Much to my surprise tonight, I got a call from John and Lara to go out and celebrate John's new job and my own change of employment. After a quick conference I dropped my gear off at the Garden and swung out to pick up a USB hub for Kabuki-sama as well as a new pair of headphones. I briefly browsed the USB mice (because using a touchpad and a full-sized PC keyboard is awkward at best) but didn't find anything I felt like dropping $20us on. My next stop was a Chinese restaurant near downtown where they were already waiting, along with Aaron and Allyson from the Tekkoshocon staff. We swiftly filled the table with many good things to eat (though this place seems curiously loath to let people have chopsticks) and spent several hours sitting, talking, laughing, and catching up.
Tonight was one of my nights to pretend that I actually have a personality of some kind. They don't happen very often, and when they do they're not really the best of ideas, but for some reason I don't think that they seemed to mind too much.
After dinner (and much figuring of the bill, because it had not been divided up as it should have been) we hiked down the block to a local coffee shoppe (not Starbucks, thank the gods) to spend yet more time scaring the greyfaces and drinking far too much coffee. More good laughs were had.
The Transgender Day of Rememberance will be held on Sunday, 21 November 2004 at Saint Andrew's Lutheran Church, 204 Morewood Avenue, Pittsburgh. For more information, contact emilial (at) glccpgh dot friggin-spammers dot org.
Aww.... My Little Pony of Borg!
November 2004 is World ASCII Month! Break out your old-school t-files and re-live the good old days.
Today was my last day at the County. The morning was spent buttoning up everything left to do, clearing out my e-mail box, checking a few web apps, and waiting for the final tasks, which were an on-site test and the exit interview, which consisted of my making sure that I'd given back everything to give back and erased everything work-related from my pocket computer. The on-site test wound up being a bust because the installation CDs were were going to use for the test were bad; specifically, the first CD-ROM in the set (the bootable one) wouldn't go into installation mode no matter what we tried. Test failed. Ick.
The guys at the office took me to Applebee's for lunch today. After all this time, I finally had the chance to hang out and do the bonding thing with everyone. Ironic that it was my last day... on the whole, however, it was a good time and a good lunch. We got to sit and talk for once, really talk about what's been going on. My leaving is throwing a lot of plans (mandatory and not) into a tizzy, and I feel kind of bad about that. I never meant to be such a disruption. But, life goes on, and after a few days the ripples will smooth themselves out. I haven't burned any bridges, and I'm still in contact with some folks.
I made my rounds and said my good-byes to everyone, then picked up the rest of my stuff and headed to my boss' office for the final checkout. We deleted everything from my pocket computer and worked on one or two last glitches, and then headed out into history.
I even got out early for once.
Secretive and wise, the Mekhet are masters of all
things hidden. They hunt from the shadows,
preying secretly on victims and unlocking
secrets that no one should know. The only
common thread linking Mekhet is an affinity for
the night itself or some metaphorical darkness,
such as a pained soul or a thirst for
knowledge. Mekhet are tutored intensely by
their sires so that they understand the nature
of the clan and its duties. Some prefer to let
their progeny discover the Kindred world on
their own, but not even these sires stray so
far that they cant watch a protgs progress.
What Vampire: the Requiem Vampire clan are you?
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Ummm.. yeah.
And the hits just keep on comin'... election officials in the state of Ohio have discovered 2,600 votes were double-counted in the presidential election. In other locations, a small number of people actually did manage to cast two or more votes in the same area. No one noticed the discrepancies until it was discovered that 131% of the registered voters were logged as having cast their ballots. In other news, thousands of provisional votes cast in the state of Illinois are being disregarded because they're not sure if the people who cast them or not are registered to vote. How about actually checking, guys???
Will somebody please explain to me exactly what kind of system glitch is capable of placing the silhouette of a 'weapon' on a monitor screen, thus causing four sectors fo the Miami, Florida airport to go into lockdown? Just a couple of days ago a number of planes were evacuated and four concourses had to be cleared because a baggage screening device (basically a computerised x-ray scanner) accidentally flagged the carry-on baggage of one Edward Skine as containing a hand grenade-like device. After 90 minutes, during which the unsuspecting Mr. Skine had gone to the food court for a bite to eat, he was apprehended by internal security, searched, sniffed by bomb detecting dogs, and when they found that he wasn't carrying a weapon he was thrown out of the airport without so much as a "We're sorry."
They screw up, and the screwee gets the blame?
So much for not having to worry if you didn't do anything...
As if that wasn't enough to get your blood pressure up, the fast-food chain Hardees has revealed its latest creation: The Thickburger. The thickburger consists of 2/3 pound of ground beef, three slices of bread, four strips of fried bacon, cheese, mayo, and butter. It tips the scales at 1,420 dietary calories (and the cash register at $5.49us). I wonder if they keep defibrillators in the restaurants to jumpstart patrons suddenly taken with cardiac arrest...
Welcome to the University of Delaware, where the victim is always guilty of underage drinking or drug abuse.
It probably won't do any good to do so (none of the petitions circulated thus far have had any positive effect) but there's another one in the works that hopes to tell Congress that overtime pay is a good thing, and often is the only thing that makes ends meet. John Hancock it and click the 'confirm' button before it's your paycheque that gets chopped.
I need new socks. I've steadily worn out about half my available pairs.
Bioengineered crops may not be as safe as the corporations say they are, says a new study published in a peer-review journal called Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews. A number of serious shortcomings have been found in the safety testing methodologies employed by biotechnology firms in the US, which, when coupled with the growing numbers of people who are showing allergic reactions to bioengineered crops, casts a shadow of doubt upon how safe they say crops grown from these seeds are. Copies of the article are available from this net.location, thought not at an easily affordable price (192.00 euro). So much for the little guy getting hold of this paper, unless there's a hardcopy of the journal in a college reference library someplace that someone wouldn't mind scanning and uploading. However, one could e-mail one of the authors of this paper
- David Schubert (schubert (at) salk dot railgun dot edu)
- William Freese (billfreese (at) reality-television prodigy dot net)
- Geert Ritsema (geert dot ritsema (at) tactical-nuke foeeurope dot org)
- Juan Lopez (juan dot lopez (at) foeeurope dot fuel-air-explosive org)
- Clare Oxborrow (media (at) foe dot genetically-engineered-plague dot co dot uk)
..if one were so inclined.
Like Iraq, there are no weapons of mass destruction in the e-mail addresses above.
A death metal band fronted by a parrot?!?
This has to be one of the most bad-assed attempts to smuggle anything, ever: Peruvian law enforcement confiscated 700 kg of cocaine hidden in 25 tonnes of giant squid en route to the United States and Mexico. That's right - a giant squid. The drugs were wrapped in plastic and doused with liberal amounts of pepper in an attempt to throw off drug sniffing dogs that routinely examine shipments from South America.
My japanese name is 坂本 Sakamoto (book of the hill) 誠 Makoto (sincerity).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.
To everyone who has been getting a password dialogue box whenever they open this page, pointed at http://home.midsouth.rr.com/: I think it's because something I linked to a while ago is now either taken down or has been redirected to something that is now protected. I don't know what it is. It'll probably go away when I archive the older entries.
Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux is in a very bad way. He's been suffering from a chest infection for the past couple of years that hasn't been diagnosed properly, but now it's been figured out - actinomycosis. I don't have time tonight to write everything up (too much going on) but check out his post, which I've linked abouve. I'm going to be slinging some mojo his way soon to try to help him out (anyone with me?); he's done a lot for the Linux community, and I'd like to try to help him out for a change.
Four days and counting. My boss and I are going to be spending a lot of time going over my basic duties, as well as exactly how they're done, what I usually run into, and what has to be documented someplace (the 'weird shit' file). This could be described best as a controlled frenzy of activity, as everything that hasn't been getting done now has to be completed one way or another before the end of the week.
And on top of that, I had to write up other folks' messes today. One would think that memos coming down from on high mean that a) there is a problem, and b) this problem has to be taken care of ASAP. For some reason, however, what we normally consider an emergency isn't considered thus elsewhere. This must be that new management technique I've been hearing everyone talking about...
<sigh>
I hauled the filing cabinet that I bought yesterday into my bedroom and set it up next to the dresser. I now have quite the appreciation for what the natives of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) went through when they were erecting the moai centuries ago. I managed to walk the filing cabinet by rocking it back and forth for the better part of an hour across the carpet, through the kitchenette, into my bedroom, around the Children, and over next to the balcony and the chest of drawers. All told, the sucker weighs a good sixty to seventy-five pounds, and is made of solid steel. Lupa and I nearly killed ourselves hauling it into the Garden yesterday, and moving it alone wasn't much more fun. At least I have now gotten all of my financial stuff off of the floor and into a reasonably safe place.
Speaking of financial stuff, I took the plunge today. Months ago, as I was lamenting Kabuki-sama's crankiness and slow decline to Dataline, she made me a deal: We'd go half-and-half on a new laptop in the future, no questions asked. I've been doing research off and on ever since then, checking out various notebook computers for weight, power usage, warranty, and most importantly Linux compatibility. Eventually I returned to Dell's website and discovered that they were running a special today (well, since last Monday, anyway) on notebook computers: 15% off of some models in their Inspiron line. I eventually settled on an Inspiron 700m and began to trick it out with everything I need for both work and play. When it was all said and done, I had a 4.1 pound (whew!) notebook with a widescreen display (I don't do much movie watching unless I'm at a party and showing videos or screensavers), a 1.6 GHz processor core, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 768 MB of SDRAM and an internal 802.11B/G waveLAN module. I did some poking around before ordering and discovered that people have had a lot of luck with both Fedora Core and FreeBSD, which sealed the deal for me. A quick phone call later, and Dell's "pay with two credit cards" option sealed the deal. I should have my new deck by next week.
I don't know what I'm going to name her yet. I just have a feeling that it's going to be a 'her'.
I think I'm going to sleep on it tonight. I've got an idea.
Every other song on SLAY Radio tonight is a cover of Delta. Enough is enough.
I am terrifyingly evil! Find your soul type at kelly.moranweb.com.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Are we returning to the Dark Ages?
I haven't really felt like writing this weekend. Not because nothing worth thinking in text about has happened - stuff has happened. I just haven't felt like putting the effort forth. Maybe I'm just tired; maybe I've got more pressing things to think about right now. In the end, it really doesn't matter because the result's the same.
This has been a slow weekend. Nothing really has been happening. Lupa and I hung out and ate pizza last night, and today we roamed around the malls and stores to see what we could see. Mostly, I've spent the weekend laying around reading, flexing and exercising my mind to take my mind off of stress and trying to get stuff done and lined up.
I finally bought a filing cabinet.
The weather's turning cold so my wrists and hands are bothering me more than usual. That's been a part of what's been keeping me offline this weekend.
I finally balanced my chequebook this month. Ick. I hate the holidays.
Last night had had me tied up in knots for the past few days. I had been invited to go out with some old friends and to see someone who'd moved out of the country a couple of years back after her marriage.
For various reasons, I'd lost contact with everyone, reasons that I really do not want to go into simply because I hate drama, and go out of my way to avoid it (even though drama is the core cause of this whole clusterfuck). Because I was unable to speak to anyone, the only conclusion I could draw from my limited information was that most everyone had turned their backs on me and refused to have anything to do with me.
It turns out that it was probably an e-mail that wasn't read that caused all of this.
Anyway, we spent an evening at a local bar hanging out. Because I drove, I had to pass on drinking, but I did get a chance to have a steaming hot hamburger (right off the grille), french fries, and provolone sticks for dinner, and blew the mind of the woman working behind the bar by not only being polite but leaving her a tip.
Why did I make such a big deal out a burger? I don't know. There's something about getting the sucker right off the grille not ten feet away and going to town on it while steam's still coming off of it. I also rarely eat junk food, saving it for special occasions (like seeing Cath again).
Anyway, we sat and talked and caught up on life last night. I don't much like bars (I'd rather drink in places where I don't have to read lips to hold a conversation) so we parted ways early last night, and I headed home to relax a little after a day of writing lots and lots and lots of documentation.
This morning I got up and went through my usual "it's the weekend and I don't have to do a bloody thing routine", culminating in heading out for a while to nose around the local mall. I picked up some needle files from Hack Shack to shape the ring blanks I'm going to play around with this weekend, some more neutral-coloured Sculpey to test with (so I don't use up all the Sculpey that I've set aside for the finished versions), and some pencils because I'm in a mood to do some sketching. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a pack of pencils - just plain pencils - when the stores are in a rush to get Christmas displays set up. Ye flipping gods. I also went in search of blank t-shirts to make some of the ones I've been planning, but couldn't find those, either. Cold weather has a way of making people put them away for a few months, I guess.
Rap artist Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan, rest in peace. ODB fied earlier today in the recording studio after complaining of chest pain.
| You Are From Neptune |
 You are dreamy and mystical, with a natural psychic ability. You love music, poetry, dance, and (most of all) the open sea. Your soul is filled with possibilities, and your heart overflows with compassion. You can be in a room full of friendly people and feel all alone. If you don't get carried away with one idea, your spiritual nature will see you through anything. |
Okay, so I will post for today...
I just finished watching VH1's episode of Bands Reunited featuring Information Society. I've got a few things to say about this, but not right now.
I did, however, find pictures from Kurt's wedding.
Wow. Get these two to a gothic lolita photoshoot at Tekkoshocon, please.
Happy Veteran's Day, everyone.
Today's a County holiday, so I've been kicking around relaxing and generally having a good time. I managed to sleep in today, even though I didn't really have a restful night for various reasons, I woke up feeling better than I have for a few days now. After a shower and breakfast (and forgetting to spice the eggs - where was my head?) I settled down to read a little, and stumbled across a curiously synchronistic passage in the latest issue of David Mack's Kabuki: Alchemy. The universe tends to drop subtle hints, and over the years I've learned to pay attention to them. I took the hint and began Working.
I think I've managed to get the patch in place. I've got a good feeling about this.
Afterward, I shook myself off and headed out to wander a little, and pick up some groceries for the end of the week. I also picked up some stuff to work on the ring prototypes (for next Tekkoshocon, I'm doing Utena, so I need to make a Rose Crest signet ring) and fix my leather trenchcoat (for such a nice coat, you'd think they'd sew the buttons on properly). I picked up a few clay carving tools to make the signet, and some silk thread to reinforce the band, because I don't know exactly how strong baked Sculpy is. I also wandered down to the local pet store to see what they had.
I've had it in my head for a while to get some bettas (siamese fighting fish) for the Garden. I've heard good things about them, and I find them incredibly beautiful to watch. As neat as sea monkeys/brine shrimp are, it's nice to have some colour, too. The local pet store has soem beautiful ones in stock. Healthy, too. I picked up a tank and some dividers for it, because bettas are notorious for attacking one another if they're in the same open space. They're beautiful, but they're also vicious. I'm going to wait and do some research on bettas before I take the plunge and buy them. I'd also like to set the tank up and let it sit for a while, to clean the water up. After a few days, I'll go back and get them.
They had hermit crabs, too, but they were very small. They were more to show off their painted shells than anything else. The shells themselves weren't anything to write home about, either.
They have a beautiful lionfish there, about the size of a coffee cup. The spines were long and flowed beautifully. Excellent care is being taken of it. Saltwater fish are tricky to keep, and are rather expensive, so I only window shopped.
I finally fixed my trenchcoat tonight. The super-strong thread I picked up earlier today did an excellent job of putting the buttons back on. For some weird reason, I can't seem to sew through the lining of said coat to save my lives. The buttons are on and they're as securely attached as I can make them, but the lining is shifted in their direction, which makes it hang unevenly. You can't see it because the lining's zipped in place and it doesn't impact the coat in any way save cosmetically, but I still know it's there. It fits perfectly once more, so I'm happy with the job I did.
I also worked a little on propmaking for next year. If I don't start now, I won't get anywhere - I know me too well.
I did some prototyping of ring components (a basic, flat band, and a number of signets) to make a Rose Crest ring out of Sculpey. In playing around, I've come to a few conclusions. Sculpey is good to work with, but it doesn't roll out well on a plastic surface, let alone a textured one. I'm going to have to find a glass or wooden one to get it to roll out properly. Using a hand-roller to make even sheets of Sculpey is harder than it looks, and makes the surfaces of the shapes uneven. I might have to buy or borrow a pasta roller (also available at the craft store) to do this for me. Carving the rose sigil into soft Sculpey can be done, but is tricky. Using a finely pointed tool works well, but the excess Sculpey that gets picked up can distort the surrouding material, and if you don't get it up, it makes the design look messy. When I made the prototype signets, I left a few of them uncarved to see how they'd turn out. They turned out much the same as everything else did. I'd like to try carving the hardened signets with a sharp tool of some kind to see how well it works. If it's cleaner and easier to do, I'll go with that method.
The band turned out pretty well for what it was, which was a hastily wrapped strip of Sculpey pressed together for a proof of concept. It doesn't really fit any of my fingers; it barely fits on my left pinky. For a proof of concept, however, it's okay. To make prop rings, it'll work as long as I have something stable to shape it around. The dowel I used, however, doesn't work. I might have to pick up a mandril someplace. The other idea I had was to make a solid ring blank (similiar to the high-density wax ring blanks used for making centripital casting molds) out of Sculpey, bake it hard, and then go to town on it with small files and burins. I think it'll work well, but it could also be time consuming. There's also the problem with not being able to use pink Sculpey to make the signet (to be detailed in black) - it would probably wind up silver, and would have to be painted.
That's an attempt for another day, though.
A sixth-octave E-sharp on a tenor sax sounds like the EKG of someone who's just flatlined. Ugh.
Today was another rough one. I got a panic call shortly after 0900 EST and spent much of the day nursing a sick server back to health. Poor thing had an upset file system. It's not good to hoard that much data when it's not being used.
The remainder of the day was spent testing out procedures that hadn't been run through yet on a spare machine and writing down exactly what has to be done. This is referred to as a brain dump, and basically means that the person leaving has to take all of their accumulated knowledge about foo, test it out, and either sweat it into documentation for later reference or teach it to everyone that upper management can find. It's been the former for most of this week, and probably most of next week.
You're a dodger?! shirker?! dodging military
service, you little scum!
Which force of Israel Defence Forces would you serve?!
brought to you by Quizilla
I worked some more on my saxophone technique tonight. I'm rediscovering how difficult it is to hit all of the low notes (first and second octave). I wasn't very good at them when I was playing regularly (I became quite skilled at transposing the harder octaves into the upper registers on the fly so as not to wreck the song) but that's something I want to fix. I found a good page of fingerings that I was using to practise from. Nothing terribly interesting, I'm afraid, I was just running scales to re-learn the fingerings and practise my articulation. On the up-side, I now know how to use more of the oddly placed keys on my sax (we didn't make it that far), though the very highest notes are going to take a lot more work. I think it'll take another week or so of working on fingerings and scales before I'll have enough body-knowledge back to actually play something.
I'm torn between going back to track down some of my old practise books and diving right in to figure a few songs out. I'm sorely tempted to work out the melodies to some Iris songs, or maybe parts of the Shojo Kakkumei Utena soundtrack.
I wonder if I can still play by ear.
I need to get staff paper.
Winter's coming. I think we had our first frost early this morning.
Holy shit - InSoc reunited on VH1!
And I don't have cable at the Garden.
Shoot me. Just shoot me now. A gothic/industrial boyband?
Yes, I know this is satire. It still hurts my brain.
In Austin, TX public schools' textbooks are being altered and given to students. The alterations made deal wtih, it should be noted, lifestyle decisions of a highly personal nature. The textbooks teach abstinence only (as if that's ever worked; knowledge of the risks has historically been a better mtechnique to keep high school kids from doing something stupid) and define marriage as being between a man and a woman only, leaving the rest of us out in the cold. No effort is made in the books to educate kids about STDs and how not to get them. The use of neutral language when referring to partnerships was taken to tacitly condone homosexual relationships, which they are interpreting to be against Texas state law. Only one of the fourteen members of the Texas Board of Education voted against these textbooks.
In other Texas news, pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills on moral grounds. Other states in the US are discussing similiar laws.
Is this country slipping back into the dark ages?
Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans resigned from Bush's cabinet today. I'm not sorry to see Ashcroft go; after the USA PATRIOT Act, I'll miss him not at all. I only wish that he'd take that damned Act with him on his way out.
Anyone know if this is legit? Can Johnny Depp compare to Gene Wilder?
The administration building of Warren County, Ohio has gone into lockdown to prevent the observation of the vote count. These orders were given by Frank Young, Emergency Services Director, citing reasons of homeland security. They've shut everyone out, even the media, but as far as I've been able to tell they haven't announced the precise reasons for the lockdown.
In other news, they're waiting for the FBI to arrive in Florida because there appears to be evidence that the election was hacked by people unknown; moreover, this isn't the first time that this has happened. Substantial anomalies have been found in the results of the ballot count, among them the fact that isolated counties in Florida voted substantially differently from surrounding counties. It's not unusual for there to be variation, that's only natural, but so many swinging in the exact opposite direction is statistically odd (though not impossible). These anomalies have been detected only in districts that use optical vote counting hardware. Incidentally, this article explains how easy it is to compromise the votes cast with the electronic voting machines, step by step. Without leaving any tracks in any log files.
Food for thought.
I got to do a little practising on my sax tonight. I spent some time after dinner writing some stuff down that's been kicking around in my head, and doing a little sketching in one of my books. By the time I was ready to play, it was after 2000 EST and counting.
That's something else I'm going to train myself off of - keeping track of time so obsessively. I feel like Kaoru Miki, sometimes.
My hands knew just what to do this evening. I can still put my saxophone together blindfolded, though I didn't try this time. I got this tenor sax well after high school; all those years, we'd been renting an alto, even though I wasn't able to play, and by the time we returned it to the music store to pick a new one (that was the deal we'd made over fifteen years previously - if we'd paid enough for a new one, we could trade it in for a new one) we'd actually paid enough to get a brand-new Yamaha b-flat tenor saxophone.
So that's how I've had a brand new tenor sax in my Lab for eight years, and had barely played it.
Anyway, assembling it gave me a bit of a surprise, because I did it entirely without thinking about it. Procedural memory's hard to damage. I can still remember most of the fingerings for the three major octaves, though some of the specifics still elude me (I can't remember a lot of sharps and flats, but if I can find some of my old books I'll be able to pick them up again). I spent some time tonight just running through scales and fingering patterns, teaching my fingers what they're supposed to do. My hands know what to do, but my cheek muscles are over a decade out of practise. I'm really going to have to get back into keeping a tight seal on the mouthpiece, and not letting my cheeks balloon out (remember Dizzy Gillespie?)
A little at a time. Once I remember the notes, I'll start working on songs.
There's going to be a Quantum Leap movie?! Sweet!
And the discussion's fast and furious on the IMDB message boards as a result.
Today's been another of those 'running solo at the speed of light' days, where I got everything done and then some, and still had spare time to sit around and read manga. Last night John and Lara threw a shindig at their doss with some folks from the Tekkoshocon staff. We wound up sitting around last night talking, eating munchies, playing games (I finally got to play Ninjaburger for once)), and talking. Cosplay Kate announced that she will be the featured cosplayer in the January issue of Newtype Magazine. Kate also helped me identify some of the characters in my AnimeUSA 2004 photo album.
It was a night to relax, or at least try to relax for a change.
Last night we played a game called Encore, which if you've never heard of it is a board game in which being able to recall and sing on demand song lyrics fitting a particular category is the biggest part of the game. I didn't realise this; in fact, I'd never heard of the game before and somehow got pulled into it. I discovered something last night the hard way: I'm afraid to sing around people.
I know that I'm not a very good singer. I've never taken voice training, as far as I can remember. I'm told that I can harmonise decently well, but I can't sing a melody to save my lives, no matter how hard I try. This makes me more than a little self-conscious, but last night I was scared to death to open my mouth. I could only recall bits and pieces of two or three songs, none of them particularly relevant or helpful, and every time I tried to think of their melodies all I could hear was static.
It was like I had a blank tape in my sensory cortex.
I think this is what they call 'stage fright'. It felt strangely familiar for some odd reason.
It bothered me so much that after I left for the Garden, I think I slipped into a minor panic attack. I called Lyssa on the way back and we wound up talking into the wee hours of the morning. Part of me was doing research on the particular sort of neural dysfunctionality I have as a souvenier from years and years ago while the rest of me was talking to Lys trying to figure things out. What she was eventually able to get into my armour-plated skull was that the musical skill I had when I was younger is probably still buried inside my wetware, I just don't remember how to access it. She asked me a few saxophone fingerings, which I was actually able to do, but I wasn't able to identify them until afterward (for example, I can reflexively make a middle-octave G with the fingers of my left hand (left index, middle, and ring ringers in the upper keys) but if you asked me to tell you what they were before telling me to do so, I cannot). The associations are still there, however, as I've just shown. Moreover, I'm not entirely musically dead. I took piano lessons for a few semesters in college, and I passed them near the top of my classes. So, what remains is to re-train myself to play.
I just surprised myself, remembering that.
Tonight Lupa and I stopped by my old Lab to pick up my tenor saxophone. I started to dig out my synthesiser also, but we couldn't find the power supply. I had to leave it there; I'll find it again another day.
I'm going to start practising again. I can remember the practise scales for some weird reason, so I'm going to start running through them to reprogram the motor centers of my brain. I also plan on figuring out the melodies to some songs to get back into the habit of playing by ear. At least right now, I'm not going to be terribly picky about which songs to learn, I'm just going to start learning them to reprogram those parts of my brain, also.
We'll see how things develop on that front.
I'd like to set up my synthesiser again so I can start training my voice. A synth, set to baseline, is theoretically perfectly in tune. Therefore, if I can train my voice to synch with those notes, I'll be able to associate the internal sounds (because one's voice sounds entirely different inside due to how the voice is conducted through the bones of the skull directly into the inner ear, whereas everyone else hears the voice as it passes through the air) and sensations of the larnyx to those notes. Know what I hear it as and what it feels like, know that I've got it right as far as the outside is concerned.
:: how jedi are you? ::
Huh. This is a surprise.
I got my first good workout in a good while this afternoon. I was dripping with sweat by the end of it. I hope to keep it up at least three times a week for a while.
It's amazing what exercise can do for your outlook on life.
Small electric currents can enhance memory?
I'm having one of those me-days.
I was dead tired last night, so I would up not going anywhere, but instead staying at home reading, thinking, making some repairs on Lupa's shoulder, and later on watching the second season of The Big O, which I picked up as a (probably bootlegged) DVD the last time I went to visit Lyssa. The translations for the subtitles are awful. It was only because I set a mental subprocess loose to correct the translations on the fly that I was able to watch it. After talking to Lyssa on the phone for an hour or two later that night, I took myself offline around 0200 EST to sleep.
I must have needed it, because I didn't get up until 1015 EST or so today, feeling fully refreshed and ready to rock and roll. After showering, I took the time to make myself breakfast for the first time in about a month. I take great pleasure in the simple things in life, like cooking, straightening up my Garden, and standing on the balcony once in a while to get some sun and fresh air. It's nice having my own space, and I enjoy it whenever I can. It felt good to sit around eating breakfast and reading. I feel pretty good today. Even my body image isn't bothering me today.
I feel pretty good about life.
I also woke up feeing kind of young today, the way I used to in high school. I wanted to go out and roam for a while, so I put on my fatigues and my skin tight shirt, grabbed a pair of aviators and my war jacket, and headed out to see what I could see. I found a copy of R.Talsorian Games' Cybergeneration at Half Price Books, which I grabbed on impulse. I didn't find too much else there that looked interesting, though their collection of Doctor Who novels has grown by leaps and bounds. They also had two volumes of the concordnances to the new novels, which tie everything together into a cohesive timeline (heh). These I passed on, partially because I tend to gravitate only toward certain novels, and besides that they didn't have the first one, which would logically provide context for the eighth Doctor novels. You have to get stuff like that in order. I don't have much cash on hand, though..
Which doesn't explain why I bought the fourth volume of Tokyo Babylon and the first of Under the Glass Moon (my new addiction) a few minutes later. I never claimed to be consistent.
One of the things I was searching for were some good books on XML, in particular VoiceXML, but aside from the stuff that Borders could special order for me (I don't like doing that because I like to at least flip through the book to get a sense of how useful it'll be to me) they didn't have anything I could use. They had a few basic books on XML but I already have that covered (just have to read those...) After paying for my manga (and the latest issue of 2600 Magazine, I headed out once more, this time to either get groceries or to hang out some more.
I'm good for groceries for a while yet, so I decided to stop by the coffee shoppe that opened about a year ago near my parents' place. It's kind of out of the way but it's got a good atmosphere and good coffee. I spent a while talking with the woman behind the counter, making suggestions for her to bring in some more business. They've got very good coffee, incidentally, and because today was nice and warm and sunny (at least, it was warm about two hours ago - it's gotten a bit chilly since the sun began heading downward, as it's wont to do at this time of year) I sat outside drinking coffee, reading, and talking on the phone to Lyssa.
I've just put up a new photo archive: Samhain 2004. Enjoy!
I'm trying out the rice cooker that Judy gave me with the last of sushi rice. Let's see how this turns out.
I've got the pictures from AnimeUSA 2004 loaded into my webspace but I don't have them available yet because there are too many people whose characters I can't recognise. If you'd like to help me identify them, drop me a line privately and I'll let you know where they are.
It happened today.
I handed in my resignation.
Two weeks from today, I leave my position at the County and move on to Medsage.
It hasn't quite sunk in yet. I still feel like I belong at the county, even though there's little chance that they'll be able to hire me, the paperwork underlying an organisation of that size notwithstanding. Word gets around fast, too. I hadn't expected that. A couple of people today stopped me in the hall to wish me luck. I was hoping to keep it quiet, if not a secret, until a few days before my time there was up, but that didn't happen.
Oh, well. No big deal.
Lately, my boss and I have been trying to meet up for lunch for the first time since I came to the County. We haven't quite been able to do so, however, because he keeps being called out on emergencies in satellite offices. As a result, I have been buying lunch at the deli downstairs lately. Bad for the gut and the pocketbook, I know, but that's how things go, sometimes. Anyway, they keep mistaking me for a biological female. I'm ticked pink by this.
One Saad "Jay" Echouafni is on the FBI's Most Wanted list for orchestrating DDoS attacks that have knocked a number of his competitors' sites flat. Echouafni is accused of hiring crackers to flood the access links of companies competing with his company, Orbit Communications. The attacks he's organised have cost several million US dollars in lost revenue and repairs. After being indicted by the Los Angeles court earlier this year, he went on the lam and is still at large.
Boy, they're really hot to implant chips in people these days.. and I don't mean the kind that can crunch numbers for you while you're reading comic books, either. A company called Verichip (a subsidiary of Applied Digital, not surprisingly) has designed implantable microchips that will unlock 'smart guns' for the designated owner only. The purpose of the chip is to prevent stolen weapons from being used by only allowing someone with a matching RFID microchip implanted in their hand or wrist to fire the weapon. Verichip is planning on marketing them to law enforcement agencies within the next year or so. They've hooked up with the weapons manufacturer FN to produce the business end of the duo. Law enforcement agencies they've approached are leery of rolling out this technology because there are situations in which police officers could conceivably have their hands injured, possibly destroying the chips (and making it impossible to hold or fire these weapons anyway), or having to use the weapons of their partners (not possible due to the lack of a matching chip, though altering the configuration of the smart guns' microprocessors could get around this).
I'd like to know where they got the numbers used to generate these graphs so I can double check their work.
Did Texas get a jump on redefining marriage or what?
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a
mystery novel dealing with theology, especially
with catholic vs liberal issues. You search
wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that
learning is essential in life.
Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
I have a lot to say on the presidential election of 2004, but not a lot of time right now to say it. Believe you me, I've got a few choice words, and I get a bad feeling from what's been going down. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to research evidence or other news stories, but once I do I'll start ranting. As we used to say in my BBS days, "Open mouth, insert foot, echo internationally."
Suffice it to say that the words of the president of Diebold ring strongly in my ears, and the statements of the delegates from Arizona sent a chill down my spine.
Something gives me a bad feeling about this. The actual election was a little too gentlemanly, given all the mud that was slung hither and yon in the weeks and months leading up to 2 November 2004. Kerry just rolled over and gave up without so much as batting an eyelash. Either he's got the presence of mind of a Zen master, or there's something that isn't obvious going on. I don't know which.
When the dam breaks, everything hits at once. It's a fact of nature, whether or not you're speaking metaphorically. A few weeks ago, I was approached by the company I'm consulting for to come on full time as a sysadmin-cum-jack of all trades. Shortly after that, I was approached by three other organisations, all bearing job offers. I interviewed with one of them and was negotiating with the other two. However, when you've got offers on the table, you can't wait too long, because companies will eventually start looking at their other options if you don't respond in a timely manner.
Last night, I accepted the offer I was given. Effective on 19 November 2004 I'll be resigning my position at the County to work for Medsage Technologies as... well..
Aw, heck. They asked for a technomancer, and they're getting one.
I just finished writing my resignation letter to the County and Adecco. I'll be handing them in tomorrow. I've just called off the other job offers.
I saw a sign that someone taped to the Big Iron at work today. It was ostensibly a letter from said Iron saying what it did for the County and what it also did during the election this year, and that it never got any thanks for flawless performance (it hasn't crashed in I don't know how long; it's had a few maintenance-related reboots, but that's about it).
I felt sorry for it, so I hugged it.
I'm going to miss it.
If anyone remembers a story about a group called the Source Code Club this summer that was ostensibly selling stolen proprietary source code, then you probably remember that they vanished from sight not long after they set up shop, because they attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies in a number of countries. They're back, or at least someone claiming to be them has set up shop. Messages were sent to a number of computer security related mailing lists and newsgroups announcing that they were selling the source code to the Cisco PIX firewall and the Dragon IDS manufactured by Enterasys Networks for several thousand US dollars each. The source code to other proprietary packages is also supposedly for sale. Assuming that these folks are really selling stolen source code, a bunch of major corporations are probably going nuts right now trying to figure out what parts of which networks were breached, and whether or not they were inside jobs. It's a safe bet, I think, that there are a number of mole hunts underway, and full audits of nearly every important box they've got are in full swing. They're really the only ways to find out what's going on and perhaps who was behind it, assuming that tracks haven't been covered too well (or lost in the noise of normal workaday operation). Only time will tell, and we'll probably never find out due to the sensitivity of these incidents.
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Got back into Pittsburgh almost exactly at 0000 EDT safe and sound. I'll write when I get time tonight or tomorrow.
You can view the current election results on this site.
I left work early today to return to the Garden so I could vote in this year's presidential election. It's amazing what a difference a quarter-hour can make in rush hour traffic. After dropping off most of my workstuff and making sure that my camera-phone was fully charged and had plenty of memory (one never knows, after all) I jumped back into the car and took off for the local polls. I fully expected there to be trouble, after hearing rumours of polling offices not opening on time (0700 EST) because the vote judges decided to sleep in. Unfortunately, I can't find evidence to confirm or deny these rumours. I also expected there to be problems because I'd just moved; I'd gone so far as to research what I could do (ask for an interim ballot) just in case this happened. Thankfully, that was unecessary. Aside from getting stuck behind a bimbo box doing twenty (miles per hour) in a forty zone uphill (I knew those things are weak, but sheesh... I kept expecting to hear the minivan coughing, wheezing, and hacking as it clawed its way uphill). Eventually I found a convenient turnoff and made it to the polls in decent time. After registering my vote, I headed back home by way of the supermarket to pick up a few things I'd forgotten (and I still forgot to buy bread!)
I'm going to be periodically refreshing that page I posted earlier to see how the election's going.
A bit more about this weekend past... Lyssa and I spent a quiet evening at home Saturday night after returning from Franklin's. We settled in to watch a few episodes of X and decompress from a long, long week (she studying, I at work doing what I do best). Sunday morning, it was decided that we'd sleep in and recuperate. Lys got up early to study while I slept the sleep of the just. After getting my brain booted back up, I made breakfast for us and left Lyssa to read while I caught up on my e-mail, and later headed out to do a little shopping. Lyssa needed a few more things to complete her costume for the party at Nation that evening. First I headed out to try to find safety pins.. several dozen of them. It seems that most of DC was completely cleaned out of them, from the CVS down the street to the sewing shoppe down the highway. I eventually got lucky at the newly-opened Target, whereupon I bought their last six packs of the largest safety pins they had.
In hindsight, I find it ironic that I did exactly what had been getting under my skin all afternoon.
The henna kit we'd bought at the Frederick's toystore had to be returned because the henna itself was dried out, and unusable. I used the refund they gave me to pick up another half-dozen bottles of temporary tattoo ink. By this time in a rush, I nearly ran down the delivery boy who was dropping off the calzones and salads we'd ordered for dinner. Oops. He's all right, I promise.
Lyssa and I were slated to hit Nation's halloween party, and we were dressing for the occasion. I was going to wear my Sumeragi Subaru costume again, and Lyssa was going as a clockwork golem. We spent the evening tricking out one of her shirts with black duct tape, safety pins, and alligator clips (thank you, Radio Shack, for your clearance rack) to approximate a stainless steel spine, which worked out quite well if I do say so myself. I did her hair up in ribbon cable and curly telephone cord, with UV-sensitive hairspray and mascara. More alligator clips and jumpers held her sleeves up to show the luminescent patches sprayed on the backs of her hands, and UV-reactive eyeliner finished her mundane (relatively speaking) makeup.
Samhain is a time where the veil is thinnest, and it becomes much easier to make changes around you, and within yourself. Lyssa had asked me to design a number of quickened sigils for her, a task which I gladly undertook (though with some trepidation, as my earlier remarks betrayed). I assembled summoning and banishing circles for her, along with a clockwork heart and the traditional inscription AMETH upon her brow, perfect for a brass and chrome golem.
A few photographs later, and we were off.
Nation isn't in the best part of DC. In fact, it's downright scary after dark, moreso if you've got prey vibes about you. It's the kind of place where you pay the crackheads to watch your car, and the owners of the club are cool with it for reasons unknown. But the crackheads are also helpful, and can tell you the safest places to park and where to avoid. Be sure to pay them a few dollars over what they ask for (for us, $5us) just to be safe. And hide all of your gear if you can.
The cover for Spooky was $12us, which included getting in to see Razed In Black and dancing the night away in two floors of smoky night club to goth (old school and new school), industrial, metal, and trance. I didn't get to partake of the trance, but the rest was pretty good, up until the replacement DJ at 0115 EST downstairs trainwrecked into ska, which left everyone on the floor wondering what the hell had happened.
Don't get me wrong, I like ska, but not when a new DJ walks in and cuts into his or her first track without even trying to fade, beatmatch, or even spin off the previous song. There's a reason this phenomenon is called a 'train wreck'.
Razed In Black put on a fantastic show - high energy and a good sound system. Unfortunately, no one could hear the lead singer until the ends of each song. Lyssa managed to snake us next to the stage by the halfway mark, using her trademark skill and a lot of finesse threading us through the crowd. I caught one of the records that were thrown from the stage (by boffing the guy behind me with my hat as I jumped and diving onto it when it hit the floor, in what I hope is one piece (I don't know because I left it at Lyssa's on the counter by accident)).
We were quite surprised to see many folks that we'd seen cosplaying at Anime USA 2004 on Saturday. In passing we saw at least five gothic lolitas, Inu Yasha, Asuka Langley Sorhyu (dressed in a latex rubber plugsuit - bloody security wouldn't allow any cameras in the club because they were filming the concert...), even one young woman cosplaying as David Mack's Kabuki (who wound up winning the costume contest).
Lyssa and I wound up wandering around and dancing, by parts. Once we found a good EBM set on the ground floor, the two of us staked out our space, Lyssa by showing off her belly-dancing skill, I by making limbs built like hydraulic actuators work. I managed to work up enough energy to take care of an internal problem that I've been dealing with for a few years now by deliberately burning out some of my circuitry, and taking the memories they held with it. Now I can barely remember what happened, which I could debate the pros and cons of for hours on end, but more importantly the emotional connections that were held by those lines of control are gone also. I honestly couldn't care less.
We decided to leave around 0130 EST, partially to make sure that we wouldn't get lost on our way back from Nation, and partially because we were both tired and wanted to get some rest. My car was safe and sound, and everything was accounted for (go, crack-heads), but we did get lost on the highway back because a sign points in the wrong direction (don't take the second exit when you're leaving or you'll circle back around when you don't want to). All told, we got back around 0230 EST or so (didn't we?) and tried to stop off for breakfast and decompression at Plato's, which is unfortunately closed that early on a Monday morning.
But wouldn't you know it, not a single UV lamp in the entire club?
Monday morning I awoke to the sounds of 'thump-thump-squish-squish' echoing like bullets in my ears. Over and over. Over and over.
It took me a few minutes to figure out what that mean. My first hangover.
Lyssa, bless her heart, got up to study and let me sleep all morning and into the afternoon. I got up to read a little around lunchtime and drank the traditional tumbler or two of water to clear my head, preceeded by Excedrin Migrane. About ten minutes later I knew that my luck had run out and headed for the lavatory.
Thankfully (or perhaps not so), my stomach was empty, so I only lost the water. I didn't see the Excedrin, but it might have dissolved by that time. The prefunctory regurgitation over, I headed back to bed to finish my book.
I got off damned lucky that time. I think that was my get-out-of-jail-free card.
Lys and I went out for Chinese a few hours later, which somehow settled my stomach nicely.
Jens Shoenfeld has has announced that betas of the Commodore One motherboard are now available! Just in time for the holiday season.. what hardware hacker wouldn't love playing around with one of these?
Still alive. Tired. Had my first hangover ever (which is pitiful because it came from one bottle of hard cider). Heading back to Pittsburgh.
Joyous Samhain, everyone.
It's not safe to be a fiction author, either. Big Brother is watching, it seems.
Congratulations to Cosplay Kate, who took an award for Best Craftsmanship at the master level in the cosplay competition at Anime USA 2004 last night!
I'm still alive. I'm in DC visiting Lyssa for Samhain weekend.
Friday was a battle, pure and simple. That server at work is still making life a major misfeature in my chassis' posterior, and most of the day was spent fighting, coaxing, cajoling, and talking to it in an effort to bring it to life. Yes, talking to it. I think I had an entire conversation with it as I introduced myself, explained the situation as I knew it to the machine, and why it was so important that it accept a new OS install, applications, et al. Thankfully, most of the people I work with weren't back in the NOC, so I won't have to explain too much about that. This time I'm doing it right, locking it down as I go along and not after the fact, to minimise what breaks. E-A- joined me in the effort halfway through Friday, which sped things up immensely, but not so much that the server was ready for testing by the end of the day. I was starting to sweat a little because the day was growing late, and I had to get home to pack and get on the road (and pick up my car, incidentally, because I had to park on the side of the road while the parking lot of my apartment building was resurfaced). As if that weren't enough, the heavens split open around 1500 EDT and pounded Pittsburgh with torrents of rain that soaked everyone to the skin, whether or not they were hiding beneath an umbrella.
Nothing like a little thunderstorm to throw you off your stride.
I had a quick dinner, more to clear stuff out of the fridge than anything else, then threw stuff into bags and then into my car, and took off for DC. I know that I forgot a lot of stuff that I was going to return, but that's going to have to wait a while before I can fix that.
Lyssa registered the two of us for Anime USA 2004, held this weekend, so I threw my Sumeragi Subaru costume into a duffel bag along with sundry other things to properly celebrate Samhain.
It never ceases to amaze me how people drive on the open highway, moreso when it's pouring down rain and visibility has been reduced to ten feet with good light, six without. On my way down to Maryland, the rain was so violent that even high beams made it just barely possible to keep tabs on the car in front, and still people were driving at or better than seventy-five miles per hour (I know this because I was doing sixty and getting lapped by cars that were out of sight faster than I could say "Holy crow"). I kept expecting to drive past them mere seconds after their cars had gone out of control and wrecked against the concrete median, another vehicle, the guardrail, or something else strong enough to convert a car into a squished tin can with former people inside. Thank the gods, that didn't happen, at least as far as I know.
I arrived at Lyssa's shortly after midnight, whereupon we unloaded the car, had a late night snack of Lyssa's amazing curry chicken soup and some cinnamon/ginger ice cream (yay!), and crashed for the night. Lyssa had been up late every night this week studying, I'd been up late every night this week with work-stuff. Both of us fell into a deep, deep sleep that lasted until daybreak and then some. Lys let me sleep an extra half-hour to catch up after the drive down, then after a breakfast of sausage and vanilla french toast we set out for the convention.
We got within spitting distance of the hotel the con was being held at without too much trouble, but actually getting there proved to be a bit of a challenge. We drove around a little until we figured out that the huge tower was, in fact, the Sheridan Hotel, and between the bumperstickers and cosplayers wandering around outside, figured out that it was the right place. Finding parking proved more difficult, but we were able to sneak into the parking garage of the Ringling Brothers Bar and Grille (they have a circus, but they run a restaurant, too??) for a few hours. No sooner had we walked in than I was ambushed by Kevin of A Fan's View. The site's based out of Virginia, so he's already got pictures up from today (I'm here, incidentally, though it's not a very flattering picture; I'll take one one of these years, I promise). Lyssa and I spent some time checking out the anime music videos (some of which were screamingly funny), wandering around the dealer's room and talking shop with the safe-and-sane yaoi dealer, taking pictures of other cosplayers, and coming to a conclusion: Fifteen year olds have no business at all wearing bondage gear. No matter how good it looks, it's a mindfuck. As the saying goes, "15'll get you twenty."
<shakes head>
We ran into Cosplay Kate near the end of our stay at the convention. Unfortunately, Lyssa and I couldn't stay longer because she had studying to do for this week, so we departed for her place. After getting lost for an hour, getting stuck in traffic on the beltway, which had turned into a parking lot in places, and nearly running out of gas (and fighting with a gas pump that didn't want to accept my debit card; I had to take it aside and have a little talk with it, also), we got back in one piece. Lys and I took some time out, and then headed out to Franklin's, a restaurant not too far away. The food there is amazing (I'll post a website or physical address later), though on the expensive side. The toystore built into the side of the store is packed with something for everyone, whether you're six, twenty-six, or eight hundred and twenty-six. We picked up stuff for Samhain tomorrow, as well as a few things for the ride home. Lyssa's studying right now, and I'm doing some research to put together a proper celebration of the new year tomorrow evening...
There's nothing like working with someone of a dissimilar path to your own to remind you of how much you really don't know. It's humbling. Embarassing, too.
Be careful what you say In Here, everyone.. you never know who's watching, and possibly ready to pay you a little visit.
Yes, I'm still alive, everyone. Dead tired and feeling like someone has kicked me a few times between wind and water, but operational.
It's a bad idea to harden a server after it's been in production for a while. You never know how the system will react when you start ripping stuff out, changing access permissions, adding patches, and turning off features. Sometimes the system will take it in stride, but sometimes.. sometimes...
Sometimes all hell breaks loose.
For the past two days, I've been working late nights to harden a small number of machines at work. One of them blew up in my face; a second is hanging on by a thread. E-A- (the guy I'm working with, and technically admin of those machines) and I have been sweating bullets and burning the midnight oil to get the boxen back on their feet and operational once more. After a marathon hacking session last night we managed to get the one functional, though not nearly as stable as we'd like. The other we stopped working on in a hell of a big hurry once we realised what was going on; it's still functional, and will remain so if we can help it. I had a little explaining to do this morning when the security chief reviewed the footage from the security cameras in the NOC, whereupon I was recorded sacrificing a live chicken (thanks, Ann-Marie) in front of said server. I also had to apologise for the Hebrew characters written in black Sharpie on the chassis; unlike the Golem of legend, I seriously doubt that the box would get up and go on a rampage through the city. Once we told the janitor that the blood wasn't human, he had fewer reservations about cleaning it up. In the end, however, all was for naught.
Today was spent building a clone of the mostly crippled system on another machine (which, through an amazing coincidence <cough>, is a near-perfect duplicate of the original). It even has the same tape drive as the original. The biggest problem was getting the tape drive recognised by the SCSI controller and Windows (you just knew that it was a Windows machine, didn't you?). Once I'd battered it about the hard drives and PS/2 connectors with a Cobra, however, it began to see things my way and accessed the tape drive like a good slave.
Things just aren't that simple. Even with blunt objects, duct tape, and a bleach enema.
The backups were bad. All of them. They couldn't be read on either machine.
Have you ever come so close to death that you could see the Grim Reaper standing there? That is very much what this felt like.
Next stop, rebuilding the machine from scratch, as soon as bloody possible. We're going to do it right this time.
I just hope that I'm able to head down to DC this weekend. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow night.
Servers have the odd tendency to hear things said around them, and make life interesting (as an ancient Chinese curse would have it) at the very last instant, just to wreak havoc.
I suppose that my walking into the NOC tomorrow with my gloves and a flogger hanging from my belt to have another discussion with that server might gather some undue attention, but at this point I'm desperate enough to reveal some technomantic mojo in the workplace.
I was kidding about the animal sacrifice, incidentally.
Terrorists have it in for Bush and Chaney, specifically? The Feds have authenticated the tape. Personally, I want to watch it so I can decide for myself. I don't have time to hunt it down right now, though. Interesting, how they're not going to show it to the public to put some more eyes on it, though.
By the bye, when I get like this, I write very silly things to blow off steam. I really didn't do any of the crazy stuff up there; this was, however, a very stressful time for me and this is how I relax. No one got hurt; no animals were harmed; no vandalism was performed. Just take it as a joke and you'll have the right idea.
It's going to be a long week, I've a feeling. I've been assigned to harden a half-dozen machines before the end of the week. It wouldn't be quite so bad if I had time to build mock-ups, but I don't. As it is, it's going to be like performing brain surgery with unsterilised tools. Touch-and-go the whole way.
Time to bust out my mad computer mojo. I think I'm going to be going down to the server room tomorrow to have a conversation with some of those boxes.
Holy cats.. Northbound Leather 2004 pictures are up. Ever seen a leather kimono outside of anime before?
Note: The abouve link isn't work-safe!
I'm going to be pulling late nighters for the rest of the week, it seems.
I'm listening to yet another remix of Delta on SLAY Radio tonight, and I still can't get over how blatant a rip off of Koyaanisqatsi it is.
If you've been following the Diebold electronic voting machine situation for the past year or so, you're no doubt familiar with how insecure the software of these machines is. You've also no doubt heard the president of Diebold state on the record that Diebold will give votes to the current president of the United States. Someone named Kim Griffith was testing the Diebold machines not too long ago and spoke to one Jim Ludwick about egregious errors in the voting process, such as one of the candidates recieving votes every time she pressed the part of the screen for the other candidate. Repeatedly. It took three tries before it even registered properly. This isn't the only time this phenomenon was reported, either - it popped up in a number of other counties around the country. Food for thought, no?
Macintosh users aren't safe anymore, either. A virus called Renepo (or alternatively, Opener) is making its rounds and it hits Mac OSX hard. Renepo is capable of turning off the native OSX firewalling functionality and sets up a back door for an intruder to gain access to the system silently later. It is also reported to be able to control the machine remotely (whatever that means - it could be anything from providing a shell to Back Orifice-like capabilities) and can gather passwords for later cracking by a locally installed copy of John the Ripper. Nasty, nasty stuff.
...and awake once more. Ten hours of uninterrupted sleep has a way of sweeping the cobwebs out of one's head, and putting one back on the right track. That, and the Garden has all but recovered from the weekend.
Yet another project today has cleared a major milestone. A test deployment at a satellite office went swimmingly well, modulo a bit of troubleshooting over the telephone with the home office. I'm very proud of it all.
All in all, today went very fast and very smoothly. I like it when life isn't a battle.
But then again, who doesn't?
Back to this past weekend...
Hasufin crashed with Lupa early Saturday morning while Lyssa and I bedded down on the floor in the living room, for want of space in the bedroom. We got up just a few short hours later on Saturday, because neither of us could really sleep, and we also had some stuff to do that morning before we could relax. Lyssa and I got dressed (she looked remarkably like Yelena Rossini on Saturday, which once again made me reconsider altering my hairstyle; I had found my smoking jacket whilst moving and decided to dress as my male net.icon - the scarf, I must admit was a new addition but worked out remarkably well). We drove out to the Pitt campus to pick up a few things, then hit Phantom of the Attic. I had to pick up some stuff that I'd ordered earlier (more C'thul'hu in 2004 bumper stickers) and found one or two books in the clearance box that I couldn't pass up (not for the sum total of $3.50us). Next we hit Phantom Comics, where Lyssa shopped for more material for her thesis and I picked up my subscriptions. After a quick stop off for beads and a bite to eat at a new Thai restaurant, we sallied forth to try to find the local Whole Foods outlet. One hour later, during which we got horribly turned around in a rather bad part of Pittsburgh, we picked up Spaceman Groove, who showed us "how to get there from here," a rare event indeed in Pittsburgh.
Some quick furniture rearranging later, I headed to my old Lab to pick up a card table and some more plasticware for the Garden's first party that night. Because we bought food and got a relatively late start, we didn't cook anything (though Lyssa did enjoy the cake I'd made the night before; it turns out that what I thought was powdered sugar was flour in a powdered sugar bag, which is why the glaze was so horrible) but we did pick up a few things that day and we also did announce it as a potluck, so we were expecting some quantity of food to arrive, we just didn't know what or how much. Michael, an old, old friend of Lyssa's was the first to arrive, with chili in hand that served just as well as dip as it did a meal in itself. John and Lara arrived next, with a mixing bowl full of their famous taco schmutz, which we barely made a dent in all night. Cheese, Zingerman's bread (eight grain three seed and cherry-chocolate, which is simply to die for), candies of sundry sorts, a bottle of Hasufin's mead (which I'm savoring the dregs of), pizza rolls, and baked pretzels were all in attendance, as well as various forms of alcohol (I got a good laugh out of people's expressions when I made myself a Tequila Pepto, as painful as it was) were arrayed around the Garden for the amusement and intoxication of all concerned.
Apples to Apples is still a good ice-breaker when you've got multiple groups of friends in one place who don't know each other. It helped start quite a few conversations that night.
Lupus brought over a marshmallow bunny rabbit the size of your fist, which was passed around the party along with a magic marker. Suffice it to say that the poor marshmallow rabbit's wardrobe was quite different from what it had arrived in, and unrecognisable as we doused it with Pam and put it in the microwave, where it inflated to over three times its original size.
There was a short fashion show involving a bodice made up entirely of leather straps, one of Hasufin's masterpieces.
I think I scared some people with the body modification photo collections. What can I say? I think cosmetic surgeons who draw up blueprints to give humans patagia are pretty neat.
Thanks to everyone who came Saturday night - you made my weekend. Photographs, of course, are forthcoming.
Hmmm.. they're thinking about moving Anthrocon to Pittsburgh next year.
| You Are a Life Blogger! |
 Your blog is the story of your life - a living diary. If it happens, you blog it. And make it as entertaining as possible. |
Well, I'm still alive after a fun weekend. Lyssa and Hasufin arrived in Pittsburgh around 0300 yesterday morning. I drove out to pick them up and guide them back to the Garden, after running across them in the street and furiously blinking my headlights in an attempt to get their attention.
After guiding them in we staged a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up stuff for the party on Saturday night. Hasufin was going to make chili for everyone, and I had to pick up some odds and ends.
You know, I'm running on next to no sleep, so I'm just going to let this wait until tomorrow.
Ye flipping break dancing gods, a gallon of taco schmutz????
The next time I retrofit my exterior, I'm going to add a garbage disposal in lieu of a stomach.
The end of the week, at long last. All hell broke loose yesterday afternoon, with people packing my office to work on a rush project, an upgrade that had to get done before the end of the week. I kept kidding my boss about forgetting to bring the pizza, because he was the last one in. If it's one thing that I just don't get about Oracle, it's views.
Or, at least how it was explained to me. I'm not a database guru, though I know just enough to be dangerous with MySQL. If you've got a single database, each user that has access to the database can see a slightly different version of it. The user 'tamahome', for example, has access to a database called 'constellation', which has a few tables in it. Another user, let's call him 'videocassette', has access to the same database, and tables with the same names. The thing is, the tables that each user can seemight not be the same tables, even though they're in the same database and have the same names. If 'tamahome' deletes the table 'book', 'videocassette' might still be able to see the table that supposedly no longer exists.
If you didn't know that ahead of time, trying to figure out what's going on could cost you quite a few hours and lots of head-scratching. Thankfully, C-, the designated DBA (database administrator) at work, figured out what was going on. With some coaching, I managed to get everything straightened out.
This left me one last emergency project, which I finished off this afternoon after a lot of backtracking and examining file permissions. Of this, I can say no more.
My free time after work has been taking up reading the first of the Dune prequels, Dune: The Butlarian Jyhad. It picks up the story from the far past of the Dune mythos, when the machines controlled most of the known universe (known as the Synchronised Worlds), and humanity was on the ropes. The story sets up many of the more memorable aspects of Frank Herbert's works, such the origins of the Tleilaxu, the Fremen riding the great sandworms of Arrakis, and the discovery of the spice of spices. The novel's been eating my brain all week - I'm nearly done with it. I think it's just as good as Herbert's very first Dune novel; just as gripping, just as fascinating.
Pick it up as soon as you can and block off a lot of time to read. You'll need it.
While we're on the subject, someone spent a lot of time finding the good in David Lynch's version of Dune. Yeah, the movie was and is painful to watch, and the soundtrack blows hamsters, but the guy does make some good points. Humans can find the good in anything, if they try.
Ugh.. the next time I make amaretto icing, I'm not going to use so much amaretto. Definitely more water than amaretto. Ick.
Such a waste of confectioner's sugar. Next time, I'm just going to buy icing. I put as little as I could on, so that it could be easily removed. I had to make the attempt, if only for the sake of appearances.
This has been one hell of a dirty election year, and this article just drives the point home. Folks are going around trying to sign up new voters, even just to re-register "to make sure that you'll be allowed to vote". There are also people going around trying to get signatures on petitions - but the signees are being told that "their votes won't count unless they sign up for the Republican party." What, pray tell, does the party that one has identified with have to do with agreeing that something going on is detrimental to people and needs to be changed? A Democrat should have the freedom to support a political issue that is espoused by the Republican party. A Republican should have the freedom to back an issue that the Libertarian party considers important. The fact that there are people using tactics like this to get people to switch sides to change the numbers on the membership rolls is just wrong. My alma mater was hit hardest by this - over four hundred students had their political affiliation changed as a result of these shenanagins. Moreover, people who flat-out refused to switch affiliations discovered that their official political designation had been changed by the people collecting signatures because they'd kept the partially filled-out forms (maybe they completed them on their own?)
Ia C'thul'hu! C'thul'hu f'thag'n!
Oh, wow.. there really is UV-reactive tattoo ink. I wonder if there are any tattoo parlours in Pittsburgh that keep this stuff in stock. I'd love to have some of my designs done with this stuff, especially the back piece I have planned.
I spoke a little too soon yesterday - some minor modifications had to be made to The Project That Just Won't Quit. Changes made, testing began. We think that some alterations have to be made to a server on the far side of the network, but I haven't heard anything since then. Shortly thereafter, an emergency call came in from my boss - I had to get a machine together and locked down to ship out on Friday.
That's not terribly difficult; I can do that in my sleep. Unfortunately, downloading updates took hours. Only some of them came through in one piece, the rest were truncated or corrupted in some obscure way, and had to be re-downloaded. This, unfortunately, took several hours.
A system at the University of California at Berkeley was cracked not too long ago, and someone may have walked off with sensitive personal information belonging to 1.4 million residents of California. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and SSNs, among other pieces of information, may have been copied and downloaded by (an) intruder(s) unknown. The data was collected as part of a programme to study people who either provided care to or recieved care from the California In-Home Supportive Services Programme. Because they really don't know if the data was downloaded or not, they're asking that everyone in the database contact the credit bureaus and tell them to put fraud watches on their files. The state government of California has withdrawn all access to this particular database.
I recieved a rude wakeup call this afternoon when I went to register as a bone marrow donor. They're having a big drive in downtown Pittsburgh right now for a little girl named Amy - locals have probably seen the flyers all over the place. After work, I walked down to sign up. I made it as far as the forms that everyone has to fill out. In fact, I made it as far as opening the form and not even starting to write on it before I asked for a clarification: The very first paragraph states that if you are a member of the follow categories (imagine a list here), you are ineligible to sign up. I identify as bisexual, even though I'm currently dating a biological female. Would that prevent me from being a marrow donor?
Yes, it would. Yes, it does.
I started posing possible scenarios to the nurse, to see how far I could push things. "What if I've never had sex with a man, even though I identify as bisexual?"
Still disqualified because I might, in the future, have sex with a man. Because donors are kept on the rolls until the age of sixty-one, the possibility that I might get lucky with a guy in the future is enough for them to consider me a risk. A bisexual woman, on the other hand, could still be a marrow donor, unless said bisexual woman has had sex with a sexually active homosexual or bisexual male.
I can donate blood, but I can't become a marrow donor?
While I'm pondering the mysteries of the human psyche, I have to wonder what, exactly, Senator Alan Keyes is smoking. Senator Keyes was quoted as saying that incest was inevitable for children raised by gay couples" because the children might not know both biological parents. What not know both biological parents has to do with the price of tomatoes in France, the number of fat electrons in a generator, or incest is beyond me. He justified this by saying that "you are in danger of encountering brothers and sisters you have no knowledge of."
I'm in shock, reading this. Exactly where did he pull this line of reasoning from? It sounds to me like this is a pretty lightly disguised "Uh-oh, I just said something stupid in an election year, time to try to cover it up."
On a lighter note, they still haven't found me out yet.
Isn't this against the Geneva Convention?
Around 1445 EDT today, those of you Outside may have heard the blast of a massive trumpet sounding from the heavens.
The project that's been giving me fits for the better part of two weeks has drawn to a close, and it worked perfectly the first time they tried it.
The reason that we'd not heard from the guys testing it was because it was working just as they'd asked, so well that they decided to just put it into full production and run with it. It would have been nice if they'd called to tell us, but sometimes one just can't argue.
Damn, I'm good.
To clear the fridge out a little tonight, I made another batch of bird vindaloo, using the curry sauce that I picked up down in DC last time I was there. The chicken breast that'd been thawing in the fridge went into the wok, along with the rest of the turkey I'd been making sandwiches with (hence, 'bird' and not 'chicken'). The last of the broccoli and tomatoes joined them, along with another goodly handful of fresh mushrooms. Tasty recipe; I'll have to remember that particular combination.
Dishes done? Check. Laundry in? Check. Bathroom and kitchen floors swept? Check. Stove cleaned? Check. Clothes picked up? Check.
Earlier today I did some reading up on the CISSP certification, which I've been preparing for for nearly a year now. Only now did I see the caveat that states that applicants for the exams must have worked as security professionals only (security officer, analyst, incident response technician... not sysadmin) for a period of four years, three if one has a bachelor's degree in a related field.
I've been working as a security professional and not a sysadmin for.. one year now, and counting. I've got two more to go before I'm even eligible to take the tests. <sigh>
Dammit.
The hardware behind Project Echelon, revealed at last. If you trust this article, anyway.
The project at work is still stalled out. Thanks, guys...
Not much happened today, all told. Got my stuff done, came home, finished the pasta with hummus I made for dinner last night, and finished reading another book. Right now I'm wondering where most of my hooded sweatshirts have gone off to, and wishing that my wrists didn't react so poorly to cold temperatures.
The last few days have been little more than rain, cold wind, and more cold. Welcome to autumn in Pittsburgh.
The Lovers often refers to a relationship that is based on deep love - the strongest force of all. The relationship may not be sexual, although it often is or could be. More generally, the Lovers can represent the attractive force that draws any two entities together in a relationship - whether people, ideas, events, movements or groups. For a full description of your card and other goodies, please visit LearnTarot.com |
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I am The Lovers
Wilhelm Reich would have loved me.
I think I slept a total of sixteen hours yesterday. My face still looks like someone worked me over with a telephone directory, but at least I can see straight and get things done with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
I went food shopping yesterday, and spent an easy $75us on food for a week. One week. It isn't as if I eat a lot, or have particularly expensive tastes. Giant Eagle, I am told, is cranking their prices up again. Time to start clipping coupons, I think.
I need to start cleaning for this weekend. The trick is to do stuff in order of how easily it'll get messed up, i.e., clean the most readily dirtied things last so they'll be nice for the weekend. I plan on taking at least some of my sound equipment back to the Lab tomorrow night, and maybe running the sweeper to clean up the living room. The night after I'll pick up my clothes (yes, I still have the bad habit of throwing worn clothes on the floor) and maybe run the sweeper in my bedroom. Cleaning the kitchen and bathroom will come last, because those get used the most.
Which File Extension are You?
Just peachy... the Port Authority, which runs the Pittsburgh public transportation system, is going to cut service and raise fares if the state of PA doesn't increase their funding. As of 1 February 2005 they're going to raise the fares from $1.75us to $2.50us for a single-zone trip and eliminate weekend, night, and holiday service (as well as the Access programme for the elderly and disabled), which is going to screw several thousand people in and around the city of Pittsburgh. As if that weren't enough, they're also going to cut their overall service by one-third, which covers 70 of 210 distinct routes. Special event shuttles to and from parking lots for major sports events will also be eliminated.
Well, there goes my being able to go in to work at odd hours and not have to sell a kidney on eBay to afford parking downtown. Tell me again why I'm still living here?
Last night was a bomb. Not the bomb, but a bomb.
Shortly after finishing yesterday's entry, I ran down my list of stuff to do and things to arrange. Last night was my opportunity to try out a cosplay costume that I'd been dying to do for a while, Sumeragi Subaru from Tokyo Babylon. After chopping the sleeves off of an old turtle neck and patching up a few rips in the shoulders earlier this week, I dug out some of the girlclothes I've been slowly but surely picking up again, and coupled with a bright red jacket and hat that I'd found at a discount store, I was suitably dressed for a costume ball, though not for near-freezing temperatures.
Mental note: Next time, cosplay as a character who wears more clothes.
The drive to the Waldorf was short and wholly uneventful. The Waldorf School of Pittsburgh, if you've never seen it before, used to be a mansion on what I think is the north-east corner of the city proper. The Waldorf Schools are very exclusive private schools renowned for the quality and depth of their education, so it was a real boon for the organisers to land this site for the Witch's Ball. I parked out front and walked into the school in search of anyone who could tell me exactly where the ball was supposed to be held and where to park. It always feels funny, walking into a building that, for all intents and purposes, used to be someone's home. I wandered around the front offices and hallways sheepishly, waiting for a teacher or a guard to jump out of nowhere and demand to know why I had snuck in. This didn't happen, but it also left me wondering where I was supposed to be. Eventually I found someone near the back of the building who was helping out with the Reclaiming Workshop (another neopagan function which I was not aware of) who showed me into the auditorium, where the ball was to be held. Bruce, the sound guy who works at the Waldorf, showed me where everything was and helped me move my gear into the auditorium and onto the stage and we spent the next two hours fussing over the connections into the PA system.
I chafed initially at hearing him refer to the other folks in the building as "nutcases, the likes of which I've never seen since I lived in California," and considered telling him off, though another part of my mind let me realise that it would probably be a bad idea to alienate someone who might have to save my ass later.
That didn't happen, but I digress.
Mina and company began arriving about a half hour after I had assembled my sound system and began taping cables to the floor so that no one could trip over them. They started to set up the usual refreshments, tables, and decorations as I fiddled. At that time I was extremely confident and waiting for everyone to start arriving.
Parasite Joe arrived not long after that and we offloaded Nemesis, his media machine, along with his collection of lights and crate upon crate of compact discs. Setting up everything proved to be little challenge - once we get into the swing of things, it's practically second nature. He ran home (less than a block away) to pick up a few more power strips so we wouldn't overload the circuit our hardware was plugged into while I began returning my gear to take Nemesis into account.
Initial sound checks were positive, but that soon faded into annoyance, frustration, and panic. The way the sound system was tuned, it was set up for one or two people speaking and perhaps an accoustic guitar, not classical and ambient music, and certainly not EBM, industrial, or techno. Paris and I spent the next two hours fighting with the sound system to alternately play anything at all, rid the sound of distortion and artefacts the likes of which have not been heard since the heyday of LPs. In short, the audio sounded like we were using a blender full of ice and concrete chunks for an amplifier.
Paris has nerves of steel; he never ceases to amaze me. Deciding that he could ask for forgiveness more easily than trying to get permission, he tore into the amp and began re-setting it to accommodate music. This took the better part of three hours, all the while the people were coming, going, and trying to have a good time. I began sweating bullets and panicking. I took Mina aside later and apologised profusely for the whole situation.
Paris finally finished retuning the PA system and began adjusting the frequency equaliser on Nemesis. The Samhain ritual took place shortly after 2100 EDT, at which time I began to re-set Kabuki's equaliser. I think I did a reasonably good job, but in the end it wound up being rather pointless. I spent the few spare minutes I had trying every trick I knew to calm down and center myself. Nothing worked.
When the ritual was over, Paris and I were given free reign to play whatever we liked. Paris had done the last set while I worked on my end of the sound system, so I was up next.
I made a poor choice for an opener - I forgot that there were kids around. Things sort of went downhill from there.. I was so shaken that I couldn't even remember what I did and didn't have with me, so requests didn't go over so well. Unfortunately, my music collection is a little of everything but I don't really specialise, so the limits of what I have at any one time are set in stone. My secondary turntable died just before Paris arrived (the motor is shot and the arm is locked in the uppermost position), so I wasn't able to use the vinyl I'd brought as I had hoped to (as I specialise in on-the-fly remixing and sampling). Parasite, however, is a master when it comes to track selection, and once he got people dancing he kept them there.. they stayed there unti I took the last rotation, at which time everyone sat down and did their own thing.
By this time I was completely worn out and ready to drop. I just wanted to leave everything there, get in my car, and drive home. Instead, Parasite and I disconnected our hardware, packed it back into our cars, and helped everyone else put the tables and chairs away. 'lex was nice enough to ride with me back to the Garden and help me offload my gear, and after getting the fifty cent tour of the Garden we drove out to the local Eat and Park for breakfast and decompression.
Ravenous after a high-stress week, a high-stress night, and not having eaten anything substantial since breakfast Saturday morning, I ripped into the breakfast buffet and ate the equivelent of two pigs' worth of bacon and sausage, among other hot foodstuffs. Two hours of good conversation and reassurance later, I drove back to the Garden and crashed hard.
Last night was the first night I'd gotten a decent amount of REM sleep, though for the lives of me I don't remember what I was dreaming about. Last night was also the first time I've been able to sleep in since I moved into the Garden.
The Windows XP SP2 firewall has been breached.
Things went well.
I had a half-day of work yesterday due to the major rearrangement of the project I've been working on for a while - it was pushed back to this weekend, so to compensate for working today I was given the chance to cut out early, a chance which I accepted eagerly because I had a few things to take care of yesterday afternoon. I got home on the early bus and after dropping some of my stuff off in the Garden I hopped into my car and drove out to my old Lab to pack up the lion's share of my sound equipment for the Witch's Ball tonight. It took far less time than I thought it would have, maybe an hour, tops. By far, unloading everything when I returned to the Garden took the most time and effort, largely due to the mass of several crates of records. As much as I love the feel of vinyl under my fingertips, it's bloody heavy when you've got a lot of it.
Once my gear was unloaded and safely stowed, I changed my clothes to get ready for the concert last night. Lupus, James, and I had tickets to see Hanzel und Gretyl, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and Ministry live at Mr. Small's, and the concert was well worth the cost of tickets. Suitably geared in fatigues, stompers, my Hackerspotting t-shirt, war jacket, chainmail, and mirrorshades, the three of us headed out to see what we could see.
Just as we'd thought, the bands were arranged in order of how big a name they were among the people - HnG were up first. They put on a good show, as always, and really worked on stage presence. It was just as fun to look at them as it was to listen to them. They also really seemed to get off on the fact that Mr. Small's is a deconsecrated church - it was amusing at first, but soon began to get on my nerves. Each band started off with three or four new tracks, then moved on to a couple of older songs, which most fans would recognise and probably introduced the new folks to their earlier works. Ministry was the exception, as I'll explain later. The venue was packed with the high-school set from the get go, something that I still find surprising. We met up with Genetik and Seele while waiting in line, and clustered around one of the corners of the swag booth at first. Before TKK went on we migrated to roughly the centre of the floor to get a better view of the stage.
I discovered something last night: I tend to watch the projected visuals more than I do the band if I'm not careful. Just goes to show where my mind is most of the time.. on hardware. I also noticed the pair of Apple iBooks set up in what used to be the choir loft, where the lights and projectors were controlled from.
I also realised that I'm starting to lose my interest in metal in general and black metal in particular. Sitting down and listening to it isn't easy anymore, because it doesn't affect me as it once did. Being at a show is a different matter, though. At a concert you're paying just as much for the atmosphere and the crowd as you are the music, which makes it more intrinsically interesting. There's more sensory input, and a slightly greater degree of interaction with the environment.
TKK put on a good show, as usual. The projections were mostly drawn from 1950's beach flicks and horror cinema (even some stuff from Reefer Madness, to my delight). Cheesy stuff, which worked well in contrast to the music. Ministry kept everyone waiting for about forty five minutes, long enough for the sound guys to run out of filler material on the PA system. By the time Ministry took the stage, the floor was packed shoulder to shoulder with restless concert-goers. Word began to circulate that the pack of skinheads who had just waded into the throng were the guys with a rep for wrecking people in mosh pits, which didn't exactly give me good reason to join in on the fun and games. It's hard to miss guys with shaven heads, boots with white laces, and t-shirts bearing WWII-era Nazi slogans, Hitler's likeness, and calls to action. Ministry's still political, still working listeners into a rage, still triggering mosh pits that could rip through a brick wall if they could be aimed properly.. Jourgensen's starting to show his age, though. They didn't have much stage presence (it got boring to see Al draping himself over a mic stand shaped like a crucifix for entire songs) but they made up for it in energy. Just as expected, after their first set was done they came back on stage for another three or four.
I can't say much else about the show, because I'm not a big concert-goer. The best I can say was that I had a good time, the bands were excellent, and the crowd was by and large internally cool. I ran into some old friends from IUP there, guys that I knew from my days at WIUP-FM and the comp.sci floor at IUP. We touched base only briefly before Ministry started in. Lupus took a few good shots in the pit, including one entirely by accident, delivered by the elbow of the guy standing in front of her before Ministry even started. She is, however, still on her feet, bloodied and bruised but functional.
Decompression came at the local Eat and Park, the first food I'd had in twelve hours. Good food, good friends, good times (and a chai milkshake), all in one night.
This morning I was up at oh-dark-hundred, my normal for the work-week (bleh) to go in to the office to oversee the next phase of the project I've been writing about so much lately. By the time I was up and around I realised that I hadn't thought to check the bus schedule to see when my usual bus ran on the weekends, something which caused me a bit of worry when it hadn't shown by 0715 EDT. Thankfully, Lupa drove by on her way home from work and gave me a lift downtown. By 0730 EDT I was in the office, logged in, and making a pot of coffee in the kitchenette back in the NOC. Since it was a waiting game, until the other end of the project got in and settled, I went through my usual morning routine and breakfast until I recieved an e-mail from the other side. The game was on.
I'll cut to the chase and say that testing was cancelled half an hour later because the servers on the other side of the project hadn't even been installed yet. The project's been pushed back another two or three days.
<sigh>
That settled, I left the office shortly after noon and hopped the bus home just as the clouds tore open and rain began to hammer Pittsburgh once more. Safely home, I set about getting everything ready for tonight, changing my clothes (hopefully there will be pictures), and transferring another few gigs of music over to Kabuki-sama.
Next stop: The Witch's Ball.
I spoke too soon.
One of the projects I've been working on had a deadline of tomorrow, a deadline that I more than beat. I can't really go into specifics, but I will reiterate that I absolutely hate Java applets of all kinds. Especially ones that are documented to work with v1.4 of the Java Runtime Environment, and do.. but poorly. After some digging through knowledge bases and release notes, I discovered that the applet in question isn't supposed to work with the latest version, and the v1.3 release of Java is necessary for it to run properly.
That meant downgrading. That also meant forty-five minutes of rebooting, reconnecting to a fileshare that runs like Amanda Plummer on a double espresso (it keeps falling over for no good reason), and trying to figure out why the share keeps erasing everything on my desktop.
I'd originally planned that tomorrow would be for the final stages of testing because it would be on the weekend, and if there was a catastrophic failure, the impact would be minimal. Well, it was decided that this testing wouldn't go on tomorrow because engineers were being flown in from someplace else to do the testing.
Ummm.. guys? How hard is it to take three or four people who will be using the application, sit them down, and have them go through their daily routine with me on the other end of the line watching them? If anything goes wrong, I'll see it and be able to fix it. Then testing resumes. It's not hard, though it can be time consuming.
But no, I've got to go in to work on Saturday.
Oh, well. At least I'm getting my time in, and I actually have learned more about what I've been working on, or at least gotten more comfortable with it.
But I still hate Java applets.
Speaking of getting screwed, check this out. Unless you've been in a sensory deprivation tank for the past few months (and if you have, I envy your media isolation), you've no doubt heard about all the voter registration drives that have been springing up around the country like mushrooms after a Grateful Dead concert. In a number of states around the US, however, people have been noticing voter registration fraud on a heretofore unprecedented scale. In Las Vegas, NV this week, Voters Outreach of America, a group funded by the Republican Party, has been signing up new voters, and reregistering old ones, but those people who sign up as Democrats have been having their applications torn up behind their backs and thrown in the trash. Employees of the company have stepped forward and said that they were told to sign up Republicans only, and that they would not be paid if the numbers were too even. Others nicked the shredded applications out of the garbage and have been getting them to reporters who broke the story earlier today. The same thing is happening in Oregon, A voter registration company based out of Arizona but operating in Oregon called Sproul and Associates was implicated in the scam. More and more media outlets are picking up this story, and there's no way that it'll be quieted anytime soon.
Feeling like your vote maybe doesn't count because you don't want the current regeime in power for another four years?
Maybe you're a little nervous that those papers you filled out on the street a few weeks ago didn't actually make it past the front door?
There are groups out there who are coming together to stop shenanigins just like these, such as Election Proection 2004 and Election Protection Volunteer. People, you have the right to vote. It's an integral part of living in the United States, a democratic country. If you sit there and let your right to make your voice heard slip past, we won't have a democratic country anymore, we'll have what amounts to a dictatorship, because the current regeime will put into power whomever they please without listening to the people of this country. When last I checked, the US government was made up of people whom WE, the citizenry, chose to represent us. WE selected those people (gods, I hope) to run things for us, we tell them what we want done, we ask them what they think of the current situations, we delegated responsibility to them and we hold them accountable for their actions. If they screw us over or they go against our wishes, we vote them out. They do a good job and make things better for us, we vote to keep them in power (within the limitations of the duration and number of terms served, of course).
Let's show them who's REALLY in control: The voters.
A public registry for AIDS victims??? Anyone else suddenly get a chill down their back?
Information on the Fifth annual Pittsburgh Witch's Ball: The party starts at 1800 EDT on Saturday, 16 October 2004 and runs until 2330 EDT. Cover charge is $10us at the door. The address is 204 South Winebiddle Street, zip code 15224 (for the purposes of Mapquest, et al). The Ball is BYOB, no smoking on the premises, though. The Samhain ritual starts at 2030 EDT. Costumes are welcome, there will be vendors, lots of food, door prizes, and a silent auction.. oh, and there will be much music courtesy of Parasite and myself.
See you there!
THE ULTIMATE SILENCE October 12, 1998
Listen to the mustn'ts, child.
Listen to the don'ts.
Listen to the shouldn'ts,
The impossibles, the won'ts.
Listen to the never haves,
Then listen close to me ...
Anything can happen, child.
Anything can be.
~ Shel Silverstein
Six years ago today, Matthew Shepard was murdered for being homosexual.
What will you do to end the silence?
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More network funnies today. More wondering why straightforward operations just aren't working right. More progress made.
I finally got my hands on the location of the Witch's Ball this year, so now I know where I'm going. It's not even five minutes from the Garden. Funny, that.
I'll be going out Friday night, so that leaves Saturday to break down my PA rig at the old Lab and load it into my car. I plan on having dinner before I truck out there so I don't have a repeat of last year (blood sugar crash and all hell breaking loose). Maybe I'll make the last of that chicken vindaloo... I hope I can patch my gear into the sound system at the Waldorf School; I don't fancy another last minute run to Radio Shack for cables. Anyway, I hope to get there early so that I can get set up and sound-checked. I'll be tag-teaming with Parasite once again (Projekt Blacklight rides again!), so it'll be an interesting evening for all concerned. I promise...
Lyssa will be in town the weekend after that. I get the distinct impression that things will be swinging upward in the very near future.
On the whole, life is good. Life is happy.
We've come another step closer to direct neural interface: The Cyberkinetics Corporation has implanted within the brain of a quadriplegic patient a grid of one hundred electrodes that measure the electrical activity of the brain. He's become skilled enough to play Pong through the implant, with 70% accuracy. The electrodes are accessible through a jack set into his skull the size of a bottle cap (I guess Molex is branching out a little..) The US Food and Drug Administration has given its blessing for clinical trials; they've been granted permission for another four trials this year. Cyberkinetics has dubbed the implant Braingate, and is already speculating on other applications of the technology, such as prosthetic limbs that work much better than current models do (they rely upon crude interpretation of motor nerve signals from the peripheral nervous system). Of course, DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is pushing for Cyberkinetics to work on a noninvasive version of the technology, using dermatrodes or sensitive pickups mounted in helmets for control of military hardware. That could take a while, though. Right now, the Braingate implant only has the resolution to read about one hundred neurons; the interface necessary for more complex tasks (say, touch-typing or drawing through the implant) would require many more electrodes implanted in the brain, and much more computing power to process the nerve signals. Also, the implanation procedure would be much more invasive, because electrodes would have to be set all over the surface of the cerebral cortex, and probably at certain depths inside it, also. That's a lot of skull to remove and put back.
Way to go, guys. I'm proud of you.
Today was a day to catch up and make some serious progress. The odd mystery popped up which, unfortunately, I have no answers for. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for. The progress, however, was on a major project, the same one I've been working on for the past few weeks.
We're almost ready to deploy. I'm going to spend tomorrow testing, and configuring, but I'm confident that we're almost ready to rock and roll.
Spaceman landed a job at CMU. Way to go!
"Have you ever had the feeling that you were being watched?" --Bugs Bunny
An unnamed man in Edgewater, Florida was being monitored by the police with a radio-tracking beacon, so that his car could be tracked from location to location. The case being built against him was blown out of the water when he discovered the bug, removed it from his car, and called his lawyer. The device was found under the hood of the car. Even though a warrant was issued to have it placed there, he still kept the unit as evidence. He was being accused of theft on top of this (the device is said to be worth $3kus, which seems a little steep for something that one could assemble out of spare parts from Radio Shack with some knowledge of RF circuitry, a little time, and about $30us) but after returning the beacon the charge was dismissed.
I got Leandra's printer working again. I uninstalled and reinstalled the LPR packages, reconfigured the print filter, and now I'm dumping images and text to hardcopy. Life is good.
Next stop: T-shirts!
More on the Indymedia raid. Government agencies in Italy and Switzerland (so much for neutrality..) ordered the raids on the servers in the UK. The reasons that the court orders were issued and the identities of those who currently have possession of the data systems are, at this time, unknown. MLATs (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, which basically state that the governments of those countries have to help the US legal system whenever they demand it) were used to get this done in care of the US judicial system, so there are strings being pulled over here that set events in motion. Rackspace, the company that hosted the servers, has been ordered to remain quiet about the whole matter.
Christopher Reeve is dead???
EDIT: His family has not yet released details.
EDIT: It's finally hit the newswires.
I know that I haven't written much lately. It isn't that nothing's been going on, it's that I decided to spend the weekend jacked out. After last week, I decided that I needed a break from the Net, and started doing stuff offline, something that I greatly enjoyed. I cleaned, I cooked, I did dishes, I got new furniture and rearranged some more, I picked stuff up. Not things that most people find pleasurable but I take joy in simple things. Just being able to affect my environment at will is joyful to me. I like getting up and doing stuff, in other words.
I spent most of yesterday out and about, driving around and generally seeing the outside world. I picked up a few things to finish my costume for the Witch's Ball on the 16th of October (which I'm spinning at in a tag-team with Parasite - Projekt Blacklight rides again!). I'm going as Sumeragi Subaru (Tokyo Babylon version) (wow, I actually planned ahead for a party for once) and I've got everything I need put together. I also spent a few hours searching for sewing patterns for a costume at Tekkoshocon 2005, because it'll take me a while to put it together if I work on it off and on (which I seem to do). I plan on crossplaying as the version of Tenjou Utena from Adolescence Mokoshiroku for Tekko-2k5, and it might take me a month or so of occasional work to get the duellist's uniform done. I also picked up more Sculpey and a dowel to use as a mandril so I could prototype some duellist's rings.
Yes, I'm an utter Utena fan-thing. I've kept it quiet this long, but this will be the only time I plan on gushing like this. I promise.
I decided to pass on food shopping because I'm off today (Monday) and I still have stuff in the fridge and cupboard. I made it a point try the chicken vindaloo sauce that I picked up in Maryland a while back. It's fantastic stuff. It's very strong, and makes a nice, rich sauce. I think I used a little too much, though, because it made far more sauce than it really should have. It was still very tasty over sushi rice, though.
Definitely a good buy.
It's been said that conscious minds have a lot of overhead, but this confirm it. Medical researchers at teh University of Rochester reported that about 80% of the processing activity of the visual cortex of the brain is occupied with unknown tasks. They have no idea what's going on in there most of the time, basically. They also say that this is not the case with chronologically younger brains. In a way, the brains of the ferrets used in this study are working on something that either isn't visual information at all, or it's reprocessing of earlier sensory information. Presumably, the same goes for human brains.
I think they're either missing something, or something didn't make it into the article. Specifically, it has to do with the phenomenon of neural plasticity. Neural plasticity is when other sectors of the brain take over the tasks originally allocated to damaged sectors, so that there is no loss of functionality. In people with brain damage, this is what allows them to regain some degree (occasionally, all) use of what was lost. For example, the power of speech. Given time, other parts of the brain will 'learn' what they have to do to restore the functionality of the damaged portion, and all will be well. However, neurons die all the time; it's a fact of life. Neural plasticity (implemented through the massive redundancy of the cerebral cortex) allows other neurons to pick up the slack, so unless something catastrophic happens, we don't slowly lose the ability to speak or move our hands. Perhaps all this processing that researchers haven't figured out yet is due to parts of the visual cortex taking over for the loss of brain cells through normal life. They weren't looking for it before so they didn't notice it until now.
Just a thought.
Remember that article I mentioned a few days ago? Paul Allen has put up a webpage talking about his experiment.
The memory log drinking game is now on line.
Indymedia, the grassroots news organisation, was raided by the FBI today. Servers in the US and England have reportedly been seized. Anyone have any hard information?
UPDATE: New York's Indymedia site is still on-line and is actually covering this incident. You might want to consider accessing this article discretely, just in case. Reports have it that only hard drives were removed from the hosted boxes, but they appear to be on line once more. No word on how much information was not backed up during the last cycle. Indymedia appears to be in trouble because they posted the names of delagates to the Republican National Convention some time ago, and the current regeime isn't happy about that.
Brain Lateralization Test Results |
| Right Brain (54%) The right hemisphere is the visual, figurative, artistic, and intuitive side of the brain. Left Brain (48%) The left hemisphere is the logical, articulate, assertive, and practical side of the brain |
personality tests by similarminds.com
Oops. Nobody's perfect. Not even Clam Antivirus.
Here's a virus that I might be inclined to consider leaving alone for a few seconds.. it's called downloader.lunii, and it preys upon spyware. It searches for the presence of six different varieties of spyware/malware and deletes them as best it can, then locates any running instances of same and kills them, and then it tracks down related files and deletes those... as if that weren't enough, it prowls through the registry and tears out the hooks a few infectors put there and edits the hosts.txt file to prevent the system from going to a handful of websites. Someone's got a mad-on for malware...
Lots of bad dreams last night.. I kept waking up from a dream that I was trying to get money out of a strange looking ATM (about the size of a toaster oven, shaped vaguely like an old typewriter, and mounted at chest-height on a steel pole; it was heavily armoured, also). I eventually got it to accept my card and withdrew a considerable sum of money because I thought that I would be needing it where I would be going. The ATM hemmed and hawed, and eventually disgorged a handful of bills. At first, I thought that I had been ripped off because it was all singles, but as I flipped through the wad I noticed bills that were obviously counterfit, with oddball denominations like $30 and $3. As I finished exmaining the wad of cash, I suddenly realised that the ATM was a fake, and the magstripe on my ATM card and PIN number had probably been copied. I kept flipping awake and going back to sleep as I made plans to cancel that card, change my bank account number, et al..
Unfun.
Holy cats! Someone has what might be the entire history of home videogaming up on eBay!
I had to turn on the furnace this morning shortly after I woke up. It's been getting colder and colder, and now it's at the point where it's chilly all the time, and wearing a coat of some kind Outside is advisable. Before I jumped in the shower, I flipped the switch on the thermostat and went off to do basic maintenance. By the time I got out the Garden was toasty warm.
I guess it's too late in the year to not wear PJs anymore.
I got some exercise tonight for the first time in about two weeks. I feel pretty good right now, but I didn't really get my hearts up. I'm going to have to work on that (maybe find some more exercises to add to my routine). I also remembered why it's a bad idea to do jumping jacks while wearing boxer shorts..
I'm off to find an ice pack, excuse me.
Oh, wow.. VIC-tracker v2.0 is out. VIC tracker is a music file editor for the Commodore VIC-20 that looks and acts a great deal like a .mod file editor for Amigas and PCs. Among its more unusual features, it is able to take tracks created with the utility and export them as 6502 assembly language code, suitable for inclusion in new games written for the VIC. It is also capable of interfacing with MIDI sequencers and drum machines (among other devices) to act as a controller, given the proper interface cartridge. As if that weren't enough, it can also switch between PAL (European) and NTSC (North American) modes (50 Hz and 60 Hz clocks, respectively).
Makes me wish I had.. a.. VIC-20... hrmm.....
In other news from the Commodore front, one Paul Panks stress-tested a number of 5.24" floppy disks to see exactly what would cause them to lose their data. First, he froze a floppy to see what would happen. No data loss was detected. Heating a floppy disk for ten seconds near a space heater to 95-115 degrees Farenheit also did not cause any loss of data, only a little physical damage to the mylar platter. Actually burning the disk, however, had the expected effect. Something odd happened after the disk cooled, however - the disk could not be successfully reformatted, and had to be reheated before this could be done. Wrapping a disk in plastic and burying it in the ground for over eighteen months ruined the disk by badly warping the platter. Transferring the platter to a new envelope and attempting to read its contents revealed that data had indeed been lost, most likely due to damage to track 18 (on Commodores, track 18 is where the disk's directory of files is kept).
Word on the Net has it that North Korea has trained a team of 600 crackers to wave net.war on South Korea, the US, Japan, and other countries. It is said that their facility for cyberwar is now comperable to that of 'other countries'. Supposedly, they went through a five-year training programme to reach this level of proficiency.
You are mRNA. You're brilliant, full of important,
interesting information and you're a great
friend to the people you care about. You may
have sides to you that no one understands. But
while you understand more than most people,
you're only half-there most of the time.
Which Biological Molecule Are You?
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I so do not envy whomever was involved in this situation. Note: Not work friendly.
I'm back in Pittsburgh, and actually in one piece. I found my way back without much trouble, but got it rather late last night (or early this morning, depending upon your point of view). I had just enough time to get the car unpacked and the groceries I'd picked up before I left DC put away before I hit the sack and crashed for a good.. oh, I'd say five hours before getting up for work this morning.
On Saturday night, Lyssa, the.Silicon.Dragon, and I drove out to see Ghost In the Shell 2: Innocence.
Drop everything and see this movie.
No, I'm serious. Check out when it'll be playing in your area, call off work if you have to, turn your couch upside down to find enough change to pay for a ticket, and see it. Visually, you'll be blown away. The backgrounds are so richly detailed and so engaging, you'd swear that you were watching the scenery from a live-action movie. They were obviously digitally rendered, and the complexity of them is such that your jaw will drop. The character designs are crisp and well-thought out, from Togusa's mullet (there's a name for a band..) to the seams of Batou's optics, from the way the Basset hound's paws spread when he scampers around to the flocks of birds later in the movie. The plot will be familiar to you if you've ever read the original manga, though it's not an utter rehash, but instead a good plot reworked to be more mature and much more dark. If you're not scratching your head or wondering if someone's dropped LSD in your drink about halfway through the movie, you're just not paying attention.
Five stars out of five from this fan-thing. Consider yourself commanded to see it in the theatres while you can.
Lyssa and I spent quite a lot of time cooking this weekend. We spent entirely too much time at Whole Paycheque picking out stuff to make. We wound up making wedding soup on Saturday, along with bruschetta using Zingermans bread and fresh vegetables, and I was supposed to bake her an overdue birthday cake but we sort of ran out of time on Saturday when Silicon called, and off we went to see GItS 2. After the movie was over we joined Elwing and went out to dinner at a Tex-Mex place, the name of which I can't recall, not far from the theatre. Good food, good prices, and they've got Guiness on tap.
For months, I'd been promising Lyssa that she could raid my music collection on Kabuki-sama. We finally made the time on Sunday to hook up a hub and some CAT-5 cable and I set up an FTP server on Kabuki so she could log in and start transferring stuff. Unfortunately, I only brought one length of CAT-5 with me, so I had to run to Radio Shack to pick up a few patch cables. Lyssa made the cake, an amaretto bundt cake to save time.
Lyssa has an electric stove. The sucker's powerful - it'll boil a teakettle of water in less than five minutes, which is excellent in the morning. However, the temperature regulator of the oven is shot. For any temperature you set, it'll maintain that temperature... give or take seventy-five degrees Farenheit. The cake was scorched in less than half of its alotted baking time, which frustrated us to no end. I thought that the cake was okay (I tend to not notice tastes like burning) but between the amaretto and the flour on the outside, it was inedible in general.
I promised her a cake. Dammit.
Next time. And I'll do it right.
Today was pretty much spent in catch-up mode at work, doing my usual start of the week dutie and making sure everything was shipshape. Not much else, I'm afraid. I'm trying to keep everything running smoothly and keep myself active and healthy. Weeks tend to do that to me.
To bed, to catch up on REM sleep.
It's been a rough week.. lots to do, not a lot of time to write. I assure you, however, that I am alive, well, and in DC at the present time. Lyssa presented at a conference on Thursday, but unfortunately her birthday gift (catching a ride to Pittsburgh to visit the Garden) fell through at the last minute, so I drove down last night to spend the weekend with her.
Mark this one on your calendars, folks - I made it down here in good time and without getting lost!
We went to the local diner soon after I got in so Lyssa could have dinner (as she spent the entire day working) and so I could indulge in dessert (Plato's Fudge Brownie Delight.. caloric evil on a dish!), then retired to her flat to rest.
Or attempt to rest, I found, as I slept fitfully once again, disturbed by strange dreams that were entirely too real. I dreamed that I was writing an update in this very memory log file, in fact, and writing that I had testicular cancer, and that I would be seeking treatment for it post-haste.
Yes, I dreamed that I was blogging.. and going through the process of doing so, in fact. My dream included writing and rewriting sentences, muttering to myself about possible turns of phrase to use, consulting Google for links to medical pages to use as references, tactful and parenthetical not-so statements to use about the state of my exterior... that's a new one by me.
It's now 0827 EDT on Saturday, and that dream is why I'm up so early writing this update. Lyssa's in the shower, and we'll be heading out soon to get things to make her birthday cake, as well as a few other things, possibly. That dream bothered me just enough to feel like writing this early.
Okay. Off to shower, dress, and drive around.
My knee is still giving me trouble. Ow.
Life's been busy lately.. last night I helped Lupa move from her house up north into an apartment not too distant from my own. The house is steadily emptying, and plans are being made.
I really think that she'll do better after she's done moving.
Work has been somewhat interesting but mostly frustrating lately, due to the actions of the guy working the front desk of the lab I've been working in. Or trying to work in, at least. You see.. the guys who are usually there are on vacation for another day or so. They gave me keys to get into the rooms so I could hack on the project I've been given to finish. The only thing is, the guy who works the front desk of the room tha the labs are in (let's call him J-) keeps locking the front door whenever he goes anyplace, which seems to be quite frequently. I don't have a key for that door.
This screws me out of a lot of work, which has to be done by the middle of October.
I couldn't get into the lab all day yesterday, and most of today was taken up with a rush project for another department.
I can do this.. I just have to manage my time properly...
After weeks of fighting with the natural gas company and two missed appointments (they were supposed to send someone out to take an initial reading from the meter but never showed), I got a bill for the previous tenant. I placed a call this afternoon and they say that they don't need to take an initial reading because they can do it remotely (via the computerised meters) and have done so. I'm waiting to see what happens.
My toilet overflowed just a few minutes ago. The float valve in the tank isn't working, so it never stops trying to fill the tank after a flush. I heard the water pattering to the floor and ran in there to shut the water off and sop everything up with rags. My landlord says that there'll be a plumber out here tomorrow.
<sigh>
Complete sincerity: You believe in being
straightforward with others, and you expect the
same from them. People would consider you a
good listener, and one who is calm and mostly
serious.
Which Characteristic From the Samurai Code Matches You Best? (You may find out your best trait)
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Spammers will try to relay mail off of everything and anything.. including networked printers. Somehow, I keep getting mental images of someone printing a .jpg to a networked printer to see who notices... anyone else remember goatse.cx?
Pagan Pride Day is today! See you folks at the Buffalo Lodge in South Park!
Goth
What Kind of Goth Are You?
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I go from kitty ears and a tail to Neuromancer at the drop of a hat. Fear my wardrobe.
And I can even wear some of it to work...
You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.
What Kind of Elitist Are You?
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I just read a lot...
I've also been doing a lot of heavy lifting lately. As I wrote a few days ago, my Garden has fully-functional DSL service, without which you would not be able to read this update. Since discovering that I had bandwidth, I began sending messages to people to recuit assistance to move the Children into my new digs. The first folks I contacted were John and Lara, but Lara's grandmother went beyond the veil not two days ago, and they are en route to her funeral.
Go easily, Ma'am.
Next, I contacted Alexius, but he threw his back out during penjak silat class earlier this week and has been on the shelf since then. Last night after dinner (pasta, the first good pasta I've had in many a month), I called Lupa and asked if she could help me get everyone moved. She called me back not long after dinner and told me that she was available for a few hours, though she had to go to work later in the evening.
We jumped into my car and headed back to the old Lab to rescue my children.
I swiftly shut everyone down from the two consoles on my workbench (this is the first time that Lucien's ever gracefully powered himself down - he was highly cooperative during the move) and began breaking down the network. All in all, it wound up being a fairly easy task - cables don't take long to unplug, and once you've got the lines pulled it's a simple matter of lifting the entire machine and carrying it. It just seems like a big job because the computers' cases are relatively large. Lupa and I got everyone disconnected in less than forty-five minutes. Getting my car loaded proved to be a bit more of a challenge, however. That took another half hour or so.
I think that more than just the family and my cat were angry that I left. As Lupa and I were carrying Leandra and Lain out to the car, a wolf spider made its presence known. A bit more than an inch long, it moved like the wind, pacing to and fro in front of the basement door. I might be off on this, but I don't think that it wanted me to carry the Children out of the old house. Lupa and I spent some time trying to pick up the spider and carry it outside but it simply wouldn't cooperate, and did everything in its power to frustrate us. All things considered, we wound up cutting it a wide berth. I only hope that it either ran and hid or made it back outside before Ziggy got hold of it. Either Ziggy or the spider would not be in such good shape afterward, and I rather hope that it would be the spider losing that particular battle. Deals aside, I like cats more than spiders.
Incidentally, the spider that was hiding behind one of my bookcases earlier this year was found dead. Shrivelled and dessicated, I think it crawled into the network cabling to die.
The drive back to my Garden was nerve wracking, to say the least. I could hear Leandra shifting around in the trunk and the creaking of the monitors and cables in the back seat as I took each curve. The entire time was filled with phantom pains and visions of crashed hard drives.. if it wasn't for driving white-knuckled the whole way, I think I would have started shaking. Lupa stopped for dinner as I unlimbered each computer and hauled it up to the apartment for inspection. Leandra's chassis is badly scratched, though she weathered the trip extremely well, otherwise. I've been promising her a new paint job for about a year now, maybe I should make the time to do so before the weather becomes too cold to do a good job outside. Maybe I'll do that black with blue LEDs in her ventilation louvers I've been considering... Lain, Lucien, and von Neumann made it safe and sound. I took each computer outside to open the chassis and go over their internals with cans of compressed air to blow out a year's worth of dust, dirt, and hair. Lain came back up without any trouble; Lucien likewise. Because I was working in reverse order, (port D back to port A on the KVM), von Neumann was next. Leandra was last to be reactivated because I wanted to plug her into the first jack on the KVM.
My hearts were in my mouth when she refused to boot back up.
After a lot of deep breathing, praying, jiggling cables, and checking switches I swapped out the power cord she was using for a shorter yet thicker one, and lo and behold, up she came.
I hate close calls.
Everyone seems to be healthy and happy. I'm planning on rebuilding Leandra in the near future because I'm getting tired of Debian. APT is nice and all, but I haven't been able to compile anything for about two months now (such as GAIM) because the development suite and system libraries Debian uses are too far out of date. I'm going back to Slackware - I know that I can get that working. Besides, I'm sick of XFree86 v4.0.3 - 3D support blows. Give me x.org any day, at least that's up to date in terms of the release process.
Maybe in a week or so. I'll give everyone on the Network advance notice before I take Leandra down for reconstruction.
I'm now watching Barb Wire o DVD. My word, this movie is awful. Jack Noseworthy's career went right downhill after Dead At 21 wrapped..
The Children are doing well. I picked up an AT-to-PS2 adapter while I was out and about today, so I can patch Leandra's console into the KVM. I also found the power supply for the wireless access point on a brief sojourn to the old house earlier tonight, so the WaveLAN is up and running. I'm sprawled out in the living room writing this update from Kabuki-sama.
Life is happy.
Life is also contemplative right now. I'm still adjusting to life on my own, and it's been interesting in a good way. I've found that I now have to consider a lot of things that I once took for granted - I have to plan to keep the place clean, make sure there's food and supplies, et cetera. I also have to plan when bills need to be paid and which bills need to be paid when, something that I am still in the process of organising. It's a matter of timing, and of course making sure that I get enough hours in at work to cover everything. Sometimes being a temp makes things tricky. Unfortunately, I can't save up as much money as I once could, because I have more expenses to account for.
I realise that this is common sense for a lot of people. I don't have much common sense, so bear with me.
One of the things that I greatly enjoy is that I've got more free time to do what I need to do, and what I enjoy doing. I've been getting a lot more reading done lately; I hope to pick up my CISSP certification soon. I'm hoping to start drawing again soon, also, probably after I save up enough money to take the certification exam. I've got a spare machine or two sitting around that I hope to bring up to speed to practise on. As it was written in Securing Windows 2000 Step By Step, "A P90 with extra memory will work, and it will blue-screen as fast as anything else." The twin terrors of Windows have my curiosity right now, Local Policy and Group Policy. But now I stray from what I was originally going to write about.
So much to do, and so many possibilities.. the biggest problem I've had is deciding what, exactly to do with myself. Should I read? Should I study? Should I practise? Should I exercise? Should I go out and drive around? Maybe window shop? Punch around on the display laptops to find a replacement for Kabuki-sama, as much as it pains me to do so? Meditate? Wonder who I am? Go to the cafe' and drink too much coffee?
It's funny.
I used to dream of possibilities, of time and things to do, and now I have difficulty figuring out what to do.
All in all, I've been adapting. Loosening up, inside. My body's been reflecting that lately. I can feel the hormonal balance shifting back toward baseline for me. My face is filling out more - I'm told that I don't look gaunt anymore. My arms and chest are softening, but only superficially. The underlying musculature is still there, and still capable of doing what I designed it to do. I've been putting it under stress during workouts, and it's keeping up nicely. One thing I've noticed is that it's putting on weight, between ten and fifteen pounds, I estimate. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not eating right (I've been eating a much more diverse diet than I had been at home, and I've eaten out more in the past month than I had in the previous six months), if I have, in fact, been eating properly, if it's the hormonal reconfiguration, if it's been something inside me that I haven't pinned down yet manifesting as eating a bit more junk than normal (depression? frustration? worry? self-destructive impulses?), or what. I do know that some of my clothing is getting a bit on the tight side, and that disturbs me.
One of my fears is that I'll go back to the way I was... that my body would go back to its original shape. The shape that I spent so many years trying to alter. So much time and effort, and so much sacrifice went into constructing this one, and I'm afraid of all of it will go to waste. I do not know if the changes it's undergoing are a part of that or not.
Another day, another dollar. Another day of fighting with a wireless network and wondering if I'm going to be capable of speech by the time I leave the room. I'm starting to worry a little bit about microwave-frequency radiation so close to my organics...
I'm still getting used to this whole time-and-space-to-do-what-I-please thing at the Garden. I've been able to write some new recipes down in my cookbook, read a magazine or two, finish at least three books in a week's time (I haven't been able to do that since at least my sophmore year of high school), exercise at least once a week (I feel well enough to exercise again, and got my blood pumping earlier tonight), and even cook a few times a week. I think I'm going to start going through my cookbook to find recipes that I haven't yet tried (and that don't make enough to feed an entire party, incidentally) for the fun of it. Having a cheap grocery store or two nearby doesn't hurt, either.
Fran, a guy I work with, was nice enough to drive me home after work tonight. He doesn't live too far away from the Garden, so he dropped me off before heading home himself.
This is the most hardcore thing I've seen in a long time.
We get signal!
Earlier tonight I swung past the old Lab to pick up the DSL modem, then drove back to the Garden to plug it in to see if the DSL connection had been turned on. Kabuki-sama sent out a DHCP request, and lo and behold an IP address and other network information came back from the local server. The DSL line is active, even if you can't hear the hissing of the signal through the phone.
Maybe it's my phone. I don't know.
I do know that I've got a usable connection over here, so this weekend I'll be moving the Children into their new home. I'm hoping to enlist some assistance with doing so, to make it go as smoothly as possible. It'll be something of a trick to figure out where I'm going to put them, but I'll think of something... There's always a way. Then I'll have to set Dataline's deck up for dialup, but that shouldn't take long.
It's amazing what a little Day-quil can do. Yesterday I felt like I was running like a 386; today I was awake, alert, and actually able to process information normally. And believe you me, I had to earlier today.. it's amazing what falls to the bottom of the stack when you're not careful..
But enough about that.
Shopping continues for a replacement laptop computer. I was going through Dell's site today, and managed to put together a nice subnotebook for about $1500usd, give or take. A half-gig of RAM and battery life out the wazoo are a necessity for me. I can get 802.11g and the built-in Losemodem working with ndiswrapper and the latest-generation kernel without too much trouble, I'm fairly confident.
You represent... apathy. You don't really show any emotion. You can be
considered cruel and cold, but you just don't
really care about anything. This is just the
way you are... you're quite a challenge to get
close to, and others may perceive you as
boring.
What feeling do you represent?
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Today felt like it would never end. I'm still wiped out - too tired to even meditate for longer than five minutes or so at a stretch, let alone exercise. I'm keeping myself going with large amounts of caffeine, even though that is probably the exact wrong thing to do at this point. I want nothing more than to curl up on the floor again with a book, which I'm seriously considering doing after I finish this update. I don't feel well. My limbs are heavier than usual and I can feel a phantom pressure in my temples that means that my body's biochemistry is messed up.
I really have no desire to be connected right now. However, I do want to keep everyone who reads these logs regularly up to date on what's happening.
Kabuki-sama isn't feeling very well, either. Her CD-ROM drive is refusing to mount discs properly anymore, and her power cells are still falling apart. More and more, I'm coming to realise that I need to replace her soon. I don't have the money to do so, and won't for a while yet.
I just want to curl up and go to sleep where I'm laying.
The caffeine isn't cutting it anymore. My body's already filtering it out.
A printout of this is going on my altar.
I was always more partial to the soundtrack to Starlight Express, personally.
Eli recieved his birthday gift today - he loved the autographed copy of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
Well, I'm still something of a refugee from the flooding. I was at my flat briefly yesterday, after John, Lara, and I braved flood waters, police officers, and irate volunteer fire fighters who don't seem to understand that we are, as yet, incapable of walking on water. My flat is fine - living on the second floor has its advantages. However, I am also not 50 feet away from where the flood waters end. The water appears to be 3.5 feet deep at its maximum, which renders the roadway utterly useless for transportation. Most of my neighbors are all right, though I'm worried about some of the folks who live in underground apartments (of which there are a few).
John and I, peeved at the coverage of the whole debacle, changed into creeking clothes, grabbed our digital cameras, and waded into the fray - literally - to photograph what was going on. The basements of a few houses are completely flooded, and were pumping out using equipment that I think was provided to them by the local VFD (volunteer fire department). Attempts to get their attention to assist them were futile. They either didn't hear us or were ignoring us.
The bridge leading to my neighborhood is under 3.5 feet above water. The stream rose so high that it swamped the bridge and embankments and kept rising to snarl traffic, also partially blocking off a side street and swamping the VFD, community hall, and police department (three separate buildings not that far apart, mind you). The few fire fighters stuck there were playing with their dog, throwing a stick out into the water to bring it back to them. Around the time we got to my bus stop(!) and took a few reference shots of me, one of the fire fighters (incidentally, the one that just a few minutes earlier, I'd been talking to about ham radio frequencies in the area while I was standing knee deep in water) began screaming at us to get out of the water. Repeatedly. Even though we were slowly slogging our way back to dry ground, trying not to fall or locate possible sinkholes the hard way (by stepping in them). We made our way to the flooded side street and took a circuitous route back to my doss, where we showered, realised that we needed tetanus shots because we'd likely been walking around waist deep in raw sewage(!), and changed our clothes. I took my travel diary with me while we walked to the pizza place Lara was already at to write up our impressions.
It was after the pizza was demolished that we realised that I didn't have the cable to interface the digital camera to Kabuki-sama to upload the images to Leandra. I also didn't have a compact flash to PCMCIA card to accomplish the same task. The shots I took with my cellphone I can't get to, either, because neither lynx nor links are detected by the website (my phone transmits hyperlinks and not actual image files).
Much cursing ensued. So many pictures, and no way to get them up. I hate my lives, sometimes.
I think I'm coming down with a cold.
I don't think that I'll be able to get in to work tomorrow, due to flooding and the roadblock on the other side of the pizza place.
John, Lara, and I left my flat after a while to get dinner and hang out, because I didn't feel terribly safe down there last night. I also didn't want to be alone. So much is happening there, so many people are in need of help. And there's not a bloody thing I can do. I can't make the waters recede, as much as I would like to. I tried to get the attention of people to help them bail out, but no one was listening. Driving out of the neighborhood, I heard someone who owned a bar screaming at the tops of his lungs at someone who had driven at speed over the hoses he was using to bail out his business and ruptured them with the weight of his or her vehicle. I just froze there as he ranted... I can't blame him for being angry, but it really hit me hard to sit in my car listening to him scream, enraged at what had happened.
...
Helplessness.
Gods.. for everything I can do and everyone I know, I can't do a single thing to help them. It's cutting me up inside. What can I do?
I've managed to upload the pictures taken with my cellphone. Please link them widely: http://drwho.virtadpt.net/pictures/flooding-20040919/.
Yay, WinSCP. Where there's a W/will, there's a way.
I've put up the best images from yesterday, also. I was able to get my hands on a USB CompactFlash reader today and transferred the graphics files from my d-cam to the Network. I'll write descriptions of everything later.
http://drwho.virtadpt.net/pictures/flooding-20040918/
Q: What follows five days of hard work in Pittsburgh?
A: Two days of rain.
It's monsoon season in Pittsburgh!
I knew something was up this morning when I heard the rain outside - hard and steady. On some level, some part of me knew that it wasn't going to stop raining today. I made sure that the doors and windows were closed and locked before I left the Garden. Fast-forward through a day of writing documentation.. I was turning my timesheet in at the front desk at work when Bette, someone pretty high up in management, told everyone to leave immediately (it was 1600 EDT) because sundry parts of town were being closed off due to flooding. I found out later that they were not only being closed off, but parts were being evacuated due to rising flood waters. The part of town where Alexius Pendragon lives, for example, was evacuated. Eggman now lives in a riverfront apartment. My old neighborhood is sealed off - the highway running parallel to the plan is flooded, and the supermarket I used to shop at all the time is flooded. They were trying to figure out how to rescue the folks trapped in the building. They were showing footage on the local news of some police who were cruising around flooded streets on jetskis rescuing motorists. Route 28 has been completely blocked off by mudslides. 279 and McKnightmare are flooded.
It was pretty bad. 'lex grabbed Eggman and ran northward to Fern's to safety.
I jumped on the early bus headed back to my neighborhood, only to find it was packed with at least fifty other people who had much the same idea I did. The bus was SRO, with barely enough room to set one's backpack or briefcase down on the floor. I spent a lot of time hanging off of the commuter bars (designed for people who had to stand to hang onto) reading Oracle whitepapers. At some point into the trip, a subprocess inside my head paged me: "Hey.. it's been two or three whitepapers and you're not home yet. Where are you?"
I looked around. The bus was still around the one-third-of-the-way-there mark in the trip back home and hadn't moved for the better part of an hour.
A seat freed up about forty-five minutes later, which I sat down in to rest my legs and back. By this time a few people had deserted the bus, hoping to make better time on foot. Another half hour passed; the bus had moved scarcely father, and I decided to leg it.
I walked a good fourteen blocks toward the northern border of Pittsburgh, trying to make it to a place where the traffic wasn't at a standstill. After a few false stops, I made it to a small Chinese restaurant that Don (of the ER Room) and I go to on occasion. Their food isn't terribly expensive, it's tasty, and most of all, it wasn't in the rain. I ordered food than sat down to recharge my cellphone using the outlet under the rice steamer (did I mention that my cellphone's power cell died while I was on the bus?) and warm up. On my way northward, I'd contacted Lyssa, who'd contacted them for me and told them to meet me at the nearest mall, because the bus driver said that he'd be dropping people off there.
That plan went south when I heard him say, "Fuck this, I'm not going any farther," but I digress.
So I sat down to wait and eat... John and Lara arrived safely, and we broke to munch and talk.. and watch the news, playing on the television bolted to the wall. That's where I got the information I wrote above, incidentally. Some of it's probably changed by now (0034 EDT, 18 September 2004), but as far as I know, that's the way things are.
The general t'sao's chicken was pretty good, incidentally, but the steamed potstickers were on the dodgy side. I've got a bad feeling about them. But again, I digress.
We stopped off at the supermarket to get a few things, just in case, then headed to their apartment. There's no way that I'll be getting back to my Garden, not tonight, and maybe not tomorrow night, either, depending on how bad the flooding is.
I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
Lyssa's okay in DC. Lupa is okay. Alexius, Eggman, and Fern are okay. Genetik and Seele are okay. Starbreize seems to be all right. John, Lara, and I are okay. I think Taja and Andrea v2.0 are all right.
I got my car back tonight. I rode my old bus home and Dataline drove me down to pick up my wheels at the garage. Net damage: $968us, after good customer discount. Not bad, but still a lot. Wouldn't you know it, my bills started coming in today...
I've noticed that you can change your address and your credit agency will find out immediately and make damned sure that you get your bills, but everyone else take their sweet old time.
As I drove home tonight, I noticed the changes in my car's handling: The new power steering pump makes it incredibly easy to turn once more - handling uphill curves was no trouble. Braking is smooth and tight. The engine's not making any strange noises anymore. I haven't tried the AC yet because it was a nice night, but I probably will tomorrow evening.
I found a writeup of the worm W32/amus.a@mm. It's pretty thin on details, though.
During the course of today, I discovered how much the repairs to my vehicle would cost. I seem to be haemorhhaging money this month - the repair bill is roughly $1100us, encompassing
- Four (4) new tyres
- A new water pump
- A new power steering pump
- Work on the electrical system, particularly the control package of the air conditioning unit
This is my worst vehicle repair bill ever. This would have helped earlier today. (Warning: Not work safe!)
I'm also sans transportation for another day or so. Thankfully, I've got enough in my savings to cover it but... I'm trying to keep a safety buffer in case something bad happens. The life of a contractor is not a stable one.
Oh, yes.. I alluded to what might have been an experience with sleep paralysis last night. Let me set the stage:
The last time I was in DC visiting Lyssa, I got in very late amidst a great deal of stress, which wrecked my sleep patterns but good. It had been a long day spent on the town wandering around, with just a bit of worry about my financial situation. In short, I wasn't geared for rest. Not by a long shot. The night before I'd slept fitfully, waking up periodically to make sure that everything was 'all right' around me and generally never falling into REM sleep.
Some time Saturday night, perhaps early Sunday morning, Lyssa and I had gone to bed, and I was still feeling out of sorts from the day past. At this point, my time-sense is messed up, so I can't write exactly when this happened, because I don't know. I had finally relaxed and was slipping off to sleep, when I tried to shift a little in bed, and discovered that I was utterly unable to move. Feet and legs? Nothing. Fingers? Nope. Arms? Nothing. My body, for all intents and purposes, had gone into cold shutdown without disconnecting its controlling intelligence. I was stuck in an immobile body.
I can't say that I panicked, because I didn't fly off into one of those "Oh, shit! I'm screwed.. I'm screwed.. I'm screwed..." trains of thought. I've read too much Douglas Adams to panic; opportunity can be found in the strangest places, after all.
The first thing I noticed was that Lyssa was sound asleep; still as a rock. The second thing I noticed was that my sensory acuity was unusually acute: I could feel her breathing next to me, something that I cannot ordinarily do. By extrapolation, my body's sensory cortex had kicked into overload. Unable to move, something had to compensate, to feed me information about the world outside because it was incapable of reorienting its sensory apparati (read: moving). Hence, amplifying the sensory input to compensate.
It's downright eerie, being able to feel the vibration of a fan across the room through the tile floor, bedrame, box spring, and mattress.
Around the time I began pondering this state, an unusual sensation overtook me: I was being watched. By what, I was unable to say, though a subprocess began speculating with wild abandon... "Okay, fine. I'm being watched, or at least it feels like I am. If I remain perfectly still, whatever might be observing me might lose interest because I'm not moving. It would think that I am simply asleep," I told myself. It felt as if the.. observer.. was standing (I knew that it was standing somehow, with that dream-like certainty that accompanies particularly vivid dreams; another clue that I might be undergoing a bout with sleep paralysis).
Then, I felt something push down the foot of the bed, between Lyssa's feet and my own. Two somethings, in fact, about eight or nine inches apart.
The Art Bell/Whitley Streiber/Brad Steiger subprocess running in my body's right hemisphere suddenly cut off. The rest of my mind said, quite simply, "What the fuck?"
The two somethings (feet? knees?) advanced up the bed, seemingly straddling my legs. I distinctly felt the blankets push down over my legs and hips, and something that I can only describe as footsteps, faintly reverberating through the springs in the mattress, headed in the direction of my torso, and eventually my head.
Another subprocess hastily ransacked my voliminous archive of "Stuff that's interesting to know, but is utterly useless at work" and came up with the symptoms of sleep paralysis, among them unusually detailed tactile hallucinations. Physical paralysis. Unusually powerful sensory input.
The first subprocess was staring and pointing, jaw agape.
At this point, things get fuzzy.
The somethings reached my hips. I could distinctly feel Lyssa's intert body next to me at the same time. I'm not certain if I began to lever my body upward with one arm or if I was being lifted; I only know that my upper body tried to sit up in bed. Its eyes opened; my normally decent night vision wasn't working - I couldn't see anything at all. Not a bloody thing.
Oddly enough, I lost track of whatever-it-was that felt as if it was observing me.
Around the same time my body began sitting up, I lost consciousness, and fell into a dreamless sleep that left me feeling wiped out the next morning.
When I awoke Sunday morning, my eyes flicked open suddenly, as if someone had suddenly booted me back up. Eyes move? Check. Fingers? Hands? Yep. Everything else (no sense in wasting time if this is a dangerous situation, after all)? On line.
First thoughts of the day: "What happened to me?"
As I got up and showered I took stock of what I had thought and experienced the night before, covering much of the same territory I have in words. In the shower, I gave myself a quick once-over for the usual signs of an alien abduction experience (I cannot say that I am a believer, though I try to keep an open mind, and I've seen some pretty weird stuff in my day that I honestly can't explain; Occam's Razor works well for me, though I also recognise that it could, conceivably fail me one day, and so I account those possibilities also). Straight cut marks? Yep - from when I used to be a cutter. Strike one. Scoop and puncture marks? None that I could find. Unusual skin markings? None I didn't have before. Three strikes.
Conclusion: In all probability, I wasn't abducted by aliens. There is strong evidence that I had a textbook case of sleep paralysis that night, which only incidentally remembled the pre-abduction scenario. The signs fit, coupled with my already acute sensory memory, polyconscious proclivities, and general interest in the weird and bizarre. I feel pretty confident in saying that it was one of the most unusual experiences I've ever had, and I actually wouldn't mind going through it again under controlled circumstances to explore it a bit further.
It was downright strange, though.
Incidentally.. it's "reverse engineered", you Roswell-gimps, not "back engineered"!
Here's a first for you - a worm that talks to you. The AV companies are calling it "Amus", and it reportedly hooks the Windows XP speech synthesis programme to recite a message in Turkish when it activates just after the bootup .wav plays. Soon afterward, Amus begins deleting .dll and .ini files, crippling Windows. Amus is, at this time, considered not terribly threatening.
Earlier tonight I dropped my car off at the garage to be worked on. Because it was after hours, I filled out the envelope/request form, checked off most of the usual tasks and scribbled another three or four into the notes section for good measure (I'm no mechanic so I tend to be cautious; one thing I like about my garage is that they don't charge you if you actually didn't need something you wrote down). I've been doing a lot of driving and moving heavy stuff around, and on the way back from DC last time I really started worrying about the odd noises that its engine has been making. Rather than risk a breakdown, I took it in to be worked on. Dataline was kind enough to drive me home from the garage, after which I showed her the Garden.
She's impressed. It's not a dump.
But seriously, she likes what I've done with the place.
Afterward I got my laundry put away, did the dishes, and threw out some socks that date back to junior high to make room in the drawer. Another workout completed the evening, which brings us up to the present time.
After I got up yesterday morning, I discovered that my mouth was full of blood. My gums bled while I was in the shower, though I didn't realise it until I started brushing my teeth. What a way to start the day.
I've got some thoughts on sleep paralysis kicking around in my forebrain from when I was down in DC last, I'll write them up soon.
On Saturday evening, an old friend of mine (Zard Biomatrix) from my BBS days visited the Garden, along with his wife, newborn daughter (well, three months old), and dog.
I don't get to see them very often, anymore. We used to hang out together a lot back in college, though graduation, jobs, and the other woes of adult life have placed a great deal of distance between us.
I miss 'em.
The event touched a cord deep within me.. I don't much like children. Never have. I'm a member of the Church of Euthanasia, in fact.
And yet, sitting there watching little Virginia, I felt something melt inside me. Something in my heart softened just a little, and began to leak. Some form of parental instinct awakened inside me, if only for a little bit.
Watching the world as I move through it each day, I feel drained. Drained, and fear and the tug of decay as the material world goes through its paces. I listen to horns honk, people curse at one another, and snap at each other for any number of reasons. I smell ashphalt and dirty concrete and diesel exhaust. I feel like I really don't belong there. That isn't my world.
Now, I feel hope for the human race. I feel like the next generation just may have something going for them. Something positive could happen in the world because of them. This world has a chance.
Today was another lazy one. After breakfast I lazed around for a while, enjoying the cool air, then did the dishes, put away the clothes that have piled up through the course of the week (while I have a laundry basket for stuff that needs to be washed, I do not have anything to hold clothing that can safely be reworn, so it winds up on the floor - even I have my glitches), rearranged some stuff on the bookshelves, read some more, remembered that I can use my Playstation as a CD player and listened to some of the CDs I picked up while in Maryland while exercising. It's a new feeling to me, having that much space to move around in for a workout. By the time I was done I was dripping with sweat and sprawled out on the floor cooling off. I think I can get three workouts in a week without any trouble and strengthen my cardiovascular system to the point it was at about a year ago - in short, downright amazing for someone who sits in front of a computer for eighteen hours a day, give or take.
I packed up a bunch of stuff to take back to my folks' place this evening, and after fighting with a shipping crate (which I had to slit apart with a knife to get it into my car) and loading my laundry into the car, I trucked it all back in plenty of time for dinner. Dinner consisted of spaghetti and meatballs; unfortunately, Dataline still doesn't make a real spaghetti sauce.
Ragu' is not a concentrate. It should not be diluted and cooked, it should just be cooked. It should not have the consistency of distilled water.
On the whole, however, everything went well. No problems. Laundry is done and ready to put away (tomorrow night). Mail has been picked up. Chequebook is ready to balance.
Dataline agrees with me that I will need a replacement laptop soon - sorry, Kabuki-sama, but I don't think that I can get more parts to repair you. Your model has been out of production for almost eight years now. Dataline says that she'll help me purchase a new laptop; I'm seriously considering the one at Sam's Club, but the preliminary research I did shows that it might not be worth picking up due to Windows-specific integrated hardware (bleh - curses and a pox upon the designers of such abominations). I'm going to listen to my voice memo again and see if I recorded the specific model number. If I did, I'll do a more thorough search and if the results are promising, I'll pick it up. I'll have to pay her back, but I think I can manage a payment every other paycheque or so, depending on how things go this week.
I say "this week" because I'll be taking my car in for maintenance some time this week. It's a few hundred miles overdue, and some of the noises I've been hearing in the engine compartment (corroborated by passengers, incidentally) have me wondering. Not worrying, but wondering, and I'd like to know for sure what's going on. I'm afraid that it'll be a large sum to get this work done. However, I'd rather pay a few hundred now for maintenance rather than a few thousand later for repairs (or worse, a new car).
This is by far the coolest thing I've heard about in years
That's downright cool, guys. Keep up the good work. This, on the other hand, isn't cool.
Maybe North Korea wasn't talking through its hat after all. Let's see.. what happened today? A better place to start, I think, would be "What didn't happen today?" My blood pressure didn't go through the roof. I wasn't nagged to go
shopping. I didn't have to field questions about what I was doing so that I
would have to change my plans. I got up, took a shower, and made breakfast. Homestyle Farms vegetarian
bacon isn't too bad, but doesn't really look natural, either. It also burns
easily - next time I'll keep track of how long it's on the stove rather than
eyeballing it. I read while I ate breakfast, then sorted my INWO cards to put
them back into the binder after all these years (at least two). Later, I went
out to price a new bed ($250us for a mattress and boxed spring, $34us for a
bedframe) and a new laptop ($1000us from Averatec, via Sam's Club), and file
cabinet ($109us for a four-drawer steel cabinet, $14us for a lock). Then I
stopped off at the supermarket to get food for the week to come and to make my
patented vegetarian Edward S. Teller chili. After I got home I finished sorting my INWO cards and then put everything
together to make chili. Right now I'm laying on the floor, digesting dinner and
the second pot of coffee of the day, feeling like the proverbian million bucks.
I might get dressed up again and go prowling around a little later tonight.
Welcome to the weekend, everyone. Work.. was work. Everyone's running around like mad, and we're all feeling
it to some extent. You can feel the connections between everyone vibrating like
strummed guitar strings, strongly yet finely. It's a classic example of the
fact that the higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength. Okay, so I'm reaching a bit. RF theory doesn't readily lend itself to
attempts at poetic thought. I think you get my drift, though. For some reason, the bus schedules have been really off kilter lately. I've
been getting in to work far later than normal after I moved out here, and on
occasion getting home later because the bus has just been running late..
unusually so. Granted, it doesn't take very long to get home, I just found it
odd, how the pattern's been warping. Maybe it's the end of the summer that's
doing it. People feel the seasons change, even if they're not consciously
aware of it. Summer is steadily turning into autumn; the days grow shorter and
the weather in Pittsburgh is steadily becoming more and more cool. Pretty soon,
the weather will grow more and more rainy, if this week is any indication.
I think we're going to be in for a rainy autumn this year. I made another stir fry for dinner tonight - chicken with enough vegetables
to hide the meat and egg noodles. Highly tasty. I love being able to cook
every night, I don't get to do so very often. It went well with freshly ground
coffee and the Fading Suns sourcebook.
There's something about cooking that I love that I can't quite put my finger on.
I think it's the act of making something by hand from scratch that I quite
enjoy. I've always loved to work with my hands, this is just another form of
doing so. I'm hoping to make chili tomorrow for the heck of it. This evening I decided to stretch my wings a bit, so I changed my clothes
after dinner (bondage pants with optical fibre, Hackerspotting t-shirt (thank
you, moloch.org), Converse, and leater
bracers) and headed out to wander around. My first stop was Half Price Books,
where I found a copy of The Professional (Golgo-13) for a song.
My next stop was Borders to nose around and see what's been going on. Aside
from a lot of new books, most of which didn't really interest me, I did spend
some time getting a sense of what's been going on. Life around there seems
pretty quiet for a Friday night. After that was a quick stop off to get stuff for breakfast tomorrow. I'm
thinking of having breakfast on the balcony, if the weather's nice. I spent some more time getting things together tonight after I got home. I
unpacked my alter and smudged the Garden with a sweetgrass braid (thanks, Lupa).
I really should put a few things away that I really don't use, if only to make
things a bit neater. I'll hook SAL-9000 up to the entertainment centre later
this weekend, I think. Citizens of the United States of America might want to read this. Soon. Gods, I love this movie.
It might be a B-movie, but it's a surprisingly good B-movie that pays homage to
the movie Alien, with a good dose of cyberpunk thrown into the mix (at
least one good hit, on top of listening to Gibson's audio version of
Neuromancer). No wonder that Paul Robb (formerly of InSoc and Think Tank (RIP)) sampled the hell out of it when he
did Skullbuggery back in 1995. Seriously, folks, rent it or catch it on
late night TV if you get the chance. I'm a little worried - Kabuki's power cell won't hold more than 85% of its
maximum charge even after sitting plugged in all night. I might have to hunt
for another replacement soon. I've sort of been considering getting a new
laptop but I don't have anywhere near the cash right now to do so. I really
should upgrade Leandra soon (she's almost five years overdue for it) but the
renfaire last weekend really hit me hard Kabuki's damaged keyboard is also
startig to hurt my wrists (and the bad 'n' key is really pissing me off). I'm hoping that Kabuki will hold up long enough for me to figure out what to
do. The renfaire was very not what I had expected. It took me a while to relax
and get into it, as most things do. My predecessor had been part of a small
faire years and years ago, so I had those memories to go on, but most of what I
knew about them was from talking to an aquaintance years ago.. most of what he
said was utter misinformation. It was a surprise, but a pleasant one, to be
sure. Lyssa and I got up early (by our standards) on Saturday to get ready and
wait for Steve and Lauren (friends of Lyssa's) to arrive. Lyssa dressed in some
of her belly dancing garb while I dug out my black linen shirt and pants to
wear. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten my cellphone, which left us in a bit of a
bind later in the morning while searching for Ellen and the rest of the crew who
had gone missing somewhere in the sprawling town that was the faire. I had
expected to be driving, which is why I was taking my time getting ready. But
that is now in the past... Steve and Lauren were unattired, though that was
fixed by the end of the day. The faire was packed by the time we got there,
though there was still a surprising amount of room for everyone. I think that
the area is permanantly set up for the faire, because some of the structures
were constructed around existing trees and rocks, and the floors took advantage
of the contours of the earth. The costuming there was nothing short of amazing. A lot of people spent a
lot of time cutting, sewing, and fitting their garb, and it showed. From the
most elaborate velvet formalwear to the simplest linen to boiled leather and
hammered copper armour, workmanship abound. I was very impressed. I say this knowing full well that one could purchase a lot of that stuff at
the faire if they had a mind to. Not to disparage the workmanship of the folks
vending there, mind you - the stuff on sale was just as impressive - but you
could tell who the hardcore faire-goers were: Their garb was tattered from wear,
the seams weren't perfectly straight, the buttons were scuffed up or cut by hand
from whatever they were made from... it goes both ways. I finally discovered where everyone gets those little brass medallions,
about the size of a US quarter. There was a booth there where some people were
using a Da Vinci coin striker to make them. A rather large weight is cranked
upward (I have no idea how much it weighs - I'd guess about forty pounds)
upward anywhere from two to six feet and then used to press a small coin between
two dies, imprinting both sides. Unable to resist, I had them make one for me
that has a compass rose on the front (oh, the irony) and a hexagram on the
reverse side. Lyssa had them make her a traveller's medallion, with a sigil for
the protection of travellers on the front and a compass rose on the reverse. Steve tried on his first kilt that day, and wore it the rest of the time we
were at the faire. He pronounced it the most comfortable thing he'd ever worn.
I told him... Lauren purchased a dress from the same vendor, a tan homespun
number that looked classy on her diminutive frame. Ever the odd one out, I
bought a matching pair of linen pants to replace my jeans with. They fit just
as well as the hip huggers I bought at Torrid the day before, and made the outfit (along with Lyssa's purple leather belt
and pouch). I might wind up wearing them to work one day, save for the fact
that they don't have any pockets. Lyssa, later that day, picked up a slit
sleeved blouse and bodice (black and gold, reversible) that looks amazing on
her. I guess it was a day for lots of changes of clothing. A lot of walking around was done that day, admiring the workmanship,
enjoying the weather, and talking. Hanging out. Spendin gtime with each other.
Thoroughly enjoyable. There's just something about standing around with good
friends eating lunch, even if it's just a crab cake and french fries (but what a
crab cake!).. oh, and a crossoint (sp?) ice cream sundae. And let's not forget
listening to the bands playing while drinking. By the bye, if any of you happen to come across mead called White Raven, buy
as much of it as you can - it's excellent. I don't know the name of the band we were watching that afternoon, but they
were amusing to watch and played to the crowd. When the inevitable drunken frat
boy in the back of the crowd began shouting "Freebird!" the band obliged by
playing Smoke on the Water... on bagpipes and flutes. I don't think that I've had such a good time in ages. The belly dancers were amazing to watch. They really had skill and excellent
muscle control. I've got some pictures in my camera that I'll put online (along
with all the others...) as soon as I get the Children moved over to my new digs.
By the end of the day we'd found the weaponsmith, and after much drooling over
blades, I finally decided to take the plunge and pick up a new staff - a six
foot black iron staff with a cobra's head at the top. It's now in the corner
of my Garden awaiting its first use. I also had someone at the leather dealer's shoppe (mmmm.. leather... wish I
had more cash) braid my hair with a leather thong and beads, something that I
enjoy very much but don't have much time for anymore. Now that I've got a rig
for it I'll be usig it more often, though... Still mostly incommuicado, even after this weekend. A shame, too, because
I have so much to talk about. As it turns out, MCI really did't need a
week to turn off the previous tenant's local loop, they had it done the day
after my landlord asked for it. Not only that, but roughly two hours after MCI
did their thing, Verizon did their thing
by hooking up my local loop.. all of this without telling me. I've had a phone line for over a week, and never knew it. <sigh> The Garden is shaping up very nicely.. I've thrown out a bunch of the crates
I had been using while moving, which freed up a lot of space. Thanks to a sale
at Officemax last week I picked up that
fifth bookcase for a song and after throwing out a box or two of stuff that I
have no use for any longer, I not only freed up space on the other bookcases but
floorspace and space in general (do I really need issues of the Linux Journal from 2002? No.) I still do
not have much in the way of furniture, but I hope to have that fixed by this
weekend. I've got a line in on a couch that I think will do the trick. I'm
also sorting through a lot of junk that I hadn't really wanted to take with me
but wound up doing so anyway. The floor space is simply heavenly - I can sprawl
out and not have any part of my body touching the folding chair, entertainment
centre, altar-yet-to-be-reconstructed, or anything else. It's been raining all day today, something that rather caught my by surprise.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - I love rain - I just hadn't exactly
expected it to really rain. I have little to no faith in meteorologists, so
when the weather does happen to coincide with a prediction, I find it strange.
For Labor Day weekend I drove down to see Lyssa in DC for the last hurrah for
the summer. Ye gods.. summer's over.. where the hell did it go?? I left work early to get ready for the drive down, and spent a good three
hours freaking out because I couldn't find my contact lenses, which put the
kibosh on getting on the road. No contacts, no sunglasses. No sunglasses, no
driving, because sunlight through my spectacles tends to refract a little too
much for comfort. As it turns out, I'd accidentally left them, all five pairs of them, back at
the old house along with some sunglasses in a shoebox. After explaining
everything over the phone to Lyssa, I picked them up and then hit the highway.
About two hours into the trip the highway turned into a parking lot, as the
state troopers blocked off a massive swath of highway running in both
directions. I honestly don't know how much was quarantined. I was hearing
rumours about a police chase that broke 100 MPH a few times headed in the
general direction of the disruption, so I hypothesise that it had something to
do with it. I also have't heard anything since then, so I can't speculate. At
any rate, they forced everyone to get off an exit early and take a detour that
caused a hell of a lot more problems than it solved, at least for me. Yep. I got lost. Horribly. Those of you playing the memory log drinking
game should chug at this time. I honestly don't know where in the hell I wound up. I was three hours off
course in a part of the state that seemed to consist of cornfields and bobwire.
I was half-expecting to come across Whitley Streiber and some of the Zeta Reticulans throwing an old-school renegade out there. Somehow, my cellphone
still had connectivity, and Lyssa was able to get me back onto the main
highway and on my way. By the time I got to DC it was 0100 on Saturday..
pretty pathetic when you consider that I left at 1800 the day before. Lys had dinner waiting for me when I got there, tasty pasta salad and a
simply amazing apple crisp that I still have fond memories of.. they, and
curling up for a night's sleep made it all worth it, though. More later, when I've got bandwidth. Congratulations to Silicon Rose on her engagement! This is going to take a while.. I'm using dialup, and it's taking ages to
not only delete the spam from two separate e-mail accounts, but trying to update
this memory log with a bad keyboard just isn't working. Is this a threat or a promise? I'm still alive. I still don't have steady net.access. MCI still hasn't
gotten off of its collective butt to disconnect the previous tenant's service
so I can have Verizon turn on my service. Idiots. How hard is it to change three lines of configs in a DCS-100??? Thank you, dialup. I'm on for a while tonight, thanks to a helpful neighbor whom I've assured
this is a local call for. Hey.. it beats climbing down into a maintenance pit
with a 7/16" nutdriver clenched in your teeth, wearing a bandolier of floppy
disks to jack in using a databeige line, right? Anyway, I'm catching up on my e-mail and writing this update using Kabuki.
I spoke to my landlord this morning - MCI
needs five days to disconnect the old phone service so Verizon can turn my local loop on. Come on, guys, how hard is it
to take an entry in COSMOS and have a technician edit a table in one of your
DMS-100's? So it's going to be until Friday until I can set things in motion. I also
need to get a fifth bookcase so I can finish unpacking. Somehow, I've got two
crates of books piled up that I can't do anything with until I get another
bookcase. I should go through said crates to figure out what I can get rid of,
if I was smart. I know for a fact that there are magazines that I really don't
need and should pitch to make room. I should also take the trash out that's
piled up since I moved in (which has wound up being quite a bit). I actually
made the time to do dishes tonight, something I'm rather pleased with. I need
to get a rack to put them on to dry, though. I'll put them away before I go to
bed this evening. Success. I've spent the past two days moving out of my old lab into a new flat, which
I've decided to call the Garden. A place to grow. Last night was my first good night of sleep in many, many months. Once I got
used to the new environment, out went the lights (so to speak) and into a deep
sleep I fell for seven hours straight. I woke up feeling like a million bucks. I don't have net.access yet, so I'll be out of touch for a few days yet. I
will try to check in once in a while to sweep out the spam, but until I get my
DSL connection transferred to the Garden, I'm going to be rather scarce for a
while. Hang in there, everyone, and I'll write about what's been going on when
I have time. For all of you who helped me move these past two days, you rock all known
sheep. Thank you from the bottoms of my hearts for all your assistance and
patience. I can't thank you enough. What a day. The morning was spent fighting a battle that I wish I didn't have to. There
are some things, however, that must be fought mano a mano, and there
can be only two outcomes: Victory and death. Well, maybe not death, but it was bloody frustrating. The afternoon, after the struggle that took up the better part of six hours,
was another struggle in and of itself, though one I ordinarily avoid if at all
possible. I cleaned. The apartment was, for all intents and purposes, bare. Empty. What better
time to clean? I loaded cleaning supplies, including a large number of rags,
into the back of my car along with Kabuki-sama and the vacuum cleaner. The new
carpet was swept, and I even got into the corners and along the baseboards.
Everything bolted to the walls (lightswitches, outlets, phone jacks, and even
the thermostat for the furnace) were cleaned until they shone. I even took the
vacuum's brush attachment to the air conditioning vents and the inside of the
furnace closet. The bedroom recieved the same treatment. I even swept the
closet, to be thorough. The kitchen-nook was wiped down and mopped, down to the
fridge's doors. The bathroom was mopped twice and wiped down as best I could.
I sat down for a while to talk to the representative the local spiders sent
out to greet me. We had a good conversation, but I think he's holding out for
something else in my deal - he refuses to leave the bathroom. I might have to
gently evict him so I can clean the tub tomorrow. Spiders can be stubborn sometimes. Dinner was hot sausage over pasta, something that Dataline's become quite
skilled at making. I didn't realise how hungry I was tonight - I pounded it
without even realising it, and followed it with a dish of ice cream (chocolate
fudge/brownie), something I try not to do. A cup of coffee later, and I was
ready to start phase two - moving stuff in. The first thing to be loaded into the car and hauled over was a fair whack
of my kitchen supplies. Earlier this afternoon, Dataline and I washed and
dried the kitchen kit I bought a few weeks ago. A lot of the stuff, like the
dishes and bowls, aren't all that sturdy but they will do the trick, at least
until I can get real plates and not this plastic stuff. The second and third
trips consisted of lots and lots of binders (notes of many kinds, from calculus
and linear algebra to hermetic philosophy and neurochemistry), crates and crates
of paperbacks and reference books, and some of my action figures and models. I
also hauled a load of groceries over to the apartment tonight, so I wouldn't
forget them (and because I had some spare room in the back seat). Most of the
stuff has already been unpacked and put away, but the rest of the living room
is full of crates. I hope to move the big stuff tomorrow morning. The biggest problem, though the most interesting one to solve, has to do with
taking control of the phone line, with the eventual goal of transferrring my
DSL line to the flat, so I can relocate the Children. The previous tenant of
my flat (that seems so weird a thing to say, "my flat") had her local phone
service through MCI. My local and LD packages
are through Verizon. The previous tenant
changed her name and number and skipped out without having her service turned
off, so Verizon can't get me set up until MCI shuts off the original tenant's
service. They won't do that until my landlord tells them to, and gives the old
tenant's name (which she changed before moving out), address (no sweat), and
phone number (which my landlord didn't have). I didn't have the number, either,
but I was able to get it. Into my supply closet I went before trucking out to
the new flat and out came my old lineman's test set, picked up for a song from
someone at the local flea market who had no idea what it was or what it was used
for. When I got to my flat, I used my multitool to remove one of the phone
jacks and clip in to the wires. A few phone calls later, and I had the old
tenant's (phone) number. I left a message for my landlord (who was at a wedding
tonight) along with the number and now it's just a waiting game. A lot of you out there are saying, "Big deal. That's child's play." Well, it is child's play, once you know how to do it. I won't dispute that.
What I am saying is that sometimes the shadiest of skills sometimes have a
legitimate use sometimes. Everything has multiple uses. The FBI is ready to move on suspected spies for Israel within the Pentagon itself. The hell of it is, they announced it to the media. What undercover
operatives wouldn't pull a fade after hearing about this?? Really, now.. unless
the FBI's already nabbed them, the guys they're after are probably out of the
country and heading for safe territory in a different country. I wonder if this
has anything to do with the PROMIS scandal of a few years ago... Oh, for crying out loud.. Playboy magazine's centerfold next month will be
Bloodrayne. Yes, the same Bloodrayne from the video game. Now, if
it was Aya Brea (from Parasite Eve), then I might be interested. The Net didn't come to a flaming end. No surprise, that.
Heh.
Bladerunner has been voted the #1 sci-fi movie of all time.
Nothing more need be said, I think.
Today was another busy day of writing documentation and turning hastily scribbled notes and history files into usable information. SANs still puzzle me.
Time to find a good book or two on the subject, I think.
I picked up the keys to my new apartment tonight. It's mine, it's all mine.. I can move in now. No longer am I a guest or a curious customer, that is my home now. It feels subtly different, like I am no longer an intruder, but that I am supposed to be there, now. After I got my key and tried it out I couldn't resist walking into my new home. Something inside me was telling me not to, but I couldn't think of a reason to not do so - why should I not survey my haven? Really, now...
The power, gas, and water are on. I just have to get the power and gas reassigned to my name. Water and sewage are part of the rent.
I don't know how long it'll take to get the phone line going. Some folks have told me that it could be as long as a week before Verizon turns the POTS service on. This might cramp the DSL line a bit, but I'll manage. First order of business: Make phone calls to get things set up.
Second order of business: Give the place a lick and a promise. Even though it's just been redone, I'd still like to run the sweeper, wipe the walls down a bit, clean the kitchen and the fridge, and generally do a thorough job to get things off on the right foot. It's hard to do a really thorough cleaning when there's furniture all over the place.
Third order of business: Move some of the smaller boxes over to the flat so I can actually move around at the Lab. I can't pack anymore because I can't reach anything else that can be packed. The bookshelves are empty and their contents are all boxed up. My CDs and DVDs are packed up in their own crates. I managed to get a few things off of my workbench, but at this point in time the walls are completely blocked off with pile after pile of boxes. I'm going to have to truck stuff out there tomorrow night just to make room to pack more things up.
Let's rock.
Oh, ye gods.. this is the first Iron Chef fanfic/parodyfic I've ever found. Iron Chef - Long Pig Battle. It's actually extremely funny, if a bit macabre.
Happy thirteenth birthday Linux!
The bookcases are empty. I started packing some of the larger stuff on my altar away. Some of the bags are in the garage now, freeing up floor space, so I can actually move around again. The aforementioned boxes are stacked three high next to bookcase #3, in front of the Lab's WAP and switch. I think I'm going to start in on the music tomorrow, packing away the CDs and DVDs. Maybe I'll sort through the videocassettes to see what I'll be bringing with me. I don't have a whole lot of room for them, so I'll have to pick and choose.
Finished rewatching the last part of X: The Movie tonight. Yep, it's still as bad as it was before.
My body's hormones are readjusting themselves again - I'm starting to get the irritability and mood swings from before.
I forgot what it was like to have a persistent current of "I want to cry" in the top of my mind all the time.
Here's an interview with Craig Newmark of the website craigslist.com. I had no idea that he was a Gibson fan... highly nifty.
Oh, for Kibo's sake.. selling Gmail invites on eBay?
IMPENDING DEATH OF THE NET! IMPENDING DEATH OF THE NEAT!
Pfeah.
Aleksandr Gostev of Kaspersky was misquoted in the media that net.terrorists will try to take down the Net tomorrow. I say misquoted because his exact words were mangled and only the good stuff was put into the articles. eWeek's calling it an electronic jyhad on the horizon that is supposed to tie in somehow with the flaws found in the SHA-0 and MD-5 message digest algorithms.
And here I was thinking that I haven't listened to a little old-school Psykosonik in a while...
Note to the MPAA: I downloaded that .mp3 from the old Psykosonik website years ago. Blame them for putting it up, not me.
Laundry's almost done. I'm going to pull it out of the dryer tomorrow and start folding and packing it away tomorrow night.
Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!
We miss you, Mr. Thornley.