stuff... from what I know, basically all in Delphi (for windows, of course). I've never used Delphi and know very little about it. In fact, I remember very little Pascal as well... She mentioned they might be open to the idea of an outsourcing/freelancing-type deal without the overhead of going into an office.

Uhm... humanities was spent with yet another fascinating conversation with the same group of people as usual (Michael, Booth, etc). This time Rebecca got involved too. And of course anytime Booth and her are together, you're likely to be mystified, amused, and appalled all at the same time.

Came home to find what has got to be at least two hundred yellow stick-on notes scattered around the house, each reminding me to do something while my parents are off on their little road trip. Incredible. I'd rather have the trees growing in the house than all those ugly yellow things. Continued listening to my mother's verbal babble for an hour or so and eventually they did leave. And finally, there was peace.

Merged the gnome patches into my gtkfaim developement tree. That went quite nicely as he'd fortunatly used a snapshot of very late. Minor rejects, nothing major. But, I have no way to compile it with GNOME compiled in. I have no idea what it looks like.

Spent a bit of the evening moving my room's floor covering into bags. I'd approximate I'm down to ~73% coverage, which is quite good considering less than 24hrs ago, it was around 97%. Three large garbage bags worth of various junk paper mails and other miscelaneous periodical rubbish.

David seems to have survived the win95-OSR2.1 upgrade. Aparently had some minor problems with video and things, but is generally working. I'm suprised. Normally it takes quite some time to fix everything it messes up on an established system.

I read Brock's log and see that he's already talked to Denton about it (and not 'the lack thereof'). I would also agree that the IGRP 'labs' were too easy. I added another hyperterminal config to that compaq so that I would configure a router and the switch or even two routers at the same time. I'm not sure whether anyone else found that useful. It certainly aided my quest to be as lazy as possible.

Brock also brought up the rain. Rain has got to be the best thing central Arizona has to offer. Of course autumn and winter rain is kind of boring (but still has a bit of 'feel-neat' factor); the best is the monsoon-related storms in the late summer. Most people don't like them. They think they're 'depressing'. However, I just can't see how a sunny day is very lifting. All that light. Terribly annoying. And sunny days here mean extraordinarily large daily temperature swings... Clouds have the tendency to even that out a bit. I still wish I lived in Britain or somewhere up there...

Anyway, I suppose that's it. My activities in the middle of the night a few days ago in the freshly irrigated grass-weed called a 'yard' has led to several inflamed ant+spider bites on my toes. Not exactly fun. I'm sure I've gained a few more with the trash-extraction activities of lastnight -- I'm sure you'd find it more settling if I didn't mention the number of critters I found. I tolerate small to mid-sized spiders and some form of ants in my room. I really don't care. Mostly they live in places I never go anyway. But, I do draw the line at 5cm roaches and related uglies. Some of the 3-4cm sand spiders are quite tolerable (and tolerant) creatures.... Of course, my tolerance of the lizards is probably a bit hypocritical -- but I think I got all of them out... (they pushed the limits -- personal space; the spiders keep their distance and I don't mind). In any case, this month is nearly done.... (and I'm sure by the time it is, I'll have written more this month than the past two combined, at least at this rate).

Well, Alan's got something that Linux supporters should probably read there. Some interesting comments, though none of them new or radical.

Okay (did I spell it right?), on to the day summary... Chem worthless as usual. Networking was as well. Will finish up IGRP project today and turn it in... then on to ACLs.

APUSH was just a contiuance of the same thing we've been doing for several days now -- watching that hilarious video. Also took some sort of quasiquiz for a reason I'm not quite sure of. This brought about the first question I've ever had about my datecodes (using the second version above). I didn't quite have time to explain it at that point though.

Mrs Foster was really stressed yesterday for some reason, so she decided yoga would be a good thing for us to do in class. That was nice. Of course, upon feeling the aftereffects, not quite so pleasant. Michael brought up the proposition of 'yoga tipping'. (Similar to cow tipping, except focused at people sitting in strange vulnerable positions instead of, well, cows.) That was amusing enough. Eventually, it was over and well, it was over.

The evening was basically quite pointless. Amanda came on and wanted to know where this log was (actually, that's not what she asked, but it's obvious that's what she meant -- aparently she'd been talking to David earlier in the day, at which time he mentioned that she was mentioned here). She said I lead an 'interesting' life and left. I'm sure she was terrified....

There's a win95-osr2.1 cd laying here for David. Aparently he really wants to attempt to upgrade his osr0 system. It's a complete new-machine-kit, so he gets a certificate of authenticity (like anyone besides microsoft would actaully want to claim merit for that product anyway) and one of those 'sell with new PC only' users manuals that always provide at least 30sec of amusement ('eject CD....put CD into tray...push tray in...'). Once that's done, I suppose he'll want to go FAT32 as well. I'm hoping microsoft has not taken cvt.exe off their ftp site yet...

Also had one of those conversations you have with your parents before they leave you home alone. I really got lucky this time: gone till Mon. Aparently, there's also going to be various people dropping in and out until then. Let's just hope I know them...

Oh, while in networking this mroning, I came across The Ultimate Taxi. That's definitly worth a mention, as it's a really nifty idea. I'm just wondering how he fits that many people along with that much stuff into that cab....

I'm getting tired of the Hertz rent-a-car 'not exactly' commercials. I'd have to say one of the most amusing ads in a while is the pagenet one for their 2way paging/inet service -- the one with the guy that starts going insane because someone walked into his 'office' (a public park bench) without knocking. You really have to see that one. Anyway...

Did random browsing. Also a read a bit of PJE Peebles... inflamatory universe models. Nothing revolutionary, of course...

Really need to start figuring out how I'm going to explain quantum mechanics to a humanities class in 90min or less. Oh, and Foster told me on Mon that I will be leading (teaching?) the economics section of the curriculum. (You write one paper on the social and technological requirement of free enterprise and they try and push all this on you...) Oh well, sounds like fun none-the-less.

Oh, I did do something in the afternoon... watched the CNN interview with Castro (that would be Fidel Castro, president (term?) of Cuba). Some interesting stuff. Really makes you think about the implicit propaganda that spews from America needlessly, giving us all a bad image just being 'Americans'. I still don't really understand the need of Cuba to have spies in our country, and understand even less the reason we need spies in Cuba. Why has American politics forced such a terrible sterotype on communism?!?! Does America not realize that Cuba _needs_ them? Fundamentally, communism cannot exist in such a small undiverse isle such as Cuba; that is, without external trade. Why make barriers preventing this? Why mess up supply and demand over political differences? Isn't the point of American capitalism to make as much profit as possible?? Why blindly prevent profit over archaic stereotypes! This is so incredibly pointless...

Average of averages...

Waaay to difficult to get out of bed yesterday. I really hate that operation in general, but that incident was especially painful (though probably not as painful as the whole keyboard/cosmology incident of the other day). Should really start getting more sleep...

Watched a video on explosives in chem. (you know, this whole new concept of 'creative' teaching is producing a disturbing lack of real lecturing and, well, learning.) There's something about watching Americans blow up Soviet missle launchers in Hungary that proves quite unexpalanably ironic...

Unger was interesting. Firstly, she handed back the TCS project. Aparently I got 1025 of 1100 points. Also aparently, most people did not-so-good. David+Someone got barely a C. Brock+Saara got less. I'm not sure what happened. Strange stuff is awry is her mind.

That was followed by doing two "labs" on the routers. Although the labs should've (and kinda did) taken only a few minutes, it took nearly the whole period because of the fact that two of the routers were completely wiped blank. Time had to be spent figuring those out. Actually, what took the most time is remembering the commands to operate those buggers. I cannot believe that they designed such an utterly non-intuitive interface for such a drastically simple model. Now I could see a larger router/switch/l3switch having a complicated interface in the name of versatility, but when you're dealing with hardware that is by definition static and finite, you would logically imagine that the configuration interface would be the same. I'm not sure that uniformity of OS across all routers is worth the price when it comes to these low-end devices (I'm talking about the 2500 series).

Anyway, while I was doing that, I was talking to Unger about various things (I'm forcing myself to make smalltalk just for the sake of my own sanity), she uttered the term 'MicroVAX'. I of course began to pay attention to the conversation at that point. Aparently, we're getting some. Don't know what models, just that they're coming. Should be in the room by Wed. Okay, now this class may be fun... VMS play time... And see just how well 2500's route DECnetIV...

The rumors were right about the ill-fated calculus class I'm in. Mr Quinn (the substitute for Capuano, who if you'll remember is off mucking with child birth or something) did quit on Fri. It would seem he just couldn't stand those Algebra I/II pupils any longer. (These are the people who are taking that class in order to pass a test that most of us take in 7th or 8th grade -- the difference is that they don't have the fortunate youth to deal with -- what's more unfortunate is that they aren't the best of pupils... In Mr Quinn's words, "most are destined burger flippers".) So now, after much adue, we have Mr Burgess as our calc teacher (going on number 3!). Since he's staff, he's more obligated to not quit. This new arragement required massive _re_arragement of most of the math department. Also, the addition of the famed Mr Hunter to teach Algebra I/II. (Think back real hard now... my APUSH class had him for the first three weeks of school.) I'm sure he'll enjoy it. He finds amusement in making fun of people and punishing them at the same time. (Just don't ask about his cursed brother-in-law... you know, the mute.)

Humanities was interesting as usual. We continued the group work stuff from last week. That means, more unproductive hilarity. Although the former half of the conversation was actually about how we were going to do the presentation, it went down(up?)hill from there. The major discussion concerned the question: "If you were to carpet the state of Louisiana, what color would you use and how long would it take?" Although I refrained from giving a definite duration, I felt that the color 'white' would be best; the justification being that white carpet attracts calamity, it would bring a significant boost to the carpet cleaning industry. Booth's color was green, on the basis that military operations could somehow be more covert in a greenly carpetted state. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but whatever.... Of course, it may just be his quasi-conservative morals, but I don't know. Throughout this conversation Michael was still dazed out attempting to recover that spectacular finger-twiddling-good idea he had for the presentation on Fri. Also, Lydia and Bo thought we were all insane, which is of course not an unusual reaction. Mrs Foster had no comment (but it is worth noting that she listen to the entire thing in utter amusement).

Nothing done in the afternoon, as usual...

Just looked at that screenshot of the 'pretty' gtkFAIM login box. Bletch... Just to get the record straight, all the fvwm and XEmacs boxes are a mid-dark grey, not some rogue spotted forest-like green. The XEmacs text is, however, mostly the right colors. (Syntax highlighting is very useful at times, btw... though the auto-tabbing is probably the most useful feature of all. Gotta love (X)emacs!) Anyway...

Talked to Saara a bit in the evening. She seems suprisingly stable, although I think it's probably the first time for that in several days now. My parents are driving out to be with her on Wed, following through till who-knows-when. Amy may be going with too, but most likely not. [It's really quite difficult for me to be this secretive, believe me.]

Did release a gtkFAIM snapshot in order to keep people from trying to use that extremely messed-up version with the SNAC code mangled. I casually forgot to make sure it compiled before I did the snapshot. I hope it does.

Alan says the interaction between the Bt848 and the SiS rev 49 chipset is that the DMA just 'doesn't work'. That would explain the black screen and the occasional segfault from xawtv. I checked /proc/pci, and yes, much to my disgust, I do have the rev49 chipset. So, I see it as a great opprotunity to do the dual-machine thing now. Draw the bt848 stuff from the Dell Omniplex and do everything else on the SiS (mammatusThree). That's all I did on mammatus today.

I guess that's it.

Gurge, gurge, gurge! (Boo koh-koh! Boo o-to-mah! Boo who-bye doo-a!) (That's furbish, btw.)

Got up, had some breakfast, then came back and guess what? Wrote yesterday's yestday's log (yes, for two days ago).

Did some {gtk,lib}FAIM work on-and-off most of the day. Made the login box look all pretty. I like it. Logo shown is by Garrett LeSage, graphics designer for and an editor for segfault.org. Also, notice that "messenger" is spelled "messanger" (as in mess-ANGER). I not sure whether he meant it or not. I frequently speel it wrong as well. It makes nice sense, though.

The above meant spending quite a bit of time skimming Gtk and GDK source code trying to figure out at run-time whether or not a pixmap is loaded via gtkrc. I guess you're not suppose to do that. Well, I did. I figured the simplest way to include a logo would be to load it at run-time through gtkrc. In general, I like the way it came out. (Oh, I had to know the geometry of the pixmap so that I could resize the containing eventbox so that it would force the login window to grow -- also had to know if no pixmap was loaded so that it could look like it did before.) Also tried migrating the ICBM routines over to the SNAC mechanism. Well, I see no better way to stress test and crash something than to use it several times a minute. As I've implied, my attempts failed miserably, not because I was doing it wrong, but because of the severe bugs in that mechanism. Instead of fixing (which I didn't have time for while people were IMing me several times a second at times (at which time I used TiK for a few minutes)), I just reverted back to the old way. I'm not sure if I'll try again or not.

Also worked on mammatus(Three) a bit. My goal was to have TV running on my TV before I went to bed, but that's obviously not going to happen. Firstly, I had to upgrade the kernel. 2.1.125 seems to work nicely. Next, I had continued troubles with the boomerang NIC, to the point where it was unusable. Had to reboot to put a 3c509 in instead. Real slow, but at least it works. (As I was taking out the boomerang,it didn't exactly feel like it was in all the way -- but I was getting mad real quick and didn't feel like trying again.) Next got xawtv compiling, followed by a bit of trouble getting bttv.o to find my video card -- turns out that was a typo on my part anyway. Then it started saying "BT848 and SIS 85C496 chipset don't always work together." from the module. I've mailed the list to see just what not "working together" entails. There's a comment in the source about revision 49 of that chipset not working with the bt848. I hope I don't have one. But, most likely I do. We'll see.

Did eventually get an X server started with an xawtv window inside. Started to draw the blue screen, and sigsegv'ed in the middle. I'm hoping it's just the lag of nfsroot making something timeout, but I think that's a little less likely than me having a rev49 SIS chipset. Arg. It may be back to the Dell for us anyway....

After trying xawtv again, I noticed I didn't have a mouse to control it with. I then went out and grabbed a mouse. I then noticed I didn't have a serial port to plug it into. So, I went out and grabbed a serial port. Then I noticed it didn't work. Then I noticed I was being too observant, and gave up. I think it might have gotten farther that time if I'd've had a mouse (you'd be suprised how handy those dual contractions are -- you never notice you speak them until you try and write them). Anyway, I decided to try and get vesafb going instead (after all, if I somehow got that to work, I could use fbtv instead and not use X and therefore not need a mouse for now). Since this Trident card is not VESA VBE 2.0 compliant, I grabbed UniVBE. It appeared to all work fine, and it said that it installed VBE 2.0 extensions, but loading linux with loadlin (which I was already doing anyway to manually switch the output over to TV -- oh, btw, did I mention I stuck in an IDE 40mb drive for booting/swap?) didn't give me the options for the VESA modes ('invalid mode ID'). Arg. I was really hoping to see the penguin tonight too. So, still no TV on my TV.

Something I forgot to mention earlier... I was talking to Yousuf before the PSAT the day back yonder, and he made the comment that he was getting a new math teacher. That seamed somewhat ponderous. He continued that the substitute for someone else quit and that now they will get the person they were going to have, and that he was going to get someone new. Everything he said pointed that substitute that quite to being Mr Quinn, the substitute we have(had?) for calculus. I didn't have calc on Fri, so he may have announced it then. Strange rumors, these be. Find out later today, I guess.

Oh, and something incredible occured! David typed "no" -without- capitilizing the 'n'! Insane I tell ya!

Also added yet another user to the system. Also, the entire inet should be morning the death of the late Jon Postel. We can only hope that the DNS system does not go insane without him around to keep personal taps on it. Jon had played a large part in keeping government control of it to a minimum (mostly by rejecting their idiotic proposals). Not to mention the fact that he authored or co-authored a large chunk of the several thousand RFCs and STDs out there. He _WAS_ the IANA after all! I can only think of one person who handled himself so well as head of a massive project, and that is Linus. Before InterNIC messed everything up (and later, ARIN), Jon was _the_ contact for requesting IPs. He still maintained the rights to the .us domain as well, along with doing all sorts of other stuff.

I suppose that's it. I really should be getting to sleep. I'm going to search my bed before I do this time, though. I'm still feeling what appears to be the "F" key in my side from yesterday....

Ay ay, Kah dah mee-mee a-tay!

Kind of late...oh well...

Started off way-too-early with the PSAT/NMSQT test in the morning. Took nearly an hour to get everyone to fill out their name bubbles correctly. Combined with that and getting started too late, a 2hr 10min test took nearly 4hrs.

Came home and did many trivial things for a bit. I really don't remember. Welcomed a new member to the ihpled user consortium. Chatted with him a bit on telephone monopolies (aparently in Germany (where he's at) they must pay for phone service by the hour!). He made the comment that combined with the transatlantic connection lag, the 28.8 isn't that noticable.

Then decided to have a bit of amusement. I implemented the beginnings of something I hope to be a bit more revolutionary than it currently is: FAIMbot. (If you're on AIM, talk to him: sn is 'faimbot'.) He will currently only relay ICBMs and give you the current time in two different time zones. Someday, he'll do more. Once I get the user info/buddy list updates happening, it should give the groundwork for a lot more exciting stuff. This may end up looking an awful lot like an IRC-esk bot.

Past that, I decided to work on mammatusThree for a bit. It's running as I write this (and has been running for the last 12hr 11min). It's also got the new video card in it that came. (The Trident Imàge975 one with NTSC/PAL output.) Its currently quite short on RAM (8mb -- anybody have any 8mb SIMMs laying about?). I'll either have to put in a small hard drive for swap or somehow get the network raw block device driver going. I'll probably do the first, as it's simpler and has less chance of damaging something. Anyway, so although X doesn't look too bad, I'm not running it at the moment because of the RAM overhead. All it's running at the moment are a bunch of telnets to ihpled and zeta, displaying various windows of BitchX and NAIM (finally got to see NAIM in color!).

The most difficult part of the above operation was getting the video card to cooperate. Aparently it doesn't support simultaneous output to both the monitor and TV. That's what I know now. After about a half-hour of getting mad at it, I dug out a msdos boot disk and started fiddling with the utilities that came with the card. THere's two of them dealing with the TV-out. One is a TSR used for modifying conversion parameters with keystrokes (one of which is ctrl-shift-f4, which switches the output from monitor to TV) and the other is a command line one that does the same things without the memory waste or interface. It appears I'll have to use the latter plus loadlin consistently on bootup in order to get it working right. (Actually, suprisingly enough, reboots don't reset this parameter! If you set it then soft-reboot, you can setup BIOS on your TV.)

I've had little if no recurrance of the boomerang/PCI problem on mammatusThree. It may have just been a loose PCI connection. Let's hope as much. Apears to be running fine, except for the occasional NFS blurbage on big reads/writes (like starting an X server or writing a swap file). In any case, with this board, the TV image is clearer than with anything else I've tried. And with tweaking of all it's various parameters, it could probably get at least slightly better (I need to talk to Trident about setting all those various parameters in linux -- wonder how open they are with docs). BitchX, NAIM, and pine work great. And are, for a change, readable. Still a lot of interfearnce and other garbage cluttering up the screen that I'd really like to rid it of. It's probably caused by this cheap VCR (my TV does not have composite inputs, so must convert it to RF to take it in). Or, unfortunatly, maybe caused by the TV itself. We can hope it's just the coax though! :) Did find that alot of the interference does go away if you don't plug the monitor in at all (shutting it off does nothing) to the card. Without doing that, you get a strange _vertical_ stripe (not the normal RF-overpush-bar, but a thin stripe!). All is well now. Just only have one output and it's fine (only one works at a time anyway). This all suggests that this Samtron monitor is badly terminated, which really wouldn't suprise me.

Some family "issues" came up late in the evening that are really too personal (personel? :) to our family at the moment to comment on here. Let's just say: It would appear spring has come a bit premature this year. Will know more later. And probably comment on the ramifications of this event later as well, since they're kind of interesting and/or upsetting.

In any case, the above paragraph kind of explains my abrupt departure at that time. After having family discussions, I was kind of tired and just simply fell asleep without warning. Fortunatly, I was already laying down. Unfortunatly, as I found out this morning, I'd fallen asleep ontop of an IBM keyboard and a rather large volume of Principles of Physical Cosmology. One bit of onimonipeia: OUCH.

Ho hum.

Chem was spent copying notes onto another peice of paper... err.. I mean taking a test. Networking was spent doing even less than that. Mostly, doing humanities work (copying questions onto note cards). Continued watching 1776 in APUSH. It gets more amusing every minute. Humanities was used for discussing the presentations in our groups. Uhm. Ya, that's it. Of course, with our group (Michael (Smith), Booth, Lydia, Bo, and myself), it wasn't too productive (well, Lydia and Bo are always nice and productive, but, well, the rest of us...). Let's just say it took 20min to figure out who was in the group. And being our lazy selves, it appears most of the presentation is going to be class discussion (where basically all that's required is making sure people don't kill each other -- that's probably closer to a problem than you think).

School was pleasurefully short. Was home a bit prior to noon. Wandered around the house a bit, well, for more like the better part of an hour. Trying to figure out just why it was 30degC in the house and less than 22degC or so outside. Decided that opening every dwelling orafice possible would be the best course of action. It's seems to have worked, as at this point it's quite frigid in here (for arizona, that is) Of course, some of this has to do with there existing a rather large puddle of water ("irrigation") directly outside my window; I figure this is as close to oceanfront property as I'm going to see for a while.

Started up zeta under the intentions of working on gtkFAIM/libfaim (since I'd only gotten less than three hours sleep the night prior and therefore was a tad bit tired, I figured it was the optimal conditions for coding). Well, that would have worked if it weren't for a few other things. Firstly, OSCAR decided to take an early weekend off. All out dead. It started with DNS failures. So, I went to primenet, which had the address for the authenticator cached, and used the IP directly. That worked for a bit. Then piece by piece, the entire farm kicked the bucket.

Secondly, Brock majikly appeared at the doorstep for no apparent reason. I later found out that he was delivering a Mathematica book I'd loaned him some time ago. That really didn't make overly much sense, but at least it was a reason. He for some reason had the urge to wander completely aimlessly (this is the aim that didN'T die) around the house. I guess it's epidomy of boredom that you wonder around _this_ house, of all retrodwellings. Luckily, he made it out unscaved, unharmed by the flying debris normally associated with these walls.

After all that, I was too traumatized to retain my state of sleeping awakeness, and wandered off into socially-accepted unconsciousness. Eventually, of course, I came back to the former state, but, that was all-too-soon indeed.

Still intent on getting something done today, I began to work on various trivial features of gtkfaim. Added support for parsing of gtkrc's. This allows much more configurable amusement. I threw together a quick gtkrc just to make sure it was all working. (I haven't had the chance to make one that actually enhances the usability). There's a screenshot of this here (and a only-very-slighly-different one here). You'll notice from the first screenshot another feature that I quickly added: timestamps. Yes, you too can now know exactly when you sent and received messages. Actually, the more I think about it, the more useful this becomes. It was quick and easy. Then spent a bit more time implementing the user search results box, then the user search request box itself (I like to work backwards from the fun stuff to the drudge stuff). I should probably have made a screenshot of that as well -- it's just as impressive looking. All that required figuring out how Gtk's CList's are suppose to be used. Really quite simple once you figure out how to do it. And it looks neat too. The frontend support is done for both searches by address and name, although only by-address is currently working, as backend support for by-name is, well, non-existant (this would require me getting out tcpdump and a windows client again -- will do later).

I figured it'd probably be nice to start testing those a little more widely, so I released a snapshot (yes, a _snapshot_ not a real release). Also did the very-uncommon-and-completely-nonunderstood act of sending an annoucement to the lists. Probably shouldn't have done that, but oh well.

Well, to tell ya the truth, that stuff took most of the night for some reason. It's difficult trying to think in a straight line.

It was just a strange day. Yes, that was me on efnet and irc.debian.org for most of the day. That pretty much is enough explanation on the strangness thing. I really don't know why. At first it was probably caused by wanting to make sure I wasn't going insane with AIM/OSCAR dead. After that, it was just pretty much because it would take more effort to close those two windows than it would be to leave them open. I implicitly chose the latter. I think someone needs to have another 'guest speaker' type thing like they did with Alan and RMS on irc.opensource.org way-back-when.

Well, it would appear that I have to get up early once again, this time to go to guess where? School. Strangely enough, I must go down there to take the PSAT/NMSQT test. I suppose I should also look over the practice test as well. Maybe. It would help if there were several more hours between then and now. On second thought, I'd probably waste them anyway...

Ponderous day indeed...

Chem was spent doing really nothing. Went through notebooks searching for things she wanted to grade us on again. The good part is that we get to use them on the "midterm" today. The even better news is that that's the only final I have. (Oh, today is a really short day, btw.)

Okay, first hour gave me a bit of time to think. Probably too much time. I decided that I should revert back to networking for the good of myself, irrelevent of the certain persons surrounding that decision. I've determined that Unger's opinion of anything really doesn't matter (not that I didn't determine that long ago -- I just decided to really not care). I decided I'd subverted enough of her power trip by delaying my decision for this long of time. I'm glad I did that, as it gave her even more time to calm down.

Went in there and started a calm and rational conversation with her. Told her that if the option was still open that I'd benefit from not quiting the class. Also told her that we are apparently naturally incompatible people for doing anything, but that, although incurable, it could be at least a tolerable situation with a little effort. She agreed and suprisingly enough admitted to not being in best of minds the week prior and that she possibly wasn't acting in a rational or even appropriate way. I admitted nearly the same. Agreed on all that. Ended it with a handshake and departed.

All in all, it was most likely the best move that could've been made (for more reasons than I have time to explain here). I told Ms Pyle that if she needed help in her CP 1-2 class (remember that's where I was going to switch to), to call and Unger just might let me out to help. I'm happy with the situation. Although the class is not something I want to take at this point, it is something I feel that I need to stay in and finish. I'm going to have to take a few lessons from Mrs Denton on this one. (And Denton certainly deserves a thanks here already as well.)

Went on to what is suppose to be my lunch. While reading a few bits of random paperwork on the quiet part of campus, Mrs Foster caught me and started asking questions. Discussed quantum mechanics, parallel universes, complexly embedded simplicty, and some bits of biology and personal history (I learned that she originally minored in medicine (!)). Talked to her for quite some time. Then went and sat outside the room of my next class (calc) physically staring at the walls, mentally doing various maintance. Chaney walked by and looked at me a bit... I didn't really notice...eventually he went on to his normal business of kicking people out of the building (you should probably know that students are really not suppose to be in the classroom buildings while there's class going on -- Chaney's got a special type of lunch duty: the kind he enjoys most -- kicking people out and yelling at them). Why he didn't say anything I don't know. In any case, I did move until the annoyingly loud bell rang and I got up once again and moved a few metres into the classroom. And, of course, calc is not exactly the most exciting class.

Humanities was spent firstly watching the rest of Remains, and then listening to more of Remains. You see, we watched the movie, but she's got this audio tape that's very close to the book, so we're listening to that as well. Since the school is too cheap to buy us the books, she must force this into us in as many ways as possible. As usual, much is missing in the movie. During the journal discussion, Foster for some reason brought up our earlier discussion about complexly embedded simplicity. Somehow she found it relevent to what the discussion was about. Hmmm...

Since there was quite a large obstruction in front of the door to get out of the interroom room by the programming rooms, it took a bit of time to remove myself from the mess. Aparently someone didn't like having the bookshelves immediatly in front of the wall and decided that the middle of the narrow walkway already obstructed with a large (broken) copy machine was a fabulously better place for them. They also decided that bookcases don't deserve to have bookshelves, so those were strone about the walkway as well. All in all, we were lucky to get out. I'm sure we were only minutes away from seeing the collapse of the entire 600 building superstructure.

I did make it home. Read mail. Lot's of mail. Eventually booted up zeta. But, unfortunaly, into win95. Had much homework to do. Ended up not starting it tell 0500 or so anyway. The TCS networking drawings ended up getting drawn on my dad's machine with Photoshop (yuk). The humanities quiz questions and flash card questions did eventually get written.

Urg. It's getting way to late to be still up. I cannot believe that out of all these volumes of Feynman lectures I have here, there's no real in-depth discussion of real quantum mechanical issues. Arg. Now I actually have to go looking. I'm still wandering how many hours it's going to take to explain all this to the class. Again, I hope Booth will cover a large section of it, but this physics stuff is going to get messy. (This is where the aforementioned simplicity discussion came from, btw -- quantum mechanics is complex until you understand it, at which time it seems somewhat simple,)

And for all the gtkFAIM/FAIM users out there, I don't currently know my developement schedule. It would appear that the only currently unimplemented feature set of AIM 1.0 protocol that's not implemented in FAIM is the group of neighborhood control stuff (zap/block/etc). That should be relativly simple, and I don't think an implementation as complete as AIM95's is really necessary considering the relative maturity of most open source users. For all I know, it may just be fun to implement. .. Anyway, after that it's on to AIM 2.0 features like chat.

[Insert slighly humorous bit of irony somewhere in here -- too tired to think of one.]

Yesterday I wasn't thinking... The months don't need a full byte...a mere nibble will do...

Finished up the Crimes Against Inanimate Objects in chem. Ripped apart cooper wire with silver nitrate and, well, we kind of messed up the copper chloride thing....

I went to turn in TCS Attempt Number Two to Unger, and well, she gave it back once again and said to keep it till Fri. So it looks like I will have time to do the computer-generated drawings anyway. I need an excuse to use GIMP anyway. Will do later (really later) today. Don't let me forget.

APUSH was spent watching the start of 1776. Now there's something she didn't say about this film. It's a really hilarious musical (not that it's suppose to be anymore than slightly amusing, it just happened that way). Funny.

Humanities was spent doing not much of anything besides watching more of Remains of the Day.

It happened to be a short day today (was home by 2000). Gave me time to read more mail than usual. Finally got through the backlog on the iname account (need to procmail that again too). Still haven't gotten through linux-kernel. I most there's nothing terribly exciting in those 800 unread messages... While reading through the iname mail, I got a laugh out of Ralf's self-modifying MMU code for MIPS. Great stuff. (Much more efficient than the stuff that retrieved MMU contextes before -- not to mention how neat this new stuff looks!)

Spent the rest of the afternoon being productive by being unproductive (ie, sleeping). After only getting a couple hours (I mean 'couple' in a quite literal way) of sleep after doing all that homework, I needed it.

Did some other unrelated stuff. Then for some reason started working on gtkfaim. Got send-IM-on-enter working. No more ctrl-s unless you want it. Can now just press enter. This convinced me that a full 0.0a release was worthwhile. So I released...guess what? A 0.0a gtkFAIM. Well, actually two. I forgot and released it with a borken prefs.c again (the same reason 0.09post1 had to happen). Luckily the bad tar was up for less than a minute till I remembered and got a fixed one up. I don't think anyone could've gotten it that fast. Anyway, it's working great for me. Did have to rework the way gtkfaim_imwindow_send_im() works -- had to make it detect whether it was being called from the ctrl-s or from the individual key callback that does enter (this was so it could know whether or not it was passed the message text or had it passed in).

Hope everyone liked the summary of quantum consciousness et cetera, yesterday. From the logs, it looks like it was a hot item. I did turn in a summary yesterday as well. It was a little more verbose about some things, particularly on the idea of non-computable operations (used some Feynman excerpts on the subject, along with a few other things). I'm sure I went overboard, but it's just difficult to explain something like that briefly. Booth (Mike) is doing AI, so I'm sure he'll cover most of that in more detail.

Since the cable was out most of the day, I watched Univision Telemundo when I didn't have anything better to do. That's one of the three channels that I can get when the cable is out and can convince my TV that the coax cable works just fine as an antenna. (Yes, the cabling _IS_ that badly insulated and terminated.) Oh, and out of the three channels...yes, the one I can only understand parts of is still the one most worth watching.

I just love how these milk bottlers think they need to be so informative. For instance, it has come to my attention that the milk I just drank will officially expire on the twentieth day of Octobre in the year nineteen-ninety-eight on the fifty-first minute of the ninth hour. I think I'll stay home from school and watch.

How about THAT for a date code?! For some reason, in the fearful depths of my early-morning mind, that started to get written on my papers this morning. I'm sure the teachers will run in fear of unfamiliarly encoded datehood...

Today has really been no different than any other. (Well, there was a vast increase in smog propagating from the greater Phoenix area, but that's just caused by the people who slept-in in hopes of a four-day weekend and missed their carpools...That's my theory anyway...Not many have accepted it needless to say.) Started the lab-portion of the district assesment of chemistry. Woohoo! More torching of innocent toothpicks and melting of bystanding copper fragments with painfully stenchful acids!

Finished up the networking project for second period in second period... Aparently she didn't like it and gave it back to me after school (actually, she had Brock give it back to me -- I just wonder what goes through her mind). I'd already known I did parts of it not corresponding with her requirements when I did the self-assesment sheet (you'll be happy to know I gave myself a very low B because of it -- I was missing a large part of a small section). One of the problems was a missing IP address map (I guess a complete description of the paradigm wasn't enough for her) and that my maps were copies of her's with a lot of pencil writing on them. It doesn't seem she had a problem with using hers, but more of a problem of the pencil. I suppose you grow fearful of pencils in age. She wanted computer-drawn maps. Well, with this late of notice, I have no facilities to generate to-scale maps with exquisite design. I am therefore returning those maps to her stating that. She'll probably take off several hundred points for that reason alone (she's getting very spiteful these past few weeks -- I don't know why). I did make an address "map" for her, though.

I spent lunch reading a bit on something I'll talk about in a bit for humanities. I swear I must have fallen asleep in calculus, as there are several blocks of many minutes that I just cannot account for. He's implementing a new quiz-taking scheme and policy, which is all the usefull information I could derive from the 90minutes worth of chatter. Started watching Remains of the Day (the movie this time) in humanities. I really wish we had the books. It's really much better. Foster decided to make the brain-related reports due...well...today.

After school, it's a good thing I went through the labs, for if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to get the returned project from UNger (err...Brock). Came home, ate, read small amounts of mail, slept. Read enough mail and talked to Daniel enough to know that the aim-clone mailing list had it's most traffic ever yesterday: three (yes, 3!) messages in the same 24hrs! Aparently Orb read my log for the day prior and decided to comment on Daniel's ECT proposition (a preliminary one, mind you). And there were a couple comments. Also, we were all told to expect a GNOMEified gtkFAIM "soon" by...uhmm... I can't remember the name... SN is 'VryDmbName' though.

Woke up and felt terrible. Still do, actually. Did various things to waste time as I wasn't exactly feeling well enough to do homework. Did this until about 0600 and then decided that it wasn't going to go away. Quickly did the remaining bits for the TCS in networking...then moved on to a much more interesting topic...

Quantum Consciousness. Ya, that's neat, you say. Well, it's a lot more interesting than it sounds. The basic idea here is that consciousness and quantum mechanics are founded in the same root. (Meaning counsciousness is quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics is cousciousness.) The article I was given gave the most credit to an unlikely chap: Roger Penrose. (Suprised?) It turns out that his theories were pretty trivial when you look at everyone else's work, but considering his fame it's not really suprising they took his as gospel and ignored the rest.

The foundation for this is laid in the workings of cellular microtubules. (I remember learning about these in bio -- or rather not learning about them: we were just told "they exist" and not much of what role they played in cellular reproduction, etc.) These are filaments that strech to every part of the cell. Their most critical operation is determining the exact cytoplasmic movements during cell reproduction (and cytolysis of course). But, a guy down at UofA decided they are more important. He found that the basics of consciousness could be found embedded in the reactions of these filaments, most of which can be explained using standard quantum theory.

There's more too it than that. (The above paragraph assumes a bit of knowledge about quantum effects which I know is a big assumption...I certaintly don't know much more than the basic ideas.) Anyway, since the homework was to write a report and an outline, I decided that since the outline has got the most info in it, it should be the one to go here (msword6/7/95 format). I hope I explained it all enough. (Don't you just love having copies of my important work? :)

For those who don't feel like digging up a msword viewer, here's a few less proprietary information sources...

• What are microtubes?
• The Quantum and Beyond
• The Brain Project (there's a lot of other neat info in this one too)

Anyway, since I should really be finishing my homework (I need to get up again in just over four hours), I'll leave it at that.

Oh, and the Trident video card with composite-out should ship tomorrow. I wonder how he'll ship it... always a mistery...

Woke up. Really. I did.

Finished up the TCS dodad for Unger. Put it in a red folder to get a better grade, of course. Really Step One didn't take more than 15minutes or so. It was finding a three-hole punching device that took an hour. Then, of course, I'd lost all my writing utensils and had to find them as well.

I must say that it took longer than planned because while I was doing that, I was also trying to get ihpled back in running order again. Aparently in my rush to get the Debian-SPARC download going yesterday, I'd forgotten to notice that I had no where near enough disk space to do that. It ran out about 1530UTC. I didn't get to it till 1900 or so. So, for those hours between, no mail flowed. And not much else worked either. I must find a solution to this problem someday.

Trying to remember.... Somehow yet again, TheOrb's sister (she has a name too -- "Sara"), you know, the octodimensional one, arrived a little to close the keyboard again. Discussion on what "art" is. You must bear in mind that I did not know that this was her that I was talking to -- I thought Orb was still there (and yes, I was puzzled by the question). For some reason we also ended up in agreement. I was suprised as she. Art is not what it represents, but how it represents it (ie, how the human factor has changed/modified reality). That expressionism is what makes it art. And I remember something about saying that hanging a urinal in a museum is art, even if for no more reason than the thought it took to take it out of context and put it there. At least I think that's what we decided. In any case, it's not important what we decided, just that we decided.

Got the urge to do something later. Decided adding the long-awaited "away" functionality to gtkFAIM/FAIM would be a good thing to do. Started with getting the incoming ICBM parsing code to detect whether or not a message is an auto-reponse or not. Just a plain blank TLV does that. That was easy.

Decided to go on. It turns out that all this stuff is on the client side. The only thing AIM95 does to the server is send up a modified profile (it prepends the away message to it seperated by an hr -- note that gtkFAIM does not currently do this at all). Outgoing auto-response messages use the same flag as incoming ones. So, I just added another FAIM call that sends the flagged version instead. After that was working, it took little more than 5minutes to get it all working with the gtkFAIM UI. Should all work cleanly. In gtkFAIM, unlike AOL AIM, you can send messages while still staying away (note that I call this a feature and not a bug).

After doing various other little things, I decided I should make a release. Josh didn't think so. He didn't think it was a big enough change. I had my doubts as well since it would have ended up to be 0.10 (a symbolic number), but I was still going to release it anyway. His idea: use hex. I found that splendid idea. That will give me 6 more releases before the symbolic 0.10. Freshmeat should have fun with that too. It eventually came out that I didn't get a release made tonight away. (Well, except I did put up a 0.09post1 that fixes the compilation errors for some people.) I did however put up a pre-0x00.0a snapshot.

Spent a bit trying to figure out how fseek()/f{get,set}pos() were suppose to be used. I still don't know. They sounded logical enough. Anyway, I was trying to implement run-time preferences saving. No-go on that. Josh wanted me to stay up with him for an all-night hacking run, but I don't think I'm going to make it. But that means maybe SLIM (his new AIM backend) will be something to look at later today.

Also tossed a few ideas around with Daniel/sanekitty/linuxkitty about a file-transfer/DCC/CTCP-type thing for AIM (would only be supported by the clones obviously). Good idea. Prelim idea there.

_Really_ need to get to work on mammatus. Even CUMULUS for that matter (remember that project?). But first, well, I must go keep the bugs and other legged-creatures (ie, lizards) out of my bed.....

Sheesh...these things just get bigger every time... This volume is up to over 65kb already... and to think, the first volume was only 80kb... I talk too much.

Uhmm... ya... well....

MOrning was quite unproductive from what I remember. Something about getting NAIM to look right on a bichrome display while still using TERM=linux (for backspace to work). And some othe stuff too.

Worked on the TCS project for Unger for a way-too-long of time. Entire thing appears to be done except, of course, Step One. You see, even though I did everything else, I somehow managed to avoid doing the simplest and, well, _first_ part. And then, even worse, I avoided doing it all night. I'll have to spend a portion of my holiday working on homework. Ugh.

Somehow got into one of those Discussions About Nothing with Josh. I really should try to avoid those. Topics included eastern religion, socialism, the y2k "bug", and the y2.03806k "bug" (I hesitate to call them bugs...IMO, "feature" would be a better term). Did you actually think I'd talk about sometime else? Some of his conservative ideas tend to get in the way... but I'm sure he thinks the same of my liberal ones...

When she came on, I had the odd urge to want to talk to Amanda (Goff, that is). Unlike my attempt a few days ago, this time it really was her (it was Elena last time, and although that's not a bad thing, it was unexpected). She is well...except for her elbow...which aparently has a tendon that is now a tad bit longer than it was _before_ Fri night. Aparently she fell off the stands or something. Whatever happened, it sounded painful.

After that, I decided I should finally go build up mammatusThree while I still had open access to the garage's bench (my room is way too...well...eventful (stack-reflow-wise) for working on machines). Used the Asus 486 board (with a 486dx4-100). I'd forgotten that it's only got two 72pin SIMM sockets. I'm limited to 8mb because of that for the moment. Three PCI + Three ISA (usuable at once...it's actually got 2PCI + 3ISA + 1 PCI/ISA/VLB shared). All filled up: PCI: {VGA out, NTSC in, ethernet (3Com)}; ISA: {SCSI, Radio, Sound}. It does boot. But the ethernet card gives similar oddities has zeta gave when it had that faulty Supermicro PCI bus in it. Bad news. Let's hope it's the card. The STB sound card does show up when i run isapnptools' pnpdump on this motherboard. That is good news. I still need more configuration time on it. I just wanted to get it put together for now. At this point, it's basically just a very heavy worthless 486. (Something which is not uncommon in this house.)

Throw in some mtndew, some string cheese, a wee tad of web browsing, and a bit of sleep, and you have my day.

I think I'll download Debian-SPARC and see how it goes on the SS2/OPUS....

Finally had the chance to sleep in. Good thing too. Standing while sleeping was getting tricky.

Really unproductive day in retrospect. Actaully, it didn't seem terribly exciting while I was doing it either.

My dad got done building my mom's new machine. I saw that AMD K6-233 staring out at me from it and convinced him a P200classic was enough for her. zeta is now running at 233Mhz (89 Bogos before, now 465.31(!)), but not without trouble. The 4pin jumper that controls the multiplier is mislabled on this Tyan 1571S board. Pin one is labeled on the wrong side. I did get the board to go to 266MHz, though, which Tyan says it won't do. I also somehow came up with a speed of 210MHz. I'm still wondering about that one. Also, the mobo will not even POST if the MMX jumper is set incorrectly.

Downloaded CVS. Never got it installed. I've been thinking of putting FAIM and gtkFAIM into a CVS repository for a while now (so I can make snapshots and releases with a single command). Also, after seeing some things I had the urge to fix on Brock's current web project (cehs.ml.org), I thought about him using CVS for that. (Oh, and Brock, I didn't change anything... I just felt like it.) Then I thought about it again and it sounded like too much work for such a (currently) simple project.

Added basic HTML entity parsing to gtkFAIM and released 0.09. There's more to 0.09 than that, though. Mostly just rearragements and the non-buddy fix I worked so hard to find. Also, I made the faim stuff completely seperate, including it's own makefile, and compile directly into an ar archive (libfaim.a) like linuxkitty was doing. Much cleaner/nicer.

Somehow Orb's sister got too close to the computer and started typing on it. Somehow the window she typed in was the AIM window to me. Interesting person. She does, btw, claim to have body parts that are octodimensional. And that fact led to a clearing up of the word "through". I'm enlightened. I never thought about that word that much. It's normally used as an inclusive set specifier, but if you think about it, it's really exclusive. Now I know. In regards to that thought, she continued "That's what i always wanted to do with a degree in math. That, and the cute 'Will solve non-homologous differential equations for food' signs." Keep in mind that she was apparently doped up on Nyquil at this time (after finishing a conversation with someone else about getting down from a PCP high). Interesting person.... (Oh, and she called my ideas "puritan". Hey, I laughed.)

Daniel Holzemer, while thanking me for putting up the pinouts for the DVC1000 card, sent me a link to working Win95 drivers for it. He pointed me here to a link at Zoltrix. Looks like there should be something in there somewhere that's useful.

I decided to go to altavista and see just how visible this place is. Turns out, if you search for "DVC1000", somewhere on ihpled comes up three times. One of them is this log (rather, last months -- but on the next refresh, this month). A total count comes to 48 referencse on altavista to both ihpled's external names total.

Not-all-that suprisingly, mammatusThree didn't get put together, let along booted up. While he was building that new machine, my dad tested the STB sound card for me. It did get detected by Win95 as being PnP, and clearly asked for "AMD InterWave" drivers without being told what it was. This means there's a problem with isapnptools and that card. Maybe it will work in mammatusThree (which will have a PnP BIOS). No homework today either. Too bad.

`=1-203948576
q]w[eprotiyu
a's;dlfkgjh
/z.x,cmvnb
Isn't that neat? Maybe not.

"How dare he make love to me and not be a married man!" -- Some movie I don't know the name of but is probably not too important since the local PBS affiliate could afford to show it...

Ho hum.

Yesterday was boring as usual. First period spent doing nothing. Well, I looked up to find a bio video of Oppenheimer every once and a while.

Now, ok. I go tell Unger I'm there, and go back to the business office to start doing something. Now I wondered around in there a bit (my usual amount of pasing). Unger came in. She waited until I sat down (power thing), then explained that the meeting with Sanderson the other day was not to make a schedule thing, but to "open communication". She continued to say that if we set up a specific agreement to avoid another of these incidents, that I would be welcome back to her class.

Okay, when you resume consciousness, read on. That stunned Mrs Denton (who was sitting there doing real work at the time) and I. Unger left after I told her "I'd think about it". Denton and I sat there talking about this and various (and I do mean _various_) other things for over an hour (needless to say, she actually got very little real work done!).

I'm just plain confused. Previous behavior has told me to not expect she's doing it 'out of the kindness of her heart' or even out of guilt (I don't think she feels either to any influencial extent). I just don't know.

And yes, I have been thinking about doing. Not for her, but for me. But, my problem is that in doing it for me, it would make it appear that I was doing it because of her. I don't want to feed her ego. But, if I go back, no matter what I or anyone else says, she'll think it was because of her cunning that I came running back. She may even interpret it as an apology, which is far from the truth.

I don't want to stand down from my beliefs here. But, although some of us aren't concerned that much with image, others are. Like colleges. If there's a slipstream change on my transcript, they'll think I'm a quitter. It won't say in big letters next to it "PERSONALITY CONFLICT". It's going to look like I couldn't handle it. I don't want that.

Mrs Denton says to just ignore it. She says that Unger needs praise and people to reaffirm her faith that she's perfect. Denton says giving it to her is easier. I'm beginning to agree. But, on the fourth semester, it's not going to say "BARELY TOLERATED".

Although we both have come to the conclusion that the certification will never do me any good before it expires, it still would be better to just have it, even if it expired before I ever used it. Basically, the conclusion there was to just suck it up and go back. Ignore it till December. Yell as much as needed then.

I still don't see why it's _me_ that has to make the effort to create good relations here. It's okay if I've gotten enough sleep and am in at least an ok mood, but sometimes I just don't feel like making an effort to think a week in advance of the effects of what I say. With her incredible mood swings, everything I saw puts her into a different mood. Can I stand to be in a good mood every day for three months?

Anyway....

APUSH was taught by Michael today (the TA). Ms Pavia was out doing a volleyball something event. Nothing thrilling. Finished up the last of the pre-Revolutionary British acts -- that means the war is next.

Humanities brought the Siddhartha test. Some confusing stuff. I probably didn't do well. I really should've at least read what was going to be on the test first. After I finished the test, Mrs Foster gave us (Michael (Smith, same as above), Josh (Konkol), and myself) the project of opening a can of V8 (vegetable drink of some sort) that she'd tried to open when the pull-tab dodad broke off, leaving no easily way of opening it. Michael tried various writing utensils. Josh attempted it with a pocket knife of sorts. After trying various tools of my own, I finally succeeded with a 3cm paper clip. Foster doubted that a paper clip could open an aluminium can, but it was really quite simple. That was the entertainment for the day.

After the usual amount of sleep in the afternoon (I believe in segmented sleeping patterns, btw), I decided I should do a bit of homework. Well, I can say I tried. But I can't say I tried hard. The printer ran out of paper and I couldn't find any more. I got lazy and just started doing other things. Chatted with Josh a bit. Read mail. Upgraded ncurses and lynx on ihpled. Grabbed a new naim (still trying to figure out why backspc doesn't work when TERM != {linux,xterm}).

And to think, I did all that without getting out of bed. zeta never got turned on. This is why all the text-related upgrades above happened. Lately, I've been using lynx more than I've been using netscape. (Which isn't overly a bad thing -- just think of all the cycles I've saved!)

mammatusThree may be brought up tomorrow. I've got the case. And everything is all go (except for that Trident vide card witht the tv out, but that's unnecessary anyway). This will be a ISA+PCI 486dx4-100 machine. If it works and I can keep it for an extended period (remember that the mobo is not mine), it may replace the current mammatusOne.

And although I think celebrating Columbus day is utterly stupid, I'm still glad to have a three day weekend. But, why not celebrate Amerigo Vespucci day? Or Corondo Day? (the latter would make much more sense for us in the southwest) I say we just get all our Presidents' days back and get rid of that phony "Presidents' Day". The day they combined those had to have been a low day in national pride... maybe capitalism ran over it... SLAM!

Ok, Jared from PUSD wrote an explanation about why their firewall/proxy doesn't work quite right that I thought I should share (because it's funny, not because it's relevent)...

"It [failure] could also be due to the fact that there is a full moon. The gravitational pull of the moon throws the electrons in the CAT5 cable out of balance in their orbits... This is the result of years of conspiracy by Microsoft to oppress the Macintosh user. There is a preliminary announcement in the CAT6 standard that will fix this."

Anyway... First period was spent doing nothing. Well, I did stare at the walls and every once and a while doodle a few words on some diagrams for the TCS project. Second period started with a short and informative-only conversation with Unger. As predicted, the due date is now Tue (as apposed to today (Fri)).

Humanities brought two guest speakers who spoke of homeopathic and related medicines (acupuncture, etc).

Spent the evening finishing up the chem project. I really should have been reviewing Siddhartha for the Big Test today. Of course, I spent a few minutes doing other things...err...maybe the other way around...

Josh got me (re-)started on the idea of using gcc to generate assembly for the TI-89/92. It turns out that gcc _does_ have a -m68000 option (I didn't think it would generate code for less than a 68020), so it should be fine there. The main problems are:

• binary format: I thought about having gcc stop at the assebly level and continue the rest of the process using the normal Fargo tools. It seems that the Fargo-supplied assembler is way too simple to support gcc outputted code -- limited label support, for one.
• Run-time libc: just because you use gcc doesn't mean you get the libc for free. stdlib functions would have to be rewritten using a custom libc in order for those to be used. But, even using the base C language with a few bits of embedded __asm is still better than doing all assembly. It would appear that with the release of the ti89, the user base of 68k-based calcs will drastically increase, also creating the need for easier programming. (A C compiler would most likely aid Brock in his quest for a ti89/92 port of HAL-IC.)

You see, I could easily add a third item there. A Linux kernel. Once you got those two above items done, a kernel would be the most trivial part (though still not exactly trivial! -- still need software MMU emulation ala Sun3).

Since Brock isn't in town to defend himself, I figured I'd go ahead and announce that there's now another log of stuff here at ihpled, this one being his.

I'm going to talk about it now so I can write the rest unencumbered...

Unger came into the office and told me I needed to check in with her for attendance reasons (she blamed it on Mr Sanderson for not telling me -- because, of course, nothing's ever her fault). I gave her my IP address sheet (with a few example addresses attached). Listen up..here's the quote of the day... "I'm not sure I understand it, so I'm not quite sure what to do with it." And that was it. I attempted for a few minutes to explain, but since, well, you know, since everything I say is supposedly demeaning, I gave up after a bit. Explaing it to someone who does not understand binary and who is not willing to listen (let alone learn) is not what I felt like doing at that time. (Especially since even being in the same room with her makes me nausious.)

Ok, I think I can be done with that now. It appears now I have to lower myself to her standards so that I can get a decent grade (no more creativity!). Damn it.

Did the whole chem thing this morning. Mrs Gumm's scheduled jury duty was aparently descheduled, so she was there (though she won't be today or tomorrow). Talked about radioactivity. That's always fun, don't you know...

Then moved on to second period. Had Ms Pyle sign the class creation sheet for Sanderson. Went into the business office and sat down, foolishly attempting to do work. (You see, normally, Unger never ever goes into that office for extended periods of time during her prep period (while I was in her class). But now that I'm banned from her classroom, she stayed in the office nearly the whole period. I'm really confused. I guess she just wanted to make my life miserable too (in her eyes anyway -- having her looking over my back while I was doing work is something I really don't care about, though the excessive human-related noises she makes are somewhat annoying).) After I was kicked off the office computer, I took my stuff and spent the rest of the period with Ms Neilson and her yearbook class. That was fun. Her first problem was that her scanner and Zip drive wouldn't work when both were plugged in (both SCSI, on a powerbook 1400cs). That turned out to be an ID conflict. The Zip drive works, the scanner pretends to work. It scans (the lamp turns on and the head moves back and forth) but it doesn't put out a picture (or any error condition). The only odd thing I see is that the status light on the front never goes off or stays steady, but is always quickly flashing. I presume this is a fault warning, but the manuals certainly don't illude to such. It's a UMAX Astra(?) 1200S. I don't know.

At lunch, I took the paper into Yvonne (Guidance) so that could get cleared up ASAP (the slang acronym, not the test). Then went and talked to Ms Pavia (aka Ms Hoffman aka Mrs Phipps aka Ms Anything-Else) a bit. After class started, our group of four went and talked about what our presentation was going to be (although we had been given over 2.5hrs already to decide this, we figured the last 15min would be the best time). Our presentation was first... a semi-impromptu debate on the merits of the British Land Proclamation Act of 1763. (I took the British side, of course.) Yelling is fun when it's completely irrelevent. The class got a good laugh from us as well, which with Janeese in the group was an assurance anyway (her tear-jerking editorial rebutal at the end was truely moving and presuasive against the limiting factors of the Act). Anyway, that whole thing put me into an unusally good mood (I seem to be having many more good moods since Tue morning...wonder why...).

Humanities was interesting enough. After a 40min discussion on proper parental work habits, Foster put on an audio-book version of Remains of the Day. It was like last year's Antigone all over again. Over half the class was asleep within minutes. The rest of us were making idle and irrelevent conversations in a desperate attempt to remain in the world of the waking as long as possible.

My parents and I went out to eat somewhere. I don't remember the name. It's somewhere inside the mall in our backyard.

Aparently several days ago, my dad ordered a CD writer. Today it came. Seeing the box was the first time I'd heard of it. The installation CD is funny. It's got hundreds of MB full of mpeg movies giving installation instructions. It gave us a good laugh anyway.

I spent most of the evening doing bits of homework (though, as usual, there was much more non-work going on than work). Scanned in the floor plans for the rest of the Unger project so I can spend my idle time tomorrow marking up my own copies. Also did the part of the chem project that's due tomorrow.

Lessons for the day:

• Never leave dead insects on your monitor glass for extended periods of time (esp the really squished kind). They can impede the proper writing of logs.
• Never edit large scanned images unless you have enough disk space. This especially applies when using the GIMP, which will open up a new dialog error box for every 4kb that it failed to write (for multi-megabyte images, this takes a while and eventually makes your X server's window handle counter overflow).
• The best tool to remove staples with is a putty knife. Clean it off first.
• It takes 33 small paper clips to encase a .25in diameter wall hook.
• Try to avoid listening to the sounds of geese. I think they honk vegetarianist propaganda.
• Don't listen to anything that's in a bulleted or numbered list.

Oh, joy, oh joy, oh joy.... (Maybe a round of the BSD-VAX song is in order? Nah...it's not Christmas YET...)

The morning started off okay. I'm still not sure quite what went wierd.

Sat in the library for 90min for chem. Nothing exciting there. I tried to get a Java telnet to work so that I could at least do _something_ useful in there. No go on that.

Be aware that what follows is my own account of these events and that some things may be different in real life... We cannot escape our perceptions completely. And sometimes, stuff gets remembered badly. I'll try not to make it look too messy....

Okay, so I go into networking as usual. Sit down. Login. Do all the normal stuff. Sit there thinking about subnetting for a bit. Did some sketches of various things on paper. About after 20min of doing that, Mrs Neilson walks in and asks Unger if I could go do something for her real quick. Unger replied that no, I couldn't, because that her and I were going to have a conference with Mr Sanderson (my guidance counselor). [You must note here that 1) I had no idea this was happening, and 2) Unger did not deem it worthy to tell me directly that it was going to happen.] That got me a tad scared, but more confused. Why had she called a meeting without even telling me? Esp for a meeting that would decide my future in "the program"?

Sat there in confusion for a bit more. Tried to be as productive as possible. Sanderson finally came in. We went off to another teachers classroom (the "dreaded" Mac lab). Sat down and talked. At least that's what we were suppose to be doing. Sanderson asked what the problem was. I said 'personality conflict'. She said the same, only in much more rude and insulting terms. I decided I could play that came too. I frankly said that I did not repsect Unger as a teacher. Unger's basic response was (this was not said to me, but to Sanderson, as Unger didn't want to look me in the face) "Adam doesn't understand his role as a student." She talked of tolerance (and my supposed lack thereof). And of "the real world". (How she could possibly know anything about the real world is beyond me!) That angered me plenty, but I didn't respond.

Eventually, the question of a solution was brought up. Unger seemed to think that this could be resolved. (You see, she made it seem as though it was all my fault (I have a short temper, don't you know), and that by me restraining myself, I could stay in the class.) She did not understand that this was really a fundamental problem, not just a mere incidental tif. I said I wanted out of there (one secret meeting was enough for me!). She tried to convince Sanderson out of doing that. I guess I finally prevailed (for once). After Sanderson finally agreed that removal was best, Unger basically stormed out. On the way, she flung things like "You should know that you're not welcome in my classroom..." and other trivial things. Sanderson and I went to talk to Mrs Denton about it. She silently agreed that it was for the best (through a variety of facial expressions and verbal inuendos). Denton said I could stay with her until the end of the term-thingy (the 9wk-long things -- too many new block scheduling terms!). It's over on the 12th of this month. She mentioned that Mrs Pyle needed help. So I went and talked to her. She said she could use a tutor. So I said why not and went back to Denton. After that, Mrs Denton basically said "go to the restroom and don't punch anything". Considering my mental state, that was obviously a good thing to do.

By the time this was all over, it was lunch time (yes, I now have a lunch time again!). I wandered about. Went and talked to Mrs Neilson to see what she wanted when she was so rudely interrupted earlier. I'm not quite sure what she wanted. Something about setting up a bunch of Macs. I don't know. I sat there for a bit (she's one of those people who it's just nice to sit back and listen to). Neilson's classroom holds that building's community microwave, at which was standing Mrs Denton. Finally a calm, sound conversation. She said that Unger was trying to make up stuff about my dealings with Denton (again, she's trying to prove that I'm a terrible person). She thought it was funny, I guess. She couldn't believe that she said other teachers agreed with her (that I was disrepectful to teachers -- i'm the great rebel, you know). Anyway, that was that. Denton clearly saw avoidance as the best method of tolerance. At this point, I'd have to agree.

This has stopped being a fundamentalist battle. It's now a 'save myself while I'm still sane' thing. I can't stand the situation enough to actually SOLVE the problem. I can only distance myself from it.

After that, I wandered around a bit outside. I was impressed with the strict boundries that Chaney and Melissa were keeping on the campus these days. No students within 5m of the property lines. Anyway, I wandered a bit. Went into the guidance office to put my name on the list to see Sanderson again. Then ventured over to the 200building. That's a nice quiet place to sit during that time (as I've found before). Contemplation. I laughed a bit. Though I'm not sure whether that's because I was laughing at myself or at the passerby Mr O (he's an interesting person -- everyone should have the experience of having him as a teacher).

Anyway, the bell finally rang and I jumped up and moved a few meters into calc class. Nothing exciting in there, as usual.

Humanities finally came. Well, it turns out that Foster had a run-in with Unger earlier in the day. (Actually, Foster wanted to talk to her about Brock, not about me...but guess who they ended up talking about?!?!) By the time I saw Foster, she was nearly in tears with laughter. She just said basically "you question a bit of authority here and there and they make your life hell, right?" I laughed and that was the end of that. Sanderson called me to guidance during that class.

So, of course, I went to guidance. He was busy with someone else, so I sat there and stared at the walls (not like this was a rare thing). Yvonne Nesbit (the guidance secretary) was having problems with her printer (a new HP LaserJet 4000). My answer was that her printer cost too much. It was just printing blank pages. She wanted to print pages 14 and 15 of this document. And when she did, it printed two blank pages. I learned something about MSWord today. If you specify it to print more pages than you have in your document, it prints blank pages instead. After figuring out that the right file was not open, and getting that resolved, it worked fine.

Sanderson was finally freed (actually, he'd already been free twice before, but I was busy with the printer problem). Went in, told him that it was all basically final, and got the papers to create a new class. The unfortunate part is that I must have Unger personally sign them. Ugh.

On my way out of guidance, Yvonne wanted to know how to make tables. A quick little tutorial on that, and I was eventually back to humanities. Where, there was a discussion going on (at my desk even!) about the whole heaven/hell/purgatory thing. It later mutated into something about the Pope. I'm not sure.

Usual procedure after that... go back through 600 and talk to whoever's there. Brock and David obviously had questions. Aparently Unger had thought it in her position to inform Brock that I was removed. But not much more than that. I gave a "quick" summary and was eventually on my way. But, not without Denton making her usal faces at us.

Well, my mom picked me up after school. Unger had called her. (I think I forgot to mention that while Mrs Denton was giving me some "private time" in her office, I called my dad. He completely agreed with the decision I'd made.) My mother had a different opinion I guess. Unger had called her at what i can only guess was the same time I was talking to my dad. Of course, the story was that I was a horrible person and that Unger did nothing but be helpful and kind. (She aparently started off the conversation with something like "I've known you [my mom] and Doug [my dad] for many years and I felt I should call you." Wasn't that noble of her. But, after having my mother explain to me the things she said, you can obviously tell it was a ploy to force the blaim wholely on me, and make her seem the distrout one who should be pittyed for having to put up with such a horrible child as me. Oh, btw, the statement that she's known my parents for years is an utter lie and nothing more. Unless you call 'knowing' equivelent to meeting once or twice over the span of five or so years. The entire conversation was a power ploy to get my mom's opinion of her strengthened before she talked to me.) Luckily, my mom was smarter than that. You see, I've documented all my troubles as well as talking to both my parents about it for the past several months -- she can't say this is a limited incident or that I acted rashly. My mom did a lot of the phone equivelent to head-shaking and hung up. She then called my dad, who I'd already talked to, and got the Rest of the Story.

Anyway, after school, my mom still seemed to want to talk to me. She has the opinion that I should in some way apologize. God knows I'm not doing THAT! The minute I make an admition of ANY guilt, I'm admitting ALL guilt in the eyes of Unger. It's all or nothing, and I take nothing. This is not to say that I haven't faulted. I have, many times. I did act childishly and rudely many times. I said many things I shouldn't've. But, they were not without worth or reason. They were always in response to rude comments to me from her. I never insulted her without her insulting me at least twice first.

My mom's comments basically centered around the fact that no matter what, Unger still has at least the title of "teacher". And for some reason having that title is suppose to command immediate respect. (I don't agree -- that's nearly as bad as blind diety faith!) I just said that the minute she insulted me or any one of her students, she lost all respect I would have ever had for her as a teacher. Teachers just don't insult students (and she even used tolerance in her arguments against ME!). If teachers insult students, why can't students insult teachers? "Don't expect what you do not provide to others." they always said, right? Or how about "respect is earned"? Does that apply to everyone except teachers?

Unger would day after day make personal attacks on me as a person. The way I live. The way I interact. She judges me as a person by the two hours a day I spend alone with her. She saw how I interacted with ONE person. How I worked with ONE person. Yet, she generalized all that into who I AM. Again, this is the same person who called ME intolerant.

I'm not sure what else I can say without repeating myself. I'm sure I've left something out. It's just terribly madening...

Overall, it's been one my best days in quite a while. I've gotten stuff done. Rethought about most of the last year of my life, and other fun things to do when you have nothing better to do (or when you're getting insulted).

After the chat with my parents was all done (quite interesting actually -- ended up being more like my parents versus each other: my dad knows Unger (and had actually talked to Ladd Bausch about the situation after I got off the phone with him) and understands how she thinks; my mom can only speak generally. The problem with that is that you can't generalize Unger into the class of "normal people". She thinks in a very childlike, superificial way. It's inexplainable really. Just go talk to her someday. So, that conversation didn't take much work for me (dad agreed, mom wanted an apology -- I don't who won).). I found a DVC1000 on the doorstep. Finally. It's still in the box, though.

Had a lot of homework that kind of needed to get done. Started with Unger's IP addressing assignment for a sample school district (you see, even though I'm banned from both entering her classroom and ever speaking a word to her again, I must still complete the work up till the 12th). There's a msword95/7.0 edition of my solution there. Notice the use of classless addressing and heirarchial subnet masks that don't fall on byte boundries. Please note that I did it that difficult for my own amusement, not to mess with Unger. It was quite fun doing it. Also note that most of the numbers on that sheet are in binary, since they don't fit well into dotted-decimal notations.

The evening was finished with some chem homework. Nothing exciting there... evaluating sources! woohoo!

Maybe I can get some real work done tomorrow. Doubtful, but maybe.... And to all those people who are still in class with Unger: have fun.

Eek... this has really gotten long. But, I guess you already figured that one out. It took nearly an hour to write all that. Oh, drat...now my mtndew's flat... (now, tomorrow, remind me to break this trend of ending with two rhyming phrases...oops...looks like i've already borken it... )

Been a while since I did two logs in the same day. I was just kind of TiKeD that morning... I needed it.

Sat around and did mostly nothing in chemistry (well, talked to Kari and Mrs Gumm a bit). Need to do some research on forensic chemistry (toxicology, etc).

Well, you heard about second hour. Period 4A was spent sitting around doing nothing again, except for trying to make it look as though I had done my homework. The strange part was that I was explaining the homework content to the people who did do the homework... and they thought I knew what I was talking about. Land Proclamation Act of 1763, anyone?

Humanities was spent talking about and reviewing Siddhartha. She was trying to prepare us for a test today (Tue), but everyone later convinced her that we needed until Fri to prepare.

Actually, the less interesting side of that class was spent trying to fix Mrs Foster's Epson color (ink jet) printer. It would only print blank pages. Common sense would say that the black ink cartridge was empty. But, it was new. Nothing a kleenex and a little ink sloshing didn't fix. I guess it was slightly clogged. It's now printing fine. But, it has got to be the slowest printer I've seen in years. Takes several seconds for the cariage to go from one side to the other even when doing nothing! Terrible.

Mrs Foster also told me I should talk to this person named "Brock Wilcox" about setting up the AD pages. I guess I should track this person down and talk to them. Maybe third hour would be good.

The DVC1000 has ended up in "Phoenix, AZ" at roughly 1530, so it should be here today. Finally. I thought it would never get out of Mesquite (TX).

Spent part of the evening putting up pictures of Amanda's First Birthday. This involved getting bttv to cooperate.

Spent a small section of the evening doing AIM-related things. Tryed out a snapshot of NAIM. Works, just make sure you only use an 80x25 console or it's segfault city. (My 80x24 rxvt wouldn't do!) Also had a "eureka!" moment with one of the gtktree bugs in gtkfaim. In the refresh function, it traversed the entire buddy list, including invisible (ie, non-tree-item) temporary buddies. But, it wasn't checking for the latter case. That really wouldn't have been a problem. But, combinded with the fact that that struct never got initialized properly, gtk_widget_{show,hide}() were showing/hiding random addresses causing random segfaults. And there's the answer. But, that's only ONE of the bugs. I don't know what causes the current rack of crashes.

It was "Motif Change Day" for several major organizations. CNN got a new set of on-screen logos and captions just in time for the impeachment hearing debat this morning (the "meeting to discuss the decision to have a meeting"). CNBC's "Bug" (on-screen summary-only ticker) got a small font and color change. Brock also noted that HoTMaiL now has an MSN logo on it instead of the Microsoft logo. That's all I've seen today. Probably more tomorrow.

The language of the next century: FURBISH!

Just got done having a not-so-pleasant chat with Unger about the next part of the TCS. IP addresses due Wed. She finally just ended the conversation with "I think that's where you and I should stop."

While skimming through that chapter, I found this statement: "Availability is increased by adding more resources." That very statement has got to be what's wrong with modern computing. They then go on about how it's best to save costs (infer that buying cheap hardware as opposed to quality hardware is the answer). Now the proper way to say it would have been: "Although adding more resources is an option when increasing availability, it should only be used as a last resort. Many other methods can increase availability more simply and without the scalability or budgetary problems associated with adding more resources." Now isn't that nicer? Since I'm beginning to sound like I read too much Dilbert, I'm going to stop...

She just got done talking to another teacher about how "subhuman and intolerable" the students in her classes are. Then she continued to talk about her understanding of who "engineers" were (egotistical, illiterate, no-personality people who are terrible to be around). That pissed me off just a bit (sarcasm, btw). Arg. When will she understand that that is the antithesis of what she is attempting to describe... What she's obviously describing are "pointy-hairs" (Dilbert-speak) like the people at Cisco she deals with. How she gets off calling them engineers is beyond me (probably because they are "certified" with a CCNE (Cisco Certified Network Engineer)).

And after telling me that I insult Mrs Denton, I listened to a conversation between Unger and Denton. Oh, boy. Can Unger be any more overruling and cocky?

People like Unger are the people who convince me that I woulnd't be able to stand a career in this industry. Not for the industry itslef, but because of outsider's reaction. It's filled with too many "buffers" (the people in between the core technology industry and the rest of the world) who are just plain morons. They think they know it all and go around talking to people like they do. They're the people who would be better off dead or in a cave somewhere.

Okay, I just spent about 20minutes wandering around the room. Unger was aparently suprised that walking, thinking, and making paper-clip architecture could all be done at the same time. I had a short chat with Mrs Denton while Unger was out of the room. She seems quite aware of Unger's personality problem and that she herself is getting insulted every minute of the day. In response to "how do you put up with her!?!?!", she gave the confusing answer: "the same way you do." I'll have to have her explain that one to me. At least I know she's aware of the roots of the Main Problem.

Brock, David, and the rest of the third hour class will be arriving in a mere few minutes. Logging out... (and cleaning up the large mess that has collected in front of me from actually doing work)...

For some reason, I'm getting tired early. I really hate it when i get less sleep on weekends than normal...

Dad got the commode changed out in the back toilet this morning. I'm sure that was fun. Probably nearly as fun as fixing the carburator in the white suburban, which he did in between naps for the rest of day...

Got up late, and didn't do much of anything for a bit. Day flowed in and out of productivness.

The evening was spent in the dark coding some bits for the FAIM backend. Should now be able to handle multiple outstanding SNACs at any given time. That allowed the beginnings of the user searching to be implemented. Search by address is basically done, it just needs a UI. (BTW, the TLV code I put in the other day allowed me to parse that command in a matter of four lines of code.) Next: chat! Actually, there's a lot to do before chat ever happens.

Put up a snapshot of gtkFAIM+FAIM so that the developer of NAIM can get the latest copy of the TLV and SNAC routines. The patch ended up to be nearly 30kb, so I figured it was probably kind of important.

Did some homework in the afternoon. Found that I'd lost my sheet for APUSH. Bad news. I get to have the pleasure of making up an excuse tomorrow.

Unger will most likely force me to work on her "Threaded Case Study" this week. She wants a fully addressed and priced network plan by Wed. I wonder what I'll do for Mon and Tue....

The new new computer that's being built will have a new case, instead of the one that used to encase doug. This means that case is up for grabs, and I'm taking it. I think I'll put one of Herbert's 486 boards into it (which means it will be temporary only!) and use it as a mammatus test node. PCI+ISA, up to 486dx4/100.

I'm guessing that's it for now. Have fun, John Glenn!

Exciting news this morning: Harold got Linux/MIPS booting to a single user shell on one of his DECstations! Multiuser and a full system are closer now than ever...

Woke up really late. Did the usual morning things (read mail, read BBC news while watching CNN/CNBC (ironic, isn't it?), etc).

Spent a majority of the day at Amanda Allenberg's first birthay party (there's some year-old pictures of her there -- she's much larger now, and can facilitate self-motivated locomotion via the lower pair of large-scale appendages). I'm not about to explain how she's related to me, ask if you care. Quote of the day: "I've wondered for years how to eat cake... Now I know." (Joe Hamilton, Amanda's grandfather).

Quickly compiled a set of very simple TLV routines for FAIMone. I really didn't want to do that in FAIMone, but I thought it would be needed to hold us over until FAIMtwo gets its timing problem worked out. Also fixed the oncoming/offgoing buddy command assumptions (I had been assuming that the upper byte of the warning level was 0x00 and therefore used it as an implicit null terminator for the screen name). While I was at it, I made the oncoming buddy parser update the user info block. The state-based attributes in the buddy list tree ala AIM95 should now be (more easily) possible.

Did basically nothing the rest of the day, and loved every minute of it. Did the normal Saturday-night things later (read mail, watched Mr Bean and Red Dwarf -- by Saturday, I'm in need of a good laugh).

Daniel Reed has whipped together an AIM client in record time: one evening. (Of course, he kind of cheated by using the FAIM backend!) It's ncurses-based (he didn't like the way cLAIM worked). He's promised an initial release for tomorrow. I'm anxious to see it. Maybe finally I can start AIMing from my laptop.

gtkFAIM ran all night with no unexplainable crashes. Of course, it was running without a buddy list. Several reports have come in saying that the buddy list gtktree manipulation bugs don't happen in gtk 1.1.2. Could it be that the dev versions of gtk are actually more stable than the stable versions???

Today I made an astonishing discovery. It turns out that the dog on the Taco Bell commercials uses the same model of VCR remote that I do (the Panasonic VSQS0369). Since they don't show the actual VCR in the clip, I can't tell it's model. It has to be of the same era though. It's reassuring to know that I use VCRs that are being used by the rest of the country as stage props...

Found out that aparently a good majority of the current rack gtkFAIM bugs are caused by the buddy list notifications/manipulations. By running without a buddy list, it's been working for me for many hours. Of course, I can't see anyone. Put up a patch-only update from 0.08 to what I'm calling 0.08post1. It's the fixes for 100buddy's and a partial buddy list manipulation stability fix (though it's not very effective). After that, Thomas (TJM) sent over a copy of his preliminary preferences dialog, and put that into my tree. Looks very nice. Now if only it did something. Still pondering various ideas for how the rc file should be done...

Chem teacher came back today. Taught class from her desk. Kari (her TA (and sister of Brock)) did most of her leg-work. Funny. It's usually Kari who sits at her desk and doesn't get up.

Unger was trying to convince me this morning that every time I walk into a room, I insult someone. Granted I do insult a lot of people, sometimes on purpose and (more often) not on purpose, I don't think it's reasonable for her to say that. Just because I hate her and and she hates me, it's no reason she should make stupid judgements like that. She also made the very offending comment that I insult Mrs Denton on a regular basis. I respect Mrs Denton very much as both a teacher and as a person (far more than I do Unger), and it would be painful for me to know that I insult her somehow. I don't believe I do. Personally, I think Unger is just trying to fill her own inadequecies by degrading me. Bad idea.

Just another one of those Mrs Foster-style unproductive days in humanities. There've been surprisingly few of those this year. I was getting worried.

Had to stay after school for quite some time taking tests and quizes for chemistry (from several months ago that I missed during the Kansas trip). Nothing eventful there.

Most of the evening was uneventful. My dad got his DVD player today. The quality of DVD video is incredible. Far better than any VHS, and probably even better than SVHS/SVideo. Even Super8 is not comperable. Truely amazing that just a few years ago we had to mess with postage-size movies at substandard frame rates. And now, full rates at relativly large geometries.

After seeing how well his video card's composite out looked, I was depressed by the quality coming from the willow box in my room. I really didn't mean to buy anything. I bid on an auction at haggle for a Trident Image975 PCI video card with composite-out. But what I didn't notice was that the auction was a QuickBuy auction, where the first bidder to meet the asking price wins. And guess what... I was the first bidder. So oh well. Maybe I'll be amazed at the quality. Maybe I won't.

In any case, I made further attempts at making mammatus work the way I want. Still no-go on the sound card. My dad's building a new win95 machine next week, so I'll test it in that before he stabilizes it. Hopefully it's not completely fried. I tried to put in a 3com boomerang, but it hung up the kernel boot shortly after the card was detected. The 3c509 on the same kernel boots fine. I'm not amused. I really need to get the extra boomerang speed (everything the machine does will go across that card at least once!).

I found that the cable on this IBM Selectric-style keyboard I'm using on mammatus is long enough to reach completely across the room. Very nice. Now all I need is the IR mouse emulation and I can be mobile and get out of this chair. Anybody know where you can get IR keyboards cheap?

Suprisingly enough, that's it. I found the reason the monitor was so bright. Now wait, it's a logical reason.... The brightness knob was turned up. I'm not quite sure how that happened. I always leave both the contrast and brightness knobs all the way down (older NEC monitors are naturally bright...esp when used with #9 vid cards). I'm guessing it's this house again. (Haven't heard about that yet? YOu should at least get a summary. It started a few years back when my sister hung up a few pictures on her wall. After hanging fine for a few months, they all of a sudden stopped wanting to stay on the wall. Every day or so, a picture would just 'jump' off the wall. The usual jokes about ghosts and things came up, but no one really took much interest. About a year ago, we were setting up a computer in the extra room, and noticed the monitor would never fully degauss. This is a bad thing, as it's very annoying to look at a shaking monitor. Although they joke about it now, the event continued with more interest. Finally one day my dad made himself a relativly large EMF ring (normally used for manually degaussing/regaussing CRTs), and hooked it up to a pair of headphones. He wandered about the house. Patterns emerged. In the extra room, the electricians that built the house made a big mistake. The AC outlets in that room are arranged in such a way that the normal wiring pattern generates an osscilating loop. We had unknowingly placed the monitor right in the center of this loop, causing it to osscilate with the AC moving in the wall. This is not easily fixable, but can be remedied by moving the monitor somwhere else. Now back to the pictures on (and off) the wall. Turns out they were in metal frames. Taking the EMF 'detector' into that room found yet another AC loop, with the pictures just slightly off it's center. The imbalance made them unstable and every once in a while, made them leap off the wall and out of the loop. There ya go... a 'short' summary of that. In any case, our house is haunted by the ghosts of bad electricians.)

Now that all wouldn't be too overly unusual, except for the fact that most people who have lived here at one time or another have personified those electricians under the name of Walter.... twallalalala....

For some reason my monitor is getting really bright tonight. It's proabably because I ran it at 640x480 for a while (so I could see it from several feet away -- yes, i was sleeping on the job). So don't be alarmed if I happen to go blind from this intense radiation....

Aparently my chemistry teacher sprained her ankle. You can tell I'm heartbroken that she wasn't there today.

Unger decided that I needed to take a test today (I should note that I was not explicitly warned of this, leading to the suprising belief that I was suppose to actually infer something from her behavior. I'm shocked.). I was given a few minutes to jot down some notes. So, I wrote down three one-sided post-it notes worth of notes. Not really notes, rather just copies of every bulletted list I could find in that chapter of the curriculum. Oh how predictable she is. And to avoid the questions of her grading that occured on the last test, for this one she added to every question: "...as learned in the curriculum." I'm glad she's such a wonderful teacher, aren't you?

Also, she's forced Brock to not work with David for the Last Big Project (lasts from now till the end of Dec). (Though it's really not that bad for Brock, since she's forcing him to work with Sara Webb, a notably nice and hard working person). The reason for the seperation is that aparently Unger thinks that David doesn't work when Brock's around. Uhmm... Ok. What Unger doesn't understand are higher levels of communication and productivity (ie, those beyond verbal and physical). It comes down to the fact that she's intolerant of people unlike herself (ie, most of us).

Humanities was amusing enough. The test she gave us for ancient civilizations was exaclty the same multiple choice practice test that we spent 90minutes going over the day before. Needless to say, it took less than 20min to fill in the bubbles. The only change was the addition of an essay, which was short. How funny she is.

As I was suppose to be staying after school to take a chemistry make up test and the teacher wasn't there, I ended up wandering around the comp labs as ual. Had discussions concerning entropy-based organizational methods and the ultimate source of EMF radiation (which somehow was derived from an earlier discussion on the tremors that often occur in that building -- you know, the ones that make the fiber crossconect box's lid flap open every few months). Discussions held with Brock and Booth (from what I remember, anyway).

I made further attempts to get the STB sound card working on mammatus. The fact that it doesn't show up on the pnpdump list is troubling. I grabbed ALSA, which is aparently the only sound system for linux that supports generic Interwave-based cards like this one. ALSA won't load because I was booted with a kernel that had OSS/Lite compiled in (a no-no). I'll have to make a new kernel and try later. Though I'm hoping it will autodetect it since I can't set it with isapnptools if it doesn't show up... If nothing works, I guess I'll have to use my dad's machine for testing with windows (I currently can't verify that the card works at all).

I looked at the AIM 100 buddy maximum problem. I put in a limit in the FAIM backend code to only send 100 buddies (if you send more, the entire list gets rejected, as opposed to only sending 100 and all 100 working). I'll have to rewrite that code in order to send a seperate command per 100 buddy block (and hope it works the way it logically should).

Also removed that strange buddy list cleanup() thing I put in a few weeks back. It seems to be making gtkFAIM crash alot on oncoming/offgoing events. I've had no crashes during those events since I removed it (and none of the strange problems that that function was suppose to fix either). Also, scrolling in the user information window causes an instant crash. I don't know whether it's a gtk bug or a miscoding of the way I connect the scrollbar to the text box. Both are unlikely, but nontheless, its an instant crash.

I need either sleep more or sleep less. I can't tell. All I know is that I'm not doing something right. I feel terrible and have no energy. Something needs to get done. Maybe I'll just continue to sit here and whine about it for a bit more. Ya, that'll work....

Oh, great... Some person I've never seen before just put gtkFAIM 0.08 on freshmeat this morning.... People must be really finding it usefull if they announce it without even talking to me first. I'm still pondering the actual size of the current user base. I've been explicitly contacted by about two dozen people. A few new people show up every night (at an increasing rate, btw). Wow.

As I must get up in less than five hours, I will be leaving, I guess. The temperature is finally getting reasonable outside (at night at, least). But, we can't open up the house's windows because everyone else here seems to have an alergy problem these days! Oh poo...

The new clothes washer and dryer come tomorrow. No more having to listen to what sounds like an aeroport in the room next door! Maybe I'll get my hearing back.... Now if only I could get my eyesight back after looking at this way-too-bright monitor....

Firstly, since the month has yet again changed (actually, most people are now in a new fiscal quarter as well), this log's been rotated. volume four: sep 1998 is there.

Ok, that's done.

Started out the morning building Bohr atomic models from miscellaneous food-style items. Oh, these non-honors classes are just sooo much fun.....

That Compaq that died in the cisco lab yesterday got moved up to the library a/v room to get sent over to the CSO (ok, my dad :). If he can't get it to work, then it will get serviced by compaq (again -- this is the second time it's died in a month and is the only one of that model we've had any problems at all with!). And those compaq service people are just so much fun to have a conversation with...

Umm... I think I did something during that class this morning, but I don't remember it. I was amused to watch the third period class play this strange mutation of a "jeopardy"-esque "game". So does anyone remember what IEEE 802.1q was all about?

There was an interesting discussion that took place towards the end of humanities. Here's the situation. A student who knew that they were going to have a substitute in a class and knew that he would get nothing done in that class, ditched class and went to the library to study and do homework. Now, an admin found him and gave him a few detentions, sent him to sweep, and then back to class. Ok, the question here is... Is it okay to disobey the rules if it is for the good of the cause? Where's the line between laws to keep social peace/structure and laws to produce effeciency? What good are laws that limit the usefulness of the effort? If I wasn't so tired, I'd write more, as this is very important concept... (and also seems to be very important to make the case for or against our president)...

Walked home today and found all but one car here and my dad's work stuff. I didn't think too much of it at the time. After an hour or so I began to wonder. Eventually, I found a note from my parents telling me that they'd gone to Flagstaff. Aparently Amy is ill and needed a ride home.

Got a somewhat strange mail from Unger. Firstly, she mailed me from home, which means she doesn't want to actually talk to me in public about it(and she calls me the one who lacks interpersonal skills) and secondly that she's probably not in a good mood (ie, bored). She says that though I can continue to stay in her class for 3rd period (my lunch period), that I must stay away from Brock and David so that they can do "my [her] stuff". Uhmm... okay... You know, I really don't think either one of them have a productivity problem. But, you see, they don't seem to have anything to do. And can anyone guess who's fault that is? I can tell you one thing... it's not mine!

Drew up some small sketches of the layout of the mammatus. I'm really not sure how I want to distribute it. Physical space is becoming a problem. I'd like to keep the speakers where they are (at the north side of my room) because from there, no matter where you are, they're always aimed towards you. So, I thought about having a simple node that took an audio stream off the TR and put it out the speakers via a pro audio card. But, I'm afraid that card doesn't have enough power or fidelity to push a large enough signal. Also, I'd like to put only the lower-quality audio sources onto network streams (namely, TV audio and FM radio). I don't want to listen to CDs that skip all around, which is probably what's going to happen sometimes with the network. I'm just Really Not Sure.

I grabbed the isapnptools in hopes of finding a way to configure that STB audio card. It doesn't find it. STB has no mention of it other than "it's an OEM card" and "don't ask us: we don't know!". I guess I'll have to go grab the InterWave specs from AMD and see what I can tell. Since that's mostly all that's on there, it probably handles the configuration. If not, I guess I can start poking around a bit...

I guess that's probably it for now.