I have a slight problem where Debian dumps me to an "oh shit" shell (what's the real name for that thing?) because it can't find /dev/hda.  Everything is on /dev/hde, and it knows this, yet one step during bootup is looking for /dev/hda.  I can make symbolic links for it and it works fine and everything, but they never stay.. so I have to do this on every bootup.  There must be some permanent solution. 

The differences between Debian and Ubuntu are amazing.  I find that even if I chose to install all the extra Debian things I still had to do some work to get the system useable.  Ubuntu, despite being based on Debian, just works.  Then again, so did SUSE for the most part.

I uploaded photos of the Delta II rocket launch to Facebook.  They'll find their way here eventually, and when they do they'll be in their full 2592x1944 resolution, not the crap by crap res that Facebook scales them too.  Not that it matters much, though..  The shots didn't really come out too well. 

In other news, I added about eight hours of play time to my KOTOR save.  I have become so dark sided that on my character sheet I don't have just have a red glow behind me, I have a red glow that sort of explodes into a fiery.. thing.  Black smoke all over the bottom and these hot ember like particles floating up.  It's neat.  I wonder what it looks like when you become just as light sided.

My car died on me when I was on my way to pick up Dad from the Chevy dealership.  Wouldn't start until after Brian came to get me and we had picked up Dad.  Thankfully a nice couple helped me push it into the Speedway at Riverland and Van Dyke.  It died in the left turn lane JUST before the Riverland driveway.  Started up just fine for Dad on his first try and gave us no more problems.  He's borrowing my car for the day tomorrow because apparently the van has this big electrical problem and will be at the dealership all day.  I hope my car doesn't give us anymore shit.

I just had to make a change to the pipe link plugin..  The regular expression was using \w to catch alphanumeric characters.  "/" is not alphanumeric.  A quick search on Google revealed that \W will catch nonalphanumerics.  Just copy and paste what I had..  change one set of \w's to \W's and all is good. 

Elyse got me to sign up to anonidate D: There are a few females in the Sterling Heights area, but I suspect most of them of being traps.  I found two in the entire Chicago area.  Not that I would really want to get to know a female /b/tard anyway...  That would be extremely weird...

I am slowly learning the language of Quake III shaders...

At least I made it through my entire shift at work today.  Had energy this time.  The new managers (three of them) officially started at the Forum as of Friday.  I thought there were a lot of changes before...  There are going to be a shitton now.  Sam stopped making usher gameplans for some reason.  She asked if I made tonight's, I said yes, she enthusiastically approved.  Whenever I see Kevin on the schedule, my default action is to have him be the lead in a section if there are not enough leads.  However, Holly, Kristy, and Adam also applied for promotion.  I have yet to see Holly actually own a section, so I gave A section to her.  I left shortly after she got there, but I have faith in her. 

I was so out of it at work today.  I had the energy... but not the focus.  It was weird.  I disliked it. 

I am off until Thursday.  When I first saw that, I was upset because I need the hours.  However, with this sickness that is having fun with me, I need the downtime.  I think I may stay at Dad's for the next week as well, just to recooperate...

I have had the chills for the past five hours, now this blanket is suddenly too warm for me.

I wish I brought my Wii over, I need to play some good old Resident Evil 4. 

I have installed MythTV on Din!  I just need to acquire my TV card from Jason and figure out why the hell the MySQL server is giving me such problems.  I really like the idea of having a DVR at school next semester.  Imagine never missing an episode of Stargate: Atlantis or The Office because I am at dinner or hanging out with friends or, god forbid, studying.  Corey declared love to me because this will allow him to get NCIS as soon as it airs, rather than torrenting it and waiting hours, sometimes days.  Is it bad form to declare on your public web journal that you or someone you know torrents TV shows (that have not yet been released otherwise)?  If I get a letter from any major TV networks or the MPAA, I will be sure to inform everyone.

The earphones I got with my Sansa c240 are surprisingly decent when plugged into my computer.  Sure, they are not my big-ass amazing headphones, but they are portable and easy. 

I talked with Alyssa about things..  with Linda about things.. with Nicole about things..  I was antisocial for the majority of Brian's grad party today (hence how I talked with those three), due to being sick.  Dad ordered two ice cream cakes because the one that he got for my graduation party disappeared in no time.  The second one is sitting, cut up (it is huge) in his fridge because no one touched it.  There were FAR less people at Brian's grad party than mine.  Oddly, I have always assumed Brian to have more friends than I.  Friends outside of our shared friend group, that is. 

I find myself having a hard time listening to Rammstein these days..  If I need something heavy, I opt for the Dragonforce and just ignore the lyrics (which are surprisingly lifting and upbeat).  Corey recommends Nickelback or Metallica, but I have a severe lack of both bands' music.  Lost Prophets is usually pretty good, too.  If I am feeling especially emo.

Speaking of Din..  She is finally up and running.  Almost perfectly.  There is only one minor problem: I am having a hard time trying to get Samba to allow network users to write to the dump folder.  It worked great last time.  I am using the same configuration as last time...  I am not sure what is going on, just have to fiddle with it a bit more.  Everything else is great.  Web server is up and running.  Quake III server exists.  I am enjoying this.

At least I don't feel like I have to puke...

I ordered an IDE controller card from Newegg before trying the second drive.  Let's hope it helps...  I think it's just gonna be a waste of money...

In other news, I got my sky and liquid shaders working in GtkRadiant.  Natural lighting all around.

So I was wrong about everything working on Din now.  The 120GB still has problems!  At least the BIOS correctly displays the size, it just now hangs at "Verifying DMI pool data.."  As Jason said, "pool's closed."  Not exactly what I expected...  The harddrive limit for older motherboards is 137GB.  I have a 17GB difference in my favor, here!  I am trying to update the BIOS anyway, but the flashing program keeps freezing (thankfully rebooting it doesn't kill the BIOS).  This is bothersome.

Raul has some neat music on this CD.  Follow Me by Uncle Cracker.  Have not heard this song in forever.  And, of course, The Safety Dance.

"In my experience, one of the secrets to being happy (and, I suspect, successful) in life is to never ever take yourself seriously." -Jeph (Questionable Content) -- Mr. Landers said something similar.  I think he actually said it when I had him for tenth grade history as well as The Law in senior year.  It really is true.  I have started to care less and less about the silly little things I do and have just accepted that that is who I am.  I notice that I am less nervous when meeting new people and that I am more free around people I do know.  So I make a fool of myself, whatever.  I laugh at myself all the time.  It is a good feeling. 

This quote has been sitting as the title of a draft post forever.  I have a few other quotes up there as well.  My personal favorite would have to be:
"It is hard to get a lady to evaluate to true." -Pintsize (anthropomorphic PC in Questionable Content)

I had big plans for Din, damnit.  Why am I running into so many problems?  At least Debian gave me very little trouble after installing Brian's stuff.

Why does Gtkradiant refuse to use Quake III's sky shaders (Nexuiz's work fine, by comparison)!

There is a singular draft post that I guard with my life, for some reason.  I update it arbitrarily with important things.  I have no intentions of ever posting this, so I always hit "save" instead of "publish."  Because of the contents, I always reload my main page about.. five times just to make that it was indeed not posted.  Sometimes I do not understand myself.

So now that I have made my decision (it was really decision1, which, in turn, made decision0 (call me dumb, call me hopeless) a whole lot easier to make), I am mostly going to try to just float through the summer, trying to earn as much money as possible and just generally have as much fun as possible (we shall see how well both of those go, though). 

Din is up and running using Brian's old hardware.  The new stuff should be here tomorrow or so.  It was in Baldwin Park, California on Friday, when the order was placed, and is now in Louisville, Kentucky (where it has been sitting since I last checked Saturday).  Why is it that I always seem to order things from Newegg just before the weekend?  Had a little bit of trouble getting X to start again, just had to download and install the nvidia drivers, which was kind of tricky thanks to a few of the Debian repositories not being enabled.  I got that working, so now the graphical display runs a LOT smoother than it used to, thanks to Brian's old GeForce FX 5200 (like it will ever be needed, anyway, headless and what-not).  Everything that I need works, but it sure would be nice to get the thing out of dependency hell.  Apparently I have the front harddrive light connector flipped around.  Din is also now equipped with a second ethernet card AND a shitty sound blaster that...  I do not ever remember Brian using.  I just need to find my old TV card and I could install MythTV on this thing. 

I open the theatre in two and a half hours.  I think the LAN Party kind of fixed my sleeping schedule: I got up on my own at six-twenty. 

My head is fuzzy.

Breakfast time.

Oh, and get my head shaved.

My day started at about two or three in the afternoon.  I got up for...  some reason.  I do not know.  I dicked around on the computer for a bit before showering and picking up David.  We stopped off at Andrew's really quickly, where Brian already had his computer for some pre-LAN+no-more-school fun.  Talked with Brian about computer stuff and placed an order on Newegg for a pretty decent combo.  Din will yet live, thanks to Brian's old hardware (though the MicroATX board that Brian will be getting would be GREAT for Din).  Took Brian to the MST building for his robotics (?) banquet, then came home, ate dinner (cheesy hot dogs!), and got to work a minute early (whoo!). 

Work was... slow.  I forgot to see how many tickets we sold, but it was... dead.  Dead, as in, we probably did only four or five thousand people.  I guess the next big weekend will be Harry Potter weekend.  Possibly Die Hard... maybe.

Because it was slow, I mostly dicked around with Christian all night.  It was fun.  Got off around two-thirty...  I brought my mp3 player, but I really should have brought my DS.  There's still a few GBA and DS games I need to finish... 

Came home, got three e-mails saying that my newegg.com order existed, that my card was charged, and that the order was shipped.  Estimated time of arrival: Wednesday.

Had a... good conversation with Linda.  Generally there is not much said between us...  But not tonight (this morning, ergh).  It was cool.  She, um, has seen the pictures of me with the goldfish in my mouth...  :oops:

The LAN is in a mere seven hours...  and I cannot go to sleep.  I was dead tired about three hours into my shift (odd, because I had only woken up six hours before), but now...  I am wide awake.  Meh.  Just drink a lot of Bawls, maybe grab some Cocaine (an energy drink, I swear to god.  Kevin had some before work sometime last week...  He was... energetic, to say the least), to stay up for the LAN.  Apparently the Sunoco at Mound and 19 sells 'em.

My mp3 player has the oddest radio tuner.  It gets great signal just a few feet from the ceiling fan (coming from the hallway; and a real ceiling fan, as in.. in the ceiling, pulls air in from the windows and up through the attic) and then just a few more steps and it is static.  Great in front of the fridge.  Horrible in front of the bathroom sink.  Pretty good by the big tree in the backyard.  Not so great near the clothes-line pole just a few feet from the tree.

I am extremely excited about the LAN...  nervous about becoming bald...  excited about Din...  and pretty content with giving up.  I believe that I need to make one more final effort, to see if I really should give up, but...  I am slowly finding happy again.  And giving up will help.  Moving on, I believe it is called (I wonder who will take this what way).

89X has so many freaking forty-minute "x-blocks" at night / in the morning.  It is pretty nice.

In the meantime, I will probably be working a bit more on Quake III mapping or something. 

I forgot how slow the thing was.  Somebody decided to put Windows XP on it at some point...  oops.  It is now runing the latest stable release of Debian and will become a file server next semester.  I now have a use for my Playstation's old 120GB harddrive (the computer only had a 4GB drive in it!).

My plan is to eventually fashion the thing a makeshift case that is easier to hide away than its current case (granted, AndrAIa's case is just a tad bigger all around).  Only problem I forsee is that the ethernet adapter is a PCI card rather than being on the motherboard itself.  There goes the slim factor that I was hoping for.

Legos.

Installing Debian went well, used the netinstall disc.  Doing things in Gnome was painful.  I am sure there are graphics drivers somewhere out there for an onboard SiS 750 (?) graphics chip, but this thing is going to be headless most (all) of the time.  All it needs is some sweet (X over-) SSH lovin'.

For some reason, whenever I edit /etc/motd and reboot, Debian replaces it with the default.  I never had that problem under Ubuntu... 

I got Samba up and running.  Took a few hours to get it to accept Windows clients as guests, but now it is all done.  There is a folder for people to dump things into and a folder for people to steal things out of.  I figure that I deserve something in return for sharing a bunch of shit, so all I ask is that people drop things in the dump folder every now and then.  It is fair.

I christened the box "Din," after the fire goddess from the Zelda series of video games, despite the fact that I think of the box more as a male...  (It only seems fair, really.  Andy is female, Din is her counterpart.  Or they are lesbians.  I like that idea too.)

I need to get another harddrive to stick in the thing, I am going to run out of space fast if I put everything on it that I would like to share.  I wonder how cheap a half-terebyte harddrive is these days... 

Din is also running an HTTP server and FTP server.  You know, for when you are not on the same network but may still need something.  This will be fun.  I enjoy playing with this machine.  Installing Hamachi on this thing would be a good idea too.  Maybe a command-line torrent program, even!  Azureus runs command-line.  Hmm...

Sometimes I wonder if I get too excited about computers.  Then I get distracted trying to figure something out (like finding out that http://din points to /var/www on the actual box).

Grr.  Sleep is required.  Playing with computers until three-fifty (easily twelve hours of my day) does not make work at eleven-fifteen easy.

I promise that this thing will run a dedicated Quake III server next semester.