sugardeath

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be lookin’ for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross
even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I’ve been looking for
In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the valley of fear
To a river so deep
I’ve been searching for something
Taken out of my soul
Something I’d never lose
Something somebody stole
I don’t know why I go walking at night
But now I’m tired and I don’t want to walk anymore
I hope it doesn’t take the rest of my life
Until I find what it is I’ve been looking for

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To the river so deep
I know I’m searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night

I’m not sure about a life after this
God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man
Baptized by the fire, I wade into the river
That is runnin’ to the promised land

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the desert of truth
To the river so deep
We all end in the ocean
We all start in the streams
We’re all carried along
By the river of dreams
In the middle of the night

I don’t do lyrics. Why am I doing lyrics?

The Taiwanese kids are surprisingly good at basketball. My arm is scratched to hell from trying to fish the volleyball out from the canopy of a fucking thorn tree. Sat atop some taller girl’s shoulders (musta been taller than Casey). I counted at least sixteen scratches on my left arm and hand and a puncture in the palm (thankfully nothing broke off in me, unlike that poor kid… like half an inch of thorn.. goddamn). Like… two on my right. Despite my right-handedness, I do a surprising number of tasks with my left. That was twenty dollars right there.

Tonight is fireworks at Navy Pier. Should be pretty awesome.

There’s so much crap on my bed that I just shove it all to the side so that it’s half on the window sill, half eating up bed space. I’ve got… a towel, a few shirts, socks, my bag, perhaps my khaki pants? (I need to find those..), my pajama pants.. Usually my bed has to be empty save for a blanket or two and a pillow. I dunno why I don’t care at the moment.

There’s stuff on my glasses… Usually I’m OCD about having clean glasses too but… Whatever. I’ve gotten so lazy and laidback lately it’s terrible. It will come to bite me in the ass BIGTIME, I can see it coming.

This theme looks better in Opera than it does in Firefox, maybe it’s a default fonts thing. Or maybe I changed Opera’s display fonts? I don’t recall.

The kids are surprisingly good at English, I think the main problem is that they’re shy or unconfident in their abilities. Usually they’ll say little blurbs of keywords to me, but perhaps that’s because this is only the second time they’ve seen me.

Late night talks are good, fun, a little detrimental to waking up on time; but hey, that’s alright.

Somehow by using the auto update for the BBCode plugin, I managed to break the TTF Titles plugin that gave me pretty rendered titles in any font I wanted. It still displayed and stuff, but I couldn’t get into the settings manager to change width limitations. Screw it, the ttf titles looked a bit out of place in this theme anyway. I keep thinking I see daylight out the window, but we’ve got about an hour until that happens…

I get to take my SOC302 exam early today due to hangin’ with the kids tonight.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-Mark Twain

Found this quote while looking for another one… in my backgrounds folder.

life sucks. music doesnt.

There we go. It’s kinda true. I love music. It’s amazing. I can’t play it… (bad experiences, probably scarred for life, pianos haunt my dreams) But I sure can enjoy it. I like to think that I enjoy a wide variety of music, just as long as it isn’t beggars banging in rhythm on the floor of the trains trying to get money. That or Rap. And newer Country. But like Jazz, Classical, Rock, Alternative, Pop, whatever Enya falls under (though I’ve only heard one of her songs). Oh, and not Christian Rock. God no. (hahaha) The train rides to/from work would be immesely boring and long were it not for my Zune. Work itself would be immensly boring and long were it not for my Zune. Though lately I’ve been listening to podcasts more than music. Last week and the week before I caught up on a ton of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech radio shows and this week I’ve started listening to the Paranormal Cafe. They had some decent stuff on the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, and the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk Project. Though the guy talking about the latter two was obviously a loon (he was a bird?), as he claimed to have seen a Thunderbird (and therefore became a Shaman in his native american circle) as well as to having multiple conversations with someone who is supposedly him from the future. He had some neat information about the actual topic of the interview, but the rest of it kind of made me think about him… less.

The interview about John Titor (wiki) was especially interesting. I had read about him once before somewhere several years ago. Basically the story goes something like this: Baby John Titor is born in 1998. In 2036 the military sends him back in time to 1975 to recover an IBM 5100 computer because I guess it could interface with the mainframes they had or something? He made a pitstop in 2000/1 ish and spent some time with his parents (who were suprisingly understanding). It was during this time that a serious of posts made by “John Titor” appeared on various time travel forums. He made a lot of predictions, many cryptic, many not so. One of his was that the methods to time travel will be discovered at CERN. Shortly after he predicted that, CERN announced the developmment of the Large Hadron Collider (which some believe will end the world, but that’s a different story). The gigantic hard-ons (if someone could get me the motivational of the “Large Hardon Collider,” I would appreciate it ) will be colliding in roughly sixteen days. Perhaps they’ll find a way to harness the power of the mini-blackholes that supposedly allow Titor’s time machine to do it’s thing? He also stated that there would be no more Olympic games after the 2004 summer games. There WERE 2006 winter games, but appprently it looks like the 2008 summer games in Beijing are on shaky ground? The reason Titor needed the IBM 5100 was because of a special function it had that very few people knew about. Later a member of the team who developed the machine came forward and confirmed that the machine did have that functionality and that only ten or so members knew about it. There’s also a bunch of other little things.

I’m uploading the two podcasts (it’s one interview, just chopped up) to http://sugardeath.net/podcasts/paracafe/. They should be up by the time that most of you read this (hell, probably by the time that I’m done writing this).

Yeah, a lot of his predictions came true, but a good number of his predictions have also not come true. Or at least, not yet as some believe. Titor says that a second American civil war would start in 2004 or 5 (I don’t remember), but that the actual shooting would not start until 2008. I haven’t read anything anywhere that would indicate unrest, but my initial thought was that there might be some issues if Obama gets elected (the whitehouse would become a blackhouse, etc.). The dude in the interview actually suggests that it might be related to immigration or illegal aliens near Mexico. In response to a question a forumer asked of him, Titor responded with something along the lines of “Well, let’s just say that Spanish is popular in that region [Texas].”

I haven’t looked through the johntitor.com website yet, but I hope to eventually. The podcast should provide enough information to pique fascination. I mean, sure, the whole thing is probably some retarded prank; but you have to admit that it is damn fascinating.

I think… I think I should get some sleep now. Jacki was all “I should get to bed, it’s almost 4AM” (wuss). Well, it’s almost 4:30 now here, so I should probably get too (wuss).

I hope they have some more interesting stuff like this on the Paranormal Cafe. UFOs and stuff are interesting here or there, but I want to learn more about things like the Philladelphia Experiment, the Montauk Project (which if you haven’t read about yet, is supposedly very related to the Philadelphia Experiment…), people like John Titor, etc. I’d be especially stoked if they did any of the cryptids I’ve been reading about lately. I never use the word stoked.

Seriously though, if you have nothing to do for about an hour and a half or so, or can easily divide your attention, listen to the two podcasts I uploaded (in order, please, they’re labeled). The host is kind of annoying in the beginning, but once they get into it, it’s some good shit.

With that, I’m probably out of here. Gotta be rested for examination in the afternoon.

I was finally able to get my hotkeys for MPD set up like I used to have Winamp/Foobar in Windows. Because I don’t use KDE, I could never get the Amarok hotkeys to work when the window wasn’t focused, and so I had to open the window all the time and it was annoying when playing a game if I wanted to change the song… Poop like that. Well, there’s a client for MPD called MPC (how imaginative). It’s a simple command line program that just sends chosen commands to MPD when executed. Set up ALT+CTRL+KP_INS in your favorite window mananger to execute mpc toggle and you have an easy access play/pause button. Hot shit. I am really digging this server/client interface for a freaking music manager.

I don’t believe I have a category that all this paranormal stuff fits under… and I don’t feel like creating a specific ‘paranormal’ category, so… welcome the ‘interesting’ category! Maybe it’ll be used more than ‘humor.’ Maybe I should start using tags, too. Maybe I should tag/categorize my old blogger.com posts (of which there are roughly three-hundred or so? Only about a fifth of my current post count (the post count in the theme lies… it’s the post ID, I’ve deleted/not published many posts… I’ll maybe fix it)

I am extremely amused by my new [two week old] mouse theme.

I decided, oddly, to update my graphics driver under Linux. Why? Fuck if I know. The newest .run from nvidia’s site installs, but breaks a few things for me (notably X, which complains of a version mismatch between the loaded module and the desired module). Well, I uninstalled that and got the old drivers working and X was back and all was well. Except I lost OpenGL… What? How? Currently I am (re)installing the linux-restricted-drivers package from command line as well as posting this from command line. Fun stuff, eh?

Oh, look. X is back. Still don’t have GLX, though, despite the apt-get install nvidia-glx-new I just did. Argh. Not that OpenGL is much use with a broken graphics card, but I don’t like the fact that it just doesn’t work for seemingly no reason at all.

I finally got mysql-server and mythtv to play together (and with me, and not sexually)! I wiped the old Debian install on Din and tried to install Knoppmyth, but it wouldn’t install LILO properly. I never did like LILO, Grub has always handled booting better in my opinion. Easier to use, too. I was then gonna try MythDora, but a Fedora / Red Hat system has never appealed to me… I like Debian-based distros too much, which explains why I just reinstalled Debian and gave it another shot. Worked fine this time. I got the thing running mythfrontend on bootup and everything. Now I just need a TV card to test things with.

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 2592×1944 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.

What the hell did I catch?! And from whom?! I stole (as in, used) some ibuprofin from work today, Dad is going to have to buy a new bottle for the house after I go grab the last two tablets in a couple of (few, several, many, lots, too many) minutes…

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.

The LAN was pretty cool (more on that later… maybe… I will say that the Wii Photo Channel is absolutely hilarious with a basement full of sleep-deprived /b/tards…). I now have very little hair on my head (it is cold… i could feel the rain yesterday).

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.