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

New version of gtkFAIM out this morning. Version 0.08 offers not much more than anything. It's most likely less stable than 0.07, but oh well... I did get to quickly implement self-destroying dialogs. I also had the pleasure of manually applying the rejections from Orb's feconfig patch. Oh ya, that was fun.

Had a chance to do some hardware reconfigurations in the Cisco lab this morning. The Compaq that Brock and I use now has 56mb of RAM. Don't ask. In any case, it runs much better. I can run Netscape, XEmacs, a half-dozen xterms, and a compile all at the same time while only going a few megs into swap. Much nicer. (It only had 24mb before.)

Unger didn't happen to tell me we were having a fire drill this morning. She was not with me at the time, and since I'm the only one in the class, I wandered around the school wherever she wasn't just to annoy her. (Oh, did I mention this was a hostile relationship?) She was only slightly upset.

Got half of the ap history test back. Missed 4 of 75 on the multiple choice. The essay has yet to be scored. I have always wondered how you can be productive while being unproductive. It seems Ms Pavia does it quite well, and teaches everything equally well.

Mrs Foster reminded me again that I should get started on Centennial's AD page. I suppose I should. She aparently had a joyous time in Boston. Her son married some sort of city planner (she does the nature preservation work or something -- so Foster being the environmentalist she is, loved that). Wish I could spend a week on the Cape...

The US$9 sound card came today. No jumpers. Plenty of i/o ports. And, well, a 30pin SIMM socket. I was suprised. I wonder how large you can put in there. Anyway, there's an obvious AMD InterWave chip on there, so it should work with the GUS (Gravis UltraSound) drivers under linux. I will finally need to deal with isapnptools, though, as it doesn't appear that manual setting is possible. The card came in no retail box and with no manual. Just a card (not even a static bag!). Well, there is one trinary jumper, but I doubt it does anything. I'll try it out sometime this week(end). Hopefully.

Slept most of the afternoon. My body appears to be having some problems with this whole 'get up at 0600 for five days in a row' thing. I say we go to 3 day weeks.

While I was sleeping, my mail from primenet/iname was downloading and procmail'ing. Took just under 80minutes to run 4000 messages through procmail. The PLUG list changed their SMTP headers, so my rule for that stopped working half-way through, making me do the rest manually. While that was going on, I was watching When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth on AMC. Funny movie. Well, it's not suppose to be funny, but it was. The language they had the cavemen speaking had every-other-word exactly the same. (Yes, this was a very inaccurate movie, as everyone knows, the human neolithic age didn't start until long after the dinosaurs were gone.) In any case, it was something to do...

Uh oh...MATLOCK!!!!!

One of the more productive but least satisfying days in a while yet...

Spent most of the evening with my mind set on getting that packet full of corrections and updates for the AZPE web site done. I think I did finally get it done. But kind of two months late.... (the packet finally floated back up to the top of a stack the other day I decided I better do it -- since I did get paid for that job and all!)

In between scanning and GIMPing, there was discussion with various people. Including Josh/shorti and some others. gtkFAIM felt it really needed to crash on me every few minutes. Josh seems really interested in the Linux/m68k-ti89/92 idea/project. He seems to be designing some sort of Z80-based coffee maker. Interesting.

Oh, and I did stay up and finish Siddhartha yesterday. Everyone who cares should read that book, at the very least, the last chapter. Never seen the concept of timelessness expressed so well. Incredible.

Two words: "Sara Webb". Anyway, it would appear that I'm, not suprisingly, not the only one with certain opinions on the teacher currently known as Ronni Unger. Sara and David and I don't know who else also have these ideas. I'm supposing we should find something to do about that. My suggestion: go to the admins, request that one of them express their right to a surprise supervisiory session with one/some/all of her classes. That may not work the first time, as she seems to have a way of making it look like she's always doing the right thing, but I suppose if they observe her long enough, they'll eventually figure it out.

Now seeing as how I only got less than 3 hours sleep in the last sleep cycle, I should probably get some more tonight. But, seeing as how it's already 0045 (local), not too much more.

A local news station has informed me that if anyone sees a recently pregnant woman without her baby, they should call the police immediatly. Don't be frightened. I guess they didn't mean that to sound as hilarious as it did, but I suppose that is their problem. CNN also informs me that sex is better after 60. What wonderful things you learn from CNN.

It appears that general knowledge of syntactical devices such as dipthongs is limited these days. I guess with the days of old Saxony long gone, there's no reason to remember that 'n' and 'g' were suppose to be one single combined letter (that would be a dipthong, btw). And no one cares that 'a' and 'e' should always be a dipthong when surrounded by non-vowels. Oh well....

Aparently Kim is having a jolly time in Venusuela. She's grabbed herself another nick ('Provocator'). I did receive a somewhat lengthy explanation of that term in various variations in the language of Spanish. Interesting that food can be provocative. I really can't think of the last time food really provoked me. Well, there was that incident a few years back...but I don't want to dig up painful memories...

Uh oh... this chair has begun to fall apart... ahhhhhhhhhhhh... crash.

Long day....

Got up way too early this morning. I'm still wondering why.

Most everything before 2000 is fuzzy. I worked on FAIMtwo (the new backend) trying to get it to send the buddy list properly. No luck. I noticed sometimes that the profile didn't get set properly sometimes either, so I put a usleep() in the tx_purge() loop. That seems to work reliably, but it's a little slow. I thought the buddy list problem might be related, but aparently not. The Add Buddy command can be sent as many times as you want (I now having it add a buddy everytime you send it an IM) with no response (neither in the form of an Oncoming Buddy command nor an error). I'm baffled. Not the bits. Not the timing. I've run out of dimensions.

Did a calculus "take-home" test in the afternoon. That didn't take too long (thanks to the help of a ti92 and Mathematica). [Mathematica runs very nicely under most versions of WINE, btw. I'm still running 2.0, as I can't exactly afford to buy a new version of an app that costs US$900 (my current copy was giving to me many years ago by a professor in Maryland (tought electrical engineering-related coursework -- he now has his Ph.D. and last time I knew had a non-acadamia job back there somewhere -- oh, did I mention he's rich? :)).] Anyway, the test is done. Mrs Capuano (calc teacher) was going to have an induced [child] labour yesterday (Sun). Hope everything went well. Don't get to see her again until Jan 1999. It should be fun to see who the substitute is today...

After all that, I decided to take a break. Bad idea. I layed down with intention of not dozing into sleep. So what do I do? I fall asleep. Didn't wake up until 0625 or so. I definitly had not intented to do that. And I really wish I hadn't've (wow! a double contraction!). Wasted too many productive hours. It's not like I missed anything. It was a Sun night after all....

That was followed by doing a little web browsing and mail writing (you seem to get more mail when you're asleep). Nothing terribly eventful there...

I intentionally tried to stay away from gtkFAIM for the day. It needs a thought break. Aparently (TJM) has been writing a preferences dialog along with the rest of his gtk UI work (I think I'm going to be very scared of that patch when it finally comes!). This means that I'm going to need to write the code to save preferences. Ugh. I'm not looking forward to that either... Looks like I can't stall too much farther, though.

Well, I'm going to go try and catch world report on cnn and hopefully finish reading Siddhartha. The inbox is still incredibly full. I need fix that someday. I also need to run the iname inbox through procmail so I can stop getting those stupid "you're 15mb over your 5mb limit!" messages from primenet. (yes, I do have over 4000 messages in one file) Mmmm.... mtndew and string cheese...

Some somewhat excitement this morning. I woke up to see a new tarball out of AOL. This was not your average AOL tarball. This one contained software licensed under a BSDish open license. I'm not kidding. It's called TiK. It's a TCL/Tk-based AIM client. With source (of course). Under a special non-AOL-like license.

From there, it's starts to get closer to logic again. This client doesn't use the AIM OSCAR protocol. They came up with a new "protocol" called TOC. It's based on FLAPs, but a special kind: SFLAPs. These are FLAPs that contain only a plain-text string instead of the normal SNAC/TLV data as in the full OSCAR protocol. What's more: there's file called PROTOCOL that comes with the TiK dist that fully documents how to write a TOC client.

From what I can tell, TOC is a gateway protocol. You connect to the TOC server, it authorizes you and connects you to BOS and chat/chatnav. The client never sees an auth cookie or a direct BOS or chat socket. The client sends commands to the TOC server that it sends to the OSCAR farm for you. From the fact that the TOC commands are plain text, you could easily assume that this protocol was made specifically for using with scripting languages. A client written in perl with gtk bindings would be neat. (Tk (xaw) is kind of ugly, IMHO.)

In any case, this doesn't really affect the FAIM project, and most likely not the LAIM project. TOC by AOL's own words is not meant to be used for full clients, but only quick utility clients. The normal OSCAR protocol that FAIM and LAIM currently use (and that all the other windows and mac clients use) is still the prefered protocol. Though, TOC offers things like server-side persisent buddy lists and profiles accessible directly through http (though the latter could be done in any client; you just have to know the user id number).

Using TiK today did allow a real trialog on some currently outstanding FAIM issues (namely, configuration files). Glib's GScanner was mentioned. I guess Orb found it to be too complicated and went back to scanf. I believe we mostly decided on have one configuration file with options that could be set using an FE specifier. This allows for a different set of some options between frontends (although not really an issue yet) and yet still share others (like the buddy list, which would be common to all FEs). I need to remember to integrate Orb's patch tomorrow (and move gtkfaimrc back to faimrc!).

I also submitted a statement about AOL's open source trend to slashdot. I think they'll find it interesting. Maybe they'll actually post it.

Poked around the DTV1100 card (with the Temic tuner on it) with a meter and scope in the late evening. I'm wondering if the i2c lines are suppose to run at 5v. I'm confused by the "i2c address selection" pin on the temic. The SDL and SDL (i2c) lines are pins 70 and 71 on the Bt848. Hopefully, they're not grounded on the Bt848 (unsoldering pins on PQFPs is _not_ fun). What I'm really confused about is what the CVBS video format is that comes from the temic.

I guess the first thing is to just hook it up to the i2c bus on the bt848. Then load the v4l i2c module with the bus scan turned on and see what turns up. We'll go from there. I'm not sure if the v4l tuner module has drivers for this particular temic, so that need a little work (the tuning command format is fully documented in the temic manual, though and theres only a few commands). After that, if nothing is smoking, plug the CATV coax in and watch some automatically tuning TV!

I did get a few words in to James Croall, and actually got a few words back. He concured with my suspicions of TOC being a mere proxy protocol. I also asked about the AOL checksum. He said he'd never found his notes on it. But, he made the comment that it was "a pretty standard 16bit CRC". I don't quite know what he means still, as my brute force attempt to find the CRC parameters failed. Since that was the last phrase from him, I was left once again in confusion.

I should've done homework today. But, well, I didn't. Oh, and I had a short conversation with Orb about...uhmm...lack of innovation, that was it. Returning mideivalism, conformist education, lack of "out-of-box" thinking, etc, etc, etc... I say we're doomed to repetition for a few more centuries. He thinks different. He believes some 'one man' will rise as an innovator and bring back inventive passion. I say we're destined to be arrogantly bound to our own "scientifically founded" world view, which limits our thoughts more than anything else. It may even take something analogous to the Protestant Revolution of the 16/17th century to get us out of the rut. Yes, I mean religion changing science and society for the better. (If it's a lack of passion you're having, what better way to bring it back than to threaten someone with eternal damnation?)

Concerning yesterday's comments about Unger.... David believes a revolt is in order. He thinks that if him and I go to the admins, Brock and other's in the class are sure to follow. I still doubt we can do much.

I felt like doing some non-computer things in the late afternoon. Decided since I hadn't played in over 5 months, I'd pull out the tuba and play for bit. It's amazing how much you don't forget. Did some technical stuff, then did a quick playthrough of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Neurenberg. The latter is long and very tiring to play, so I ended it there. Glad to know I'll still be able to play in Jan (1999) when I have to start doing it every day.

Well, it sounded like I did less than I really did. I was actually planning to go do things today, but I got up quite late and by that time the TiK flury had already started and then by the time that was over, I didn't feel like going anywhere. Frankly, most of today is missing from my mind. I really should've worked on mammatus today. ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz...

It would appear that friends die off in batches. David is ill. Neither Brock nor Orb has been seen in over 36 hours. Too bad. Actually, David said he was "sick". Now that's a loaded word for you.... The implication of illness should not necessarily be applied.

Finally had one of the first yelling sessions with Unger for this year. In defense of her not knowing what the hell she is teaching nor what her students are suppose to be doing she stated: "I have a life." You would not believe how close I came to a very loud madened scream at that moment. (Ok, brief insight that's probably already been seen by most readers of this: I would have to say that part of your "life" is your profession, no matter how much you like it or not. You're obligated to do your job no matter what personal differences you have about it. That's is what you get paid for, after all. Last time I knew, you didn't get paid for sitting around doing nothing yelling at people. Well, not in a formal job description anyway.)

I'll refrain from covering that further as I'd probably just put my self in an angered mood again.

The APUSH test was incredibly simple. The essay portion especially. Wrote a three page essay in less than 25 minutes (and it actually had information in it too!). The multiple choice section took nearly twice that long....

I'm quickly going through the calculus take-home test with a ti92 in hand. Goes very quick when all you have to do is type it in.

My inbox has been collecting gtkfaim suggestions/bug reports for the past couple days. I finally decided to clear out a few. There'll probably be a 0.08 showing up tomorrow sometime. (BTW, I hit an interesting bug by just bumping the minor version up to 08. I'd forgotten the fact that C interprets numbers with a leading zero as radix 8 (octal), and therefore gave strange output when doing 08. That was my amusement for the evening, anyway.) Many, many other things. There's 13 seperate items on the CHANGES list so far. Probably be more things by the real 0.08 release. Many small things. Alot of namespace cleanups. I also had the pleasure of relearning how to do preprocessor macros (for GTKFAIM_DEBUG()). Oh joy. There's still about 8 messages containing bug reports that I need to sort through and fix ASAP. We'll see. Some are probably the same bug.

Bugged Ahhz about my continued lack of a DVC1k from them. This time he says their mail server had been dead. I've never had problems with these people till now. Kind of strange time to have so much broken management.

I dug up the second mammatus node this evening (it had already sunken to the middle of a stack). Found half of a can of mtndew in it. Interesting find. Kind of warm and flat, though.

Ahh...get to sleep in tomorrow. I also seem to have ended up with the house to myself for the weekend. Again, interesting find.

I'm glad there are only 1e days this month... I'm getting bored of it.

Setup an old compaq 486 this morning to be a serial console for a catalyst (1900) switch. Not terribly eventful. Next time I remove a machine from that network though, I should remember to remove the MS net client (or at least shut off the domain login) before taking it somewhere else. Safe mode on a slow 486 is not exactly fun.

After that, I got to spend about 10minutes doing labs for networking (yep, that's all i've done in there for the past five weeks: one test and three very short labs).

Did a bit of FAIM/gtkFAIM work today. Not really code work, but administrative and decoding work. gtkFAIM has been offered a spot n the next Debian release (or if it's not ready by then (2.1), then 2.2). Good news, I guess. Also have been getting messages from people all day about gtkFAIM. I guess freshmeat works better the second time around. And, the number of times gtkfaim crashes seems to be equally proportional the number of http requests ihpled gets. Go figure.

Orb was talking alot about strange fields in the Chat Invite form of the incoming ICBM SNAC. I took a look. There were several unknown fields, but nothing that was actually variable. A fixed field is better than a variable field. There's several other dumps (from both him and me) in that same directory. Should be not-so-difficult to adapt gtkFAIM to interpret those. That's a very minor step in getting full chat capabilities though. I also have logs to prove the connection to a second "chat" OSCAR service server.

Did not-much-else for the remaining holes in the day. I really could've gotten more done today. For some reason it didn't happen. I'm also sure that there was something else I was going to put here, but I can't remember. I should go study for that APUSH test I must take tomorrow....

Oh, it's beautiful! Well, okay, maybe that's a little pushing it. I'm listening to Mahler's 1st symphony ("dur titan") through my new ultra-cheap Benwin three piece speaker system (it arrived today!). They're plugged into my "standard" CD player/"boom box" thing now (somewhere between Quadrant III and IV; there's no room over here in Quadrant I with the computers!). They really are powered low right now because the only output that thing has got is for headphones (not exactly enough power to drive this much hardware, but it's doing fine for now -- until I get mammatus going better -- waiting on sound card from OnSale). Bass is great. I'll have to put on Dvorak's Ninth next Just Because.... Hope I don't wake anybody up... (one great thing about my sisters finally being gone: I have the entire southeast corner of the house to myself!)

It turns out the subwoofer was only 4in. Aparently someone can't use a ruler. It even says 4in right on the cabinet. Everything else is right though. One of the tweeters swings a little loose (the fullrange and the tweeters are are attached, but can be swiveled to point apart, as is aparently proper). Nothing a few twips of a screwdriver can't fix. Again, great bass.

Quickly took a "test" over various historically notable chemists in (guess what?) chemistry (this is a continuence of the same unit we were working on the other day when I had to give a strange impromptu lecture on the microparticulate matter theory of Democritus). After that, well...

Was forced to attend a 'Recognition Assembly'. These are one of the worst things to have to sit through. You sit in the gym (on strangely shaped bleechers no less) for over two hours (last year it was nearly three) listening to the admins call people up individually, and passing out awards. Unbelievably boring and somewhat painful at that. I unfortunatly walked out with pieces of paper for honor roll, perfect grades, second year academic letter, and some other malarchy. (These awards were 'honor'ing us for our deeds last year.) Once a year is way too often for these things....

After I got out of there (finally), I went over to where I would normally be at the time (over with Unger), only to be caught by Denton with one of her bizzaro problems. Aparently the wonderful Fortress diety had decided on one machine that instead of the "Programming Apps" group (this is win311), it should display the "MS Office" group, and hide the former group to where the latter was. Unbelievably confusing for two reasons: 1) it's in a different (hidden) place and 2) it did it for seemingly no reason, without provocation or misuse. I was amused, but certainly couldn't fix it, as Fortress won't even let you move the windows around, let alone keep them in a sane order. A left and went on to Unger's "class"....

Only to find my test that I took the other day laying there. I wasn't wholly upset. After all, I did get 164 out of 160pts possible. But, some of the comments from her on the test were somewhat disturbing. I suppose I should broaden before I specify...

A very disturbing, well, trend, of Unger's teaching has been bugging me. (A note: this is meant to be somewhat constructive critisism and analysis, not some childish backlash of anger toward the natural teacher vs student relationship thing.) Since I've been in her class to begin with, she has always had an 'absolute' teaching method. She teaches facts instead of concept and essance. This is fundamentally in opposition to my natural ideas and flow of thoughts, but I've persisted without critical public comment to this point. At first, it was just a bias towards the absolute. This year, it has grown worse...quickly. This first test was prime example. You see, the curriculum is laid out in what is usually a very logical pattern, mostly made of lists (benefits/drawbacks, cause/effect, etc), and the rest is usually hard fact. This last test, most of the questions were "list five benefits..." or "list three switching methods..", etc. These are questions of utter confusion. If someone who'd never read the curriculum before looked at those questions, they'd be confused when they got their test graded. For, even though the questions sound open-ended enough, they way she grades is not. She has the lists from the curriculum. The only difference you can have is slight wording difference and order difference. Any more, and it's marked wrong. You may have wondered why I called this absoluteness. I call it this because in her mind, those answers are (strangely enough) absolute! I read back through that and I'm sure you won't understand unless you've listened to me babble about it vocally.

The tests are given in such a way that you may use any notes from the curriculum that she approves on the test. Now, since I've mentioned she uses the lists from the curriculum directly, you may wonder why she does this. As do I. The possibility exists that someone who even looks at one of her tests will know how to take notes. You copy every list and every arcane, never used (and probably made up by the masterminds at Cisco) acronyms. There ya go. There's your test. Now, I ask, what have you learned? (besides how to get an A in that class) My point exactly.

Is the point of teaching to make students remember/memorize/copy facts? Or is it to make students remember concepts and to actually learn something about the subject? Of those two options, the choice is clear. Aparently I'm one of the few who sees that. Or at least believes that. Many teachers go on and on about 'higher-level teaching' and all the other modern buzzwords. But, how many of them actually know what it is and how to do it? Obviously, this one does not. It seems her idea of higher-level thought is remembering something for more than an hour.

What was most disgusting was the comment to the real class that on the next test, she will be even more strict when comparing to the curriculum, as there were too many "questionable answers" after the last test. Hmmm.... Does this sound like the act of a good teacher to you? It does not to me. Comments?

I thought about refraining from personal comments on this teacher, but I've decided mostly against it. It's my right to post here, and maybe if one of her future employers decides against her, it will be for the good of what would have been her students. If she happens to read it, she'll get the point.

Anyway. Yes, I'm refuting her teaching abilities (and in a moment, there'll be a personal attack at that). In my opinion, she has no right to be a teacher in her present state. Maybe she's better with people with more controlled behavioral patterns (people closer to her own age maybe), but her handling of her current students is dreadful. I do not see how anything productive could ever come from that class without a lot of work from each individual student on behalf of themselves. I know Unger is bored, but that's no reason for her to neglect her duties as a teacher! She gets paid, no matter how little, for a reason. I cannot believe that she's paid to stand around and do nothing. If anything, _her_ behavior is distracting to the students! I could've sworn that teaching was more about selflessness than about ego! (though both should still be present no doubt)

Well, okay, I'm getting tired. Just a few comments on my dealings with her as a person instead of a teacher. She is what I'd call shallow, or more, "flat". The ultimate WYSIWYG personality. Everything appears to be made of superficiality to her. (Money, mostly, which is ironic.) And strangely enough, personal glory seems to be much deeper than she goes, and aparently she posses little to no desire for such. Confusingly thin, she is. I could not personally carry on any sort of conversation with her for more than a minute. (And for avoiding a longer conversation, it is ME that is thought strange by her!)

That's enough of that. Basically, I don't agree with her as a teacher. I think she's incompetent as a teacher of at least networking and probably all technical academia. This could be a much longer conversation on general teaching styles, effeciency, output, etc. but that's too much to put here, and is better put into an essay that I will probably never write. But, obviously I do have opinions, that is clear. I am open to opinions and I'd be happy to listen to other's experiences when it comes to this sort of matter.

Something strange happened in humanities. We didn't do anything. I'm still amassed with confussion. Foster will be gone from Thurs until Tues. Her son is getting married (over in Boston Mass).

I don't remember anything happening after school. I don't remember. As I'd just woken up from the stay in humanities, I probably had a reason not to remember. Oh, I remember. Part of it anyway. I stood around with Denton and Neilsen talking about overpaid sports professionals for a bit. I don't know why exactly, but I did.

Came home to find my speakers on the doorstep. Went and did some other things for several hours. Mostly wondering around and staring at different aspects of walls. After dinnertime or so, I decided to read slashdot and freshmeat. gtkFAIM 0.07 was listed on the freshmeat section of slashot. It was of course listed somewhere on freshmeat too. It looks like ihpled has rounded out the day with 2705 hits. What I find strange is that the day before freshmeat, it got 1632 hits. I think someone has been having premonitions again. Other than those two days, it looks like the 500-600 hits/day average is still holding.

Fixed a few stupidity bugs in gtkFAIM 0.07. Like forgetting to actually kill itself when it gets into catch_sigsev! (it sits there in an endless loop beeping and whatever so much that you have to open another xterm just to kill it!) So stupid. Also did something else I can't remember. Not worthy of 0.08 yet. I have been getting positive comments all the time. Great. Just wait till it crashes in all it's beeping glory for them their first time! One comment even said "I've just started with the freenixen and love the culture...you're one of the prime examples why...". I thought that was nice enough.

Anybody ever read the Connections column in SciAm? I'm about to do something very much like that...

After fixing a few bugs, I decided to unpack the speakers and try them out. The subwoofer is sitting as close to the floor as I'd want to put it (on the bottom shelf of a book case (a few cm off the floor)). The satellites scattered in other parts of the book case. Sounds great, in case you forgot after all this. Thank goodness KBAQ (98.6fm) finally upgraded their transmitters. You now no longer need to use a fine-grain oscilloscope to tune them in!

Now wasn't that connection nice? You should read the real thing monthly by James Burke over at Scientific American. (Also one of the last magazine web sites that let you read the articles of the current month without user names and passwords and credit card numbers...)

These mtndew 24packs get harder to open all the time. You'd think they could come up with an easy-to-operate yet strong packaging model...

Did finally end up releasing a gtkFAIM 0.07. I wasn't planning on it. Then I started looking at the code instead of doing homework and made a few mods and before I noticed, I had a whole bunch of little minor things done. Then I was about to make a release and it started spewing garbage characters in the IM window. That scared me, as I hadn't remembered making any changes to that code. Then I remembered that I did add to the HTML parser (for the AOL3 pre-tags). Aparently I'd left out an 'else' clause. Oh well. In any case, 0.07 did make it out.

Took a "test" on ethernet switching this morning. Oh, yes, that was difficult... I didn't go overboard as usual because I was tired. I did get the usual complaints about illegibility and things. A couple of my friends have taken interpretation of my handwriting on as a challenging hobby. It's not exactly "English". It's definitly not Spalding "script"...

Took a calculus test this morning. Not overly difficult, although that doesn't mean that I did well by any means. Humanities was just a mass of confusion. Strange jumps from conversations the likes of affirmative action and public education reform. I stayed out of most of it. Those discussions are amusing for a bit, but then get terribly circular and horribly boring to even listen to...

I did actually understand Brock when he was talking after school. Something about half-dead compressed hard drives. I remember mentioning something about the non-linearity between Life and Death. I also remember looks of blank nonunderstanding. Kind of reminiscent of the 'telnetting in the rain' prose earlier in the day....

Today was just one of those days when everything smells like chalk dust.

Utterly boring day.

I walked into Unger's room this morning to find a very large television on top of a filing cabinet. Color me suprised. That has got to be one of her largest feats yet: con-ing admin out of a TV! a humongusly large one at that! So I was watching CNBC and the Clinton tapes until the latter was deamed inappropriate and everything was immediatly censored. Too bad. How I am I suppose to watch my president get impeached if they censor CNN?

Slept in humanities again. She needs to stop shutting the lights off. Last hour is a bad time to be doing that. We're for some reason still stuck on ancient Egypt. Really boring....

I woke up long enough to walk through Denton's office and be utterly confused by their (Brock, David, Booth, Denton, etc) conversation. I'm not sure whether I was half asleep or if they were speaking some different language. I could not understand. I left. I went back to sleep.

Later in the evening after I'd done a few hours of homework, LunarBard mentioned to me that he wanted to send in gtkFAIM to freshmeat. Since I'd just gotten done putting up a quick patch to 0.05 for people getting reservation errors, I decided I should release a more explanative version before the freshmeat people came along. 0.06 should be just that. Better INSTALL document. Included reservation "fix". Made the "zap" button a compile-time option. Included my fixes to insert_html() for talking to people with background colors in their IMs (that means you, Orb!). Should be a grand and merry release. Uneventful anyway. Now is ihpled ready for freshmeat again? 0.06 did make it out before 0000 PDT, so it should make it one the mirrors here soon. Oh, and I also took that cute default profile out. Some people didn't find it as amusing as I did at the time.

Forgot to mention several days ago that Temic emailed me the PDFs of their tuner specsheets. I was amused to find out that Temic is a Daimler-(Chrysler-)Benz company. Anyway, of the ten pins coming out, only five are used. Shouldn't be too difficult to adapt it. I am wondering just what kind of format the video comes out of the tuner in, though....

I hope that's all. If it wasn't, that means I'm still probably half-asleep, which is either a good thing or a not-so-good thing depending on how you look at it. I will leave that babbling discussion for later. Brock commented on yesterday's entry that the Macintosh ADB Compact keyboards make nice pillows. I'd have to disagree. I'd say the Macintrash ADB Extended's are more comfortable. But still, for the softest keyboard-sleeping around, there's nothing better than a Sun Type 4 (just make sure the optical mouse is pointed away from your eyes before you fall asleep...if not, people from across with internet could take control of the LEDs in the mouse and begin reprogramming your brain during REM sleep). I cannot comment on whether that would be a good thing or bad. Possibly this could explain some of the strange anti-social behavior that occured among large universities in the late-1980s?

Won the auction for the STB sound card. Canceled my order for the BW717-3D speakers. Placed an order for BWS30-3D speaker set. I found it for less than US$10 more than the others, and this one includes a subwoofer. Better solution.

I kind of remember doing something to gtkFAIM this morning. I can't seem to remember exactly what. I think it had something to do with spitting out an error when you specify an SN less than 4 characters in one of either the "Get Info" or "Open IM Window" boxes. Seems many people are trying to misuse those. I should either make the behavior more intuitive (the more intuitive way in this case is one I don't like -- making those buttons work for the hilighted name, not always-specify) or actually go to the pains of writting user documentation (which I suppose should be done before a 1.0 anyway). Ugh.

Parts of the day I can't seem to remember. I do remember sleeping for a few hours in the middle, though.

Massaged some perl CGI code for TheOrb for a few hours in the evening. It all turned out to be a permissions problem on a temp directory. Remembering enough perl to get any debugging actually done was the hardest and most time-consuming part. Since the problem was after the socket closed, debug messages had to be done in the form of writing files to an arbitrary directory. In any case, the online ordering at www.rtweb.net works now (or at least it did after I touched it last). I did get an account on a fast line with 15mb of web space out of it though...

The iso8859-1 charts seemed to have flown off my wall today (okay, they're more specific title would be ASCII charts). I will have to take the time to fetch them one of these days. Or, maybe I'll just memorize them all in my "spare" time and avoid future worry.... And much spare time I have.... I'll do it right after I finish cleaning up from the Center Stack fallout of yesterday (that's in my room, for those of you who don't live here). Then maybe I'll get some of these mtndew cans out of here. They make a tremendous racket at the termination of their gravitationally induced decent....

It seems I've run out of things to attempt to relive in hopefully a humorous aspect. I guess I'll have to go to sleep then. I guess I should go to bed before I do that....your face feels kind of wierd with impressions of keycaps stuck in it after a good nights sleep.... (The next great revolution in sleeping technology: The SuperSlumber Keyboard!)

Fixed up insert_html() a bit in gtkFAIM. No release though. The Orb may be redoing it all anyway. I did finally get it fixed to the point where I can read his messages without having to select the text first! (The problem was that the background color was not in the spot I thought it was -- AIM sends it as a subtag to -body- not to font.) Also, Thomas Muldowny (VryDmbName) sent me a GNOMEified gtkFAIM 0.05. That will probably take some time to integrate, as I don't even have a decently new gnome on zeta; it's also a lot of work. Until I do get it integrated, I may distribute it as two seperate tarballs. We'll see. In any case, thanks to you both.

I but a bid for US$9.00 on a STB sound card at OnSale (although I desperatly hate OnSale, they _did_ have the best price). I'm really getting desperate for sound hardware for mammatus. I was actually going to order two, until I saw the price for shipping ($9.95!). This board aparently uses the same chipset as the GUS (AMD Interwave). Also, found and ordered a pair of Benwin BW717-3D speakers at a very good price. They look like nice speakers (15w output each, amplified, shielded, 3.125" speaker). They'll go on mammatus so I can actually get some decent symphonic sound out of it.

Slept in (unfortunatly, painful coughing woke me up and kept me up several times during the night...i finally just gave up at about 1030 local). Did homework most of the day. Or at least, that's what I kept telling myself. I actually talked to brock (using good ol' talk of course) for parts of the day, and watching TV and dozing off once and a while. All in all, what should have been a half-hour assignment took around six hours. Too bad.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday in all the flurry of statistics... Fri morning Mrs Foster grabbed me out of the crowd on the way to calculus and asked me to do the website for the Centennial chapter of the Academic Decathalon. It's the first chapter in this school district, so she wants everything done right PR-wise. I've always dreaded the day when "PR" and my name were in the same breath, but oh well. I've yet to have any earthshaking ideas for design. Actually, I have absolutly nothing to go from. Oh well.

Anyway.... You'll notice I have come to the conclusion that I will not be able to do everything I wanted to do with mammatus in one machine. Here's what I'm thinking. All nodes shall be EISA. Run the "cluster" interconnect on 16mb token ring using the SMC Elite EISA cards I've got. Either pry the drivers for those from Jay Schulist's hands (the linux-sna guy) or run FreeBSD (which aparently has support for them, albeit not in the main distribution). FreeBSD is okay (though I like NetBSD better, but it's not an option), but I'd just rather have linux. We'll see... Since I'm seemingly going to need to do streaming audio feeds for lack of slots per machine (all outgoing audio should terminate at one node so that it can be multiplexed and output to the same speaker system), it's going to need large amounts of network bandwidth. A dedicated 16mb token ring should do the job nicely. Now if only the CPUs could stream as fast as the TR could handle it...

That seems to be it. David is telling me of his AOL trojan horse story. Amusing. Good morning.

Radio card came today. Looks like the right one. Haven't even taken it out of the static bag yet. I'm waiting to save up enough energy to rip the paper sticker. Then, I'll have to save up energy to actually install it somewhere.

Put a very small fix into gtkFAIM. Definitly not worth a new release, as it's probably an arcane case to end up in anyway. I didn't even recompile it! I'm really getting lazy...

I attempted to use analog on the ihpled web server logs, but it came up with strange wacky numbers, so I gave up.

It would seem that somehow the address cehs.ml.org (which is a virtual host of ihpled) ended up in the school newspaper this morning. I'm still not quite sure how that happened, as it's not official nor is it even close to being complete. I must admit I was amused to see ihpled had made it into the papers... ...pondering... Kari refuses to get off, leaving Brock unavailable for questioning. I'm guessing he had something to do with it, though probably more than he'd admit to.

Using a combination of grep and wc, I've got basic stats for the cehs virtual:

Quadrupled the count in one day. Interesting. Boring. Suprisingly high considering how there's absolutly no information at that site besides a bunch of 'remind me' messages from brock.

Here's for stats for just the main ihpled daemon:

This one goes a bit further back, because I wanted to denote what is aparently the record high this month: 9 Sep 1998: 988 hits. For a server on a 28.8kb/s line, that's not too bad! Mostly, though, these hover around 450 on a daily basis. Note that these figures aren't corrected like the cehs ones above for things like loads from inside my network, which are minimal.

I've for some reason been going back and searching the logs for the past months. It appears ihpled was getting hundreds of hits a day quite a bit before the freshmeat incident (on 13 Aug 1998). Towards the end of Jun, we were running around 45 hits/day. By early Jul, it averaged in the several hundreds. Some local highs were 11Jul at 487hits, 14Jul at 542hits, and 20Jul at 601hits. On the 12Aug (the day before freshmeat), we got 201. The next day, 4066 (that's 4-0-6-6). The day following was 3250. From then on it has averaged in upper 400s and for parts of Aug avged in the upper 500s per day. There was another high on 21Aug at 1771. (That's kind of ironic because if they'd have all just waited until the next day, they'd have gotten the great, stable, sound-filled 0.03pre7 instead of the buggy pre6!) I'd have never guessed at 4000 hits in one day over my slow connection. They must have been terribly annoyed with the speed....

After wondering why my connection was so slow lately I decided to check when it had redialed last. Turns out it has been using the same connection since the 12Sep! A week ago! It had slowly dropped itself down to a terrible rate and was passing packets at less than 1.5kb/s. Bad news. A quick ppp-down/up and it was back up to over 2kb/s. Thank goodness. I thought I'd finally maxed out my bandwidth...

I was asked to fix a Mac Classic at school this morning. It was spewing out A- and F-line traps out everywhere. My recommendation was replacement. I think I was right. Classics are no fun to reload System on to... Frankly, I'm not at school long enough to do it.

Spent most of the evening doing homework. Just as well. I surely don't have the energy to be doing much more.

Oh, I forgot to mention this a couple days ago. One of the rabbits died. It was a brown one. Don't ask me. There's still a bunch of them left out there anyway.

And my dad got his new computer running. Very nice. It's the first PC we've had that does soft-power-down! Now I can shut it down with VNC and not have to go out and flip the power switch! Yea! Now all he needs is that really-fast-K6 he wants so that the current not-so-fast-K6 can be passed along to my mother's new machine. That will move zeta down to third on the list of fastest machines. Do I look like I care?

And something else I would like to note. There's this lamer that goes by "L0nmore" on AOL (so l0nmore@aol.com). This idiot sent me a message today out-of-nowhere with no subject (a sure sign of spam) and the body: "Why would anyone care about the crap on your page?". Well, why I'm calling him a lamer is probably quite aparent after reading that. He probably came off the ti-hardware list and is most likely a Grant-Stockly-supporter and maybe even president of the Grant-Stockly-Fan-Club. You see, when mess with Grant Stockly, you mess with his band of ungodly stupid cohorts as well. Idiots band together for a reason, I suppose. (I'm guessing it's so they can get killed easier, but that's personal opinion.) Anyway, if you're stupid enough to ask why, don't ask. You have no right to know why people care about my "crap". It's their own business. I certainly don't care. I'd be writting this anyway. It just so happened that this file got marked with 644 permissions instead of 600. You could call it a stroke of luck, or a draw by means of your devil. Take your pick.

Sorry about that.... going back to my normal bits of insanity...

That's probably all. If it's not, I'm sure I'll let you know (or you'll let me know).

Ahg! Not the best of days (or the worst of days :)...

Did go to school all day today. Got the work that my chem class did for the three days I was gone. Probably doesn't make up even an hour's worth of real work. I wonder if anything productive will ever happen in that class.

Did nothing in networking, as usual. I did find that when I finally wasn't there for a bit, she rearranged the room! It's looked the same for nearly a year, and she picked this week to rearrange it. Strange woman that Unger is.

Denton popped her head in the door wondering if I'd maintain the school's web site next year (after brock has left us). I agreed, but only if she got somebody to work with me so she'd have someone for the year after that. I'm guessing picking a decent student out of the current freshman or sophomore classes is quite a difficult thing. It seems to me that the lineage of decent programmers in that department has ended (it was slowly declining before). Brock's class is probably the last of them. Too bad. There used to be some good stuff happening. (Most of the better graduates are either at NAU or UofA.) Anyway....

Had AP us hist today. Turns out i got over a 100percent on that last quiz/test thing. And it was suppose to be on a curve... I got some bad looks today... (I was quite suprised too, as I was quite full of drugs the day I took it.)

Took a nap during humanities. Couldn't help it. Su Yong was giving a lecture on ancient egyptian history that turned out to be nearly 40min long (mostly in the dark too -- he was using the overhead proj). Zzzzz....

Anyway... thought about doing some homework at various times during the day. I think I'll just do what I need in second per tomorrow...

Had a discussion with TheOrb concerning the independent council executive order (I found it hypocritical, he just found it strange, I guess) and representation of truth. David popped up every-once-and-awhile to ask some question about IDE. I guess he finally got brock's drive working in his machine. I don't quite know what the final problem was (he never really said). Last time I talked to him, he was going to shut down and put his machine back together again. I haven't heard from him since. Maybe it fell apart again.

I yelled at Grant Stockly several times for preaching about things he knows nothing about, and that that was okay as long as you explicitly state that you're guessing. He doesn't understand. He has no idea how to learn from other people. He also aparently also always needs the last word. (This was all done quietly, calmly, and patiently in private mail, btw -- I still haven't posted to the list since that last one). Speaking of that last one, I believe his response was something like "you know what I meant". (I yelled at him a little for that too (assumption of interpretation).) He seems sensible, but he's an idiot and there's no third party cure for that.

Well, there's an IM window here for awwaiid, but he's not talking at all. Probably died. Too bad. Maybe he completely erased his hard drive again. That was fun.

I was really planning on getting up and going to first and second periods this morning, but somehow I managed to sleep through them. Did sit (sleep?) through calculus and humanities. I was hoping for more fortune cookies and strange Indian foods like yesterday in humanities, but it didn't happen....

I must go to school all day tomorrow, though, as there's a group of really stupid rules that go along with this ridiculous 'block scheduling' deal. I've already missed 5 days, so I can't miss any more till January or so. Too bad. I was planning on a Great Public Education Revolt Week in late Octobre.

I won't bore (or excite) you with all the details of my illness, or the side-effects of the drugs I'm on (let's just say that they don't stop with ever-persistent bad breath and the taste of mucous in your mouth). Luckily, the terrible coughing (which is worse now than ever before) doesn't affect my typing.

Had the joy of going to the optometrist after school today as well. Dialation of the pupils is always an amusing thing to look forward to, as are the associated events 'Banging into Walls' and 'Trying to Focus on a Laptop LCD'.

Did a few tidbits of homework. Unfortunatly got myself tied up in yet another Grant Stockly-induced flamefest. Too bad too. I started off the evening in a not-too-bad mood. As Grant now knows, you shouldn't call a proxy server a router while I'm listening, or you'll regret it. BTW, this may be the very last message I ever send to that list. I promise this time. They just make me too damn mad to survive it anymore. Grant's inability to learn due to his bloated ego infuriates me greatly, and I just can't take it anymore.

Finished up the evening with a chat with TheOrb about conformism. And with awwaiid discussing conspiracy theories around Computer Works (a local rip-off computer retailer). He thinks they gave him a Trio64 card instead of the ViRGE/DX which I (and XFree) detected. Of course, the 17in monitor mystery is still, well, a mystery.

Some people seem suprised that I'm still alive. Although I never mentioned I was dying, it seems to have been implied. Yes, I am alive (much to my suprise as well).

Uhmm... well...

I've been kind of ill for the past couple days (still am, actually). I went to the doctor on Mon. I was right about the ear infection. Though it turns out that both of my ears are infected and severely conjested, along with having the beginnings of bronchitis.

So, I haven't been doing much of the whole 'school' thing. The diziness and lack of equilibrium make that kind of difficult. For Mon and Tue, I just went to the last two periods, as those are the hardest ones to make up. I really didn't feel like going to them either, though. General body aches and pulled muscles in my neck (caused by severe coughing) are beginning to be very painful....

So, neither of the past couple days have been very computer-related either. Except for a couple of sessions of email reading, I've been sleeping most of the time.

I did manage to get gtkfaim 0.05 out Tue though. Quickly added support for sending profiles (rather, fixed the code for that that's been there since the beginning). Also put in 'The Orb''s debugging patch that cleans up parts of the FAIM backend. Nothing terribly exciting...

Guess thats it. You'd think I could get more done with two days of my life...but oh well....

In the wee hours, I quickly put up some info about working with the AOL protocol. I hope someone can help. I'm stuck.

Spent a good chunk of the evening trying to get Brock's X to work correctly. I can't think of too many things more frustrating and difficult than configuring and troubleshooting X/XFree, but certainly one of them is configuring and troubleshooting X with many km between you and the monitor your attempting to not fry. It appears I was not so lucky concerning that last part. Brock says he smelt smoke, but that doesn't mean it was coming from his computer anywhere... In any case, it appears we got it working suitably (and usuably) at 1024x768x24bit@65Hz. (NOrmally I'd be scared to death at having to look at 65Hz, but he doesn't seem to mind.) Many points of my stupidity were based on the fact that for some reason I was blindly using the SVGA server instead of the accelerated S3 ViRGE server. Not that things got all that better when I switched to the latter, but it made me feel better anyway. The numbers from what is suppose to be his monitor's manual obviously aren't correct. It seems to start collapsing the vertical sync at about 80Hz, where the book says it's max is 95Hz. Not good. I'm still questioning whether his monitor is actually the 17in they told him it was. He refuses to get out a meter stick and find out (probably for denial reasons).

Had yet another short email discussion with Alan Cox (btw, his log (and esp his wife's) are kind of my inspiration for this load of useless information (only thier's is usually useful, even if for nothing more than for a good laugh)). This discussion was concerning that DTV-1100 card I have. He was explaining to me how that worked. He also sounded confident that putting that Temic tuner on the i2c bus of the bt848 was an okay idea, but to be sure that proper shielding is involved (it turns out he was talking about the tin can that the tuner is in, so no problems there).

The rest of the day was fairly unproductive. Watched Wargames on TNT. You can derive a different message from that movie every time you view it. Also watched some movie that was on after it (Red Dawn) that was kind of strange. It depicted a Communist invasion of the US that caused a third World War. Unfortunatly, it tied up with a touchy-feely ending of nationalistic trite (ie, Communist defeat by partisan grass-roots efforts). Most of the movie was, like a large percentage of war movies, focused on male rights-of-passage into "manhood" and all that ritualistic rubbish. I'm still wondering why no one has any original ideas anymore... Surely the film industry hasn't turned to the point where only reiterations of the same garbage plots are deemed viabile, has it? Guess it has... When's the Planet of the Apes of this decade going to get produced??? The industry certainly needs it...

Well, I suppose I should mention that I did do some homework today as well. Nothing much. Just worthless tidbits of basic chemistry. I should have gotten more done, but it was getting late (late to be doing homework that is!).

I seem to have either come down with some horrible disease or for some reason created an infection inside of myself. I'm beting an ear infection. This could all be caused by alergies again, but I hope not. My throat is quite sore, and I'm coughing much more than I'd prefer... Not to mention the dreadful pain in my ears during mastication...

"Is that hex I see?" you ask...well, yes, it is. I forgot to do it when the time came (mere days ago), so I went back and did it. (I _was_ originally planning on doing it anyway, but I plain forgot.)

Muddled around doing not much of anything most of the day. Tried to get an EISA configuration disk going on one of the ALR boards. No luck: a combination of "Insufficient disk space" and "Not enough memory and/or disk space". Look further into when I feel like it.... Also stuck in a 486dx2-66 in the 486dx-33 board. Well, it works, it just gets fiery hot. But, I can't mount a fan on it because it conflicts spacially with the cache card...

I got a message from Ahhz. A DVC-1000 Bt848 board is on its way. He was kind enough to let me keep the other Diamond card that was sent in error (DTV-1100). I mentioned to my dad something about interfacing the Temic tuner (on the DTV) with the Bt848 (on the DVC) (a surface-mount compenent). The look I got was not one of joy and/or excitement.

Also won the bid for the Aztech/PB FM radio card. A whopping US$11.50 ($8.50+$3 USPS). Got the money off to her in todays mail.

Also worked off-and-on on gtkFAIM, in hopes of getting version 0.04 out (with user information parsing!) sometime during the day.

Brock drug over his machine later in the evening for massive software-side repairs (at about 2030). We erased both his hard drives and repartitioned. Installed Win95 OSR2 (OSR1 started acting wierd when he put in his CD burner). Stuck in a boomerang and installed Slackware 3.5 off of ihpled. He now has 4gb for Win95(FAT32) and just over 4gb for Linux. His machine's new name is phlurm (we talked about both pitching in and buying phlurm.org -- still want to do that?). I also had the wonderful joy of hacking on pppd command lines and chat scripts for quite a while in an attempt to get it working correctly for him. Most of my problems arose because Inficad doesn't use the normal login passages ("login:" and "password:"), and detecting only the first part of each of those creates strange timing issues. Did eventually get it fixed, though. Also, I found out that my phone line can connect at speeds greater than 33600bps. Using his 56k modem, we were able to connect with up to a 53100 carrier (on the house's voice line -- I didn't disrupt ihpled just for that!), which I've up till tonight believed to be impossible. Interesting... Oh, and it seems Win95 OSR2 fixes all his wierd problems. He was able to burn a CD with no freezes or fatal exceptions....

After taking several hours to do all that, I went back to gtkFAIM. I did get 0.04 out, but not until a few minutes ago. It does seem to include everything that I wanted to include for this release. So, I guess thats a good thing....

Oh, and Grant Stockly says that 1) he knows the difference between right and wrong, 2) the difference between Linux and UNIX, and 3) he walks on walls (which was not one of the options I gave him, but that was his response).

Oh, and everyone take a moment to remember CNN's John Holliman. John had to have been one of the best reporters in the past few decades, and definitly the best special-assignment science reporter. Most notable of his accomplishements was his role as one of the "Inside-Iraq-Three" (the first three reporters in the world to break the story of the Persian Gulf War in Iraq back in 1991). He also was suprisingly good at making science make sense, especially for the people who it didn't already make sense for. John covered all the US space shuttle missions for the past few years for CNN, and did an exceptional job. Aparently he was killed in a car accident on Sat morning. (I guess I should actually go _read_ the story instead of pulling random memories out of my head like this...) I betting most people reading this can remember his vivid coverage of the Mars Pathfinder mission back in early Jul 1997.

Yesterday, I'd mailed Alan Cox to make a few queries about that PS/2 he keeps talking about. It turns out its a measily model 77, but that's probably good for what he needs it for. Anyway, in the discussion, he asked me if I wanted to be the MAINTAINER for the IBM Token Ring drivers. So, I said, 'why not?'. He should be sending me the PDFs of the docs soon. I'm going to try and implement the Tropic (shared-memory controller) "Enhanced Mode". It should be interesting. I'd also like to stabilize the already present non-enhanced drivers and try to make it a little more robust (it's extremely fragile at the moment and every little minor ring error condition makes you have to reboot (remember ihpled's problem of bind hanging in the 'D' state? that's what I'm talking about)). I'd like to at least do something, anyway, even if it's minor.

The moral of that story is: when someone mentions 'PS/2', always ask questions! :) I was also able to find him a few MCA patches. (His goal of getting this PS/2 was to test the 2.1 MCA drivers on it and refine them (though I've had no troubles past the 3c5x9.c driver not compiling with CONFIG_MCA on, which I do have patches for around here somewhere from when I fixed it for CUMULUS/echidna, but I don't think I was the first to fix it!).) He'll probably want to mess with the IBM SCSI driver a bit anyway (it's not very stable or clean AFAIK).

The ALR motherboards finally decided to arrive today (to take a break from their three week journey from Ontario (Canada, that is, not CA)). Very neat stuff.

A box from Ahhz arrived today as well. Normally these guys are very good about sending you just the right piece of junk you asked for, but this time, I guess they slipped up. Instead of the PCI DVC-1000 card, they sent me a DTV-1100 (an ISA card which requires you to use a S3 Trio64+ video card, but it does have an RF tuner on it!). So I've mailed them in hopes of a trouble-free solution to this micromess. Also, I'm glad I went with the AST remote back when I did. This Packard Bell I got for about the same price is real shit. The pad is only 4 segments and is really sickening to use. And there's less buttons, and holding it gives you the feel that you could throw it across the room and not notice it was gone. The AST (true Logitech) feels robust and feels like it works.

Wasted way too many hours doing basically nothing this evening.

Some of that time was spent making minor modifications to the Compudyne case that the old echidna master node was in. That case wasn't meant to fit a full-size AT motherboard (like these ALR boards are). I had to remove the drive mounting rack, so how I'm going to mount the floopy for a boot drive seems to still be a mystery. I did find 16mb (4 4mbs) of 30pin SIMMs for it, I could have gone to 32mb, but the board only has 4 slots. But, this way I can have two machines: 1 16mb 386dx-33 and 1 16mb 486dx-33. I don't have another case, so I can't build both. But the one I'm building will probably get used as a secondary mammatus interface node.

Which, btw, brings up the point that I bid on a Packard Bell OEMed FM radio card (uses the Aztech chipset, which there is V4L support for). Since I can't hope to have enough slots on the main mammatus node, I'll add the peripheral peripherals to the second node (the ALR) and pipe and stream and everything where I need to so there's only one access point in and out of the mammatus system.

Some more of the evening was spent working on a few gtkFAIM things. I think I'll release a 0.04 tomorrow. Probably skip a few numbers and release a 0.10 by mid- to late-next-week. Really, there's not that much left to do feature-wise before the entire AIM Version 1 protocol is fully implemented. I took a step further tonight by implementing the "get user information" command. Not overly difficult, but parsing the response did finally let me understand that strange status information block thats used everywhere. That allowed me to get rid of that CLASS/CLASS2 mess. What I was calling CLASS2 was really the class ID, and what I was calling the CLASS was really a sort of meta-TLV. I'll rewrite the spec to show this, as it's kind of strange that I didn't notice it in the past three months. It tells you how many informative TLVs follow (which is 4 for FREE and TRIAL, but 3 for AOL (its missing the idletime TLV)). Really not difficult. Whats more difficult is understanding why it took me so long to notice that. Anyway, this allowed me to implement a cute little TLV miniparser and get that sorted away in a tight loop. I then moved the gtkfaim_parse_incoming_im() over to using this loop. I'm not quite done fixing that function yet, though (it's still using the 'wait-for-the-dword-of-zeros' hack).

All thats really left featurewise is searching and the 'neighborhood watch' functions ('zap' and 'block'). And there's some things that need to be cleaned up. I'm hearing that 0.03 is very stable (as in the most stable yet). That can be nothing but a good thing. I need to keep reminding myself that these are still developemental versions and I shouldn't be afraid to introduce temprorary instability. That fear was what produced those annoying 'pre's of 0.03. No more!

Later in the evening, I really got unproductive and got into a little tif with Grant Stockly. Arg. He really knows how to piss people off. 10...9...8..7...ahhh....

I think I'll go to bed now....

Release day for gtkFAIM 0.03. Final version. No more prereleases. They're too boring. That's what I spent most of the evening doing (I ran into some strange and stupid problems), with short breaks in the middle for various other things.

Scarily enough, I had a short non-real-time (SMTP) chat with the famed Grant Stockly, the ticalc.org superspamer himself. He seems to know his stuff, but wow, is he arrogant! It definitly impedes manifestation of his knowledge. Strangely enough, his knowledge seems to focus mostly on Macs, yet he really did know what he was talking about when it came to the MacII and 68020 hardware. Or the history of UNIX, SysV and BSD (but that's not what he'd tell you of course). I hate people like this guy, no matter how much they know. Nothing can hide true arrogance, especially not knowledge.

I was quite scared when I say my drawing of the Ziggurat that I did last night. I'm still wondering what the hell I was thinking. I must have been have asleep (or more). In any case, all went well during the presentation today. The group of 5 of us (started out at 9, but one-by-one, they slowly dropped out or "got sick") got just under 90 minutes today. Guess what? We didn't finish. Well, my part finished, but there's still probably 20minutes left of material to cover tomorrow. Eleven lucky members of the non-presenting class had the pleasure of acting out a part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I'm not sure how much fun that was, but it was certainly hilarious to watch.

Got to boil water in chemistry (oooo). Yes, that was exciting. Well, melting styrofoam cups was quite interesting as well, but we weren't really supposed to be doing that. But it was much more amusing than doing what we were suppose to be doing (building a calorimeter from the 3 cups). Oh, non-honors classes are just soooo much fun....

I suppose thats it.....

Nothing terribly exciting once again. Short school day (out at 1145 local).

Talked with the Compaq on-site 'repairman' this morning. They're really more of parts-swappers than repairman, as they only indirectly repair things. Made jokes with Unger, and basically got nothing done.

Pavia finally decided to show herself 3 weeks after school started (she's the real teacher of my AP US Hist class). Mainly just talked about non-history-related things in there (eg, child birth). In Humanities, did class discussion on cloning. Waaay too cliche. Basically, it all narrowed down to the existance (or non-existance) of a soul. Zzzzz....

After school, rode around with Brock for a while. Did various things probably not worth mentioning here. Did finally get to go out this his house for a change.

Spent several hours this evening attempting to draw a Sumerian Ziggurat (the drawing being about 500cm x 700cm). Much more complicated than it sounds. I have absolutly no skill in visual artistry, and it shows. I perfected it till I got bored of erasing and gave up. It still looks terrible, but it's going to stay that way, as I don't think it can get much better.

As that took most of the evening (I finished about 2300 local), I decided not to power up zeta. So, I'm writing this using normal emacs on ihpled (from my laptop). It's scary how little you can tell the difference between Emacs and XEmacs (if you know the keystrokes, that is).

Brock seems to be complaining of erasing his hard drive. Too bad.

Guess that's it. Humanities presentation on the ancient Middle/Near East tomorrow. We have nearly 90 minutes to cover over a dozen civilizations across nearly a millenium. No doubt that much of our time well fortunatly get wasted covering Epic of Gilgamesh. Also have a Academic Decathalon meeting after school tommorrow. This week's almost over...

Not too bad. Found out that my partner for Humanities went ahead and put my name under her's on her paper (on the same topic). This was great news, as it probably saved me 4 or 5 hours worth of homework today.

I did finally get a firm answer from Unger and "George" on why we can't swap the 1700 for the 1900 in the Cisco lab. And it's a good enough answer: we need the 1900 for the VLAN labs. (As I'm sure I've mentioned here before the 1700 is shit and should have never been released, and barely switches, let alone do VLANs.) This spured my interest....

So, I decided to actually LOOK at the curriculum for Semester 3 this morning (yes, that is a first...i've managed to avoid doing it for 4 weeks now, but I couldn't resist this). And, yes, it does talk about VLANs, much to my suprise. So, I read through the first couple chapters or so. I was disgusted.

First of all, the text makes the wild assumption the VLANs are and always have been a GOOD thing! I, for one, would not necessarily agree. But, on to more sickening things. The amount of bias in the curriculum to Cisco products, and only technologies that Cisco pushes products for are covered. Now, I can see since Cisco is funding the class and providing (minimal) equipment, that they have the right to promote their products and technologies. But, whats the goal here? To teach Cisco propaganda or teach the concepts of networking? If the latter is thier hope, they've failed miserably!

I especially dislike their demotion of token ring as a valid and modern network topology. Contrary to Cisco's current belief, IEEE 802.5 Token Ring didn't die just because they stopped pusing products that access it. It's still alive and well, and now comes in many varients, including the regular 4 and 16mb/sec standards, and the recent 100mb/sec switched HSTR standard, and now the current rush for a 1000mb/sec GBTR standard. (I really should note, though, that Cisco does still offer a (limited) variety of TR products. But, I do find their current trend of tag-switching TR over ethernet kind of disturbing and, well, overly pointless (the reasons they state for its usefullness make no sense, as for the cost of that method, you might as well go all ethernet for cheaper).)

Also, they only cover the basic two switching methodologies (store-and-forward and cut-thru (which is a Cisco-only term anyway)), leaving no mention of the more efficient and not-all-that-expensive CellBus and other architectures (even Cisco uses Cellbus in their high-end chassis switches!).

As I said, they make it seem as though VLANs are 100% perfect and there's no way they can be anything BUT a good thing. Aggrivating.

Also, in the curriculum, they seem to make up a lot of terms. I know thats the trend of the pointer-hairs (to make up buzwords), but really...why??? These are not experienced programmers or engineers your teaching, they're high school students! The usefulness of self-made buzwords has no purpose in this setting and only leads to unlearnable (and unteachable) curricula that is of no enjoyment to anyone, and serves no useful perpose. Hey, all you CCNE's out there...when was the last time you used the acronym PDU in reference to the OSI layers? Thought so. (Yes, PDU has many other (more useful) expansions than protocol-data-unit, but that's not what Cisco says, so it must not be true! Uh oh!)

That's enough ranting for one day I suppose. I'll go read some more tomorrow and get a little more angered.

Nothing else exciting really happened. I've been reading about various religions part of the day (I enjoy it much better when I don't have to write about it afterwards!). Mainly a focus on Hinduism, as that seems to be the one I connect most with these days. Christianity is just sooo boring and Eastern religions are good way to escape....

Wrote up a short little tidbit on mammatus. Nothing exciting, and definitly a boring read if you've talked to me at all lately (I usually become very single-focused when it comes to good projects). Oh, and I finally cleared off enough space on zeta to recompile gimp (if you'll remember, gimp broke when I upgraded the dynalinker in the process of installing glibc2, creating the inability to load modules, which prevented saving in any file format besides the GIMP native (XCF)).

Oh, and Brock through his mastery has figured out that Netscape DOES animate backgrounds. Go insane here. He's still taking comments for usefulness of such a feature, though... (talk to him at awwaiid@delphid.ml.org)

School ends early tommorrow! Though not by anywhere near enough...

Completely unproductive day.

I decided that there's no way I could write that paper to the caliber needed, so I didn't do it at all. I'll most likely do it tomorrow, after I make sure I'm not the only one not finding any information...

Unger says we can't swap the 1700 switch for the 1900 in the Cisco lab. Well, not really. It was "George" from Cisco that's got a problem with it. Too bad... Unger and I did have a short conversation on how many letters should be in the word used to describe him, though...

Attempted to get ipportfw working ihpled so we can have 1) the VPNs back 2) direct access to inside machines (like, for example, controlling mammatus' services from anywhere in the world). It appeared to work (no errors) but didn't. I don't understand. Someone needs to inform me.

I made no headway on the main userspace control for mammatus. I'm not sure the layout I want. I'd like to avoid the problem that most of my projects have (overdesigning and in doing that wasting so much time I lose interest before I finish and get a usable product). I've been thinking (dreaming?) of this type of system for probably 5 or 6 years now, so I probably will not lose interest easily. But, I'd still like to avoid overdesign and I'd like to get a usable system soon.

I did get the daemon and the cd player client to compile on mammatus, but function they do not. THere must be some glibc2-libc5 funnies that I haven't looked for yet. Or maybe it's just really, really bad interference! It looks like the problem is in the client, not the daemon. That's a good sign. Well, wait, it may be still the daemons fault. One of the main problems is over-repeating, making it impossible to skip to tracks between the beginning and end. It may be that quick fix I put in the other day (in the daemon). I'll have to look. It looks like 'mute' is having some trouble...but that may be caused by the over-repeat problem as well. I also need to add support for using more than one CD player (maybe use the channel up-down for changing decks?). mammatus can hold up to 7 CDs at a time, so we must find a way... Also need to periodically check to see if a CD is present yet if there's not one there initially.

Well, I think I'll go off to bed. Not much left to stay up for.

For the most part, a non-computing day. Spent most of the day doing what else than watching television (specifically, AMC's Planet of the Apes 30th Anniversary Marathon). Watched Beneath followed by the newly restored original Planet of the Apes. Since I missed the beginning of the Marathon, I haven't yet seen them all (5) today. Since they replay everything, I'm now watching Conquest. I also caught the end of Escape (just as well--i've already seen the beginning and it's got to be the most boresom of them all anyway, although there's a few good parts its generally uneventful).

Did somehow end up at the Glendale Library today. Found near nothing. I have a "summary" (really a small research paper) due on Tue (ie, tomorrow) that I have not exactly started on. I need to get doing that. Oh, the presentation got moved to Thu.

To sum up the day I missed: fixed the Dell, modified and loaded Slack 3.5 onto it, and did some other stuff (not to mention sleeping!). The Dell had a bad power supply. What was suppose to be a 12v line turned into a 14.5v line and what was suppose to be a 5v turned itself into a 6v line! (The normal tolerances for these lines are +/-5% (4.75-5.25v) and +/-10% (10.8-13.2v) respec.) Luckily, Dell used wider tolerances and nothing got toasted (AFAIK). Though, I can't get the on-board IDE interface to work with anything but hard drives under DOS (CD-ROM drives under DOS don't work and neither works with Linux). Modifying Slack wasn't overly difficult. Just comment a line here and there (it's all bash shell scripts). So if you notice there's nearly no space left on ihpled, that's why (that's where mammatus' nfs root is).

Nothing terribly exciting occured besides that stuff. The holiday is extremely short and I need more time to complete my work. Mrs Foster wishes that I not audit Humanities for my own good. She'd like me to participate in the Academic Decathalon and I probably can't do that without doing all the work. The question becomes: do I want to be in the Decathalon? Would I be doing any good for myself past creating large amounts of stress and lack of free time? Would I only be doing it for the benefit of others? Anyway... keep on this thread and we'll be into existentialism by the end of the hour...

The collection of items in my room has grown by quite a bit this weekend. The printer (esi1) has moved over into the forbidden Quandrant IV of my room (and is the first computer-related peripheral to ever inhabit that area). This was to make room for the ever expanding amount of stuff in Quadrant I (where the rest of the computer related pieces lie, as well as all the RJ11s, RJ45s and and a couple RG types terminate (for ethernet, POTS, and CATV). Specifically, the pile on the dresser has expanded. It's current top-mounted inventory: 2 TVs (the 19in Samsung and a 14in RCA (well, it SAYS Montgomory Wards)), 2 VCRs (both Panasonics of the same series (both use the same remote, which makes things "interesting")), a pair of speakers, a 6disc Pioneer CD-ROM changer (DRM-604x), a Willow scan coverter, and a modified and hacked-up Dell OmniPlex 466 (which is now really a 433). Oh, and the Wyse is nested up there somewhere too. That side of the room is beginning to look something like a film editing studio... And still, no one has asked the question: WHAT IS IT???

I brought in the Wards set in order to figure out why the picture from the scan converter was so strange. Well, it turns out that it wasn't. It's the stupid Samsung sync-locking thats at fault. The Wards set and the big RCA in the garage (it used to be mine too! sob!) display a 640x400 (console text) from the converter just fine. But, the Samsung looks pinched in the middle and bloaated on the edge, making it generally useless. Also, I'm now running X in 640x400 so that the image actually fits onto the TV screen cleanly (640x480 is too long). This means I'm not using the Wards set and not my big Samsung... (sob again!)

Since I'm only running at such a measily resolution, I see no reason to use such a hefty video card (PCI 4mb #9 GXE64Pro). I'll find a different one sometime. I'd like to find an ISA or an EISA one so that I don't waste that PCI slot (it could be very usefull for other things...like ethernet which is terribly slow right now). There should be a couple of EISA video boards coming with the ALR motherboards...if they ever arrive... stupid mail system...

Looks like I've convinced Unger into at least thinking about 1) using a router between the Cisco lab and the rest of the lab and/or 2) replace the current mainstream Catalyst 1700 with the currently unused 1900. I like the 1900 better and I belive it generally to be a better machine. The 1700 is (IMHO) crap and should have never been released. Besides, the 1900 is faster and newer, both of which normally appeal to her. I suggested the use of the router because she'd like to have more control over students' inet usage. I see no realistic way to restrict that using a standard L2 switch (ESPECIALLY the 1700!) and a router would at least get a little farther. She's definitly going to need more convincing, though...

One of the VCRs is now set for UTC, as the extreme relativity and anticoncreteness of even MST has annoyed me for long enough! There's only two sources of MST time left in my room, and I hope to have them bannished soon as well. It will be a better place, believe me...

Ahh! The Revolution has begun! All Apes shall soon rule the Earth as free creatures! We now return to the previously unscheduled programming.... Oh, btw, slashdot looks truely horrible on an 8bit 640x400 composite NTSC display...

One correction from yesterday...The machine I'm going to be using is not an OptiPlex, it's an OmniPlex. Leave it to Dell to come up with confusing names like that! I've been having loads of trouble booting Linux on the thing. It gets to a random point in init/main.c and SHUTS ITSELF OFF! It actually shuts down the entire machine including the power supply. Its interesting. I don't quite understand how that's possible, as APM is disabled in every possible way. Anyway, after spending several hours manually trial-and-erroring through kernel init, I've come to the conclusion it's one of 1) bad blocks on floppy or 2) overheated (and overclocked :) CPU. The latter has more evidence to support it, but my experience cirtainly is enough to support the bad block theory. I don't feel like messing anymore with it to night... (In case you're wondering, yes, I did overclock it: 486sx33->40mhz. I didn't think such a minor difference would be a problem, I guess it is. I really need to find another dx66 -- this machine will not properly support dx100's.)

I don't really remember what happened most of the day. I'm guessing for most of it, I was in some sort of disconnected state (that's probably more good than bad). I remember finding something this morning on the PUSD WAN that I shouldn't have found on a publicly accessible PUSD employee machine, but past that I don't remember much.

Brock suprisingly dropped by the house in the afternoon for some reason. He was ranting something about a CD burner and $200... From what I remember, I wasn't listening...

Got yet another power supply to try on the vga->tv scan converter. This one was slightly different, though: it worked. The guy I bought the converter from was nice enough to call up Willow (the manufacturer) and find out the correct supply and then send me one. It turns out that the behavior we were seeing was perfectly normal... Who would've thought that such a simple device would require 2amps...

After minor scuffles with my VCR and TV (the Samsung 19in in my room), it now seems to work as good as its going to in X (console/text mode doesn't work: the image is squished in the middle and expanded on the top and bottom, very ugly and unreadable). X at 640x480x60Hz seems to work okay. It still flickers and does a few odd things, but other than that, it's okay. I'm not sure that it produces a decent enough picture to actually reroute TV over or not, though. I may just use it as a control panel console instead of the complete gateway I was planning (I planned it using optimal hardware of course, not the ultra-cheap stuff I actually have access to!). I don't really need the video overlay though, as I can just control the TV with a IR transmitter from the computer and switch back and forth between the TV image and the VGA image as needed, just not visible on the same screen. Probably better anyway.

Still nothing working yet. Still just ideas. Oh, and I continued my ranting about TR and ethernet on the ti-hardware list tonight. They seem to like talking about it, so I continue to correct thier mistakes. They're going to learn not to talk about those things real quick... I couldn't believe that somebody thought that the proper (and only) way to connect 10base2 was in a physical ring! I briefly explaned the ramifications of his statement and he digressed, but I got a good laugh about it anyway. Tonights lesson concerned the differences in the three types of token ring connectors, with a bit of info on ethernet thrown in...

Went ahead and ordered another Diamond DVC1000 capture card. I also went ahead and ordered one of the remote controls that ECS had. They're not the exact same, but they should use the same chip. The one I currently have is a Logitech that says AST on it. This one should be a Logitech that says Packard Bell on it (don't worry, I'll scrape it off), and also look quite different, but the protocol should be the same (hopefully). The receiver on this one looks like a squished QuickCam. The remote itself is slightly different as well, but that's not really what I care about...

I finally got mad and gave up on the Dell NetPlex chassis. I'd forgotten the other difference: the drive mounting rails. The NetPlex rails are completely different and I have not source to get them. So, it looks like I've found another machine to use. It's also a Dell, but it's an OptiPlex, but it's a double-height OptiPlex (twice the height of a normal OptiPlex). But, that's not even coming close to the best part: it's EISA! (and PCI) I'll try and put up a system config list similar to that of ihpled's sometime soon so I can remember everything. It's only got two PCI slots so one for VGA out (probably a #9 GXE64Pro 4mb) and one for composite in (a DVC1000 Bt848). I'll stick with the rest of the old config for now as well, even though some parts may move to EISA instead of ISA cards (Media Vision Pro Audio 16, 3Com 3c509b, MAYBE CREAF Video Blaster). Wish there were 3 PCI so I could use a 3c905 instead, but video is more important. Also, this board has more SIMM sockets, so I was able to go to 16mb RAM with just 4mb chips. I'll try and find at least one 8mb chip laying around somewhere (they're 72-pin so for a 486, a bank is one SIMM). Also, this appears to be a machine that my dad was doing some overclocking with (specifically, a DX2-66 to 80MHz) and it therefore has a couple of keenly added fans to keep it cool. I may do the same. Or, I may just use a dx4-100, IF it supports it (it may not). Hopefully, this power supply is as quiet as the one in the NetPlex...I think it's the exact same one, so good....

Worked on Mrs Fraley's Mac machine a little bit more this afternoon. I'd forgotten to rebless the system folder, so it was using an empty one it found for itself somewhere (and therefore it was not loading the CD-ROM extension). She was complaning because she couldn't listen to her Evida CD! So, I fixed it, put that CD on and quickly snuck out without her noticing (though I heard the screams of joy from the hallway when she heard it -- I'm not kidding, this lady is someone who some would describe as "ADD", which is kind of ironic, since she is a math teacher)... But, she chased me down later anyway...

Nothing too exciting else happened. Finished my fvwm2rc in 2nd hour. Had the pleasure of melting and burning candles in chemistry. I also found amusement in torching aluminium foil, which suprisingly enough will anhilate itself with just a mere touch to an open flame... Must be some coating they use that does it.... Anyway, I'm not in the mood for doing another door analysis, so I'll leave that alone. Guess that's it... One day left this week (yea!). Humanities summary and presentation on tuesday (boo!)...

Also, I'm sending that tape back to Frank...I don't really have the time I'd need to put into that project. If I had eight hours a day to do things I don't have to do and don't get paid for, then I'd probably do it, but as I don't, I can't. Maybe in a couple hundred days, I'll try again.

Changed a hard drive for a teacher this morning. Got a possibly-still-alive 2.1gb Quantum SCSI hard drive out of the deal. Also worked a little on the fvwm2rc I seem to have ended up using at school. Also put the Cisco Semester 3 curriculum up on quick, which means it will soon end up on ihpled (though it will NOT be publicly available for copyright and other legality reasons, which goes along with Cisco's current bought with being nasty).

Attempted (with distraction) to do some research on ancient middle eastern religion for most of the evening (realize that very little of that time was actually spent doing what I had intended on doing!). Didn't find much, that is until I noticed I'd been spelling "Sumer" wrong (two 'm's anyone?)...

Should have enough to last through tomorrow, but I'll need more I'm sure... Summary due Fri, presentation on Tue. The presentation needs to be 20minutes between my partner and myself. Should be interesting...

Watched CNN a bit just to liven up the evening. I really wish they'd put some of the better programs on in prime time and (better) even later... The only thing decent on late night is World Report (0800 UTC weekdays, 0700 weekends). But the repetitiveness of Headline is secure and reassuring....I guess.... Of course tonight, CNN interrupted my normally scheduled viewing to bring me a special report on a downed MD11...although the fact that an MD-11 actually crashed was verging on amazing, it really wasn't worth interrupting my evening for... Is there a CNN2? If there is, I wish I got it... damn Cox...

Didn't actually write anything for Mon. Nothing really happened anyway. It was a Monday, and one of the worst since I'd missed the two days prior. Not exactly fun...

Today was not exciting, but happened anyway.

I attempted to move the ihpled lists to majordomo (currently using procmail+slist), and failed miserably. Got it to the point where no error messages come up, but in doing that, broke the rest and now it says nothing and does nothing. I put slist back in.

Tarred up a snapshot of my code for the new FAIM backend. Not workable yet, but it's a start. I haven't looked at it in over a week, so the comments should be interesting.

I really need to start doing school work, though most of it seems still to me to be fluffy rubbish. We took a standardized state test this morning. It was slightly amusing. It was a combo multiple-choice + written. For the last written part I just got mad and started on a little rambling about the stupidity of state-administered standardized tests, and how trivial they all become when they do a dozen of them a year (this rambling was in the form of a business letter, which was the proper form for the assignment, though the subject was not exactly close :). Is the point to distract from the supposed central purpose of school: learning? Things to ponder... and to be madened and disgusted by...

Finally got through all my backlog of both email and paper mail. I guess that should be a relief, but it's really not. The backlog of school work is much more important anyway, esp as I really have no time for it... I find it strange how my one non-AP honors class (Humanities) has more homework for one day than I have in 4 days of both my AP honors classes combined....

Well, I was hoping to be able to fly out to NC for Linux Expo '99, but it looks like it will fall on finals week! Bad news, may be we can work something out... but the way it's looking the AP tests will also be that week or somewhere very close to there, and I definitly can't miss or change those... May 18-22 are the expo dates...

Oh, I guess I should mention that "vol three: aug 1998" of this document is available at http://delphid.ml.org/log/august.html.