I really like this new theme.

I've finally got around to getting an HTML version of my resume up.  I think it looks good.  Ended up having to make a few formatting changes to make it look good on the web that I eventually carried over to the PDF version (linked on same page) because I like 'em so much.

I also disabled comments on posts older than fourteen days, since that seems to be where most of the spam is concentrated (actually, it's like eighty percent on one post from two or three years ago).

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 :mrgreen: ) 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 :eek: (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 wonder if it's because I haven't updated the plugin in ages.  Note, however, that there has been no need to whatsoever.

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. 

It says my database is out of date.  Ok, I'll run the upgrade.php.  Same problem.

Shit.

So I go to sleep after playing some Armored Core 3 till too late in the morning...  After Math class, I get back to my room and go online.  Suddenly, I see the WordPress Dashboard again!  Huh?!  My page is still not rendering right, so I check the topic I made on the support forums.  As suggested by chradil, I start disabling plugins one by one...  MTDewVirus' Recent Comments plugin is the culprit, though now my theme doesn't work.  So I switched to the theme you see here, and the WP-Cut plugin starts causng the problem...

Did my plugins get corrupted or something?  What's going on?

Oh well, just thought I'd let y'all know what's been going..  I doubt any of you even saw the temp page I put up last night, it was like one in the morning here... so about two for most of you.  :-P

Now, to explain exactly how this works:
Below the Name, E-Mail, and URL fields that were always there, you now see an OpenID pulldown menu.  You choose which authentication server you want to use (LiveJournal, DeadJournal, or generic OpenID) depending on where you're registered.  For example: If Elyse wants to comment on my site, she can now do so by choosing DeadJournal from the menu and typing in her DeadJournal user name.  It will bring her to the DeadJournal site for a minute to ask whether she wants to authorize my site or not.  She hits "Yes, always" and is sent back to my site, where her comment will be displayed (it may still get thrust into moderation, i'm not quite sure).  If Jacki wants to comment, she can choose LiveJournal, put in her LiveJournal user name, and the rest is the same!  Now, this is where it gets cool.  Since I despise Livejournal and DeadJournal, I can use my own site as an OpenID.  So, if I wanted to comment on someone's LiveJournal, DeadJournal, OR an OpenID-enabled MovableType, WordPress, TypeKey, or even TextPattern site I could just use my URL as my OpenID!  Well, I could, if I weren't getting that error..  But that should be fixed shortly.

By the way: If you're going to post using the OpenID system, DO NOT fill in the Name, E-Mail, or URL fields!  That is all.

Check out the wp-plugins.net dowload link as well:
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/e2pipe/

My Poem (without the spaces) becomes My Poem!!

However!  It doesn't replace the spaces in the URL with +'s yet, nor does it add the title attribute to the a tag...

But!  I DO have a script that does JUST that with a fixed string (ie. NOT the random content produced whenever I post) over here.  Thing is, it can only be done with one string right now.  Somehow, I need to incorporate the second script into the currently functioning (albeit limited) plugin.  I would need a way to search the $content for any string that starts with , and ends in .  I don't want [$any_text] because that would include additions to quoted text, and even what little BBCode I use.  Plus it just plain wouldn't work, as there would be no $result[2] to call for the link text.

All in all, I've still got a lot work ahead of me.  I've managed to come this far, though, and I'm quite proud of myself.  For several hours I was confused as all hell trying to figure out regular expressions, but I think I've got them pegged now. 

Time to sleep.

So my mission is to write a plugin for WordPress.  It will be my very first plugin and I will have to learn quite a bit of PHP as well as how plugins work in WordPress, but I think it will be worth it.  Not only will it expand my knowledge of PHP, but it'll perform a function I think I would use a LOT.  And who's to say that someone else won't take advantage of it as well?

Oh, and it wouldn't have to be limited to E2 either.