sugardeath

9:28

Got to work fifteen minutes late (technically an hour fifteen, as I originally planned to be here by eight), will be leaving an hour early (which would be the normal time if I did get here at eight, though). Whatever. It’s my last day and I need to tidy my room a bit before Jacki gets here.

I’ve got a cricket in my room. I think this also happened first semester last year? It’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to sleep from 6:15 to 7:30 and the thing just keeps going and going and going. It was kind of ridiculous.

I wonder what good stuff I shall find on Wikipedia today.

I hate these v-neck undershirts… They feel funny, plus I have exposed skin. I am either going to go shirtless if I want to expose skin, or wear a full shirt if I don’t want to. Nothing in between thank you. I don’t have cleavage to show off or anything. Plus a white undershirt collar looks a bit better beneath a blue dress shirt than skin does.

I am so majorly screwed for classes right now, this is going to be fun.

The ubiquity of BASIC interpreters on personal computers was such that textbooks once included simple “Try It In BASIC” exercises that encouraged students to experiment with mathematical and computational concepts on classroom or home computers.

So true. My math books in junior high (and maybe highschool?) always had BASIC code in the back. It was pretty cool.

Dijkstra believed that computer science was more abstract than programming; he once said, “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”

Hence why I got out of CS… It’s all.. sciencey with it’s theories and math. I don’t want to spend days figuring out the quickest algorithm for something, I want to spend days programming something useful or fun.

Recently, a set of TCP/IP routines[3] for QuickBASIC 4.x and 7.1 has revitalized some interest in the software. In particular, the vintage computer hobbyist community has been able to write software for old computers that run the DOS operating system that allows them to access other computers such as on a LAN or the internet. This has allowed systems even as old as an 8088 to serve interesting functions, such as acting as a web server among other things.

Neat.

rubbermallet.org - for all your.. um.. web/irc server needs for DOS. Really neat stuff. I like that he’s gotten an IRC server written in QuickBASIC to run with “acceptable” performance on a 4.77MHZ 8088… with 640KB of RAM. Why? Why not. Nothing like good ol’ minimalistic programming. More programmers need to realize that..

The TSR has now almost disappeared completely, as multitasking operating systems such as Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux provide the facilities for multiple programs and device drivers to run simultaneously without the need for special programming tricks, and the modern notion of protected memory makes the kernel and its modules exclusively responsible for modifying an interrupt table.

Oh TSRs, you really were quite amazing.. even if the only TSRs I used were game trainers =P

10:17

Apparently daemon is a homonym of demon? I always thouhght it was DAY-men.. Hum.

“Random article” gives a lot of song and album related articles. Accept when it gives “Random (disabiguation).” How.. appropriate.

Hah. The bit bucket article contains funny phrases such as “write once read never,” “First In Never Out,” and “Write Only Memory.”

Neat, I didn’t realize there was a /dev/full device…

10:52

Did I just crash IE by trying to display a gigantic SVG from Wiki? Silly ActiveX controls..

12:01

Unix philosophy… unix wars…

Plan 9 has the cutest mascot.

12:14

WorldWideWeb (WWW) [the first web browser] was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993, thus making it free software. Some of the code still resides on Berners-Lee’s NeXTcube in the CERN museum and has not been able to be recovered due to the computer’s status as a historical artifact.

That is pretty awesome.

12:25

The 486DX2 66 MHz was the most widespread high-end 486 version. For many players of video games during the early and mid 1990s, towards the end of the MS-DOS gaming era, it was often coupled with 8 - 16 MB RAM and a VLB video card. This configuration was capable of running every title available for several years after its release, making it a “sweet spot” in CPU performance and longevity.

I think Dad had a 486DX? I remember reading 33MHz on the case sticker.. I could be wrong. He tossed the machine a few years back, I wonder did he kept the processor?

Windows 95 signaled the end of the 486 era due to its high memory requirements (16MB to perform as well as Windows 3.x with just 8MB). Many 486 users at that time were running eight 1MB 30-pin SIMMs leaving no available slots for expansion. As 4meg 30-pin SIMMs were still very expensive at that time, it made more sense to buy a Pentium rather than spend a premium on upgrading a system that was nearing the end of its service life.

Win95 WAS a bitch to run on that machine..

Huh.. Haiku, a free BeOS replacement, became self-hosting (the ability to be built from within itself) in April of this year. The project began in 2001. That’s pretty good, I’d say, as being self-hosting is a major milestone. I can’t find when linux became self-hosting, so it’s kind of hard to compare…

Apparently there are releases of Opera, Firefox, SeaMonkey, VLC, and Quake II and Quake III for BeOS. And they run natively in Haiku.

It is kind of sad that Be Inc. died when they did. I remember being interested in running BeOS years ago, as it looked pretty neat and certainly different from Windows. I think the reason I never got around to it was no longer supported or something and I couldn’t find any downloads (BeOS wasn’t a free OS, which is probably why)? Be Inc shut their doors on November 15th, 2001. Not all that long ago.

The default browser for BeOS, NetPositive uses Haikus as error messages. More programmers need to be creative like that.

12:40

I’m trying to take my mind off of Jacki coming in today. The less I think about it, the sooner it will arrive.

Huh, there was a new release of Wordpress today… and it’s a month ahead of schedule?

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress’s popularity.

Damn straight.

13:00

Maybe I should eat lunch.

I wonder if anyone’s gonna be like “why was this guy surfing Wikipedia all fucking day?”

13:29

Huh, rediscovered Jyte.

wiki just has a lot of music related articles in general, wtf.

13:53

I think I was home for the Chicago Zombie Walk…

15:33

So close…

15:54

Here we go.

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.