Happy Birthday Iambe!

So who has my Matrix DVD?

11/26/2000    -{ Ve came, for ze Tea! }-

So in an unprecidented move of sportsmanship and team spirit, I agreed to play volleyball with my team for a charity event yesturday. We played two hours of very fun volleyball, and didn't suck nearly as much as a team full of computer geeks should have. Course, we were playing the actors guild and a bunch of dentists (well, the dentists kicked our asses, but that's another story).

Anyway, today I kinda hurt :) Oh, and it's Sunday too. That means tomorrow is Monday. That really sucks.

I had (yet another) strange dream last night.

I was playing real life quake in a convention of some sort (but it was in an old style library like place, with lots of wide open spaces). It was real life in that I was actually running around and shooting people, but virtual in that no one was actually gibbing. Think laser tag I guess. Anyway, Jennifer Love Hewitte was there sitting with some people. I go over to talk to her and she says that it would be great if someone would make her a martini for when she gets back. I of course, wanting to impress, head to the bartender and ask for the ingredients for a martini, and then fumble through mixing and making it (is there a slice of orange that is put on the edge of the glass? I didn't think so...). I have it ready for her when she returns, and she thanks me and asks me "so how did you make it?" I of course have no clue and say something like "well I put some of that stuff in that stuff, mixed a little of the other stuff, and there you go!" She didn't like that at all (judging a man by his ability to know how to make a drink) and told me to bugger off or walked away or something equally put-down-ish. Pah! Women.

I am proud to have made a contribution to the geek nexus in purchasing a wacky-cool DVD player, a real one that doesn't involve stringing wires across the room from my computer! A Toshiba SD-1600 with all sorts of cool features. Now I can watch DVDs (and even on my TV they look great (yes Silv, they do look fine! :)). Now to start getting the other bits needed for a great home audio experience.

11/24/2000    -{ No more alarms, for the love of gawd, no more alarms! }-

I got to bed at 11 last night after another round or 3 of Team Arena, however I didn't actually get to sleep until at least midnight. Again.

I was in a movie theatre, watching Star Wars (or perhaps the trilogy). My buddy dragon25 was beside me on my left for part of it. Beside him on his left was a thin girl who didn't look all that great. At one point she licked a needle puncture mark on her upper arm in what was supposed to be a seductive manner and said "you like that?" Towards the end of the movie there was some excitement towards the front where someone had tried to grab a needle that was found. The guy was in a red pullover and ran from two guys, one was a cop the other was a teacher(?). The girl beside us turned into another guy (I think) and hid his/her needle in desparation as s/he realized that the cops were around. The guy in the red pullover ran right in front of me with a needle in his hand and two people (in fact I think a lot of the theatre was getting into the action of trying to chase him). He ran right in front of me and I didn't do anything for fear of getting a used/dirty needle jabbed into me. I think I stuck my hand out and pushed him away but that's it. That's all that happened before the alarm rang anyway.

11/22/2000    -{ Ah, old country sung in the shower }-

11:10pm
Good thoughts and prayers to tigs grampa. If he's anything like the stubborn old git that tig is he'll be around for a while.

Aside:
Foo. My "1" key is broken.

Morning
Semi dream for ya.

It really sucks when you're on the moon and the only good sandwich joint gets destroyed huh? And you're stuck with two other guys and the only alternative is a mcdonalds? It was bad enough when there were two places to eat, but then one got damaged/destroyed (think lander accident from Armageddon). Then you have to decide what to do and running in anger/fear in a space suit is kinda scary.

I'm thinking I really should make a separate page for my dreams, to keep my sleeping insantity away from my waking insanity.

11/21/2000    -{ This scroll mouse thingy is pretty cool actually.... }-

So I hopped into windows to view some of the wack ass animations on swma.net (the Star Wars Modelling Alliance) and thought two things. The first was "man media player 7 blows hot and sweaty goat scrotum". My $DEITY what was microsoft thinking when they released that piece of shit? It's slower, more bloated, more buggy, and about as stable as an epileptic three legged camel on crack. I decided after a while that instead of just saying "run program from location" and then double clicking the .mpg in winzip, I would save it to my desktop and then run it from there (seems the only way to get media player 6.4 invoked). Now MS puts out some crap software, but as a mpg/avi player, media player 6.4 sucks less. It especially sucks less than media player 7.

The second think I thought of was "what if these are viruses?" Now I'm a Linux person, so I worry more about exploits than some lamer deciding to unleash something that'll wipe out my registry... but I'd rather that not happen if I can avoid it. See, while most of the animations in the gallery are zipped .avi or .mpg files, some of them are .exe. Wouldn't be hard to slip in a little trogan that went to work while you were thinking it was loading a movie huh?

So I go looking for anti-virus software. Well, it's next to impossible! Mcafee used to have a shareware or similar type idea program that was a great piece of anti-virus software... no more. Go to their download page and you're asked to either make a purchase or prove you've done so already. A 10 day trial? Hardly worth my time. The other one was fprot, whose web page again gives you a choise of trail versions of old software, some "contact local dealer for a cd" messages for the linux stuff, and a free version of their DOS software. Wee.... Also both companies have gone on this subscription kick. Why is there no nice, free anti-virus software you can just download and install? I don't even mind going out every once and a while and getting the updates myself! Got one that doesn't suck? Tell me!

So in a fit of stupidity I thought I'd look for a warez version. A quick search on google.com turned up some warez sites which claimed to have mcafee stuff on them. I have never had to go through such BS to get something. Or in this case, not get something. I estimate in the two sites I visited approximately 20 browser windows popped up. I kid you not. Links to ads and other sites were very cleverly hidden so that what looked like a normal file listing was actually just links to other pages. Generally entering or leaving these pages involved at least 2 pop ups, generally to sex sites. Some of them put themselves in fullscreen mode (you know that wonderful explorer feature?) making it (slightly) more of a pain in the ass to close. Of course, closing these windows generally popped up more.

Some sites used the incentive of entering them to get the user to vote that site in what I assume is the top 5 warez sites of all times. On at least two the first page was "to view warez, click the vote 1 button, enter the site, click the vote 2 button, enter the site, then come back and click on the warez button to get all your 31337 4zz war3z d00d3!!!!" Clicking on the vote 1/2 more often than not took you to a lovely porn site, or another "click here for the top 5 warez sites on the internet" page. Finally coming back and clicking the "warez" button just took you to another warez "site" which seemd to only have banner ads and links to other warez sites. Closing it of course meant, yes, you did guess correctly, more popups.

Needless to say I don't care about getting virus protection anymore.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the rest of today kinda sucked too.

11/20/2000    -{ Don't mind the voices }-

So this is what it's like to be old eh? Well, Illiad said it was all downhill from here, but quite frankly I don't notice a difference. I probably will when I get home today, but thats because it's a monday.

Thanks to my folks I now have a vaccuum cleaner! One that works! And knives, wonderful knives.... no more digging through a drawer for one the two that I have (one a small paring type knife and the other a huge bread knife)! Other assorted goodies as well. I got lots of birthday wishes as well from everyone which I hugely appreciate. My birthday gift to myself was to head to Chapters and pick up some books. One on GTK programming, GNOME programming, and one on Intrusion Detection. Cool stuff. I even found a morning routine that can aid me in getting the time to actually read these and the million other books I'm reading. Instead of sitting down and watching TV or sitting on the computer while I eat breakfast, through the lost art of stacking and shoving I cleared a space at the kitchen table. This table currently is used as horizontal storage space, so this was a good trick in itself methinks. Anyway, now I will do my best to eat breakfast while reading a book, just like I did in the olden days.

11/17/2000    -{ Happy Birthday to me.... }-

Well, my day (morning) off started with two distinct and connected dreams.

The first one is less remembered, but it had to do with the end of the world approaching.

The second was about it being a lot closer. There was going to be a supernova and I was at college (not my real one of course). Basically everyone knew that everyone was going to die. Kinda depressing :) For whatever reason I was more concerned with getting some songs out onto napster that I had made/written/gotten/something. They were for my first girlfriend (for what reason I have no idea). That and I was very concerned about how to get people to download them and start distributing them. Weird. Anyway, as the end of the world approached, people started collecting water, "It's going to get hot." The only image I remember from the dream is standing inside the building looking out through a window and people were walking along the edge of the window on the glass separators (I guess there was just enough angle on the building that they could walk normally). The people were kinda switchbacking back and forth and getting higher, ignoring the fact thatthey were, well, getting higher. I think at that point I realized that it didn't matter if they died by falling, it was going to be better than slowly frying from an exploding sun. I think around them I was woken up by the phone.

Visions of the end of the world? Hmm.... scary thing is, assuming mankind doesn't kill themselves off in the immediate future, and the earth doesn't decide to us off, we'll face something like this in a few million or billion years. I'm hoping that by then we'll have the technology to move somewhere else though. Tom Swift encountered this in one of the "new" Tom Swift books, and he fixed the sun by diverting a small black hole through the sun to suck out the excess energy....

Hey, you never know.

So what am I doing today? Relax. Hack a bit at the active alert stuff that appears to have stopped working for no real reason on the test boxes. Go to the UF party a bit early and play on the SGI boxen that apparently render Q3 smooth as silk with all the graphics options turned on and at 1280x1024! Wow.

11/15/2000    -{ Ever wonder if what goes on in your head is normal? }-

So what has gone wrong tonight so far? Well, not a whole lot, but the three things impacting me right now, as I sit and eat a late dinner are:

1. Leaving the toaster on "Bagel Mode". Until today I didn't know what bagel mode was, but I thought it was pretty cool that I had a toaster that had it. Seems that on bagel mode only the inside coils heat up, so that your bagel is toasted nicely on the insides, but not the outside. Sounds good right? Yup. Too bad I was toasting bread. Now I'm eating my fried egg on toast where the toast is only half toast. One side is a nice brown, the other, well, isn't.
2. Recently I've tried to get green tea that is nice. Whenever I go and get sushi I drink gobs and gobs of the green tea. So I went out and got a couple of different flavors the other day to try. Well, there is definately an art to it, which I haven't quite mastered yet. I tried a tea ball with a lot of leaves.... didn't work. Tried a few leaves just in the bottom of the mug... didn't work. Not sure what to try next.
3. When selecting sandwich bread, do not choose something like, say, french bread, which works nicely for sandwiches, but poorly for anything where you need to flip a fried egg onto it (I don't know how you eat your fried eggs on toast, but that's how I do it).