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

I want churchoflinustorvaldsoflatterdaypenguins.org. (Or maybe just penguindomination.org. (All of worlddomination.* are taken. Bah.))

I'm tired of doing homework. The unfortunate bit is that I was tired of it before I started.

Wednesday. Wednesday was a day I didn't do much. (Unlike every other day, where I am terribly busy doing nothing. Staying busy doing nothing is a difficult skill to attain.)

Hum. NFS+emacs is doing Weird Things. For instance, for a bit there, index.html had completely disappeared. Luckily I hadn't closed emacs and could still recover. Developement kernels are fun fun fun.

Anyway, I can't remember what happened on Wed, Thu, or Fri. I think I spent the majority of Friday at BandN and Borders (where I managed to subconsciously block out the precence of mandie for a good hour (I swear I was there. I was sitting on the floor in the math/engineering section reading DSP books and being annoyed by employees kicking me trying to get their work done! (aparently their work is to kick people sitting on the floor in the math/engineering section...go figure))).

Today (Sat) I spent most of the day sleeping, reading, and wandering around Frys Electronics. I'd never actually gotten over there before (the 20ft wide intestine above the front door never inspired me to go in). I spent quite a bit of time there. And I found my next laptop. (Of course, I'm not going to buy it from Frys, even though they have the same price as everyone else. I really don't want to pay tax. I'll just get it from Sony directly.)

I also listened to the Bose demonstration. Rather impressive. A hell of a lot of sound comes out of those 1in speakers. Too bad its 1200$ for a 5.1 set (yes, thats actually rather cheap).

Aparently I should've gone to BandN so I could accidently ignore mandie some more. Maybe tomorrow. (I really think BandN and Borders should be open 24hrs a day. They might get more money out of me. (Probably not. They'd just have me sitting there all night long doing everything but spending money. (But they do seem to enjoy kicking me, so perhaps thats an incentive for them.)))

I actually did spend money at borders yesterday. I got the sequel to Catch22 ('Closing Time'). And I finally got a copy of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. That means only nine more symphonic poems left and my collection of Mahler's life works will be complete. (I'd like Kindertotenliede next, for the obviously curious title.)

"I sound like a bad inspirational poster." "The story of your life." Bah.

All praise Homer. (Yes, thats been sitting around for a couple weeks now. I kept forgetting to link to it.)

I'm rather tired. And its terribly hot in here. G'night.

Sheesh. Now I'm going to have to come up with my own chiasmae six days out of the week to keep myself entertained.

Today was horrible. You came here to hear me say that. (You should know that I feel so strongly about that, that I spent five minutes searching my room for a mic to record me yelling 'Today was horrible'. Of course, I failed. But you can easily imagine me yelling that, can't you?)

deepthought needs to be rebooted. (I mean that literally, not in my usual highly metaphorical lets-mock-the-nature-of-the-universe kind of way.) Its having major problems. (More than just 'who' segfaulting.) Any connection that lasts longer than a few seconds gets stuck or slows down really badly (down into the single digitl kB/sec). I'll reboot it when it migrates back to the garage in a week or so (as soon as I get the time!).

I have an extreme lack of time. I have about five weeks of homework to do. Not because I'm that far behind, but because the teachers are that far ahead. Yes. That must be it. (Nothing is ever my fault. But I really should stop stating the obvious.)

I only went to band and "physics" this morning. There was a sub in calc and I really didn't feel like sitting through that. I spent that time much more productively.

I watched the old Fountainhead movie instead. ("I have enough drooling dolts.") [I disagree with the IMDB commentents. It does not lack humor. Not at all. Its there. They just missed it. Which is the problem I have with IMDB commenters to begin with. They're all drooling dolts. Which is why I put the IMDB link on that quote instead of on the title. (But I really shouldn't've had to point that out. I should really stop pointing out the obvious. (And yes, double contractions are just fine in my world.))] Sigh.

I slept all afternoon. And spent all evening at bandn and borders. I was doing homework; really. I finallly found Stevens' UNPv2! (at Borders -- I missed it yesterday, it was close to the bottom and oddly indexed) I found out what I really want is not my hacked-up SysV message queues, but POSIX.1b message queues. Which, of course, are not implemented on linux. Damnit.

I think I should spend all evening at bandn and borders. Its fun. And the chairs are soft. Actually, I think they should move borders tech section into bandn's tech section and leave bandn's programming section alone (bandn has the advantage of having lots of ORA books, borders doesn't). But I really need the nice bandn chairs. Thats the only downside to borders (that, and borders really bothers me with its crowded atmosphere). Also, borders' math section is quite nice. Lots of DSP-related stuff (DFT/FFT, FIR, etc).

Enough rambling about bookstores. For now. Wait til tomorrow. Heh. Someone want to buy me UNPv2? All the good books are way overpriced.

Feel free to implement kernel-side POSIX.1b message passing for me too.

I get to go to compandlitheavenofnoremorse tomorrow. Yay? Perhaps not. Some 'senior stuff' tomorrow too. I'm already TOO BUSY with 'senior stuff'! How do they expect me to fit it all in?!

Okay, I'm done.

"it seems very natural coming from you. you seem like someone who would stand on the top of a mountain with a painball gun screaming "fuck them all to heaven!" at deer running in the opposite direction." I have no idea what that means. But its damned funny.

Aparently nothing has gotten written in a while. I hate it when that happens. It serves to produce nothing but one big long entry following the fast.

I don't remember what happened the weekend following the last entry. I know the following monday was just horridly redundent. The tuesday following that, I slept in until compandlit. I got there just in time to sit around and do nothing for ninety minutes and go home again. Wednesday was nice and short, but still worthless. It also marked the start of the trek to Colorado. Got to Albuqueque mid-evening. Slept horribly. Drove to Longmont the majority of the day Thursday.

Managed to get lost at CU at least three times during the 'tour' on Friday. The campus doesn't seem all that large until you've walked all the way across a few times. I learned nothing. But I'm still going there. Its great.

Drove back home Sat and Sun. Made it home by 1400 Sun. Slept the rest of the day. (Oh, we stopped in Castle Rock to wander around the Sony outlet. They had a few interesting deals, but it was less interesting than anticipated. They could do better. They had very little MD stuff. Only portable players. Both were under a 150$, though, which I think is a decent price. Oh, and nearly everything there are refurbs. Which isn't a major problem, I suppose.)

And then I came back to school today to see that yet again, nothing has changed. I still have an idiotic teacher second hour. I'm still behind in calc. And I still have no idea whats going on in compandlit.

There was a fairly disturbing discussion about eating children in compandlit. Perhaps this is pertinent. Seems so. (The existance of a Colorado City, Arizona is frightening enough.)

I have a rediculous amount of work to get done. In 15 weekdays. Actually, substantially less than that. The problem is that I'm tired of doing work. I'm tired of doing ridiculous assigments. And worthless labs. I'm tired of putting up with these teachers.

So what does one do who is trying to avoid homework? Go sit at barnsandnoble for three hours, of course.

They had lots of copies of jonkatztheidiot's 'Geeks'. I normally would run in fear of anything with his name on it, but the cover was a pleasant bright ugly green and I just had to pick it up. I of course cannot buy it because I refuse to donate to anything relating to people who use the word 'hellmouth' (a word that I truely detest), so I sat there and read half of it. (This is perfectly adequate, since I was just looking for a reason to sit in those nice bandn chairs some more.) Perhaps its just my overwhelming voyerist needs, but its actually rather good, once you skip the last half of the intro and a few parts later on, where he just babbles on about himself and his own self-riteousness (I'm glad I don't have that problem). Its actually relatable. Amazing. But this does not mean I'm going to take him off my "authors to hide" list in my slashdork preferences. I still severely dislike him.

I also picked up a copy of Catch-22. I decided it was too good for me not to own. And they had it on sale or something. (Its mentioned in jonkatztheidiot's book too. But don't buy it for that. Yeek, no.)

The cliffs notes for it are impressively worthless, too. So it must be good. (As you should remember, its one of my rules that if the cliffs notes are decent, then the book is horrible. If the notes are skimpish, then the book is hugely insightful and the cliffs notes author completely missed the point. Which happens more often than should expected as profitable. But I'm not Cliff Hillegass.)

So, I got nothing done tonight either. Maybe tomorrow. Bleh.

Sprint is dead. Doesn't look like its coming back anytime soon. I'm just going to go to bed instead. I'm rather tired. I haven't gotten much sleep lately (esp last night (lets all praise beth, broq, and mandie's feet for that one)). And I haven't been getting my naps because of having to go to dealerships. Basically, I've slept four hours in the past two days.

And to reward me for that, I got to take a calc test this morning. School is so wonderfully nice.

Anyway, Wednesday was a teacher-inservice day. Nothing exciting happened. Unless you include not doing anything in compandlit. Shock. Sat around and "discussed" money for college. ("discuss" as in how compandlit people yell at each other and generally annoy everyone and themselves. Not that I cared about this "discussion" anyway. Well, if current trends (ahem) continue, I may need to. (And no, you can't make jokes about my net worth.)) So our "one week" for Joy Luck turned into two days, one of which is already gone. Methinks we're doing it next week too. (And yes, I did stay up til 0200 finishing the book on Tuesday. I got fairly distracted earlier in that evening and ended up not getting to that until rather late. Oops.)

Grandparents took my sister and I out to chinese that afternoon, and I then went with my dad to wander around GMC dealerships. The Peoria Pontiac-GMC people were just rude. The guy even complained that he was on the way to clock out when we came. Bah. (To get Internet prices, you have to talk to the Internet salesman. Not that it really matters.) We just left after forcing that guy to show us as many things as possible to waste his time. Then went to Yates GMC in Goodyear. Its a bit of a drive, but they really had a good deal. And the sales tax in Goodyear is only 6.9% (its 7.2% in peoria...0.3% is a large amount of money for many-k$ purchases). Anyway, they had two 4dr 4wd GMC Jimmys. Both 1998's. One black, one green. The black one was 2000$ more than the green one. I never knew that electric seats cost 2000$. I decided that for 2000$, I could pull on the lever myself. I got the green one. Decent deal. Its quite nice. It drives just like a real truck, only its smaller (I went with the GMC for a reason...you can get the original Chevy version (the Blazer) for slightly less, but despite what the Peoria people say, there's many large differences...just look under the hood). Fairly acceptable gas milage for a 4.3L V6 as well. Spent several hours doing paperwork on Wed. Went back and picked it up this afternoon. (Oh, and no, I didn't piss the Yates people off. They were quite nice to me. And got me a better deal than I expected. (Its only a 2yr old vehicle after all. I was realy expecting to top my upper margin.) I recommend them. The cheap sales tax in Goodyear is a major plus as well. Now if AZ registration didn't cost so damned much...)

So now I have a new cartruck. Amazing. How liberating.

Not having internet access right now is really pissing me off. I keep thinking of something, and think I'll go look at it further only to see netscape and remember its dead. Bah.

I guess I can't go to second hour tomorrow. I don't have the resources to do my assignment. How sad. I'm heartbroken. Really. That means I get to go to bed early tonight too. No distractions from thosepeople. (Maybe I'll reply to her mail, though, just to have my daily dose of praising her feet.)

Anyway, today was boring other than the calc test (which was just really annoying) and getting the truck.

Time for bed, I supppose.

"We don't believe in rules like, we gave them up when we starting living like freaky beatniks. ... You gotta help us, doc! We've tried nothin and we're all out of ideas!"

USWorst borked our phone lines today. Aparently they don't feel like fixing them either. I might care if I was still using dial-up. But I'm not. So, eh.

Today gets more exciting by the minute.

Knocked by inbox down to 16 messages. From 113. Yay. It hasn't fit on one 80x25 term in years.

I want to be able to go back in time. Not forward. And not to change anything. Just to watch. It'd be a good distraction from making a crappy future for myself too.

Shoot the bears. You need to start writing original material. (Its "worshipped ... by others"? I think I missed something.) Haha. "Moral dilemmas really suck."

Well, She did it, and I'm going to to. Now for my favorite section of my favourite general-purpose python song:

Life is wonderful. A&E's Python Biography last night was fairly amusing. And it reminded me of that song. You should memorize it too. Its wonderful.

Today was fairly boring. I got near nothing accomplished. I need to finish the last 100pages of Joy Luck Club before Wed. (She nearly gave us a test on it today.) School was just especially long and boring otday. With the special appearence of fake dead people second hour. "mock crash". Boring. (Things like that only serve to annoy the people who don't care and further disturb the people who do. Sigh. They'll never learn. They're a school. Please don't point out the obvious irony. Irony that obvious stops being irony.)

(Mandie is going to reply to the 9kb of mail I sent her today. Haha.) "The aliens prefer Scotts." You've got to reply sometime. You'll force yourself.

Compandlit did aid in illustrating the fact that theres close to nil time left this year. I must admit that I really didn't know The End was that close. Not that its a big problem. I just have a lot to do before it happens, and I thought I had more time. As far as compandlit goes, we're ditching Grapes of Wrath. And only spending a week on Joy Luck. And thats it. The rest is test prep (and that stupid banned book assignment, but that should be near-trivial).

I still need to buy a car. I got the largish check today (lots o zeros). I need to do that soon. But the jimmy I wanted mysteriously disappeared. And there's no others on the local lots yet. (They're all the two-door models, or they're 2wd. Neither is acceptable.) Grr. Anyway. I need that soon, because I'm planning to drive to Colorado with it next Wednesday, to visit CU. I should be back that Sunday afternoon sometime, depending on how many things we find to do up there. Its an 18hr drive. Probably stay a night in Albeque on either side.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this... I'm living in California for the summer. Leaving probably a week or so after graduation (which is the 18th of May -- I need time to get my affairs in order here; it will hopefully be my last week ever of permanently living at home). I should have an apartment out there to live in. Or I'll live at the office. Or both. Anyway, I'll be working and making (more than) decent money. Then I can learn to hate The Valley even more than I do already.

And then in August, of course, I'm leaving for Colorado. Probably come back here for a bit first. And then its off to hate school again.

Which amazingly is the same thing I'm going to do here in a few hours. (Except its a lot hotter than CO. (I discovered tonight that its already impossible to get less-than-warm water here. That usually doesn't happen until may. Its scortching hot even on full "cold". Blah. I hate this place.))

"i would never make fun of you using a past-tense transitive verb." "you're a dolt."

Hrm. I wrote the header. I guess I have to write something.

I finally got the closed-caption-to-IRC pipe working. I did a little hack that just reads from stdin and writes into a channel. And then you add fflush(stdout)'s to the closed captioning extractor. There's a few caveats. Mainly in that you have to remove the flood protection from your IRC server. I could care less about that, since I run my own daemon anyway. And my connection naturally flood protects. It also random Bad Things occasionally. Oh well. Join me for live commentary (with dialog!) in #midstv on irc.auk.cx:6667.

I want to talk through a kazoo all the time. So when I do a fake kidnapping of a random 40yearold, I can take it out and no one will recognize my voice without the kazoo. I will get my money.

I need to fix this ircd. Its not allowing ops.

Today was even less productive than yesterday. Did get masq finally working on harmless, so my wireless is now truely useful. Its incredibly nice to have wireless in linux. Anyway, it took kernel 2.3.99pre4-pre5 to get it work right, finally. It hasn't crashed yet either.

I should've finished Joy Luck Club today. I didn't. I suppose compandlit will be fun. Heh. Don't make me go.

Nearly everyday I go to weather.com hoping they've fixed the flush-data-at-midnight problem. Everday, its not fixed. Everday, there is no weather for us. It makes the site rather useless for me. I never go there during normal hours, when supposedly its working just fine.

Boring few days.

The Evil still wanders among us.. I can't believe its still available. No new release since oh-so-terrible-1.19, over two years ago. The developer pages are still around too. Broken links and all. Amazing. I played with that for a bit, trying to get it to work with my aimd. Somewhat successful. I think I could get it fully working if I really felt like it. Oh, that gave me a chance to use IBM's JIT. Not quite as impressive as I expected. But usable on a non-impressive machine.

Yesterday was mostly just a waste of my time and everyone elses' involved. Had to listen to some guy ramble on during second hour about "choices". The only thing I got out of it was that you should get a good lawyer if you get divorced. Blah. Came home and slept all day.

I took my room into summermode a few days ago. I decided to try cardboard this year instead of foil. Its working okay so far. Its good whereever it covers. The problem is that it's really difficult to cover everything. Foil is definitly more maneuverable than a mutilated cardboard box. Anyway, its dark in here 24x7 now. Quite nice. It dropped the normal daytime temp in my room from about 95degF to around 85. Decent enough.

Didn't do much of anything globally useful today. Oh well. (Not that I can talk about anyway.)

Basically one of those "oh shit" days. Err...

Band this morning was Good. Settled many questions about what would happen until the end of the year and was generally calming. Second and third hour were adequate. Things went down from there. Namely, when the news crews arrived.

It saddens/maddens me to see the powers of the press used to lie. Not just to lie, but to overdramatize a boring lie. And then after its overdramatized, it gets boring. Thats about when the crews get out of their vans and stop people in the middle of the road to ask them questions. They don't stop people who know anything about the situation of course, just people who seem to have nothing better to do than to talk to idiotic news people. (This is of course the ironic part, since they were obviously in the middle of the road for a reason; namely, to get somewhere other than in the middle of the road, where the danger of getting stopped by idiotic news people is unfortunatly rather high.)

That being said, I would like to make clear what I implied: idiotic news people have no sense of responsibility. Gone are the days of credible journalism. And anything sex-related gets at the top of the headlines, true or not. (Channel12 proved this to me even further tonight: they pushed back the story I'm referring to to the second-most-important-story position because they found an even more dramatic sex story that just had to go before it. (That ended up being a good thing, so eh.)) These "news people" are out to get the "story" not the news. They want something to put THEIR story first on the broadcast. They'll do anything to do it.

Including stopping unsuspecting people in the middle of the road.

A note to KPHO, KPNX, KNXV, KSAZ: Get away from my school. Get away from my band. Get away from its former director. Get away from my neighborhood. Get away. We didn't ask you to be involved. You have supplanted and dishonored your duty as a public service. You have done a disservice to your audience. And get the hell out of the middle of the road!

There is something rotten here. But its not the teacher in question. Its not the student in question. Its you.

And the administration. I hate to bring this up here. Because that seems to be making bad use of this space. But I do think it needs to be mentioned. Many, many teachers are leaving Centennial after this year. And not all of them for personal reasons. Additionally, theres many teachers (and staff) leaving the peoria district overall. Firstly, you did it to yourselves. Secondly, I can't say I didn't warn you.

Hmmm... I think thats enough ranting for today. (I got to do a good rant on my birthday.)

I said the word 'Zowie' yesterday, out of nowhere. I hadn't said it in months. And now today, Lego bought Paul Allen's Zowie Intertainment. I control the world with my thoughts.

Odd start of a week.

Not So Good Stuff ocurred late last week, ending in us no longer having a band director. Oops. So how thats working out is rather interesting. Oh well. (Its not my place to comment about what happened. Its mainly not my place to do that merely because I don't know anything more about what happened than you could conclude from the above anyway. Administrators don't tell us students anything. Not as if we're the required part of their job or anything. I digress. (You've been here before.))

So anyway, post-first-hour-Monday was rather much like any other day. As was every other day this week. If I remember anything memorable, I'll let you know when I remember it.

Wee..I'm having fun squatting random AIM screen names. ihateyoumandie!

I hate homework. School needs be over. Now. (I bet you would've never guessed I'd say THAT again.)

'AOL Instant Messenger Registration: We're unable to process your registration because you have reached your registration limit for the day. Please try again in 24 hours.' Have I mentioned that system is over designed?

"'...yellow submarine...'...with green and blue polkadots..."...and black trim. Did the yellow last month. Blue is this month. Guess what next month is. Heh.

Twenty volumes...twenty-two months... You'd think I would've found something better to do with myself by now. But yet I still come back. Nearly once a week even. heh. Oh well.

I am aware that I changed moods in the middle of that paragraph. Deal with it.

Speedchoice came on Friday as planned, on schedule. Though I should say Sprint came on Friday. Speedchoice is completely gone. All the trucks have been repainted to say Sprint on them. And I had to sign a new AUP. And I got a new IP address.

DNS took forever to update. Looks like its all okay as of this (Sunday) afternoon. Grr. I hate DNS. Its fault tolerant and all that, but its really inflexible and even worse in terms of recoverability. But oh well. Its not going away any time soon. I predict we'll have a new DNS shortly after IPv6 rolls out, which should happen as soon as hell actually exists.

I can't really say its any faster. They put up a new antenna. Took away my big 19in claw looking thing. Its now just a 13in diamond-shaped thin box. Its at least as good as the other one, which is impressive considering the size decrease. The other antenna+transverter must've been real shit if this one can do the same with a majorly smaller antenna. In any case, Thanks Sprint. Oh, and latency is lots better. Its nearly been cut in half since the conversion. Upstream bandwidth took a big increase too.

Had a band thing on Saturday. Bleh. Slept all afternoon. Did workish stuff in the evening. Also did some random libfaim optimizations. Check out libfaim+mfaim if you want to play with a zero-(userspace-)copy transmit path. Not that that helps mere clients any. Oh well. It cleaned up a lot too. gprof has severe problems dealing with libfaim. I don't understand it. And its really a hinderance.

Today was just a waste. I want to start over. Please.

I'm getting rather pissed off at life in general for no aparent reason. Not that this is particularly out of the ordinary. Especially for this time of year. And under my current circumstances.

Only one more week until I can officially refuse to defend my country. Yay.

I'm buying a vehicle soon. Probably a 1996ish GMC Jimmy 4dr, 4wd. Its a size cut from my current beast (chevy suburban/silverado20). But it should be worth it in terms of gas consumption. Twenty year old vehicles just do not do well on modern gasoline. Neither in fact did they do well with old gas. Oh well. Anyway, theres a nice one down at a lot in Goodyear. I just need to decide where to borrow the money from myself from. Rather interesting decision in the current market.

I haven't started on that rather largish compandlit assignment for Hamlet yet. I don't see why we have to do both an assigment AND a timed writing. Grr. I hate that class.

I am Scorpio. I intimidate United Nations.

Am I done yet? I should hope not. I don't want to do anything else. I haven't done anything this weekend. I'm getting behind again. Damnit.

I've been sleeping a lot lately, for no aparent reason. Rather annoying. Its not exactly helping me be productive.

There's also been a large lack of rambling. Which is rather odd. I've been having trouble rambling. I usually do that quite well and for long periods at a time with little to no effort. Sigh. Perhaps I'm just too tired.

Not that I have mood swings or anything. Hah.