bytex64.net

I made a realization today. BLOCKQUOTE POWERS ACTIVATE!

It is better to be seen as crazy than weak.

I mean, sometimes chicks dig crazy. Chicks never dig weak. Being crazy is a surefire way to get noticed, although not always by the people you want. For example, spray-painting "I ♥ KAREN" on the side of the Union is probably not the best kind of crazy, unless you plan on mailing her sonnets from a prison cell.

James just got his shiny new 12" Powerbook. Right now he's a bit excited about the F11 key:

James: they jump form the path of hteri master!, weee i own you! oph, and back again, jsut kidding, NOW JUMP

I can't make this stuff up.

So I went home for my Mom's birthday yesterday, and my Dad pulls me aside.

Dad: Did anyone tell you what I got mom for her birthday?
Me: No.
Dad: I got her an Acura.
Me: ... *blink* *blink*. *stunned silence*
Danielle: They always have the same reaction...

Yes, my Dad got my mom a freaking car. A '99 Acura RL. It's nice, too. 3.2L VTEC V6. Going 90, it feels like you're going 40. I'm sure it would feel that way at 120, too, but Mom stopped me. I did finally get to try one of those manumatic shifters, though. It's sluggish, doesn't sync revs when downshifting, and there's only four gears to play with. It's nothing to write home about. I got to experience the VTEC kick-in, too. It's definetly noticeable. At about 4000 RPM, the engine gets an amphetamine kick, going from smooth and quiet to lively and... quiet. You never really hear the engine. Or the outside world for that matter. The entire car is designed to make you oblivious to the world around you. It has the kind of effortless speed that could get you in big trouble with the law.

And Jen wants me to go shopping with her as her guide in buying a new laptop. *sigh*. Here we go again. I should have run when I had the chance. "Yeah, uh, your laptop is fine, it's, uh, just a bit tired. Let it rest, and try again tomorrow. If you need me, I'll be in Mexico." Oh, well. I need a wireless router, anyway.

Ugh, it's been one of those days. And I'm only three hours into it. I get up, tired, go to class, the teacher yells at us for not doing our readings. I did half of it. In my defense, the stuff was impenetrably dull. The first reading was a paper written back in '97 about information technology. I tried to take it seriously, but after it used "desktop," "desk-top," and "desk top" within the same paper, meaning the same thing, I sort of stopped caring. That, and they not only mentioned Gopher and Archie, but misspelled Veronica as "Verocia." Stuff like that isn't worth reading.

I'd like to apologize to James for setting him up the info-bomb the other day. I had used stalkernet to look up information on a girl he mentioned on his blog. While the information was readily available to both of us, it was wrong of me to dump it on him like that. Must... use... powers... for... good.

But in other news, there's finally a girl with glasses in my class. She just joined, I guess. She's young, though. They're all young. I guess that's what I get for joining a sophomore class.

Oh, yeah, other good news. I've got my probation meeting tonight. At least it's at a different location this time. If you're bored, come to 100 MSEB at 6 and help me pass the time.

That's what last night was like. It was a mad grab for some sort of culinary greatness in the same way that a child climbs a tree, tries to grab the moon, then falls and breaks his collarbone. Ok, we'll start from the beginning.

Yan had picked up some chicken thighs from god knows where for the bargain price of $0.99/lb. Now fast forward to three days after the expiration date. Yan needs these things cooked now, so we decide to barbecue them on the grill at my place. Yan gets back at 8, it takes 20 minutes to walk back to my place, and 40 minutes to figure out that the grill isn't working. The guests were told to arrive at 9. Failing the grill, we rush back with the raw chicken in a bag full of barbecue sauce and cook it in the oven while our guests wait.

They wind up waiting further, since the first batch was just barely cooked. The second batch came out great. At about 10:30. So the food was a wash. At least we had a chance to get everyone together. Even Kan had time to come over. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about Jen's hard drive.

So Jen calls me up the other day, saying that her computer won't boot. I stop by to take a look at it, and as we're heading up to the apartment, she mentions, "Oh, I spilled a little bit of water on it, too." It's this kind of vital information that nobody ever mentions up-front. "Oh, uh, my keyboard stopped working, could you come look at it?" they'll say. Later, when you enter the room, they'll say, "Oh, I spilled some Diet Coke on it, do you think that might have something to do with it?" Uh, yeah, maybe, just a lot. It's like the kid trying to avoid the monster under the bed by closing his eyes and hiding under the covers. "Maybe if I don't mention that I've saturated the device with corn syrup and water, then maybe the problem won't be my fault."

Anyway, long story short, the drive was a little soaked, so we left it to dry out for a day, but it turned out to be permanently fried. She's running on Knoppix 3.9 right now, and is shopping for a new laptop. Right now, I think she's swaying towards a shiny new Powerbook (she just got an iPod). I've at least warned her away from buying another HP. I've got to figure out exactly how the frick wpa_supplicant works, too.

Yan and I have decided that we must have an Iron Chef throwdown at some point. Look forward to that. :)

Ah, Monday. The worst day of the week. At the robot meeting (where we spent several hours concocting a small letter to potential sponsors), Jason asked, "If there were another day between Sunday and Monday, what would it be called?" I couldn't think of anything at the time, but now I think they should call it Wootitsnotmonday.

My boss is gone for the day, handling things from home. Of course, being the beginning of the semester, everyone is stressed because everything's falling apart. Toner is empty, computers are locking up, projectors are on the fritz, and on top of it, things are shoved out in the hall because we're getting the building re-wired. This also involves a masonry drill that's none too pleasing on the ears.

My surprise, however, was that my two 15" monitors that sit on either sides of my 17" monitor have been replaced by two very nice 17" Hitachi flat-screen CRTs. One of them is reserved for computer testing, but the other two are now a very nice two-screen Xinerama display. On a side note, if you need a nice-looking background for your dual-monitor setup, check out Blatte's Backgrounds. It's ten billion pixels of widescreen goodness. I've got Waveform on my desktop right now, and it's frickin' sweet.

Did you play with Play-Doh as a kid? We've got some at work, as a stress-reliever. Believe me, it works. Apparently the stuff has borax and processed petroleum products in it and is still somehow non-toxic. It smells good, too.

I need a chair for my desk. I've been standing and typing for almost a week, now. I think I'm going to make one last attempt at finding one lying around town, then head to the stores. No, fuck that. I won't stand for paying $100 for a chair. Well, actually, I guess I'll stand for it either way. :)

I spent tonight making marshmallow guns with James. But before that I went to a dinner party at Erickson's and had a great time. Our conversations covered such varied topics as NASA's new orbital launch vehicle, and Microsoft Plastic Dentist. Much food, fun, and boxed wine was had. Not necessarily in that order.

Afterwards, James and I retired to my place, watched Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, and clomped down to the basement to craft some PVC pwnage. For those who have not seen them, a marshmallow gun is nothing more than a blowgun with a crook in it. Here, see for yourself. Apparently the crook creates some sort of airlock, which allows some pressure to build up behind the marshmallow. Or maybe not. I'm a CS major, what do I know?

We made three guns. James had already made the standard model you saw above. He made a smaller, "derringer" type, and a strange-looking "sheep-horn" type, which was a loop of pipe, looking something like a horn. I got a "rifle" style, which was the basic model without the foregrip and a longer barrel. Later, James made an addition to the derringer that turned it into the normal model. Unfortunately, we had all these guns, but no marshmallows, so we headed to Meijer.

We had wanted to have a marshmallow fight in the store, but I decided against it, considering that I'd like to return to the store at some point. We bought a one pound bag of marshmallows, and tested out the guns in the parking lot. After a while, a guy came out and told us to leave. The conversation went something like this:

Guy: You're making a mess. Leave.
Us: Ok.

But should have gone something like this:

Guy: You're making a mess. Leave.
Me: You cannot KNOW what marshmallow DOOM I shall unleash upon your parking lot, silly mortal!
James: Yes, your silly store has now incurred the wrath of the marshmallow elite! Prepare yourselves for a MAELSTROM of high-velocity puffed sugar and gelatin!

*both of us shoot him with marshmallows, incapacitating him*
Us: MARSHMALLOWNED!

We tried to test them back at the house, but it was too dark to see. *shrug*. From the testing at Meijer, the long barrel does help a lot. My rifle was consistently outdistancing both of James' guns. Unfortunately, beyond about 15 feet, the accuracy drops off. A lot. Much like a student walking home after a night out at the bars, marshmallows apparently have their own idea of a straight line.

Oh, well. There shall be robot mayhem tomorrow. Oh, yes. Such mayhem. If we can get the darn thing to run. :)

So I got a curious email today. "Engineering Academic Probation Meeting." It's not curious because of its content, I'm quite familiar with the academic probation rigamarole. It's curious because, well, I wasn't expecting it. I did well spring semester, got a 3.0, which in my book was freaking outstanding, considering I was taking junior-level ECE courses and an Advanced Comp. "Curious," I thought. "Did they forget to take me off the list?" I figured I'd check banner to get to the bottom of this.

Oh, right. I'd forgotten about summer session. It turns out I got a C- in that Mythology class I took. A C- nets you 1.67 grade points. Which means I got a 1.67 GPA for the "semester." So, due to a single class, I'm now on academic probation for the third time.

I'm seriously considering just raising my hand during the meeting and saying, "Sir, I've been through this twice already, can I go home?" If nothing else, it'll get a laugh.

So I'm in the considerably hillier town of Peoria tonight. I'm visiting Mike at his new place, which is, I guess you'd say, "grown up." He's got a nice comfy couch, a coffee table with matching end tables, and not a string of blue decorative lights to be found. He still has crap lying everywhere, though.

While Mike was at work Chrissy and I ate at the Olive Garden (still overpriced, but in fairness, our waiter was helpful, cheerful, and entertaining). Afterwards we tried to catch a movie, but arrived too late. Instead, I taught her how to drive a manual transmision in a nearby parking lot. She picked it up pretty quickly, after she learned exactly what "slowly" meant. Yes, she stalled it the first time. Everyone stalls it the first time. She did better than Mike, though. Mike only got to second gear. Chrissy got to third. That's like, 25 miles per hour. My car isn't exactly the best car to learn on, though. It's a bit severe.

So I'm going to go to sleep. On an air mattress. 'night.

I'd checked out my graduation status online earlier, but it warned me that I should go see my advisor for the final word. Well, my advisor referred me to the advising office, and the advising office sent me to Steve Herzog's office. He pulled up a website, which looked strangely familiar, and said I was all cleared to go. It looked familiar because it was the same site I'd used to check my status a couple of weeks ago.

Bollocks. If I'd have known that, I would have stayed home.

So Chrissy is here for the night. She hung out with one of her friends for most of the day, so we didn't get to do anything that fun. Still, it's nice just to see her and talk with her. We did have an awesome dinner. Grilled hamburgers, with pickled peppers from the farm (Thanks, Mom, they were outstanding!). We're leaving for Peoria tomorrow, so I'll finally get to see Mike's place.

I've got to get to bed. I'll have a full report tomorrow about how many, what kind, and the relative hotness of all the librarian chicks in my class. :)

I was reading a post on Nancy's blog, and she used the word 'misanthropic.' I'd forgotten exactly what it meant, so I looked it up.

$ dict misanthropic
...
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  misanthropic
       adj 1: believing the worst of human nature and motives; having a
              sneering disbelief in e.g. selflessness of others
              [syn: {cynical}, {misanthropical}]
       2: hating mankind in general [syn: {misanthropical}]

Hmm. Wow. Yeah, that describes me pretty well. If, in the future, you are pressed to find words to describe me, please try and remember 'misanthropic.' It fits me to a tee.

Not that I hate all humans. I'm quite fond of a handful of them. The key phrase is "mankind in general." I'm just not a big fan of the human race. It reminds me of a quote that may or may not be true.

Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

The buzz in the tech world right now is Google Talk. It doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's IM with voice chat. Companies have been peddling this dog and pony show for years. The interesting part is that they're promoting Jabber for the job. Even using Jabber isn't revolutionary. It's been around for years. The really interesting part is that now there's a major player behind Jabber, and maybe more than two other people I know will use it. If I can't convince my friends that Jabber is a good idea, maybe Google can. :)

Google is also committed to keeping the whole system open, so that you have the choice of provider, client, and platform. I'm just about ready to ditch AIM, and tell all my friends to get a Jabber client if they want to talk with me. I'm really sick of AIM, and I don't think I need to explain why. I don't even use the official client, and I understand that's not a final version, but stuff like that is just stupid.

Maybe I'm not misanthropic. Maybe I just hate stupid people. Of course, if everyone is stupid, isn't that really the same thing? :)

I finally saw Sin City last night. I was lucky enough to have read one of the comics beforehand, and I have to say that the movie was an outstanding adaptation from the comics. The black and white contrast that made the comic stand out came out perfectly in the movie. And, well, y'know... Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. How could it not be awesome?

And I'm not sure yet, but I may have James beat with his Art for Public Spaces. I'm taking "Info Technology and Orgs" for my last social science credit. That's right. A Library Science course. I'm going to be knee deep in future librarian babes. Well, OK, probably not, but a guy can dream, right?

I'm building a desk out of 1½" PVC pipe. The whole thing came out to just under $30, since I already had the boards for the top. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of pipe I'd need. Who knew 40 feet isn't enough to make a desk?

And in closing, ponder this: Did I really just end every paragraph with a question?

Yan: I'll see ya' bright and early.
Me: Ya.
Yan: And if I don't, I guess I'll have to break down your door.